The Team House - Fire Force: Rhodesian Light Infantry | Chris Cocks | Ep. 157

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

Fireforce is the compelling, brutal but true account of Chris Cocks’ service in 3 Commando, The Rhodesian Light Infantry, during Zimbabwe’s bitter civil war of the ’70s—a war that came to be known almost innocuously as ‘the bush war’. ‘Fireforce’, a tactic of total airborne envelopment, was developed and perfected by the RLI, together with the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian Air Force. Fireforce became the principal strike weapon of the beleaguered Rhodesian forces in their struggle against the overwhelming tide of the Communist-trained and -equipped ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas. The combat strain on a fighting soldier was almost unbelievable, for the Rhodesians, who were always desperately short of ground troops, were sometimes obliged to parachute the same men into action into as many as three enemy contacts a day. While estimates of enemy casualties vary, there seems little doubt that the RLI accounted for at least 12,000 ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas—but not without cost. Fireforce is not for the squeamish. Although it has been written with unforgettable pathos and humor, it tells of face-to-face combat in the bush and death at point-blank range. It is a book which does nothing to glorify or glamorize war, for as Chris Cocks found at such a young age, war is merely a catalogue of suffering, destruction and death. Fireforce has been described by critics as being to the Rhodesian War what All Quiet On The Western Front was to World War I and Dispatches was to Vietnam. Read it … it will an experience you never forget. Get Chris' books here: https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Cocks/e/B0034P707O/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream in well as get action. to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 157 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, deproducing back there in the corner. And we have our guest on this show today.

We're very pleased to have Chris Cox on who served in the Rhodesian White Infantry. He is the author of Fire Force, which is one of my favorite war memoirs. This book kind of has it all. It really encompasses the soldier experience, I feel like Chris. Some of it is very funny about some of the practical jokes between you and your mates. some of it is also horrifying and terrifying. And, you know, Chris really does not romanticize war at all in this book. This is one of my, I'd say top five war memoirs for me, Chris.

And I really appreciate that we were able to get in touch and have you as a guest on the show tonight. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, absolutely flattered. I didn't set out to write that with any kind of expectations. I just wanted to sort of get it off my chest, really. And I think the big thing was the honesty, not trying to glorify anything. But thank you for having me.

Absolutely, Chris. Let's start off like we start off most of our episodes. If you could tell us a little bit about your upbringing, tell us about growing up in Rhodesia, and the sort of pathway that took you towards military service. Sure. I guess it was kind of accident by accident that I was born in Rhodesia. My father was British. My mother was South African. My father came up to the colonies after World War II, looking for a better life away from the greyness and the bleakness of England. He could have gone anywhere. He could have gone to Canada, Australia, could have gone to America, New Zealand. He chose Rhodesia. So it was a total accident of birth that I was born there. At the time, after the Second World War, Rhodesia, like many British colonies from the British

Empire, were clamoring for independence and Britain struggling to survive financially after the Second World War was trying to divest herself of all her colonies. was one of the last to go in terms of to black African rule, simply because there was a fairly large, a substantial white population of settlers, many British settlers who had settled in the country in the colony since the turn of the century, since the turn of the 20th century. So, yeah, I was born in 1957 when the country was starting to go through its political upheavals in terms of independence looming. And there was intransigence on both sides of the political divide. The whites were not willing to surrender power, and the blacks obviously wanted power.

ended up with a situation that there was only one way to resolve the issue, and that was conflict, which started essentially in about 1964, 65, when Rhodesia declared UDIHRDIA, which was a unilateral declaration of independence from Great Britain. there was no political settlement and Rhodesia essentially became a pariah state internationally. Yeah, and so that's very kind of broad brushstroke of where it all began. But what was it like for you on a more personal level growing up there and kind of your upbringing and then coming of age right as the Bush War really started to go hot? I think it was a kind of almost idyllic childhood, growing up whites in Rhodesia at the time, where the whites were pretty well a privileged section of society.

There was kind of apartheid in many respects. Land was reserved primarily for white farmers. There were black farmers. well obviously but the majority of land was for white farmers there was segregation in education blacks weren't allowed to live in the white suburbs that sort of thing so as a child I was kind of oblivious to to all this I knew vaguely that there was something not right and I knew that the black people essentially were regarded as second-class citizens in the country. But to grow up, I mean,

it was absolutely an delicate country to grow up. I mean, beautiful climate, lots of outdoor activities. But at the back of your mind, the whole time, there was this issue of... I'm sorry, Chris. I apologize for this. We'll jump right back into it. I think we lost you write about, were you saying it was quite idyllic as a child growing up in Rhodesia, but there was always this political baggage that you were aware of in the background? Absolutely. I mean, I was fortunate enough to go to a private school. Government schools, state schools, were segregated.

So you had schools for white kids, school for black kids, schools for colored kids, which were people of mixed race, as we call them, school for Indians. It was absolutely segregated. But I was fortunate to go to a private school for my high school years, and private schools weren't restricted in any way. So I had a lot of black friends who were at school with me. So it was a little bit kind of away from reality, because outside in the real world, blacks didn't mix with whites. So it was a, a, a little bit of a rude awakening when I got called up to, into the army, I was conscripted or drafted to realize the depths of the segregation in the country. Yeah, I mean, it was,

well, I say it was an idyllic upbringing, outdoor activity sports. Fantastic, the bush, you know, go fishing on the Zambezi River. I also think it was, It was fantastic, but it was an illusion in many respects. And all the while, slowly, slowly, the political upheaval was slowly building up into a full-blown war from a sort of almost like a police action to begin with. it slowly sort of escalated as more and more black nationalist carders were sent overseas when out the country for training to Russia, to the Soviet bloc, Algeria, Tanzania, places like that. So from about 1966, the first sort of guerrilla incursion started into the country. I was still at school

and the kind of propaganda at the time was well these were a few kind of terrorists as they were known sort of running around causing mischief they were being dealt with essentially by the police and the army was involved in the early stages

but it was still very kind of Mickey mass, I'd say. You know, it was the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the unit that I was to join, essentially cut its teeth in the Zambezi Valley in the mid-60s. And, you know, at the time, the white population believed they were kind of invulnerable. There was no ways that these rag-tag terrorist bans were going to make any kind of difference. that changed in 1972, but anyway, excuse me. Yeah.

For you being conscripted into the military, I mean, presumably you could have sat back at a dispatcher's desk somewhere if you wanted to. Why did you choose the RLI? Well, they kind of chose me. At the time, the RELI, the Redisian Light Infantry was one of the few regular, Sorry, excuse me, military, regular military units in the Rhodesian army. There was the Redesian light infantry. There was the Rhodesian African rifles, black regular unit. There were the slew scouts that just started.

And there was the SAS Sea Squadron who had been going on and off since the days of the Malayan emergency. Excuse me. At the time in 1975, when I received my call-up papers or drafted, as you guys would call it, the National Service was 12 months. I could have been what was exempted if I was exempted if I was. being called up earlier because I had, well, I still have seriously flat feet. But that, because of the shortage of manpower, that became, that wasn't an issue anymore. And too bad you got called up. So I was called up and I was told to report to cranbourne barracks, which was the Rhodesian Light Infantry barracks. I had no idea that

I was going into the Redesian Light Infantry. Most national servicemen tended to excuse me, go down to Bulaway on the border with Botswana, which was where the territorial or the the territorial army were based and where they did all their training. Territorial, I guess you could equate that to your kind of national guard, not the sort of regular, regular army. But the Ridesia light infantry was desperately short of manpower. And so they were starting to accept National Servicemen. Sorry, can I get a glass of water? Yeah, of course.

Or something stronger if you'd like. Not a bad idea. Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us tonight. Sorry for the hiccup in the very beginning. We thought it might be on R&B. Right now, this is just the joys of doing a live-produced television or YouTube show that you get these little bloopers sometimes,

and the people who watch the podcast will edit this stuff out for them. Sorry about that. Quite a right. No worries, Chris. Quite right. So you arrive at the RLI, unbeknownst to you. Can you tell us about what the training was like at that time for the Rhodesian-wide infantry? And correct me if I'm wrong, but were they not yet airborne qualified?

I think in your book you talk about, they were helicopter born and then eventually airborne qualified. Anyway, please tell us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The Rhodesian Light Infantry started off in 1961 when it was formed as a regular white unit, an infantry unit, a regular infantry battalion. It was called a regiment, but it only ever had one battalion. It was made up in the early days predominantly of South African volunteers. The majority were South African volunteers.

It saw a little bit of action up on the Congo border, which was its first kind of operational deployment, and then came back to Rhodesia in after the Congo had finished, and started essentially border control is what they called it. Manning the border along the Zambizi Valley, the border with Zambia. Most of the guerrillas were based in Zambia and were infiltrating the country from there. Lately, when Mozambique or Portuguese East Africa fell with the Carnation Revolution in 1974, before Mozambique overnight became a Marxist state and offered a succor to the guerrillas, which added another thousand miles of border for the Redisians to police.

So the training in the whole Rhodesian army essentially was based on the British system of training. Excuse me again. still very much kind of post-second World War training. I mean, almost identical. And a lot of our instructors, in fact, were British from various Guards regiments, things like that. A lot of our officers were trained overseas at Sandhurst and the various military colleges in the UK. So it was very much a British-based system. And it always was.

That never really changed. Sorry, this is very embarrassing. No, that's okay. Take your time if you need to get a lozenger. Thank you. Maybe a brandy. There you go. Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, it was all spit and polish and drill. for your first six weeks of training. Training was essentially 20 weeks, 21 weeks, I think it was, and was divided into three phases. The first phase was your basic training. I think what you'd probably call boot camp was similar, I think, where it was essentially based on fitness and drill,

marching, route marches, that sort of thing, a lot of square bashing parades, shiny boots. I might have to go and get a lozenger just now. And a brandy. Yeah. That was your basic training. From there you had a choice of whether you, well, you sort of had a choice,

whether you'd specialize and perhaps go into armoured cars or medics or a different arm of the service. most of us, though, stayed on as infantrymen and continued with the second phase of training, which was known as the classical war stage. It lasted another six or seven weeks. And there it was, as suggested, a classical war learning your battle drills and a conventional war, you know, out-trench warfare, that sort of thing. And then the third stage was phase that will.

another six weeks was a counterinsurgency phase, which was more what we were going to be doing. Again, it's very much based on the British system, a lot of disciplines based on experiences from Malaya and Malayan insurgency. In fact, a lot of the terminology we used came from Malaya and like bashes and things like that use, use CT. communist terrorist that sort of stuff and and there was very much on tracking in the bush camouflage concealment all that kind of stuff yeah and and and during that phase we went on what was called a survival course you get thrown into the bush with nothing and you've got to survive for a couple of weeks and yeah that was it and then then you've eventually passed out as you qualified as a trooper in the Redisian Light Infantry and you were posted to

one of the commandos which were effectively companies that in 68 I think somewhere around there perhaps the Redisian Light Infantry had changed from a conventional battalion with companies to a commando unit. And so the companies became commandos, platoons became troops, sections became sticks and that kind of thing. But it was very much the same. I never really understood what the difference was

becoming a commander unit other than we were adopting the role that we actually should have been, which was light infantry. And Commandos just, I think, just sounded quite romantic, to be honest. At the time, reducing light infantry was still a basic infantry unit, helicopter born for fire force operations. 76 was the third phase, I call it, of the war when it really intensified exponentially. 72 was when it started in earnest from the early days of the 66 onwards when it had been a few brief kind of incursions. 72, they flooded the northeast of the country and 76 with the whole Mozambican border down the

eastern side of the country. They basically saturated the east and the northeast of the country, they being the guerrillas, Zanla, Mugabe's crowd. The way of the Redisians were dealing with these incursions was a cordon sanitaire, a minefield, along the complete, well, pretty well the complete border, which was a massive undertaking. Quite effective. But, yeah, I mean, it was porous. And then with the territorial battalions stationed along the border operating various sectors in static roles, and the Rhodesian-like infantry and the Redesian African rifles, the RAR, conducting fire force operations, which really started in about 1974.

fire force really was just an airborne reaction, quick reaction force to a guerrilla sighting or an incident, just to envelop the guerrillas as quickly as possible from the air initially with, in our little Alouet three helicopters. but as the war intensified in 1960 quite quickly in fact, which was my first year in the army, it was very soon realized that there just weren't enough helicopters. I mean, I think the country had perhaps, including what was on loan from South Africa, maybe 30, perhaps 35,

All right with three helicopters so you know to sort of police that kind of border link border with such so few helicopters just as it wasn't working so the religions needed to get more men into the action quicker more quickly and so that they adopted parachuting as a means of doing that So from the fire force which had what they called a K-car and 3G car. So the K-car was the command alouette, which had the Grand Commander, normally the Commando Major. He was in that with the K-car was armed of a 20-mill cannon, Hispanic cannon, and that flew in an anti-year. counterclockwise orbit at precisely 800 feet, which is what 20 mil was calibrated to.

Then the G-cars, which were the troop carrying helicopters, each one carried a stick of four troopers, plus obviously the pilot and then a gunner technician, who was an Air Force guy. He manned the twin, each aloeic was armed with twin brownings. And so the first wave, as I call it, of helicopters with the K-car would go to the action, to the scene of the action, guided him generally by the call sign on the ground, who would probably be Salus Scouts operating Klanderset, But any kind of unit who is on perhaps O.P. duties or something like that would call us in. And so we'd arrive there, try and get as many troops into the action as quickly as possible

to essentially surround the guerrillas and then close them and prevent them from escaping and kill them. It was a fairly sort of simple as simple as that. There was nothing fancy. The parachuting element brought suddenly, you didn't go in there with just 12 men, you could now have 16 or 20 paratroopers going in at the same time. So you more than doubled your capacity of your fire force. At the same time, there was what was called the land tail. was hot footing it from the nearest fire force base with the trucks bringing further troops in if it wasn't too far. Chris, could you tell us then about, no, thank you for explaining the fire force concept for a lot of people who aren't aware. Could you tell us about your first contact, operational contact with the enemy?

Yeah. It was kind of a bit of a blur, I think it is for most people. It was, we were on, it was my first bush trip, which is what we called it. So I'd finished my training, been posted into the commander, and we were sent up to the fire force base at Mount Darwin, which was in the Operation Hurricane area of the country, with the northeast of the country on the Mozambican border up there, where the guerrillas were infiltrating from.

And it was a hot area, as they called it. And three commander, which was the commander I'd been posted into, was on fire force duty for our first bush trip. A bush trip was generally about six weeks. So you spent six weeks on fire force duty, and then you were a road trip. out for R&R for 10 days or retraining for 10 days and then back to another fire force. So it was May 7.6.

I've been in the commando for about a week. And there had been callouts pretty well every day the SIRM would go. And the various troops or platoons within the commando, rotated so you know you were on first wave one day and then perhaps second way the next day and we happened my my platoon or 11 troop as it was known we were on first wave and I was in a stick with the Australian he was a little Australian guy was our stick leader and he only had about a month of his three-year contract to go.

Really good little soldier. And I remember sitting in the front of the helicopter with the machine gun next to me was a national serviceman. And he turned around to me as we were flying off. And I mean, it was, the adrenaline, it was quite a buzz. It really was. And it was all kind of brand new. And we suddenly were off to war.

And this machine gunner turned around to me. And, I mean, I thought he was a kind of real macho kind of rambo kind of guy. And he said, aren't you scared? And I don't know what to say to that. Because I wasn't. I wasn't scared. I didn't know what on earth we were going into. And he turned on and said, I am.

And I was absolutely gobsmacked that somebody could openly admit that. Anyway, we got onto the ground and I had no idea what was going on. Our stick was dropped. What happened in a far-for situation was the sticks would be dropped. We were called stop one, two, and three, based on the helicopters. So stop one would be positioned, say, there, stop two over there. And they would form stop groups to stop the enemy, the guerrillas fleeing. So we would be positioned on obvious, like, paths or along a river line where the guerrillas might try and escape.

And then the second wave would come in, and they would then form a sweep line. or they would combine with the stock groups and then sweep into the middle of the contact area. So it was quite thick bush and we were sort of sweeping forward. I just remember my overriding fear was that I would do something wrong. And so I was absolutely terrified that we had to maintain our dressing that you didn't go too far ahead or too far behind that you didn't bunch up with the guy next to you. I mean, we used to probably in a sweep we were 10 to, between 10 and 20 meters apart. So it was quite a long way.

And God forbid if you got too close to the guy next to you. Anyway, we were sweeping forward and then we were told to go to ground because the links, which is a ream Cessna ground attack aircraft, which accompanied every fire force operation, which was armed with sneb rockets and napalm and brownings, was coming in to do a napalm run to our front. It came in low, low, low, low, low, low.

I remember the thing is like a shock, and it was so slow. It was almost like in so motion, you know, propeller driven job, which in hindsight absolutely perfect for the job it was doing. And these, we call them frantan, which are a euphemism for napalm. These frantan pods just sort of came tumbling out slowly. And then the sort of inferno in front of us sort of lit up the place. And I remember the smell.

I distinctly remember the smell. That still sticks with me to this day. And I'm sure your guys from Vietnam is the same sort of thing. But we were then so right, sweep, you know, up to go. And we sweep forward again. And then, you know, all the time I'm looking, looking at the machine gunner. I was next to him. Looking at the stick leader who hadn't said a word to me.

I mean, I might have, may as well have been invisible. And then suddenly he had his weapon in the shoulder, bang, bang, double-tapped, and he shot a gorilla. Just kind of was absolutely amazing. I was just staggered that he'd seen this kind of lump hiding in the bush. And within a flash, he dispatched him, and I just amazed. Anyway, we swept forward and we found several, there were several more guerrillas we found who'd been taken out by the 20-mill cannon and by the napalm strike. And so the contact came to an end.

Now, hang on, before that, when the stick leader had been, had shot this guy, the machine gun had just opened up. I had no idea what he was shooting at. And so I thought, well, I better start shooting. I didn't know what at. I mean, I couldn't see anything. And so I put the weapon in my shoulder and fired a couple of rounds and sort of wondered if I was allowed to do that sort of thing. So, yeah, and so I banged off a few rounds.

It felt good. No one had sort of upbraided me for doing that. And then we cleared the area, which was, apparently what we were doing, firing into cover, went forward and that was the end of the contact. And we had to go back and the grisly task of collecting all the bodies, the enemy bodies. At the time, they were all recovered and taken back to special branch for identification. Being a parent can be really challenging.

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walk progress that that that that's uh that that's left and then how how did you guys uh exfil from situations like that did you have to walk a certain way did the trucks meet you at a certain point Did they come all the way to you? Yeah, it depended where we were or how far. If the land tail, it depended whether we'd incurred casualties, how many bodies we had to get out, whether the helicopters could take us back to base. Generally, we went out by helicopter,

but sometimes we'd go back by truck if that arrived in time. So you guys are going in and basically three birds of four, four man sticks, so 12 people. And are there generally like two, so there were, the first 12 going as like the blocking force, you set up the post, and then a second team of 12 comes in to do the sweep. And then what, like what, because that's a very small force for, for operations. What size forces were you guys going up against? And were there ever times when your leadership would wave it off because they felt like it was grabbing a tiger by the tail?

I don't think that ever happened, but it came close. It certainly did. I think we were pretty well outnumbered all the time on the ground by the enemy. But we were fearless. I mean, we had air power. They didn't have helicopters. They didn't have a 20-mill or links with napalm. They didn't have our MAG guns.

They didn't have our FNs that we had. They had those little AKs, you know? So, I mean, at times, I mean, that first contact, we were probably up against a, I'd say, a group of perhaps at the time, the standard group would be 30. to 40. Wow.

Guerrillas. Of the 30 to 40, by the time we got there, quite a lot of them might have bombshelled and escaped. That bombshell escaped to crash RV and then meet up a few days later. But inevitably, there were a fair chunk of them who got caught or were hardcore enough to want to remain, stay and fight. That did happen. happened and particularly as the war progressed, they became more and more emboldened and braver.

And they became fairly sort of, they were good fighters by the end of the war. So. And women as well. I'm sorry, but so from the time that somebody, like a Salus scout or whoever was out there and identified the target, from the time they called back to the unit, the troop on rotation, how long? would it be for you guys to do your planning to load the birds and to and to be on and to move out to be on target or at least to be airborne okay um it varied um quite often the briefing was done in the air on the way to the target we had no idea wow we were going we just get on the helicopter and go but generally from the time the siren went which announced the call

out. We would be airborne within five minutes. All our kits and gear was all by the helicopter. It was just a question of just shrugging on your wedding and away you go. That's really, I mean, a testament, you know, with all of our modern technology, that's a testament to the pilots. It's a testament to you guys on the ground in order to strategically position troops with that little warning, not really having done, you know, good map studies, against a target that's probably moving. That's pretty incredible. Yeah, I mean, we had some pretty good guys, you know, sort of off the course,

sort of running the battles and the K-Car. I think the big thing for them and liaising with the Air Force, because all our airborne assets were all Air Force, not Army, so it was liaising with the K-car pilot who was generally a squadron. leader, their big issue was where were we going to position the fuel to resupply the helicopters and we were going to re-position all the ammunition for, you know, to spare ammunition, which would be needed. So it was very much a logistical exercise as well. And that's where the Sergeant Major was involved, the commander, and that was his job really was to get that

all going. So he would be told, the Sergeant Major, you know, contact at call out to whatever our Loxstat was on the map. And then it was his job to get fuel and ammunition on the trucks to as close to that place as possible, as quickly as possible, that would happen. It depended. I mean, if the actual callout or the contact was reasonably close to. to the fire force base. Sometimes there were only five, ten minutes flying time from the fire force base, but sometimes they were 30, 40 minutes.

You know, so by the time the birds got to the contact area, they couldn't spend much time in the air before they had to turn around and go away anyway and collect the second wave. So, yeah, it's a lot of, of it was done on the fly. It really was. And there were occasions where when we took off, I don't think even our G-car pilot knew where he was going and they would be briefed in the air what the destination was and what the plan of attack was. And when we got to the area, then

the K-car would go in there first to his 800 feet. He, the the the, the, the, the, the the major and the K-Kal pilot would assess the whole situation and then decide where they're going to drop their sticks, drop the stops. That's amazing. As 1976 goes on, you're getting a lot of experience as a young infantrymen. One of the things that you guys did quite risky was external operations. And I was wondering and correct me when I mispronounce some of these names. I'm sorry.

Sure, sure, sure. Rambanani, Rambanani? Rambanai, yeah. Rambenai. Could you tell us about that action? Yeah, I mean, as troopers on the ground, we, of course, knew how the war should be run. And it was obvious that the guerrillas, the external, when we say external, base camps, training camps, logistical camps, were based in Zambia and most. where there would be thousands of carders in various stages of training or being used as

camps coming back from Russia or Tanzania where have they been trained and then from there be infiltrated into the country a lot of these camps they were fairly substantial camps and at any one time, they might have 5 to 10,000 people in them. And there would be, for example, in Mozambique, there might be four or five camps like that along the border. In Zambia, there might be two of 10,000 people each. And when I say people, all of various, from raw recruits with no training, training to fully qualified trained guerrillas who were ready to infiltrate the country or guerrillas who'd been exfiltrated for R&R or retraining or whatever purposes.

So it was pretty obvious that if you want to get to the core of the problem, you attack the camps, the external camps. But politically, it was a dangerous game. Mozambique, for example, was supported by China, Red China, and to some extent Cuba. So there were a lot of Cuban and Chinese instructors in the camps. Zambia, which was Zipra, the other guerrilla faction was supported by Russia. So there are a lot of Russian instructors there. So it was a dangerous game, apparently, what we called cross-border or external operations,

to cross over the border and take out these camps at source, essentially. And the Salus Scouts showed the way in spectacular fashion in August 1976. Reed Daily, Colonel Reid Daly, who was a commander of the Saluskarts, had identified whose intelligence had identified a camp called Niazonia, which was a Zanla camp, probably about 50 miles across the border, east of the Rhodesian border towards the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. And in that camp, there were probably between five and 10,000 recruits undergoing training. Each camp at the same time had a large element of Frilema, which were regular Mozambican army troops protecting the camp, sometimes several companies. and they were fully trained Marxist troops. So what the Sili Scouts did,

they had permission. This was the first significant cross-border raid where it was being done overtly in terms of as far as the world was concerned. And they drove in I mean, outrageous what they did. They dressed up as Frilemo troops, all the Sleu Scouts, got on trucks that had been painted in or captured from Frilemo,

painted in Frilema camouflage, and they drove across the border into the camp as supposedly Frilemo troops. The convoy drove into the camp, all the across. recruits thousands of them, actually on parade at the time, were amazed when suddenly the salo scouts dropped their pretence and opened up with their heavy machine guns and whatever and absolutely slaughtered. I mean, thousands, thousands were killed then and then made good their escape. That kind of set the benchmark for what was achievable. I think they managed to kill something like

2000 recruits at that time. Zandr of course learned a fairly harsh lesson and what they did was they moved their camps further into the interior, so further away from the border. So it became more and more difficult for the Redesians to you. Just couldn't just nip over the border. and take out of camp, which is what we were doing when we attacked this little camp at Rambanae, which was, it was actually a Frolimo camp. And I think we were pretty, when I say we, the Rhodesian army, was certainly the Riddhidian army, were certainly the Redisian army, were pretty raw at cross-border operations. We hadn't had very much experience at it.

In the old days, as they called it, we used to operate with the Portuguese on their counter insurgency operations in Mozambique, but that obviously left in 1974. So we walked in across the border two of our commanders, three commander, and I think some of two commander. So it was just a classic cocker. We're like 200 troops in single file at night marching. And you know what happens with a long line of troops. They end up this sort of concertina. And, you know, the head stops and the tail stops.

And then the head gets lost. And it was just a disaster, absolute disaster. And I was the last man in three commander. And then behind me was two commander. and yeah I was I thought anyway

I somehow managed to get the whole of Tuchamondo lost I don't know what I did I think it was the guy behind me the Tukamondo guy who was a total asshole and he got lost

and he went veering off on a path and lost managed to lose the whole the whole of his platoon yeah an absolute disaster and I mean, we came away.

I think the map reading was appalling. We didn't find the camp, and it was only 10 miles across the border. So we came away and aborted the whole operation. We went back a few months later, having learned our lesson, and this time around it was a lot more successful. We were with operating with SAS. I mean, this is what they did. That's what they did for a living, SAS.

So we were working with them, and unfortunately they lost two guys on the way and stood on AP mines. But, yeah, it was a much more successful operation. Unfortunately, it was against Frilema, the Mozambicans. I think we just wanted to show them that they weren't safe either. And so we didn't kill many Zandler Zimbabwean guerrillas at all. There were a few for a limb. And I think we maybe killed a couple of dozen and we destroyed the camp.

So it was in effect a successful operation, but it was in terms of what came later with the big camp attacks from 77 onwards. It was small fry. It really was small Yeah. So you guys had been I mean, please correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys had mostly been operating as like this,

this strike force of small units. And that's a very different skill set than like nighttime patrols, long patrols through. Did you, were you guys constantly like training for that? Or did you sort of have to shift gears pretty quickly? We shifted gears. We weren't too sure what our,

role was. And in 76 when we first started, the motorsopper rally was half of the commando would be on fire force duties. The other half would be patrolling in the bush and doing OPs and night ambushes and that sort of thing. So we weren't really sure what our role was. And it only evolved when the pressures intensified and they needed fire force to be a fully manned operation all the time. And so by 78, 1978, we didn't go on patrols or we didn't do ambushing or, you know, conventional counterinsurgency operations, OPs, which was sort of upbred and butter in terms of catching the enemy, but we're purely onto a strike force role. And from 1979, it actually went one stage further where the RLI were now only involved in cross-border operations with very limited internal fire force operations.

So yeah, that became the RLI became essentially an external strike force as opposed to an internal far force. Yeah, it's very interesting. I was wondering, I mean, one of the tougher chapters in your book, the civilians, I was wondering if you could tell us about that. I mean, it's a very, it's kind of a haunting chapter in your book. Yeah. The guerrillas, their tactics were ruled by fear.

their goal was to occupy the ground in the tribal areas outside the cities what we called at the time the tribal trust lands which was where the bulk of the people lived the peasants sort of rural extreme you know rural agriculture, small-scale farmers, and they were caught between a rock and a hard place. They really were, the civilians, they were, they had to give succor to the guerrillas. They had to feed them. They had to shelter them. They had to give them their women. Otherwise, they would be regarded as sellouts and effectively taken out.

in some really ugly ways, cruel, terrible ways, so it was a total rule by fear, but it was effective. The Redisians could do very little to counter this, and the people were caught, as I say, absolutely in a rock and hard place. if they were caught giving assistance to the guerrillas, they would be punished, which normally meant their krails, their villages being burned down. And where did they go? So they were in absolutely no-win situation. And in a short space of time, vast swathes of the country became controlled by the guerrillas, certainly at night.

when I say vast swathes, I mean massive pieces of real estate, certainly along the border areas. The cities, they came later. The guerrillas followed the Maoist doctrine of swimming with the people and eventually taking the conflict to the stage where it would be conventional warfare into the cities. never quite got to that stage, but there were some attacks around Salisbury, the capital, and in the capital itself, several guerrilla operations. But yeah, I mean, the terror tactics was a deliberate campaign of terror conducted by the guerrillas. absolute rule of fear and often to our sort of western kind of eyes there was just no logic to what was done a lot of it was killing by example and it wasn't just shooting the guy it was

a chief or something who hadn't given his women for example to the guerrillas, he would be bantered and tied up with barbed wire and tortured for several hours before he was put out of his misery. And we came across, I mean, it was obvious, it had to happen that we did come across several occasions of guerrilla atrocities, essentially. I mean, the one that three commander, we were involved and I personally didn't go to it, but I was on fire force at the time was at the Keteo, tea estates, which was a big tea, tea growing operation on the eastern border. And the guerrillas came in one night and they executed like 30 workers or 30 or 14 workers, just tied them up and and, and, and, and, they're executed. like 30 workers or 30 or 40 workers just tied them up and and banished a lot of them

for no apparent reason other than to instill fear and perhaps shut down the whole tea operation which in time they did you know so yeah there there were atrocities yeah bad ones and you talk about one of the ones you got called up to to respond to and something that you you had nightmares for just years and years afterwards. And I mean, it sounded the way you wrote it, I think you said specifically, that event changed you. You weren't, you weren't the same person. Yeah. I think the whole issue of, I mean, from where our Australian stick leader in May 76 shot

that one gorilla, and then, you know, we had to deal with the body. afterwards the bodies and the way that we dealt with them. I was quite shocked. There were just pieces of meat and, you know, dragging them and looting the bodies, taking the money and whatever you could find. So death became, I think any war, death just becomes kind of all pervasive. But when you see it, affecting women and children. I think that's what kind of did it for me. I remember the one

particular incident which I still, it's kind of like surreal that and I still have to sort of wonder sometimes where it actually happened and I was it was in 1778 I was carrying a machine gun, the machine gun and the Air Force had gone in and had bombed a village. Quite a significant village. The guerrillas had been in there, which they did. They would hide with the people. And we tended not to take any cognizance of that.

And if the guerrillas were there, we'd bomb the village, regardless of their civilians here. I remember it was a big village. There must have been about 100 huts altogether, which was a significant village. So, you know, probably several, a couple of hundred people lived there. And the Air Force had been in there with, I think they'd been in there with our big bombers, which at the time would have been possibly the Canberra's, but certainly with hunters. and they'd gone in there and dropped their bombs and then we were then to sweep in

and pick up any guerrillas who were still there or in the village and when we went to the village it was it was the bodies everywhere and at first I couldn't tell you just see lumps you know on the ground you can't tell whether they're men

women children whatever And we were then told, it seemed became obvious that there were mainly civilians. There might have been a couple of guerrillas. I never found out. And we were then told we had to go and drag all the bodies into a central place for identification or burial. I'm not sure. As a machine gunner, I was exesial. exempt from that because of my job was to sort of stand God on the periphery while all

the other guys went and did this. And next to the hut where I was squatting with my machine gun, there were two little children dead. And I looked at these bodies for a while and I thought, they maybe were like one and three or something. I mean, small kids, you know. I couldn't see any visible wounds or anything on them. But they were clearly dead and I thought I can't just leave them there, you know? So I slung my gun and I picked them up like one in each hand. That's how small they were and I sort of picked them up by a leg each in each hand and I sort of wandered in the days to the pile where the bodies were being dumped. And I remember putting them on there.

And I somehow felt a little better that I sort of put them there. But it was a very out-of-body experience. It really was. And even now, I sort of, at the time, I remember I was sort of like looking down on myself, carrying these two babies or little children, you know, and dumping them, or throwing them on the pile. It was just too awful. So, yeah, that just live with me for, still does. Yeah, not a, not a nice thing. Yeah. Trying to move on to a bit of a little happier or more upbeat note. I mean, I appreciate you telling that story, Chris. I really do. Went off the parachute train.

1977 as the RLI went airborne. You did a little bit of time in detention for your misdeeds for accidentally shooting off a pistol. And then you cross paths with John Cronin, who was a previous guest on the show. Do you want to tell the story about John and his Golden Lab? Yeah. I'm trying to think of what John, he had his Golden Labrador. I can't remember what its name was. It might have been something like Daisy or something like that.

Was it lucky? Yeah, it's in there somewhere. Yeah. And he absolutely idolized this dog, a beautiful dog, and the trooper too. And the dog obviously went everywhere with... Lucy. Lucy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And someone had written in the ablution. in the toilets with spray paint Lucy Fux Bulldogs and Cronin got to see this

and he was the officer on duty at the time and he was a quiet guy in his quiet way but you could see

there was a hint of a smile when he upgraded the whole commander and we were given extra pokey drill which is horrible that bloody

I don't know if you know what pokey drill is exercises with your weapon oh like rifle PT yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so he gave us

half an hour extra rifle PT because someone and I know who the guy was who did it who wrote Lucy fucks bulldogs

excuse my language in the toilets yeah but he had a good sense of humor and And yeah, he had the sort of legend of his operation when we're doing a cross-border patrol as opposed to a raid. Quite a different sort of thing. We'd just go across the border, get dropped off there supposedly clandestinely at night in a helicopter.

The SAS would free fall in, of course. and then we'd walk around in the bush, hoping to stumble on some bad guys. And he did, John Coleman, Cronin, big a pardon, John Coleman was another American friend of mine. Ex-special forces, actually. He was an 11 troop. He became our, he was our color sergeant. I digress. Anyway, I think I mentioned my book about, John.

John Cronin's episode when he stopped. I think it was a two five. They were in ambush, his stick was an ambush on a track and they heard a vehicle coming. It was a two five doits full of Xanler guerrillas with two Chinese instructors, one driving. The patrol wasn't properly in position at the time, so he couldn't spring the ambush, but he took a chance and hoped they'd come back, which they did, but without the two Chinese,

lucky for them. And John Cronin, in true Hollywood style, stepped out into the middle of the road and sort of hand-raised and said, stop or we open fire, stop or we shoot. You know, words for that effect. And of course, the guys in the vehicle went for their weapons and bang, they got taken out in seconds. The whole lot of them were taken out and the vehicle was blown up. So that sort of went down in legend as John Cronin.

This is the Hollywood guy with his Labrador. What a good guy. Again, correct my mispronations here. The raid on Shimio, Shimoo. Shamoyo. Yeah. Can tell us about that op in 1977? Yeah.

That, I wasn't there. I was on leave. Oh, okay. Yeah, I hadn't. But the whole commander went, and I was really angry that I'd missed that. But because of, you know, hush-hush, you went to know this. I went on leave like nothing was going to happen. But that was probably of the war the most successful cross-border raid that the Redisans ever conducted.

It was done with a total of 176 troops, troopers on the ground on the ground. who were brought in either on helicopter or parachuted in, and that they were drawn from the entire SAS and three commando and two commander. So it was an RLIAS operation. It was to take out the base camp at Chemoyo, which was a fairly massive operation, probably in excess of 10,000 people, over a distance of

a hundred square miles the area of the camp and the deal was that the the SAS would box in the one side three commander another side two command another side and Alouet K cars with 20 miles would cover the fourth side

the operation was to be would start when all the guerrillas were on parade in the morning at 8 o'clock, and the Air Force hunters and Canberra's and K-Kars went in, so to start off the operation, and then came the Dakotas, the paradox to drop the troops and the helicopters to bring in the troops to box off the guerrillas. And that was a very successful operation.

I think the Redisians only lost two killed. Both I think were S-A-S-guides and several wounded, quite a few wounded actually, and a lot by friendly fire. But enemy casualties were... they never knew exactly what the sort of enemy casualties were, and how many died later or that sort of thing. But probably, I think officially, they claimed, religions claimed about 2,000 killed, probably nearer 4,000, I'd say.

So that was regarded as the blueprint for cross-border operations. Wow. You're highly successful. Now that you are, your airborne qualified, so in the unit is, can you talk to us about, you know, doing combat jumps, what that was like for you guys? Yeah, again, a lot of it was with the Air Force as well. It was trial and error. I mean, it had never really been done before.

You know, the only people who had done parachuting in a sort of operational environment were the SAS. You know, they thought, well, they'll train us up. And what's a good height to drop you? So we did our training at New Serum, which was the Air Force Flight Training School in Salisbury. We did our nine practice training jumps with American, Australian and British instructors, parachute instructors.

And then we got our wings, and we were into action once we got to the file force base almost immediately. We, the Dakota, the, was a DC3, you guys call the C-47 that we used. We were supposed to take 24 paratroopers, but kit it up with all your gear and your MA machine guns and parachute. It was just too much. So we eventually reduced to 20 and eventually 16, so two sticks of eight each side of the Dakota. And at the time, the K-Car commander, the major in the K-car would position the

position the Dakota until he identified a drop zone or until he identified where he wanted the sweep line to move in from. And essentially the paratroopers became the sweep line and they would sweep towards the stops who'd been bought in by G-Cars. Or he might decide to drop all 20 or 16 in one stick or position eight over there and another 12 there for example and it was done at a height of 500 feet I was going to ask you how high yeah that's that's a fast drop there's like no point to packing a reserve yeah yeah you don't need a reserve because no yeah being a parent can be really challenging it's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses

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And I mean, 500 feet was generous. I mean, more often than not, it was well below 500 feet. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I certainly, I mean, certainly sub 400 feet on several occasions. And every jump, there were casualties, every jump. because there were very few drop zones. You know, it was bush, thick bush. Yeah.

So, yeah, we would be fortunate if there was a plowed field or agricultural land, where it was a little bit of a drop zone. But if there was a wind, I mean, you'd be taken into the rocks and trees. And, yeah, we had a lot of casualties. Yeah, you don't have any time to steer anywhere either, right? I mean, you wouldn't have much time between your opening shock and hitting the ground. No, none.

None. That's crazy. I mean, I think the lowest recorded, and I might be wrong, was just over 300 feet. And I mean, there were broken legs. I think there was one death. And that was with the

Rhodesian African rifles in the Zambezi Valley. Yeah, that was 300 feet. I mean, that's like the Russians, you know, in World War II, throwing more of the wing. Yeah. What were some of the hairier jumps and the hairier combat jumps that you were on yourself that you can recall? I think when we, the one raid we did into, it was my last operational jump, it was in October, 1978.

We were doing a raid into Zambia. It was Operation. anyway, it became known as the Green Leader raid. It was when the Air Force basically... I remember it. Yeah, I held Lysaka Airport hostage and said, you know, no planes are allowed to take off because we're busy. We control the airspace at the moment.

That was Green Leader in his... That's what the raid became known as. It was a massive operation. There were three camps hit not simultaneously because the Reden didn't have enough aircraft to do that. So the Air Force went in first and hit FC camp just outside Lysaka. Then the SAS went into Mukushi, which was quite far north in Zambia, you know, a good couple hundred miles. They hit that camp and then the RLI went and hit a camp called CGT2 on the great east road, east of Lusaka. and I happened to be, just by accident,

I was in the first Dakota, the first C-40 DC-3, and I was the first man out the door. So I thought, that's it, I'm going to die. I mean, there's no way that I'm going to survive this. As it was, fortuitously for me, the Bush Telegraph had worked extremely, efficiently and by the time we got to our camp, our target most of the guerrillas, and there were a lot of them, I would like 5,000 of them, they had all

bombshell that fled. Not all of them, and there were a few hardcore ones in their gun emplacements, manning their 14.5s and 12.7s, which they were using in Grand Rural, which we had to deal with. But yeah, I remember that. That one, and it was a perfect jump. It was a stand-up. There was no wind. But Zambia has these massive, massive trees.

You know, being near the equator, everything grows bigger and faster and quicker. And they had these massive trees like several hundred feet high. And our guys were getting hooked up in them and being shot at by Oh my God. You know, the 12.7s down below. It's very difficult, apparently, to hit a paratrooper. But, yeah, there was a bit of a nervous time there where I saw all these guys sort of,

then they've got to extricate themselves up from this tree, miles up, and then come scrambling down like a monkey, you know, with his nine-mill pistol, shooting at the guys with the 12.7. So that was a bit hairy. But generally fire force jumps were hard and fast and, you know, apart from damaging yourself, you know, breaking your ankle or your leg or something, it was the damage that it would do to your gear, your rifle.

So, I mean, many is a time where your machine gun, your MAG ended up with a barrel sort of a foot down in the ground and yeah we lost a lot of weapons and a lot of stuff like that and you know apart from the obstacles like trees and rocks I think the best one was also an American guy a guy called Hugh McCall he was killed killed in action he was a very good friend of mine and he jumped out and we were over a village or a crawl as we called And he happened to land astride a plough, a steel plough. And he went in at speed, and he landed, straddled this bloody plough. And we thought it was quite funny.

But he didn't. And he was in considerable pain for a long, long time. Yeah, so it was parachuting. And we had one pilot who was a highly excitable Mauritian actually, French extraction. And we call them a Mastuka pilot because I don't know what the technique is, but when an airplane is flying along disgorging its troops, the pilot has to adjust his altitude to maintain 500 feet.

And this guy would always over-adjust and end up going down. So if you were the last guy out of the plane, you were going out at 400 feet for sure. So whenever we knew he was the pilot, we would, yeah, we weren't too happy about that. Yeah, lots of stories, parachuting. because of the we were used so often

I mean some guys stories of some guys I jumped into two contacts a day sometimes, not often and there were one guy who jumped in three contacts in one day, three operational jumps in a day so it didn't take long before we built up our

operational tally, operational jumps tally and I think the record in the Redesion Light Infantry was a guy I think he had 86 operational jumps which as far as I know

is a world record I mean I can never beat 86 off jumps How many did you have by the end? I had about 20 I think but I was quite clear

that I used to sneak out and manage to get on to helicopter being being quite senior in my troop I always managed to put myself onto helicopters

as opposed to parachuting during this time was were the the force Zipra in Zanu right? Or Zanlu did I know that they sort of

I know they had this mutual goal or superficial goal, but did they also fight because of different ideology is different backing? Absolutely. Yeah, they did. And there were several cases of, there was really a race between the two factions, Zipra, which was the Soviet-trained, essentially Matabili tribe, if that means anything to you. extraction tribe who came from the western part of the country. They were run by Joshua in Komo, who was the head honcho. And then you had the Zanla, Zimbabwe, African National Liberation Army, which was

Mugabe's crowd, who were essentially Shona, who were the majority tribe in the country. And the race was on between them to occupy the hinterliferation. land of Rhodesia as quickly as possible. So, I mean, we didn't know this half the time. We were sort of clueless what was going on. But there were a fair amount of contacts inside the country when they eventually clashed, Zanler and Zipra. Yeah, there was no love loss there.

Yeah. Can you tell us about some of your operational deployments going into Matoko. Motoko. Yeah. Motoko was an area near Mount Darwin, which was up on the north-eastern

part of Rhodesia on the border with Mozambique. A big tribal trust area and also a big white farming area. By 1977, I think, the white farming area had been totally cleared out. There was not one white farmer left in the area.

Zanla controlled Motoka, Sydney Night. And so it was a hotbed. It was also a fairly important infiltration route from Mozambique. and indirectly from Tanzania, which is where Zaner also had a lot of base camps. And we came a big river that flows from near Salisbury or Harare, as it is now, the Missouri River that flows into the Zambizi through Motoko, into the Tate province in Mozambi, into the Zambisi.

And it was a major impact. infiltration route and we got called out to a place called Niamapanda, which was on the border with Mozambique. Like a lot of these operations, you ended up sitting around. I mean, you don't know what was going on, you know, hurry up and wait, normal army. And we were waiting and waiting. Then the SAS arrived in the Dakota and they all got out and went and sat under the wing of their airplane and they waited around and we thought nothing's happening and we waited for

probably about three hours it was doing nothing and then suddenly you hear over the radio out the blue stop one stop one prepare for uplift and you suddenly had a bird coming and she got to jump around and get ready and that picked up a group of I might be wrong, maybe 200 guerrillas had infiltrated the country along the Missouri River. And that spotted them, the Air Force had gone in and bombed them, and then they had bombshelled into groups of 30 or 40. But it was over a massive kind of battlefield. So it was almost impossible to pin them down.

we did, we managed to have contact, excuse me, and I think we got about three or four. So, you know, those sort of things. And I realize then, you know, out of the 200 that had infiltrated the country, we possibly accounted for altogether, maybe 20. So, you know, there are 180 and escaped, and we're in the country now. This is what we're up against. It was just sheer numbers. It was impossible to deal with those kind of numbers.

As we get into 1979, the war has progressed. The enemy is getting bolder. Also, I get the sense from your book and some of the other books I've read that the troops were also getting kind of shell-shocked and in some cases pretty ruthless from all of the combat experience and some of the horrible things they'd seen on the battlefield. Do you want to walk us in from your perspective about what that was like getting into some of those final battles of the war? Yeah. Well, for me, I mean, my time was up in February 79 was when my contract would finish.

So it was always quite a nervous time, and I'm sure it's the same in any army, that in your last few weeks or a couple of weeks of your time. of your contract that it's always a you worried I mean am I going to make it you know and it was very much the case case with me I kind of knew that I tempted fate just that a little bit too much and I knew that it was just a matter of time before I before something happened I mean I'd had tell a real war story as we called their mind. I'd been in one contact where it happened in early January 79. And, yeah, that was quite a hectic contact. I think I killed six that one day. I was a machine gunner. I'd given up commanding a stick because I actually quite like carrying a machine gun because it's quite a powerful weapon.

and Hugh McCall, the American, was our stick leader. And then the other two troopers was a guy called Kevin Grace, who was a redisian, and another guy called Bob Smith, who was American from Georgia. So two Americans, two adhesions in the stick. And we went into this one village, we were quite prosperous by African standards. And it was the village, like a lot of the villages across, with two long lines of huts. And in the middle was a sort of communal area

where they sat outside and ate and cooked and things like that in good weather. And a very simple plan, Hume McCall and Bob Smith would go around the right-hand side of the line of huts. And Kevin and I would go on the left-hand side and we'd sort of envelop it like that and clear the cross. basically. So I had no idea where McCall and Smith were.

We lost them visually. I knew vaguely where they were. And as we stepped into the crawl, between the two lines of huts, the guerrillas opened up on me and Kevin. I mean, I don't know how we went hit. Absolute insane. Just volley of fire. Really. I just, I didn't think I would make it.

And I felt like it was in a box with rounds just everywhere around me. And I said, it's just time before I'm hit. Anyway, there was a little, what we call it, like a grain storage bin on stilts. And that was the only cover available, these little thin sticks or poles. So Kevin and I died behind them with the bullets was following us. I don't know how we went hit. I really don't. And then suddenly all quiet, nothing.

And I heard McCall, you McCall shouting. Chris, what's going on? You're okay, you're okay? I said, yeah, I think so. And then it's quiet. Just dust and smoke and that. And then suddenly to my right, near where McCall and Smith were, I saw these figures scurrying away through the mango trees, about four of them, four or five of them. Clearly, guerrillas. They were all armed. So I sort of

In my sort of stunned state Still sitting on my butt So squatting My machine gun was on its bipods And so I didn't bring in the shoulder any I just sat it on the ground And open fire I had a belt of 100 rounds

Which I always had as the first belt And I could see the fall of shot from my rounds, going through the dry leaves of the mango plantation chasing these guys. So I adjusted the elevation, the fraction, and the bullets just followed these guys. It was amazing. It was like in the movies, you know, and all four of them tumbled. I didn't know what happened, but they fell. So I shouted to Hugh, they're there. near you, you better sort of jump around and get cracking in case they're still alive or

there others there. Kevin and I then went over and joined them. We did a sweep and we found them, four of them. One was still alive. He'd fallen into an ant bear hole that we pulled him out and he was dispatched. I'm ashamed to say, not by me, but. We were told, get rid of them. Don't keep them.

So we then went back into the village and there were more. There were more hiding in the huts. So it was just this battle that just ensued for a long, long time. They're trying to winkle these guys. They're taking refuge in the hut. In the huts and you had to go into the hut and drag them out. or kill them and there were women and children in the huts too. We weren't allowed to burn the huts.

You weren't allowed to burn them out because you wanted to capture them if possible if there were important commanders or detachment commanders or documents or things like that. So, I mean, Bob Smith, that was his job as a rifleman, as a trooper. He would have to go into each hut. I mean the one hut he stepped into as he stepped into an AK came up and took a pot shot at him from point blank missed him I don't know how now so that that raged for a while I don't know how more women and children weren't killed not many were killed fortunately and then we swept down to the river line where we knew a whole lot more had escaped and and we had another contact and we managed to shoot some more.

I got a couple more. But at the end of it all, we were told to burn the craft, burn the village, which we did. And there were these, I just remember these women and children just absolutely stunned, Absolutely stunned, just sitting in a big group while we burned their homes. And they were too scared to move from the flames. And I went over to them. I said, get out of here, move, move, move, go. And so they did.

And then we got on the helicopters and went home, you know. So that was that night when I got back to the camp, I took off my webbing and, you know, as one does, and replenish your ammunition and fill up your water bottles and radio batteries and, you know, get ready for the next day. And I had like five or six bullet holes in my webbing. I had one through my radio battery in the one pouch on another through a water bottle on the one side and then the other side.

I had like three or four, two or three bullet holes on either side in my wedding. So, I mean, I must have come within millimeters, inches of being hit. So, yeah, someone was watching me that day, yeah. That was about the point where you had decided maybe I've had enough. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, someone's trying to tell me something here. And so that was my last.

major contact. That was the 5th of January, 1979. I didn't see much action after that. Well, things were changing politically, too, by like 1979, 1980, right? Like, what was happening? What was going on in Rhodesia itself? Yeah, politically, there'd been interventions by the British Foreign Secretary, by Kissinger to try and broker some sort of peace deal, some sort of agreement with all the warring factions.

But it never came to much. So what Ian Smith, the Prime Minister, did, was really broker a peace agreement with local, locally based black political parties which were called an internal settlement which was never recognised internationally you know Mugabe was regarded as the leader of Zanu and in Komo was regarded as the leader of Zapu

Zipra and Zanla the armed wings they were never involved in in any kind of negotiated settlement. And they knew that they didn't have to be, that ultimately they would take power through the barrel of a gun, as they called it. So they didn't need to be involved in any political settlement.

But in the middle of June, in the middle of 1979, the country changed politically. It became Mishmash. It became Zimbabwe. and Bishop Muzarewa became the Prime Minister and Ian Smith was like given some sort of defence portfolio something like that so but it was effectively the same it was still still the whites controlling the country now that all changed in December 79 when there was a negotiated peace agreement peace talks peace talks

in London with everyone around the table, Mcoma, Mugabe, Smith, Muzare, all of them. And it was agreed there would be a ceasefire and that elections would take place in early 79 with a view to independence in April 1980. Yeah. and that's when Mugabe won landslide basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you know why like other countries wouldn't recognize the internal agreement? Did they think that Smith wasn't giving enough concessions? Because obviously, you know, Mugabe and, please help me, the tour,

yeah, they weren't like good organizations. You know, they were terror. the villagers, they were doing a lot of things. So why didn't people outside of the country other governments recognize that internal agreement? That's a very good question. Some did, surprisingly enough.

But the world basically knew that Mugabe, he had the majority of support. And so they refused to recognize any of the smaller, internal parties. And McGarby's propaganda machine was first class. It really was. Yeah, I mean, the religions when it came to propaganda were hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. Yeah, so, I mean, Maghabi had pretty well everyone in his pocket.

And he was even, he was Thatcher's man. He was the British man. That's who they wanted. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much of a huge backstory with Lord Carrington and all the other weird, weird things that happened in the final days, final years of Rhodesia. But you have also written several other books, Chris, about what happened for you after the war. And I regret to say, I have your novel actually sitting on my bookshelf and I haven't read it yet.

And I have to read your other books. Could you tell us about that experience after the war and what that was like? for you and kind of what happened. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, my story is pretty well. It was a universal story of what it was like, trying to decompress from a war situation. I mean, you guys, you guys have it. People with suicides and guys coming back from Iraq in Afghanistan and, you know, that sort of thing.

and I've just read a book about a guy from Iraq, American guy, and his description was, it becomes the battle over the kitchen table, as he called it, which I thought was quite a good description of trying to assimilate back into civilian life. And now suddenly your life, you know, you're out the military or, you know, you've come home, you've done your time, you've done your tour, and now what? There's very little kind of assistance to help you reintegrate into society. Okay, they try and get you to go on various courses or degrees or things like that, back to school.

But, yeah, my mind is a typical story of just I just could not adapt or integrate back into society for a hundred different reasons and I think everyone's story is different but they're all the same at the same time and although I never considered suicide I had lots of my mates comrades who did and lots of them I mean and I think it's a truism that certainly in our little war that we lost more people after the war than during. Yeah. Which I think is what happened with the Americans and the Brits in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yeah, so I just really struggled to get back. And it was a long journey. It really was the whole thing, drink and drugs and not a happy, happy situation. and it took a long, long time. You know, with a post-traumatic stress disorder, which some people have it, some don't, different levels of it as well. And I think they say that it can take up to 30 years

to manifest itself or to really come, to really hit you. And certainly that was my first. case. I think there's a sort of the immediate impact of straight after a war situation of of just wildness, madness, drinking drugs, you know, that goes away and then the actual PTSD sneaks up. When you have to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It can be very insidious and it manifests without you even really knowing that's what's going on. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, it's easy to blame a lot of your behavior on it. Yeah.

But it's a true thing. And yeah, like I say, it affects everybody differently, some more than others. I got it pretty bad, I think. And, you know, like a lot of those nightmares, they still live. They'll never go away. but it's learning to live with that. And, you know, basically I'm a good guy who did bad things. I'm not a bad person. Well, I did some things that could be considered immoral.

Right. In other words, yeah. So, yeah, it was hard. It was very hard. But you've got a choice, you know. Yeah. Now, out of curiosity, You know, like, I feel like your experience, like the Rhodesian experience is very different than, say, the Americans, the Brits, you know, these other people because our wartime experience may be similar or that post-traumatics.

But we go back to a culture that is familiar, even if we don't feel a part of it, where you were living in a country that was changing. The culture around you was changing. and you had been a part of trying, I don't want to say trying to fight that change, but trying to stop somebody like Mugabe from taking over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you see, you know,

these things start to happen in your country that, you know, Mugabe in these fear campaigns. How did that affect you? How long did you stay in Rhodesia Zimbabwe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that, you know, we, we won all the battles, but we lost the war. And not only did we lose the war, but we lost our country.

And when I say we lost our country, the whites just evaporated. In 1980, there was just this mass exodus, and very few whites will leave. I mean, there were whites left, obviously, and there still are. but it was I was absolutely lost. I had no idea what I was doing there. I had no idea whether I wanted to stay in Zimbabwe. I could see what was going on in terms of all the, you know, the walk carried on, 1982, 83 between Zanl and Zupra,

and then what they called the Gukuruhundi, where Mugabe sent, these North Korean go and basically embark on a campaign of genocide in Matabili land against the Matabili land people and took out of all in Comos and armoured columns coming across from Zambia. And the irony is that all the pilots in the Zimbabwe Air Force who did that were all Redisian pilots who were staying on finishing the Air Force Contrast. tracks. And the troops who took out in Como's Zipra columns were either

adhesion African rifles who'd not be rebadged as something else and a lot of X. Aralagas. So I mean, it was a bizarre situation and it never sat right with me. And of course, you know, Mugabe, to start with, he was a was all pragmatism and he was hailed as a man of peace and a man who had reconciliation. And he was, to start with, until things happened and started going wrong. But I never felt it was home. Never. Never.

I stayed on for 15 years after independence. simply because of family stayed on there. But I went through, I don't know how many jobs I've been through, lots, you know, 10 different type jobs, going through my whole roller coaster of substance abuse. And that was just not a happy time. So I want to ask sort of an insensitive question, but I think that other people watching this and listening to it

might have the same question, so I want to ask it. When you say that sort of whites left, do you feel that like there were sore losers, kind of these races who didn't want to see a black government and were mad that whites were no longer in power? Was it because there were threats against white people? Was it a combination of these things? Like what sort of what was going on with the immigration at that point? I think there's a lot of.

a truth in what you're saying. A lot of whites were racist. They had a deep fear of Mugabe, the same way the whites had fled from the Congo, and they saw that another Congo-type scenario was going to happen. And so they fled, literally, in their thousands, to South Africa, Australia, UK, America, wherever, all over the world. Yeah, and a lot of...

of those people who left, a lot of people left in 1980 and immediately after independence. They went to places like Australia, for example, and they're still living in that whole time war of 1980. Attitudes, times have not changed for them. Whereas, but I can't say that about everybody. Sure. And there was a legitimate fear from Mogabi. It wasn't just people who were racist, who like didn't want to see blacks in the country, but it was the person.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I still found it difficult to believe that even in 1979, the majority of whites still supported Ian Smith. I mean, surely the writing was on the wall. What this guy had been doing for the last 15 years was taking the country down this path of just sort of self-destruction. But the white supported him. I think a lot of it was also personal. I mean, people were starting to leave. There was a mass exodus from about 1978, 79, the floodgates opened and people were just leaving.

I think they were just struggling with the military service, struggling with the whole war situation. I mean, if you were a male civilian of military serving age, you would spend, as a civilian, you would spend six weeks in the army, six weeks as a civilian. So it was called six weeks in, six weeks out. And you couldn't live like that, you know. Yeah. You know, how do you get a job on that sort of basis? Right. Yeah.

So a lot of them left because of that. Your post-military life, you described it in survival course and out of action are the two books? Yeah. Yeah. But basically the same book. I just changed the title. And it originally came out as survival course. And then I changed it.

I don't know. Okay. So out of action is the book that I need to get. order now? Well, there's a new one now called. It's now called Survival Course Again. Okay. Yeah.

And it's completely updated and revisited. Yeah. And that covers the period from when I finished with the Redisional Army and up until almost to date. Okay. But it covers the last 18 months of the war when I served with police part two,

police anti-terrorist unit as a reserve a stick leader there. So, yeah, the war didn't finish for me. Yeah. I was civilian now. And your novel that's sitting on my shelf,

is it Purple Vortex? I've again rewritten that and I've called it the reason these things have gone through so many iterations is I've never really happy with what the publishers did with them. So I rewrote them and eventually self-publish them. But it's a novel called, I've called it Deslocado Redemption. Okay. That's, yeah. Yeah. Deslocado is

Portuguese for displaced. Okay. Effectively, yeah. I'm, I'm having this conversation with you. I'm excited to go back and read these books that I haven't caught up on. And of course, what we've been talking about here today is Fire Force. by our guest, Chris Cox. I hope you guys will check it out. And your cover from Amazon may not look like this is an older edition. So, oh, yeah, Chris, you have a current edition? That's the new edition.

That's the new edition. Yeah. So we have some questions from one of our Patreon subscribers. Yeah. Were you ever tempted to go to South African military after 1980, since so many members of the RLI did go there. Yeah.

That's a good question. No, I wasn't. As I say, I had certain sort of family obligations. I'd got married when I was 20, I mean, in the R&I and had children. I had my son first child when I was 21. Wow. So I had other kind of obligations, but I was quite keen on pursuing a military career, and I'd actually made a made advances to the Foreign Legion.

I was going to go there, but then it never happened. A lot of guys went and joined the British Army. A lot of the Americans went back to the American army, various units there, and did well. Some of them did really, really well. And ditto with a lot of the guys who went back to their British Army. that arose to yeah they did well

yeah Rhodesia was one of those interesting places where it had a professional force and a lot of those members were former soldiers from other countries yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean

at one time with the Rhodesian Light Infantry because of our shortage of manpower we actively I believe used to advertise in the states and soldier of fortune and various magazines like this and in the telegraph newspaper UK and this sort of thing. So we had a fairly large complement of foreigners as we called them, Americans, Brits, Canadians,

Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans obviously. And I mean at one stage the Redish and Light Infantry had 27 different national So a real kind of mishmash, almost like a little mini foreign legion in itself. Yeah. Yeah. And then he says, any book, document or your other recommendations for learning about the conflict from the other side, from the perspective of the ordinary combatants and not the politicians? That's also a very good question.

there's not been a lot of literature from Zanla or Zipra. I did edit a book once by a guy called Agripa Mutambara, who was a fairly senior Zanla guy. In fact, he was at Chimoya when we attacked. He was one of the senior commanders at Chimoya. His book is worth a read, SETI from a sort of senior Zanla perspective. He ended up fairly senior in Ethiopia.

But yeah, he saw action at Chemoya. He was one of the guys who organized the defense there. Agrippa Mutambara. I'm trying to think what the name of the book is. You know, his name is Mutambara pretty well as it sounds. So they're not that many around. I don't know why. I mean, it's something I've encouraged.

I've actually quite interested to read combat from their perspective. Yeah. Probably, I mean, I'm just speculating, but I imagine they didn't have exactly a free press in Zimbabwe after the war. And also the life expectancy in Zimbabwe is, was like 30 for the black population. I mean, a lot of them, they're just not around. Yeah, they're not.

I mean, there are a few accounts, but written more from the senior sort of generals and senior politicians. Right. Some really good accounts and good books, but very little, almost nothing, sort of on my level, as I call it, sort of a trooper, memoirs, nothing, very little.

Being that the government, Zanl sort of became the government and the troops and whatnot, did you have a chance to talk to any of these men who had been on the other side? Because now you're brushing shoulders with them in the streets, right? Yeah, absolutely. I did.

I had quite an interesting episode once. I was picked up, I was flying back from South Africa. This would have been in about 89, about nine or ten years after the end of the war. And I was searched, coming back from South Africa, I was searched at the airport. And the guy who was doing the searching was a member of the Central Intelligence Organization. They didn't just have customs officers working at the airport. They had special branch type people there as well. And we got chatting.

And he turned out had been a Zanler combatant, had fought for Zanla. He was now a captain in the Zimbabwean army. And he said, do you want to come and meet my boss? he was also a Zandler combatant who was now a major and I said yeah sure so I met them and they were both based at the Rhodesian Light Infantry Barracks they were in what the RLI became which was

I think it was called one commander battalion effectively the same role as the Rhodesian Light Infantry and they said, well, come to the officer's mess, we'll buy your drink. The first time I ever been to the officer's mess. So I went around there to the office's mess, went through the gates, no problem, got signed in and saluted and treated like royalty. Because here I was a veteran RLI guy visiting the new RLI.

Yeah. And I went into the officer's mess and had a drink. And they were both, we got on like a house on fire, good guys. And they were upset. They were sad that all the RLI memorabilia and the colors and everything had been taken away. There's nothing left. There's nothing left at all. Even the statue of the, there was a statue of a trooper in the, we call it the Holy Ground in the middle of the barrack, the middle of the barracks. That had been taken down to South Africa. So the whole place had been absolutely stripped. There was nothing there to suggest that there'd been a Rhodesian light infantry there. And even in the officers' mess where all the swords and the banners and the various plaques and all that were hanging on the wall, nothing there, nothing. And they regarded the RLI as effectively the forerunner. Right. So they believed...

It was kind of surreal. They believed that we were... We spawned one commander of battalion. Right. And they said, if you can get the stuff back to us here, we will look after it, you know? And no chance of that happening, but I mean, I thought it would have been fantastic if we could

Yeah. Get stuff back to them. And at the time, there were American instructors and British instructors on the parade ground. I could see them out through the officers and his training, training all the trips there. So very surreal. Yeah. Yeah. And last question.

Did you see any Cubans or Russians during the war? And we mentioned Chinese, but we'll say Chinese. Like, what would be the, if you guys captured them or killed them, what were the person? procedures for Cubans, Russians, Chinese, you know, North Koreans. Yeah. I don't, I think the Redisians did capture some Chinese. They would have been quietly returned to China. I certainly know the South Africans in their war.

They captured quite a few Russians in Angola. And they were all involved in prisoner exchanges. but yeah they would have been treated normally normal prisoners of war we did not mistreat generally our prisoners of war there was no torture or anything like that yeah so they would have been treated quite normally yeah yeah be quite interesting I mean I personally never came across any but we heard stories of

I mean like at Chomoya there were lots of Cubans but they obviously managed to get the first train out of town and they got away. But I mean, even today, there's a quite a, it's mainly to do with the Russian South African conflict in Angola, the 80s and 90s. I mean, there's a whole different, different war, different story, but today there's a Russian South African military association. And all these Russians who fought in Angola against the South Africans, they will come out to Angola and they visit the battlefields with the South Africans and, you know, tell war

stories. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Jim Sheenberger, I'm not sure if you know who, he says hello. And he says, oh, thank you. He says he's in North Carolina if you're ever there. Hi, Jim.

Yeah, lovely. Love it to hear from him. And thank you, Izzy. Yeah, and thank you, Izzy. We really, really appreciate your donation. Chris, as we wrap up here tonight, is there anything that I failed to ask or fail to cover? Anything you really would like to get out there? No, not really.

I'm just sort of, you know, at the end of our war, we kind of felt what was it all for? And I mean, I think everyone feels that after any war. And we felt that in many, you know, we felt that in many, respects we had failed. We had failed as soldiers. We'd fought the good fight, but we'd be beaten by Andrew Young and Kissinger and Callahan and all these international politicians. And I remember when I wrote Fire Force, my book, I wrote the first draft in 1987. So it was still quite fresh. I mean, it was only seven years old and I banged it out in an old typewriter with lots of typics and I didn't set out to write a book. What I set out to do was to write a bunch of stories

of some of the more memorable actions or contacts or operations that I was involved with, just for my own erudition basically, for me. but at the end of it I thought maybe there's a book in here I don't know so I had this manuscript a hard copy

and photocopy at all and I sent it off to a publisher in England I sent it off to publishers all over place

and I sent it off to the main military publisher in the UK and I got this note back a brisk a brusque little note, handwritten note from the publisher. This was of no interest to us. No one basically gives a toss about Rhodesia. You know, the silly little wall. We're not interested.

And I just thought, I can't believe that, you know. I mean, really, we went for that for just as like a little mini footnote in history. I mean, and it was absolutely just gutted me. It really did. And, you know, being white from Southern Africa at that time, it was not a good thing. You were pretty well a pariah. And whether you were or you not, you were regarded as internationally as a racist, basically. And which a lot of us weren't. a lot of us were

but the lot of us weren't and that to me was probably the bottom of the barrel as far as I at the time and I just thought what is it all for? What for? And I'm sure

everybody goes through that and it's only now well I say now but in the last 20 years because my book first it was eventually published by Gallagher published in South Africa in 1989. So it's the first edition.

So it's been out for over 30 years. It's been in print through various editions. And since then, I've slowly, slowly started getting correspondence from all over the world. and from Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this guy's bought my book and he's at the bag ram or whatever. And it's just absolutely fantastic how this sort of military community has sort of reached out. And they will come back to me and they said it did matter. Yeah.

Absolutely it did matter. I say good guys and I mean I've made email friendships that endure to this day with people I've never met lots of Americans and Brits from all over the world

and you know servicemen and it's just wonderful that the sort of military type community almost it's it's really interesting Chris I

you're right for a long time this conflict was not spoken about here in the Western world for political reasons. And still to this day, it's controversial. There were people who were upset with me for having you on this podcast. Why are you having this person who fought for this racist government on your show? And I hope that they will actually watch this interview and they will see that there's a bigger story here and that it's important to talk about this history. and for all of the good and for all of the bad. And I do think it matters and I think it's important. And I really appreciate you writing this book and some of the other folks who have come on this podcast

who served in Rhodesia to speak of their experiences. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And that for me is what has made it sort of worthwhile, really, is how it's brought together the sort of military and we're not kind of luny killers and racists and things like that we're just people serving in the military and it's been just wonderful

just to get the support and I mean I had one American guy he was a captain and he was in Iraq and he said we were driving around the Humvees we weren't allowed to get out we were getting shot at all the time And he went to his major and he with a copy of my book and he said, sir, here's the answer.

This is how we should do it. And so, yeah, absolutely fantastic. It is funny how we really fail to learn from the past, you know, as military forces, that we have to relearn lessons all over again every time we get the conflict. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We're always fighting yesterday's war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, if you know anybody who had been in Zanliff, you're in contact with them, we'd be happy to have them on the show.

I mean, we're interested in, you know, history. We're interested in telling the narrative of history. So if you know of anybody, please send them our way. Certainly will. So the books are Fire Force that we're speaking about here tonight. Chris is novel, Disclocado, Redemption, and then survival course. Survival course, the new survival course, right. Yeah, the new one. They're all up on Amazon.

You can get the Kindle editions and start reading them right now. Yeah. The order is Firefox first, then the sequel is Survival course, and then there's a novel. And the link is down in the description of this video or podcast, however you're listening to it. So thank you, everyone who tuned in today. Next Friday, we're going to have Milt Bearden on the show, senior CIA officer. I've been reading his book here, The Main Enemy, about the final showdown between the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War. This book is amazing.

I'm really excited to talk to Milt. That will be next Friday. Chris, thank you again for joining us. Thanks, Steve, for your work here. Thanks, Dave. And we'll see all you guys next Friday. Thank you. Thanks.

Brilliant. Thanks, everybody. Thanks so much, Chris. We appreciate it. Thank you. Okay.