My Friend the Mercenary
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
In a fly-blown bar in West Africa, British war reporter James Brabazon found himself being briefed by South Africa's most notorious mercenary, Nick du Toit, on covert military plans to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea-a tiny country fabulously rich in oil.
The botched coup and its tragic consequences left a host of guns-for-hire victims of their own avaricious schemes and ruthless double-crosses. Mark Thatcher, only son of the former British prime minister, was famously implicated in the plot.
My Friend the Mercenary is both an account of James's courageous journey into the Liberian civil war-where he reported from behind rebel lines with Nick du Toit as his bodyguard-and the inside story of the most infamous coup attempt in recent history.
'An outstanding memoir about the power of friendship in the morally complex theatre of war. James Brabazon is a fearless reporter and a brutally honest narrator. I couldn't put this book down.' Andy McNab
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fog of war, informational and moral, permeates this adrenalized memoir of Africa's dirty wars and the men who fight them. British documentarian Brabazon entered Liberia in 2002 to film rebel forces in that country's civil war, taking along bodyguard Nick du Toit, a mercenary and former soldier in South Africa's apartheid-era army. Worlds apart politically, the two men bond amid the savage conflict in one excruciating scene, Brabazon films rebels cannibalizing a prisoner as the author comes to depend on and admire his tough, courageous companion. Nick joins a byzantine conspiracy to overthrow the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea and invites Brabazon to film the prospective coup, a proposal that crosses the boundaries of journalistic ethics, though it strongly appeals to Brabazon's lust for adventure and cash. His postmortem on the plot's disastrous outcome, with its cast of shadowy financiers, rival intelligence agencies, and soldiers of fortune, reads like a political thriller. Brabazon's searing narrative captures both the allure of war the rush of danger, the deep camaraderie, the get-rich-quick mirages and its brutal realities. It's both a seductive paean to and a harsh expos of the mercenary ethos that fattens off of Africa's travails.
