What happened to the Selous Scouts?
The Selous Scouts, now there was a top drawer miliary unit, and well worth a recap on what they were all about. As the picture shows, it was a multi-racial unit with black and white soldiers serving and fighting alongside each other, and promotion was based entirely on merit, not colour. If the rest of Rhodesia had been a bit more like that, it could have been a different story, but that’s a bit off-topic for this question. Anyway, the Selous Scouts’ official role was to track the insurgents and bring the Fireforce units in to eliminate them. The selection course was brutal At one point of the training, a dead monkey was dropped off at the recruits’ camp, and the choice was this: cook it right and you’ve got a meal, cook it wrong and you’ll get botulism. And as much as tracking was their ‘cover’ role, they did actually do that, and they did it exceptionally well. They also did ‘pseudo-ops.’ That involved them pretending to be insurgents, gaining their confidence, and either luring whol...