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 whole formations to ambush, or other times, capturing them.
They took part in several cross border raids resulting in huge enemy casualties.
They were all para trained, and without getting into any of the politics, as a purely military unit, they were the absolute dog’s bollocks (Britspeak for really, really good).
Controversially though, they also recognised that captured enemy insurgents were a goldmine of good intelligence, so they often ‘turned’ them, flipping their allegiance to Rhodesia, and even recruiting and training them as Selous Scouts, so by the time the war ended, a big chunk of them, seen by some as terrorists, had actually served as Rhodesian soldiers.
Which made those particular Selous Scouts hated by both sides. unforgiven by the Rhodies and seen as turncoats to the ZANU/ZIPRA side.
Which then very nicely brings us to the aftermath.
In 1980, the regiment was disbanded. Most of the white troops moved to South Africa and many joined the South African special forces. The black troops were offered posts in the Zimbabwe army, and many of the turned members were murdered.
For many, it was a brutal end to a very brutal war.
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