The lure of adventure

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents.

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents. Among the characters you might find banging on the bar, wedged between Rick Beeston of the Times, Jason Burke of the Observer, and gentleman freelancers such as Aidan Hartley or Sam Kiley, is James Brabazon, an award-winning documentary filmmaker specialising in war zones.

Though there are plenty of female stars, such as the redoubtable Marie Colvin, with her fantastic hair and piratical eye-patch, this is still a fairly macho world. Like the Goldman Sachs boys, foreign correspondents make sheep and goats distinctions between those who are (in the parlance) ‘big swinging dicks’ and those who are not. Brabazon’s book My Friend the Mercenary tells the intriguing tale of how he became one.

The story begins in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg in 2002. Brabazon is still quite green when he is introduced to Nick du Toit, a South African mercenary. Du Toit will later become involved in the so-called ‘Wonga Coup’, the tragicomic plot that hoped to topple the nasty, oil-rich regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea. The same that saw Old Etonian professional soldier Simon Mann landed with a spell first in a Zimbabwean and then an Equatoguinean jail, and Mark Thatcher faced with a fine of $450,000 dollars.

With du Toit as his minder, Brabazon undertakes two journeys in Liberia; where he films the hapless campaign of armed LURD rebels to unseat the dictator Charles Taylor. These trips are made in gruelling jungle conditions, in the company of the drug-crazed, rap-fixated, fright-wigged gang-bangers whose images became the signature of the Liberian and Sierra Leonian civil wars.