Hawaiian Jihadi

Aukai Collins earned a nickname when he was fighting the jihad in Chechnya in the mid-1990s: "Abu Mushakil," or Father of Trouble. He had already seen plenty of it as a 19-year-old in Afghanistan, where he learned to fight in 1993; and later during his stints as soldier and gunrunner in Kosovo and the Caucasusa career path that might have made the Hawaiian native an early John Walker Lindh. Instead, he turned his back on holy war and started working in counterterrorism for Uncle Sam, a tale told in My Jihad, an often horrifying combination of frank simplicity and cold-blooded...