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Old 04-01-2020, 07:58 AM   #387
Icelander
 
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Default Re: There's Knifework That Needs Doing

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
I was more thinking that the people who founded the training program are a former member of the armed wing of the Nazi party who took a trip to Indochina or Algeria after 1945 for his health, a SAS veteran of the wars of decolonization, and most of the first generation of students are the kinds of Europeans who fought in the wars of decolonization in Africa.
It's a good point.

By 21st century standards, everyone was an outrageous racist, obviously. Especially some of the black African recruits, who have strong tribal loyalties (and enmities). However, any racial attitudes are mostly incidental to motivations. If any ideology is pervasive among them, it's anti-Communism, ranging from a solid opposition to rabid hatred.

That being said, however, no one who has spent years training security personnel for work in Africa can be unwilling to work with people of other races. For economic reasons, if nothing else, most of their work involved training and commanding black Africans. There was only a short period in the early 60s where all-white mercenary units were at all significant in African conflicts and even then, the most effective and successful professionals were those who hired out their military expertise to build up local forces.

Ziggy Wagner wasn't a warm and cuddly person by any means, but he was never motivated by any quasi-religious racial ideology, at least not in his adult life. After five years in Soviet prison camp, Ziggy joined the French Foreign Legion (as so many German men did in the post-war years) because he had no marketable skills other than soldiering and he wanted to eat. To Ziggy, the world was divided into his brothers-in-arms, to whom he exhibited a fierce loyalty, and all the rest, about which he didn't care one bit and whom he'd kill without scruples if his primary group loyalties required it.

Ziggy spent 1950-1955 in the French Foreign Legion, most of it in Indochina. He spent 1955-1958 as the chief of security for a casino his friend J.R. Kessler managed in Havana. During Castro's revolution, Ziggy lost his wife and his home, leaving him a single father with a two year old boy. From 1959-1965, Ziggy was involved in various murky ventures in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, but more as a trainer and organizer than as a mercenary (Ziggy never hesitated to apply violence if a friend needed help, but he was averse to long stays in the field away from his boy, whom he took with him everywhere).

Ziggy had a lot of friends among Cuban expatriates, as well as in other anti-Communist circles, and he is said to have been involved in training Cubans opposed to Castro. If he was not employed by the CIA at any point during that period, he was certainly moving in the same circles, working toward the same goals and around many of the same locations. In fact, rumours say that Ziggy, like a few other anti-Communist veterans of French paratrooper service, contracted with CIA front companies for all sorts of things, not just Cuba, but operations elsewhere.

In 1965-1970, Ziggy was the head of personal security for his wealthy friend Kessler, traveling with him when necessary, which meant the Houston area, Gulf Coast, Caribbean and Africa, mainly. He also owned Almadovar Air, a charter flight company, with a former Legionnaire friend, Jean Delvaux, and some Cuban partners in Florida. Again, rumours insist that Almadovar Air had unspecified connections with US intelligence.

Ziggy continued to help out other friends from time, which could take him into all sorts of exotic locations. Jean Delvaux was believed to have been killed in Laos in 1970 when his plane went down. Ziggy left his job and arranged to have his son (old enough for boarding school by that time) taken care of by friends, so he could spend six months in Laos looking for his friend or his body, which he finally found and brought home for burial.

In the 1970s, Ziggy mostly worked as a security contractor for the growing mineral, oil and gas interests of Kessler in Africa. That meant recruting, training and commanding security in areas that might be volatile or even in a state of warfare. Ziggy didn't live in Africa full time, but he spent a few months in various locations there per year and had homes in Texas, Florida and on several Caribbean islands. He had another child, a girl whom he named Beatriz after his late wife, with an exotic dancer down in Florida in 1970.

Ziggy 'retired' in 1980, building a cottage on the island of St. Lucia, which he named Hasenruhe (Hare's Rest), referencing the German military slang of 'alte Hasen' ('Old hares') for the veteran soldiers at the front. Bored in a few months (he was sixty and still vigorous), Ziggy kept busy training security experts for Kessler's interests, which eventually grew into the paramilitary compound of the Jägerlager ('Hunter's Camp'). Ziggy's last operational deployment was in 1986, when he accompanied J.R. Kessler, as a favor, to Mali. It was there that Kessler found confirmation of something he had suspected for a while and after that everything changed.

Ziggy lived for eight more years on St. Lucia and saw the birth of the paramilitary Night Riders, Kessler's name for vigilante Monster Hunters and protectors of the world, or at least as much of it as Kessler determined they could realistically handle. Which meant the Caribbean and the US Gulf Coast, mostly. Never numerous, the Night Riders started as about a platoon and in 2018, consist of, effectively, about a company of widely scattered men in several teams, less than half of them full-time and the rest available some portion of the time (or for the older, perhaps just in emergency defence of their home towns or areas).

Morally, Ziggy was exactly like actual, true mercenaries have been throughout history. Capable of warm friendships within his unit and a soldier's romances with any available women where he operated, Ziggy didn't believe in principles, nationality (any more), politics (ditto) or philosophical justifications. What he did want was a group to belong to, which he found among a small group of friends he made in the Legion. The most important of whom (if only because of his post-Legion career), was J.R. Kessler, who eventually became the billionaire Patron of the whole endeavour. And who is the cousin of the first Texan-born Rabbi of the Congregation B'nai Israel in Galveston, Texas.

So, while Ziggy certainly never apologized for his past or stopped saying outrageously offensive things, he also never let unimportant things interfere with his personal relationships and loyalties. He loved his Cubano wife and his son Guillermo. And he loved his frères d'armes, whether they were German, Swiss, Belgian, African or Jewish Texans.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Racial stereotypes (and willingness to learn about other cultures) are likely to be one of the factors which determines who gets recruited as an instructor; another would be exactly where the organizers spent time after the war: were they spending their free time training with Vietnamese, Congolese, or Chileans?
The recruits (and instructors) who gave rise to the most trouble with racial were not Rhodesians or other white Africans, not white mercenaries who fougtht in Africa or white Southerners from the US*, but white Legionnaires.

Unlike mercenaries in African, the Legion mostly didn't train locals or live among them. And while everyone had to learn French, learning native languages was comparatively rare among Legionnaires. Not to mention that well into the 1980s, the Legion was still a majority white, European force, and in the 1960s, it was almost exclusively so.

And while both biographies and other historical sources I've read on mercenaries in Africa reveal a surprising level of racial integration, sources for Legionnaires well into the 2000s reveal multiple incidents of racial conflict within the Legion. To a degree that would never have been accepted in the US Army of the 1970s, let alone later, some Legionnaires casually bullied and regularly beat others because of the colour of their skin.

All the sources agree that by far the worst offenders were the native French among them, perhaps because they are not supposed to be able to join, but some still do (pretending to be Francophones from somewhere else) and that this element among the Legion are the men most likely to be uneducated, unskilled small-time criminals (because contrary to myth, the Legion doesn't take anyone convicted of any serious crime). In later years, this bigotry was directed at Asians, Africans and Hispanics in the Legion, but earlier, victims were the Spanish and, especially, Jewish recruits.

Not coincidentally, none of the former Legionnaires who were constant troublemakers in the Legion because of racism, bullying and bigotry were among those whom J.R. Kessler befriended, and who many years later, were among the employees of his security companies.

*If only because it's not like insular people who hadn't lived abroad were likely to be in the social circles of the founders and so unlikely to be considered.
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Last edited by Icelander; 04-01-2020 at 02:14 PM.
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