Selous scouts: Top secret war - Lt. Dol. Ron Reid Daly as told to Peter Stiff

This is the story of the Selous Scouts Regiment of Rhodesia which was formed in 1973, and abolished without formal benefit of disbandment, when Robert Mugabe's ZANU party took power after the British supervised elections in 1980.

Its purpose on formation was the clandestine elimination of ZANLA and ZIPRA terrorists, both within and outside Rhodesia. Their success in this field can be gauged by the fact that Combined Operations, Rhodesia, officially credited them with either directly or indirectly being responsible for the death of 68% of all terrorists killed within Rhodesia during the course of the war… losing less than forty Selous Scouts in the process.

While the Regiment was in being, they earned an incredible number of honours and awards, gaining the only two Grand Crosses of Valour ever awarded, one Commander of the Legion of Merit, seven Officers of the Legion of Merit, nine Silver Crosses of Rhodesia, twenty-nine Bronze Crosses of Rhodesia, ten Members of the Legion of Merit, five Defence Meritorious Medals, eighteen Military Force Commendations, four Meritorious Conduct Medals and one Medal for Meritorious Service. A total of eighty-five awards.

It is usual in regimental histories for a roll of honour of the dead sustained by a Regiment to be included, as well as lists of persons to whom medals were awarded, but this has not been done in this book. Not due to lack of respect for the honoured dead, or because former Selous Scouts do not wish to salute their heroes, but for the more simple and germane reason of fear of reprisals by former terrorist against men who served in the Selous Scouts or their loved ones, particularly former African Selous Scouts. It is for the same reason that some former officers and men appear in these pages under a nom de guerre and why the faces on some illustrating photographs have been blanked out.

It is stressed that this does not necessarily mean the new spirit of reconciliation between the old order and the new, in the State of Zimbabwe is looked at askance or with cynicism, quite to the contrary, it merely means that a certain status quo has been accepted… that this is a story of Africa… and that things in Africa have never been the same as in any other continent.

Generally too, throughout this book, the fighters of ZIPRA and ZANLA are called terrorists when being referred to from a Rhodesian Security Force context… not to create controversy, but because terrorist or terr is what they were called by the Rhodesians during the war, and to call them anything else would create a false historical perspective. Nevertheless, it is accepted that all terms from terrorist, terr, guerilla, boys-in-the-bush, freedom-fighter, sons-of-the-soil or cadre, mean one and the same thing and are interchangeable, according to taste or viewpoint held.