My Friend The Mercenary: A Memoir

James Brabazon, a war reporter and filmmaker, was already a veteran of many conflict zones by his early thirties. So when he was offered an exclusive opportunity to report from Liberia, caught up in a vicious civil war, it proved too tempting to turn down. He needed to take a bodyguard, someone with strong knowledge of the region and, more importantly, someone with a gun slung over his shoulder. James hired Nick du Toit, a former South African soldier and mercenary commander, to guide him into the bloody world of Liberia’s rebels. During their time together, James and Nick slowly formed an unlikely friendship, forged during scorching days under unrelenting gunfire. Narrowly surviving the harrowing experience, James returned to the quieter, saner confines of his life in London. But only a few months later he found himself back with Nick in a fly-blown bar in West Africa plotting another, much more dangerous journey—this time to the heart of Equatorial Guinea. Nick’s mission: to overthrow the government of this tiny nation fabulously rich in oil.

My Friend the Mercenary is an exploration of the mercenary myth and a chapter in the story of modern Africa. It is a brutally honest and undeniably human account of a journey into the heart of what it takes to be a friend, a survivor and a journalist in the morally corrosive crucible of war.