RHODESIAN PRIDE

Extracted from African Crisis
[Photo] My Brother in the Rhodesian SAS at only 17
Date Posted: Saturday 17-Jun-2006
Here is a yellowed newspaper clipping my mother kept from Rhodesia from 1962. At the time, my brother decided to quit school. (I was also a high school dropout, and I left school, got on a plane and joined the S.African Navy at the age of 17). My brother is the real soldier in the family though. (I'm completely useless!) At the age of 17, my brother got his wings in the Rhodesian SAS (which was an extension of the British SAS). At 17, I think he was the youngest ever to get his wings.

During his training, he and others had to jump out of planes and navigate their way through the African bush in countries like Zambia and Malawi. Not long after this, by brother was sent to the north of Zambia, because of the fighting which was going on in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire). The Rhodesian SAS had to sneak into the DRC to watch the fighting, and to see to it that it would not spread into Zambia which was then still under Colonial rule.

In later years, my brother had a very successful engineering business in Rhodesia. My brother then ended up at the other end of the scale as an "old soldier". My brother was still doing callups and fighting in the Rhodesian bush at the age of 35! In one of his last contacts, he told me he was the machine-gunner for his "stick" (a unit of 4-5 men), and they were dropped by helicopter into a contact (fireforce), which raged all day long. At the end of the day they had killed 32 terrorists. Jan