Product Description

Executive Outcomes was the title of the most successful private army of modern times. In Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea, it stepped in while the UN revealed itself as little more than a debating society. But the motives of this mercenary army are open to question: was it more interested in protecting Sierra Leone's diamond mines than the people caught up in a savage guerrilla war? Journalist Jim Hooper followed Executive Outcomes on operations all over Africa. Here he reveals the story of a mercenary army in action.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #607392 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
James Hooper is an American journalist with 20 years' experience of first-hand reporting from African and Asian war zones.

Customer Reviews

Out for the money or servants of international justice?
Jim Hooper's Bloodsong! is a maddeningly inconsistent account of the South African mercenary organization Executive Outcomes' 1993-1995 campaign on behalf of the Angolan government. On the one hand it is a very intriguing portrait of modern war in Africa. On the other, it poses many questions but fails to answer them.

The eyebrow raising fact here is that Executive Outcomes' top staff were former South African Defence Force soldiers who had fought against that very same Angolan government in the Bush campaigns of the late 1970s and 1980s.

It is pretty apparent that Hooper and the publisher had different ideas about this book. Hooper plainly states his account solely details EO's Angolan campaign and that he will discuss other EO operations elsewhere in a forthcoming book. Yet the back dust jacket raises broader questions like "was [EO] more interested in protecting Sierra Leone's diamond mines than the people caught up in a savage guerrilla war?" Bloodsong! does not address Sierra Leone at all.

Hooper is a journalist with an extensive southern African background, however, if you are expecting a neutral, dispassionate account of EO and Angola, you will be sorely disappointed. If anything, Bloodsong! is a near-official history of EO in Angola missing only the now-defunct organization's Rook insignia on the cover.

That said, Bloodsong! does not go into much detail about Executive Outcomes itself: how it was founded, how it operated overall, what its philosophy was. The founder Eeben Barlow is mentioned but his background is only briefly sketched.

South African and South West African veterans having switched to the other side for money, despite the wishes of the South African military and intelligence establishment, is bound to raise many questions in the readers' mind. How, for instance, can a former Recce Commando like Colonel Hennie Blauuw, who once helped save UNITA rebel leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi later offer his services to Savimbi's Angolan enemies? Also, if Executive Outcomes were totally above board--Hooper and the many EO veteran accounts state over and over that the organization's lawyers and South African government officials had said their Angolan contract was perfectly legal-why are all the top EO brass in Angola referred to by nicknames such as "Dolphin" and strange Latin monikers like "Carlos" and "Ricardo"?

The book does provide reasonable background on the Angolan conflict. But overall, the book is a patchwork of recollections by EO personnel and exact dates can get fuzzy. Worse, many of the places referred to are not on the maps supplied.

It's obvious that Hooper and his interviewees felt the Angolan government to be in the right. Dr. Savimbi's decision not to honor what he saw as a rigged election in 1992 is portrayed as a betrayal of the democratic principles he fought so long and hard for. The fact that EO was originally brought into Angola because of Western oil interests is highlighted but not delved into by Hooper. UNITA atrocities are mentioned, but in the one time that Angolan government troops are said to have committed atrocities, Hooper glosses over it.

Personal motivations to fight as a mercenary are not well explored. Though Hooper starts out with some excellent accounts from the major EO players of their service in the SADF during the Bush Wars, he really doesn't explain why they decided to leave the SADF and join Executive Outcomes. Nor does he explain whether any were hesitant to turn on a former ally. Did EO personnel fight for the better wages they offered? Did they fight out of outrage over Savimbi's refusal to honor the 1992 election? [The seemingly tacked-on postcript by Blauuw describing his disdain for Savimbi's post-1992 actions seems like a belated recognition of this criticism by Hooper.] It is quite apparent that EO contained many "wannabees" for every time it experienced any kind of major action, a number of EO personnel resigned.

That is not to take away from the efficacy of the core of EO operators in Angola. Their presence and influence was well beyond their actual numbers.

Though the skirmishes and battles are not portrayed as glamorous, it is still hard not to feel like Hooper is glamorizing the overall war the EO fought. An account of EO personnel and Angolan personal popping beers on top of a Russian BMP-2 armored personnel carrier didn't strike me (a career military historian) as men celebrating the fact they were alive but as, well, mercenaries happy to have pulled off a major score.

Hooper mocks the UN as a "debating society" (and surely it was) and tries to posit that EO acted while the world community would not. However, I cannot see that EO did anything more other than choose one of two morally dubious sides and got paid very well for their trouble.

A little disappointed
Bloodsong is a good book that gives us an insight into the mysterious world of the mercenary. These men have a glamorous persona that is shown not to be so. Many of these men have served in the finest Special Forces units in South Africa. War is what they know and it is how they make a living just like an electrician or a plumber. After reading Jim Hooper's first book Beneath the Visiting Moon I was a little disappointed in this book. Bloodsong did not have the same action packed scenes that Moon had. In Moon, Hooper gave us a connection to the characters and when something happened to them the reader felt it, not so in Bloodsong. Overall it is a good read about a group of men that many people know little about. I would recommend reading Nine Days of War of Beneath the Visiting Moon before reading this to gain some background knowledge of the situation in Angola.

It's facts not fiction!!
Growing up in Namibia and South Africa this book was everything I had expected it to be, and more. EO was controversial because no one realy knew what they were about. Jim Hooper sets the record straight in this gripping book.
He tells it like it happened and takes you into every contact situasion and puts the reader right amongst those men fighting a war.
Some people say it's disappointing, I disagree. These guys weren't Rambo's. They were real soldiers that went in to do a job overcomming language and logistical problems. This is an account of what realy happened and of a group of excellent soldiers that fought shoulder to shoulder.A good read!!!