When 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.
About 100 mercenaries are now training royalist guerrillas in the hills of Yemen, and a squad of ex-R.A.F. pilots known as "the Dangerous Dozen" fly jet fighters for Saudi Arabia. In the Nigerian civil war, a mercenary of uncertain nationality named Johnny ("Kamikaze") Brown pilots the battered B-26 bomber owned by the rebel regime of Biafra.
But the best market for mercenary employment remains the Congo, where President Joseph Mobutu is now trying to quell a mutiny led by some 150 whites, who were hired a few years ago by ex-Premier Moise Tshombe but have more recently been on Mobutu's payroll. That mercenary force had by last week battled its way out of a forest encampment near Obokote in Kivu Province and was pushing toward Bukavu near the Rwanda border, where a small government garrison was waiting.
Species of Superman? The mercenary apparently gets great emotional satisfaction from his work. In a new book, Congo Mercenary, Colonel Hoare, who is now retired and living on a yacht moored off Durban, reflects that a large number of his recruits were drunks, dope addicts and ("the greatest surprise of all") homosexuals.
Whatever he was at home, the average white mercenary quickly pictures himself as a species of superman in the jungles of Africa. He soon finds that he is in charge of his own personal retinue of blacks. Equipped with better arms and much better military brains, he can go confidently into battle against an enemy that outnumbers him 20 to 1 —and that flees in terror at his ap proach as tribal drums beat the message "The white giants are coming."
Fringe Benefits. All meres are well paid. Pilots in Saudi Arabia command as much as $2,800 a month, and meres in Yemen, many of them radio and demolition technicians, earn more than $1,000 a month. In the Congo, where the hazards are greater and more than 100 mercenaries have been killed in three years, the pay is less. It averages $800 a month—with bonuses for perilous assignments. But there are also fringe benefits that come from plundering captured properties.