Creasy is a mercenary.
At the start of the recorded adventures, he was one, or at least he had been up to the time he had had enough and needed a break and went six months without anything. To say he was burned out would be an understatement. Years of fighting in strange lands far from a home he no longer called his own, fighting alongside people who might well be killed the next day, all for regimes he did not believe in or causes that meant nothing to him or possibly in the name of a religion he had no faith in at all. It had taken more of a toll on him than he wanted to pay anymore.
Creasy was darn good at being a mercenary, possibly because he had nothing to go home to. A not too pleasant upbringing brought him to the U.S. Marines at age 17 and he found a home. Then a fight with an officer who was getting good men killed resulted in his being kicked out. Needing something to do and having just been trained to be a soldier, he joined the French Foreign Legion. He soon became part of their legendary paratrooper regiment and so began a period of fighting in intense areas and learning how to survive.
He also learned what it mean to fail and a brief time as a POW in Vietnam, before the French left and the American came in showed Creasy how bad life can get. It did not, though, cause him to quit. He got transfered to North Africa where a large group of the French Army disagreed with now President De Gaulle about giving up Algeria. His superiors picked the wrong side and he was again out of a job. He was not, however, out of work. Someone with his hard-earned skills could always find a job in one army or another.
And therein lay the problem. Too much death and no reason to live. He stepped away from it. Unfortunately, he had nowhere to step into.
Then the odd employment offer of being a 'premium' bodyguard and that is when things changed. He did not stay a bodyguard for long but his days of being a soldier-for-hire only were over and different things would come his way that would make up the essence of his days from then on but at the beginning and throughout what happens next, when people talked of Creasy, it was of him as a mercenary. But the talk was highly respectful.