Mad Dog Killers: The Story of a Congo Mercenary

By: Ivan Smith

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Synopsis: This soldier of fortune’s “superb [and] harrowing” memoir of joining the fight against Africa’s Simba rebellion “cuts to the core” (The Weekend Post, South Africa). In the summer of 1964, young and cocky Ivan Smith volunteered as a mercenary in the Armée Nationale Congolaise. Armed with a naïve invulnerability and a promise of “exciting work” and “high rewards” Ivan signed a six-month contract in hell. The “danger money” was for warding off Simba rebels in Africa’s bloody Congo-Léopoldville revolt. A member of “Mad Mike” Hoare’s Five Commando Group he and his companions were nominally soldiers—but there was little in the way of campaigns, tactics, or discipline. This was not conventional warfare. Loyalty to country or unit did not exist. For Ivan, the greatest dangers came from within his own band of fellow mercenaries, more of whom would die from accidental discharges, drunken shoot-outs, or stray bullets in the back than were ever killed in action by Simba rebels. More than half a century later, Ivan relives the nightmare that was his time in the Congo, where he’d come to understand that there was no law of the jungle—just a lust for killing, and a true abject fear that helped to keep him alive.