Tales of Madness and Rhodesia

I can't escape my past as a professional soldier of fortune, lover and gambler during the Rhodesian Bush War of 1976.

I had gone AWOL from my position as a drug mule for the Greco-Turkish mafia, and as such had a significant blood debt upon my head. Suffice to say, the obvious immediacy led me southward.

Along with many Afrikaners, Dutch and amoral adventurers, I had been hired as a mercenary to train the peasant irregulars of Rhodesia into killing and dying, but mostly dying.

Those feverish nights led to a kind of sultry desperation; I witnessed things and did things which I will never repeat to another human being. And dare not repeat, even upon my deathbed.

I distinctly remember that a shortage of tobacco had led a mad Boer named Piet (art forger by trade) to capture and torture dung beetles. The resulting carcasses were then ground up and sprinkled into his cigarettes.

It may have been his infectious madness, or a madness of sweat and delirium and violence, but this spread quickly through the camp and made all of us mad.

Fresh dung beetles were sold at a premium exceeding gold or bullets. The tips of these cigarettes were then dipped in mostly diluted and cut cocaine, provided by the Soviet agents and harlots that frequented the region at this time.

The lisping Persian was essential in these transactions, but I was never able to assess his exact role. He was my best friend and most hated enemy; a man that would alert you to the latest assassination plot against your life while profiting by assisting the CIA or KGB on how to make the next four plots more efficient.

These were bleary, hungover kind of days. I had profited from rigged gambling in each of the mercenary camps, and fled to South America with a Canadian felon that had specialized in faked passports.