BURKE’S BASTARDS, THAT was the name some newspaperman came up with after that first foray into Katanga. We lost a lot of men, but others lost more and the newspaper stories certainly helped recruiting. They built Burke up into something of a legend for a while and then forgot him, but then our reputation as an elite corps was secure. There was no more difficulty in finding men and Burke was able to pick and choose.

And they were marvellous days – the best I had ever known. Hard living, hard training. I felt my strength then for the first time, tried my courage and found, as I suspect most men do, that I could keep going when afraid which, when you come down to it, is all that really matters.

Burke was never satisfied. During one lull between engagements, he even forced us through paratroop training, dropping over Lumba Airport from an old de Havilland Rapide. A month later we used it for real and parachuted into a mission station in the Kasai just ahead of a force of Simbas. We pushed our way out through a couple of hundred miles of unfriendly bush bringing eight nuns with us.

They made Burke a colonel for that little jaunt and I got a captain’s commission around the time I would have been in my third year at Harvard. Life was good then, full of action and passion as it should be and the money poured in as he had promised it would. Two years later, those of us who were left were lucky to get out in what we stood up in.

Contrary to popular opinion, most mercenaries in the Congo were there for the same reason that young men used to join the Foreign Legion. It was what happened when you experienced the reality that was the trouble. I had seen what was left of settlers who had been quartered on the buzz saw of a lumber mill. I had also known mercenaries who had been in the habit of disposing of prisoners by locking them inside old ammunition boxes and dropping them into Lake Kivu, but only when they were too tired to use them for target practice.