Mercenaries: The Terrible Ones

TIME Magazine
AUGUST 11, 1967

W hen they are not drinking bitters at the Zambesi Club bar in London, the hearty-mannered young men in open-necked sports shirts spend most of their time carefully scanning the help-wanted ads. Right now there are few openings for their specialized skills. But they are sure that somewhere soon, most likely in Africa or the Middle East, they will find a fight that they will be paid to join. They are mercenary soldiers, members of a dwindling fraternity of adventurers who lay their lives on the line for money. Kaffir-a-Day. Zambesi Club “meres” are white Rhodesians and South Africans from Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare’s Fifth Commando—a unit that left the Congo last April after stamping out a Communist-instigated rebellion of Simba warriors. Other mercenaries include Sahara-scorched French veterans of the O.A.S. uprising in Algeria, tough British colonial troops from the old Indian army, and unashamedly racist Rhodesians who joke about “sending a Kaffir a day to heaven.” In the Congo, they earned the nickname Les Affreux (the Terrible Ones). Scores of them can be found in the bars of Johannesburg and Salisbury, in Brussels, Paris and Marseille.

In my experience there are two types of auctions:

*Posh british auctioneer voice* “$9 million, do I have ten? *gestures to man on phone bidding* “Let’s see if he has another million” (everyone chuckles)

*Southern accent* "Seventy dollar bidda, now seventy-five, gotta seventy-five, who’ll gimme seventy-five? Folks this deer mount got me in trouble the other day, I was standing next to it and I said “Nice Rack!” and a woman slapped me. Now I have to attend sexual harassment training. Seventy-five, now eighty, eighty, do I hear eighty? Hup, hup, seventy-five, seventy-five, eighty now, eightyyyy! Sold for seventy-five dollars, thank ya kindly!" The second one I just witnessed with my own eyes

When I was recommending people put together some emergency kits, no matter where they live, I got many replies going “Uhhhh actually some people are poor and can’t afford to be prepared”

So I decided to go out and prove them wrong

For $115 (Minus the price of the rucksack, as you can use literally any bag without having to break the bank) I put together a very basic 72h emergency kit for 2 people.

This does not include all the items recommended- the rest are just plain household items you should have, like a change of clothes, extra socks, copies of all important documents, some basic toiletries, and a few other items. Some of these items are not “the best item in this category” and that is because we had a strict budget to follow. I’ll break down the choices in the following thread, and feel free to add some suggestions, but keep in mind this is intended to be an extreme budget kit. First up we have some basic survival items-

•2 Emergency Blankets

•Pack of 2 lighters- if for some reason those aren’t adequate, a pack of storm proof lighters. Quite frankly I think BiC lighters are some of the most useful yet forgotten survival items.

• Two emergency ponchos
•a basic fixed blade knife

If a civil war ever occurred in the US it would be funny to see literally every countries military in the world descend to evacuate their civilians Bubba and Cletus battling it out with Estonian Paratroopers as they attempt to exfil Leelo and Jaagup, The crips doing drive bys on British troops in New York, Croatian and Brazilian armored vehicles ramming eachother because they had an argument about who gets the right of way

Dated 1987, these technical manuals show use of both the PSG-1 and HK33. Concrete evidence that they were procured before ‘87.

https://twitter.com/krus_chiki/status/1638572540883812353

HK knew of this and even had direct contact with East German officials. Because of this their company HQ was searched in 1992. HK claimed they only exported 39 tooling machines into the DDR.

Okay so, buckle up I have some wild stories about this guy. So, this guy, Johnny, showed up to Ukraine and joined the Legionnaires. From what I’ve heard, he was “eccentric” from the time he showed up, but it was attributed to the fact that Johnny boy wasn’t the sharpest crayon in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… At this point, his unit is out looking for him quite urgently after it surfaces that he confided in one of them, that dear Johnny was once in Isis. He’s now on RT claiming to be Antifa and a communist, was unironically in Isis, and had previously been under Russian artillery and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

the Polish government essentially sanctioned car theft in west germany to raise capital during the 1980s and while maybe not officially, Cizitens Militia members were heavily involved, and often times were the purchasers of the cars that were stolen and smuggled into Poland with forged paperwork