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Our Books:
- How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs
- Dive South Africa
- Wreck Hunt
- Mercenary Invasion of Seychelles
- Jack Malloch
- Deadline Africa
- Battles of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879
- Diving with Sharks
- Neall Ellis
- Barrel of a Gun
- South Africa's Border Wars
- The 'Coloured' People of South Africa and Apartheid
About our Authors:
Al J Venter
John H. Visser
Charles Shapiro
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BARREL OF A GUN: MISSPENT MOMENTS IN COMBAT
By AL J. VENTER, with an Introduction by FREDERICK FORSYTH.
Due to be published 2008/2009
Al Venter has spent most of his adult life covering wars. From these 40 years has emerged his latest book which, for want of something better, he has called Barrel of a Gun.
Quoting his old pal and 'comrade-in-arms' Chris Munnion - who has been covering Africa just about forever for London's Daily Telegraph, 'rarely [in the earlier days] was there a life lost as these scribes rushed about from riot to revolt, from the back-and-beyond to the front, from palaces to prison cells to telegraph, telex, phone, pigeon post and the use of many other ingenious ways to get the unfolding story of Imperial Retreat back to their newspapers'. They seemed to do so with impunity'.
Munnion is right of course. But in recent years there have been an awful lot of lives lost in the quest for up to date coverage of what is going on in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Columbia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
Venter's view on the subject of combat reportage is that danger is a marvellous tonic once you accept your own limitations. The knack, he suggests, is to know how far you can push the envelope.
'Unfortunately, the lady doesn't always smile and I've lost a lot of friends over the years, all of them professional news gatherers who were simply doing their thing and in my case, I'm only alive because I'm the original coward.'
He reckons that when the shooting starts, he likes to get his head down, 'if only because Damon Runyan had it about right when he said something about life being a case of six-to-four against…'
Barrel of a Gun covers many of Venter's exploits, starting with his first real experience of conflict after he'd landed in Nigeria following the Ibo-led putsch that eventually led to the Biafran Civil War.
From there he went on to cover the wars that the Portuguese were then fighting in a desperate rear-guard series of guerrilla conflicts to retain their African colonies in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (today Guiné-Bissau). Two books emerged from those efforts, also the subject of a book to be published in 2009.
Then came Beirut, Rhodesia, the Congo, huge dollops of the Middle East, South Africa's border wars in Angola and the consequential overflow into Zambia, Uganda, Liberia, El Salvador, the Balkans - where he went in twice - once with the United States Air Force over Kosovo and afterwards with mine-clearing teams in Croatia, Executive outcomes (twice into Angola and once in Sierra Leone) as well five weeks with mercenary helicopter pilot Neall Ellis in the subsequent Sierra Leone war against the RUF rebels. There he flew combat in an antiquated M-24 Russian gunship that leaked when it rained.
Since then, Al Venter spent a lot of time covering some of South Africa's security problems, including more than a month with para-military units active against drug elements along the Tugela River in KwaZulu/Natal, or what was once known as Zululand. (In-between he dived with sharks with South Africa's tiger shark specialist Walter Bernardis of Umkomaas, the subject of another forthcoming book).
One recent phase in South Africa involved a brief spell in the mountains on horseback, and not the first time either. He was attached to a mounted unit along the Angolan Border in earlier days, not long before one of the soldiers was blown up by a Soviet TM-57 anti-tank mine.
Venter has been twice injured in combat, once when a TM-57 detonated under his APC while with a long-range penetration group deep behind enemy lines in Angola and another time, through his own stupidity, that destroyed all hearing in his left ear. It was that close, but, as he comments, it was marginally better than the alternative...
Elsewhere, this website publishes Venter's introductory chapter to Barrel of a Gun which offers a more intrusive view of the book.
Barrel of a Gun: Misspent Moments in Conflict by Al J. Venter - with an Introduction by Frederick Forsyth (the two men were in the Biafran War together) is to be published by Ashanti Publishing in Britain, the United States and Canada in 2009 and late 2008 in South Africa
Images from the book
(Click on image to enlarge)
