The RLI became adept at this type of military operation. An RLI ‘troopie’ was trained to shoot by double-tapping on semi-automatic: fully automatic fire was almost unheard of. In contrast, the MAG gunner would customarily let rip with short, sharp bursts from the hip that clearly had more stopping power, especially at short range. With time, the gunners would hone this skill to achieve astonishing accuracy. Interestingly, a fair proportion of the RLI complement was composed of foreigners who over the years included many British and American volunteers. They were paid the same as regular Rhodesian soldiers for their efforts.

All these mercenaries saw a good deal of action during the course of the war. Major Nigel Hensen, who commanded the RLI’s Support Commando for 30 months, reckoned that his guys were called out hundreds of times in that period, of which only six operations resulted in no contact with the enemy or, as it is militarily phrased, ‘lemons’.

When the fighting was done for the day, these off-duty American freebooters would make their way to one of the most exclusive clubs in the country run by American author Robin Moore of Green Berets fame. Moore established his Crippled Eagle Club as a kind of unofficial United States Embassy in Salisbury in response to Washington’s acquiescence in the face of Soviet encroachment in Africa.

This group of adventurers also managed to ensconce themselves with other American vets who, after service with regular Rhodesian battalions, sometimes ended up guarding farms or were employed by anti-stock-theft units in the country’s interior.

The war in Rhodesia started slowly. Having infiltrated the Centenary area in the early 1970s, most guerrilla groups, not eager for direct confrontation, for a long time appeared to be intent on laying mines and attacking the occasional vehicle not in convoy. There were raids on farms, like the one in which Arthur Cumming was murdered, but the biggest effort went towards trying to subvert the locals. This wasn’t difficult in the bush where few of the Shona people had any real contact with Europeans anyway.

Significantly, their support in the cities was muted, though obviously, in a bid to portray the war as strictly African against European (even though black troops far outnumbered their white counterparts in the ranks of the regular army), they were bound to have some success. For their part, the Rhodesians reacted by initiating a lesson they’d learnt in Malaya: many rural people were relocated into protected villages, a move designed to cut the insurgents off from supplies of food and the kind of succour they’d formerly enjoyed.

Incredible stories were to emerge from the Rhodesian War, like the one that historian Richard Wood tells of Vic Cook who, with a medic on board, was flying an Alouette helicopter to a local church mission station when a volley of AK rounds slammed into it.

At an insurgent base camp below – as security forces were to discover later – were about 30 enemy soldiers doing their best to bring them down. A quick survey of the damage told Cook that his gunner was semi-conscious after being hit by two rounds that had penetrated his body armour. Also, the Alouette’s tail rotor shaft was all but severed.