In this Gerald Durrell-meets-Graham Greene account the author examines the accident of his birth to an English father and a South African mother in the booming postwar colony of Southern Rhodesia. La belle époque Rhodesienne ends abruptly when Prime Minister Ian Smith declares unilateral independence from Britain in 1965, but life in Midvale Road, on the outskirts of the capital, Salisbury, ticks on, and by, as it always has, and it is here, between 1957 and 1968, that the wind of change gusts up the lane, and through the boy. Against the backdrop of the embryonic bush war, apartheid, Vietnam, the civil rights movement and crushing sanctions, the boy grows up, with purple bauhinia blossom underfoot and the fragrance of unrest in the air.

A Colonial Boy tracks the formative years of a child who is a keen observer of life and takes us on a wonderful journey that is at once innocent and ugly, funny and tragic, but always honest.

Features 50 black and white illustrations and 2 maps

Fireforce is the true account of Chris Cocks' service in 3 Commando, The Rhodesian light infantry, during Zimbabwe's bitter civil war of the '70s - a war that came to be known almost innocuously as 'the bush war'. 'Fireforce', a tactic of total airborne envelopment, was developed and perfected by the RLI, together with the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian Air Force. Fireforce became the principal strike weapon of the beleaguered Rhodesian forces in their struggle against the overwhelming tide of the Communist-trained and -equipped ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas. The combat strain on a fighting soldier was almost unbelievable, for the Rhodesians, who were always desperately short of ground troops, were sometimes obliged to parachute the same men into action into as many as three enemy contacts a day. While estimates of enemy casualties vary, there seems little doubt that the RLI accounted for at least 12,000 ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas - but not without cost.

Out of action is the reworked and updated edition of Survival Course, the sequel to the best-selling Fireforce - one man's war in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. 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. 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.