OUT OF ACTION
OUT OF ACTION
978-1-920143-20-6
Hardback with dustjacket
234 x153mm
312 pp incl. 32pp colour photo section
Rhodesiana / Military History / Africana
March 2008
£24.20 Delivered
Originally published as Survival Course in 1999, now long out of print, Out of Action is a reworked and updated edition, the sequel to the best-selling Fireforce—one man’s war in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. The book is divided into two distinct parts:
Part 1, ‘War’, chronicles Chris Cocks’s final 16 months of combat in the Rhodesian bush war, as a stick leader in PATU, the Police Ant-Terrorist Unit. It is a time of unbelievable cruelty as the part-time white reservists battle overwhelming odds, without air support and … without a future, as Mugabe’s ZANLA guerrillas swamp the country in the build-up to independence in 1980.
Part 2, ‘Peace’, recounts the author’s painful adjustment to life as a civilian—a fifteen-year odyssey in the embryonic state of Zimbabwe. It is an intensely personal journey in which the author pulls no punches as he describes his clumsy attempts to come to terms with a) the new dispensation of black Africa and b) himself. It is a cri de couer, the story of a young man, brutalized by war, who seeks escape in alcohol and drugs, and who, in the process, causes immeasurable pain and suffering to those around him. These too are the casualties of war.
Ultimately, though, it is a story of hope, of a man’s triumph over his own demons.
Chris Cocks lives in Johannesburg. He is a partner in the recently established South African publishing house, 30° South Publishers. He is the author of Fireforce (now in its fourth edition); Survival Course; a novel, Cyclone Blues; and is the editor and compiler of The Saints—The Rhodesian Light Infantry. He is currently writing the biography of his childhood, of growing up in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the subsequent adjustment to life in the rebel colony of Rhodesia.
Market:
- Collectors of Rhodesiana
- Military History enthusiasts
- Readers of autobiographies and memoirs
- Those ‘civilians’ who want to understand something of war
Selling points:
- The sequel to Fireforce
- First-hand account of the Rhodesian bush war, and the fallout of the aftermath.
- 32 pages of colour photographs, maps
Relevant extracts / quotes:
“Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the events in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial, and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems!
Those who read about Verdun or Stalingrad, and expound theories later to friends, over a cup of coffee, haven’t understood anything. Those who can read such accounts with a silent smile, smile as they walk, and feel lucky to be alive.”
Guy Sayer, The Forgotten Soldier
By kind permission of Batsford Brassey, Inc
“Chris, I sympathize with your difficulties in writing the new book. Twenty years is a long time, and I would imagine your feelings about the war and the country have, to say the least, become very complex. And it can’t be easy looking back into and writing in detail about the darker times of one’s life. (I try to forget them!) I wish I could believe that everything does indeed happen for a reason. I’m inclined though to the view that things just happen—either for good or ill—but there’s nothing more to it than that. From within our own outlook our lives have a sense of permanence and inviolability that makes us think that when they are breached there must be a reason. But as you yourself will only know too well, having seen lives cut down in the random lottery of war, that sense of permanence is a grand illusion, and in reality life is fragile and all too easily swept aside.
Saying that, though, when you manage to come through bad or wasted times, or overcome personal problems or tragedy, these can themselves come to constitute reasons of a sort—reasons to live your life one way rather than another, reasons for holding some things valuable rather than other things, and—in an important way—reasons for holding one’s own life to be uniquely valuable. (Nietzsche was onto something I think with his idea of amor fati—learning to love one’s fate, instead of bemoaning it, or denying it, or wishing it could be otherwise.) That way you can see that no part of your life is really wasted or valueless. Look at the unique value of what you’ve been doing in recent years and are doing now, and what it means to other people.”
Steven Farrelly‑Jackson, philosopher
New York, 1999