09 March 2004

Wild Geese

When I was younger and not much brighter than I am now I used to read a vaguely pornographic magazine called "Soldier of Fortune." It was the 70's. War was raging in Rhodesia, and the magazine ran personal ads in the back purporting to recruit for irregular organizations like Grey's Rangers and the Selois Scouts.

They were looking for skill sets that were learned in the Studies and Observations Group (SOG) in Vietnam. They weren't looking for kids like me. But it was a tantalizing fantasy to imagine actually being Richard Burton in The Wild Geese, the 1978 movie epic about a ruthless African dictator who threatened a multinational corporation. Burton played the leader of squad of shady Brit mercenaries who restore a deposed former leader to power, so business can continue as usual.

I was thinking about mercenaries- Mercs, as they were once called- since Zimbabwe announced today that it had detained a American-registered Boeing 727-100 cargo plane at Harare that contained 64 heavily built White men, equipped with bolt-cutters and military style sleeping bags.

There is no claim that weapons were found, other than a few knives, but this incident comes less than a week after the U.S. tightened economic sanctions against Zimbabwe's government. Maybe Mr. Mugubwe needs a provocation. It sounds like maybe the airplane was just taking some large men on a camping safari.

But whoever they are, they are the latest in a long line of adventurers.

We don't talk about it much, but there were Americans who fought in the Mexican Revolution on the side of the rebels. They were volunteers as fervent as the Taliban Tourists from Britain and John Walker Lynd, the American Talibanista. Pancho Villa's Northern Army in Chihuahua contained a unit of American soldiers of fortune, committed insurrectionists allied with the International Workers of the World and fighting for deeply held ideological reasons. And excitement.

John Reed was one of those committed young men, though he styled himself as a journalsit. He is remembered mostly as the Hollywood Bolshevik portrayed by Warren Beatty in the self-indulgent 1981 Oscar-winning film Reds.

The real John Reed had a better story.

He was a 26-year-old solider of fortune when he crossed the Mexican border in 1914 and joined the Villistas. He began reporting on the Northern Division's march south to Torreon, a strategically important town with General Tomas Urbina, the Lion of Durango, was on Villa's right flank. Reed reported the action lucidly for the Metropolitan Magazine in New York and got a lot of ink in The Masses.

Reed believed in Villa as revolutionary Robin Hood. He was, in the saying of the time, "hated by thousands and loved by millions." He was a Robin Hood to many and a cruel, cold-blooded killer to others. He was the same age as Reed, but he was no Harvard Man. He was a sharecropped who murdered the landowner who dishonored his sister. He then took up the cattle rustling trade, and rose to lead his own franchise after the former owner was killed by the Rurales, the Government mounted patrols.

Villa had a successful business model, killing, looting and leading raids on towns. He also had a legitimate wing of the company, providing contract services for the Copper Canyon Railroad.

In 1910, Villa moved out of banditry and into politics, which amounts to the same thing. He was recruited by revolutionary leader Abraham Gonzalez to raise an army of cowboys and ruffians and re-invented himself. He also began to attract the Wild Geese of the time.

The Columbus incident happened in 1916. Reed was long gone, taking wing for Colorado, where he joined the IWW in the bitter mining strike in Ludlow, Colorado, two months before the regime crumbled in Mexico City. He took up pen and arms on the side of the miners, and then raced to the Continent to report on the Great War, the nasty part in the East that we do not hear much about.

Whle Reed was there, an American merchant allegedly welched on a shipment of arms to Pancho Villa. He crossed the Border on March 9th, 1916, the last time a foreign military force conducted operations in the Continental United States.

He arrived before the little New Mexico town of Columbus and killed a dozen citizens and burned the hamlet down.

The response to the assault on American honor was swift. Villa was pursued into the mountains of Chihuahua by General "Black Jack" Pershing. His nickname was the polite version of what they really called him for his command of the African-American troops they called "The Buffalo Soldiers."

Besides all the trappings of modern warfare, trucks, cars, motocycles, and armored cars, Pershing also mustered dirigible balloons and airplanes in his relentless quest. But the expedition was plagued by faulty intelligence on the American side, and superb intelligence by the Villistas. The enterprise ended in humiliating failure and some of the Buffalo Soldiers were captured by the Mexican Government.

Pershing telegraphed back to Washington that "Villa is everywhere, but Villa is nowhere," and packed his bags for France.

Meanwhile, Wild Goose John Reed had returned to New York, increasingly enamoured with the Communists in Moscow. The Revolution in Russia seemed to be the beginning of the great change in the world, and he set out to be a part of it.

He arrived in Russia in time to observe the October Revolution in 1917, and then returned to America, convinced the time was right for an uprising right here in the USA. In September of 1919 he was a charter member of the American Communist Party. But one revolution in North America seemed to be all the authorities were interested in, and it was past.

Reed hurried out of the country again, just ahead of the Pinkertons.

He had a brief stop for some jail time in Finaland, and then made it to Moscow to be elevated to membership in the Executive Committee of the Third International. But his revolutionary fervor was dampened as he smelled the whiff of corruption in the new Communist State

There is no telling what would have happened had he lived. He caught typhus in Russia, and died in October of 1920, the same year the Mexican Revolution petered out, at the ripe old age of 33.

I don't know if he would have agreed with the wisdom of age that says "Show me a man who is not a socialist at 20, and I will show you a man without a heart. Show me one who is still a socialist at 50 and I will show you one who has no brain."

John Reed lies buried beside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, and that is where I found him with the other Old Bolsheviks when I visited in 1998.

In Mexico, Villa continued to fight until 1920 when he surrendered his troops to Adolfo de la Huerta. He retired from Revolution to the Hacienda Canutillo. He lived quietly until 1923, when he was ambushed and killed on July 23rd at the ripe old age of 36.

One thing about the Wild Geese- it is a young man's game.

I'm glad I was a company man. My retirement came with a pension and a modest health care program.