Feral Jundi

Very cool. Al Venter has authored some fantastic books and is certainly dedicated to this subject matter. I have not read this particular book yet, and if any readers out there would like to add their two cents about the publication, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Also, this book is in the Jundi Gear store, and the link provided below will take you there directly. Or you can visit the JG store at any time and it will be there to check out or buy at your leisure.  It looks like it is priced at $21.75. Be sure to check out Al’s wikipedia I posted below because it will give you an idea of the kind of work he has done over the years. –Matt

Gunship Ace: The Wars of Neall Ellis, Gunship Pilot and Mercenary
By Al Venter
Book Description
A former South African Air Force pilot who saw action throughout the region from the 1970s on, Neall Ellis is the best-known mercenary combat aviator alive. Apart from flying Alouette helicopter gunships in Angola, he has fought in the Balkan War (for Islamic forces), tried to resuscitate Mobutu’s ailing air force during his final days ruling the Congo, flew Mi-8s for Executive Outcomes, and thereafter an Mi-8 fondly dubbed ‘Bokkie’ for Colonel Tim Spicer in Sierra Leone. Finally, with a pair of aging Mi-24 Hinds, Ellis ran the Air Wing out of Aberdeen Barracks in the war against Sankoh’s vicious RUF rebels.
For the past two years, as a “civilian contractor,” Ellis has been flying helicopter support missions in Afghanistan, where, he reckons, he has had more close shaves than in his entire previous four-decades put together.

Twice, single-handedly (and without a copilot), he turned the enemy back from the gates of Freetown, effectively preventing the rebels from overrunning Sierra Leone’s capital-once in the middle of the night without the benefit of night vision goggles. Nellis (as his friends call him) was also the first mercenary to work hand-in-glove with British ground and air assets in a modern guerrilla war. In Sierra Leone, Ellis’ Mi-24 (“it leaked when it rained”) played a seminal role in rescuing the 11 British soldiers who had been taken hostage by the so-called West Side Boys. He also used his helicopter numerous times to fly SAS personnel on low-level reconnaissance missions into the interior of the diamond-rich country, for the simple reason that no other pilot knew the country-and the enemy-better than he did.
Al Venter, the author of War Dog and other acclaimed titles, accompanied Nellis on some of these missions. “Occasionally we returned to base with holes in our fuselage,” Venter recounts, “though once it was self-inflicted: in his enthusiasm during an attack on one of the towns in the interior, a side-gunner onboard swung his heavy machine-gun a bit too wide and hit one of our drop tanks. Had it been full at the time, things might have been different.” The upshot was that over the course of a year of military operations, the two former Soviet helicopters operated for the Sierra Leone Air Wing by Nellis and his boys were patched more often than any other comparable pair of gun ships in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Nellis himself earned a price on his head: some reports spoke of a $1 million reward dead or alive while others doubled it.
This book describes the full career of this storied aerial warrior, from the bush and jungles of Africa to the forests of the Balkans and the merciless mountains of today’s Afghanistan. Along the way the reader encounters a multiethnic array of enemies ranging from ideological to cold-blooded to pure evil, as well as well as examples of incredible heroism for hire.
Link to book here.
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Al J Venter, from Wikipedia
Al J Venter is a war correspondent, documentary filmmaker, and author of more than forty books who also served as an African and Middle East correspondent for Jane’s International Defence Review.
He has reported on a number of Africa’s bloodiest wars, starting with the Nigerian Civil War in 1965, where he spent time covering the conflict with colleague Frederick Forsyth, who was working in Biafra for the BBC at the time.
In the 1980’s, Venter also reported in Uganda while under the reign of Idi Amin. The most notable consequence of this assignment was an hour-long documentary titled Africa’s Killing Fields, ultimately broadcast nationwide in the United States by Public Broadcasting Service.
In-between, he cumulatively spent several years reporting on events in the Middle East, fluctuating between Israel and a beleaguered Lebanon torn by factional Islamic/Christian violence. He was with the Israeli invasion force when they entered Beirut in 1982. From there he covered hostilities in Rhodesia, the Sudan, Angola, the South African Border War, the Congo as well as Portuguese Guinea, which resulted in a book on that colonial struggle published by the Munger Africana Library of the California Institute of Technology.
In 1985 he made a one-hour documentary that commemorated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He also spent time in Somalia with the US Army helicopter air wing in the early 1990s, three military assignments with the mercenary group Executive Outcomes (Angola and Sierra Leone) and a Joint-STAR mission with the United States Air Force over Kosovo.
More recently, Al Venter was active in Sierra Leone with South African mercenary pilot Neall Ellis flying combat in a Russian helicopter gunship (that leaked when it rained.) That experience formed the basis of the book on mercenaries published recently and titled War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars.
He has been twice wounded in combat, once by a Soviet anti-tank mine in Angola, an event that left him partially deaf.
Al Venter originally qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers at the Baltic Exchange in London.
Books
Al J Venter wrote one the first ever books on the developing guerrilla wars in Central and Southern Africa. That was The Terror Fighters, published by the British company Purnells in Cape Town in 1969. It dealt with Lisbon’s escalating guerrilla war in Angola during the 1960s and 1970s that eventually led to the downfall of the government in the Metropolis.
He also wrote Coloured – A Profile of Two Million South Africans (Human & Rosseau, Cape Town 1974) which served as an indictment of Pretoria’s racial policies and was penned before it became fashionable to be anti-Apartheid. Unusually progressive for its time, the book highlighted the contribution of Coloured people against Apartheid – some of whom went into exile or chose violent resistance. While he opposed the political system, he got on extremely well with the South African military who subsequently developed a much more realistic approach against racial discrimination. The anti-Apartheid Robert McBride found the book to be one of the most influential toward starting his political activism.
While writing for Britain’s Jane’s Information Group – he contributed to their publications off and on for 30 years – Al Venter was published, inter alia, by “Jane’s Defence Weekly”, “Jane’s Intelligence Review”, “Jane’s Terrorism and Security Review”, “Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst”, Before 9/11, he was reporting in considerable depth on nuclear, chemical and biological warfare developments in both the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East.
He subsequently wrote three books on related nuclear issues: Iran’s Nuclear Option (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia, 2005 and also published in India); Allah’s Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons (Lyons Press, New Haven, 2007) and How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs (Ashanti, South Africa 2009).
He has written six books on underwater diving. His latest Dive South Africa was published in 2009 and he is currently finishing a major work on free-diving (out of cages) with sharks. Iran’s Nuclear Option
Venter has completed a comprehensive book on African insurgencies titled Guerrilla Wars in Africa – Lisbon’s Campaigns in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea which is also to be translated into Portuguese.
Wikipedia here.