Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (35 page)

Gas prices topped $4 a gallon in 2008, but on a per-gallon basis, it’s relatively cheap. Printer ink costs about $2,700 per gallon. A gallon of Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $48,640. And antivenom, used to treat snake bites, costs $567,000 per gallon.

As publishers of books that are usually exiled to a certain room in the house, we have a keen interest in other books that have been shunned
.

M
y Friend Flicka
, by Mary O’Hara. The 1941 novel about a boy and his horse, set on a Wyoming ranch, was taken off the sixth grade reading list in Clay County, Florida, in 1990 because it contained the word “bitch,” even though it was used correctly—in reference to a female dog.

A Light in the Attic
, by Shel Silverstein. Cunningham Elementary School in Beloit, Wisconsin, took this humorous poetry collection for children off the shelves in 1985 because one poem jokingly “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”

To Kill a Mockingbird
, by Harper Lee. The powerful antiracism tale was banned from advanced placement English courses in Lindale, Texas, in 1996 because, for some reason, it “conflicted with the values of the community.”

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll
.
A parents’ group in Jefferson, Kentucky, wanted it taken out of school libraries in 1982 because all felt that stories about rock music could “cause our children to become immoral and indecent.” (The state board refused to remove it.)

Twelfth Night
, by William Shakespeare. Like many of Shakespeare’s plays,
Twelfth Night
utilizes crossdressing for comedic effect. Because of that, a Merrimack, New Hampshire, English class was prohibited from reading it in 1996. The play, said authorities, “supports homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative.” (It was written in 1601.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Written in 1852,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was the bestselling novel of the 19th century, and its harsh depiction and critique of slavery was a catalyst for
the abolitionist movement in the 1850s and 1860s. Nevertheless, the Waukegan, Illinois, School District tried to ban it in 1984. Why? It uses the “n-word.”

The Lorax
, by Dr. Seuss. The children’s book about animals who die when their forest is destroyed was challenged by the Laytonville (California) School District in 1989 because it “criminalizes the foresting industry.”

Blubber
, by Judy Blume. This children’s novel provides a valuable lesson with a story about a girl who participates in the constant torment of a classmate, only to have the tables turned. In 1990 a parent in Louisville, Kentucky, lobbied to have it removed from her child’s elementary school library because some characters in the book “behaved unkindly.”

A Wrinkle in Time
, by Madeline L’Engle. This 1962 fantasy novel was challenged in Anniston, Alabama, in 1990. A father objected to the book’s inclusion of Jesus Christ on a list of people who defended the Earth against the forces of evil.

Black Beauty
, by Anna Sewell. Even though this classic novel is about a horse, in 1955 the apartheid government of South Africa banned the book because they thought the title alone might instill pride in black South Africans.

The Grapes of Wrath
, by John Steinbeck. The plot: During the Great Depression, a family flees drought and hard times in their native Oklahoma only to find backbreaking work picking crops for meager wages in Kern County, California. In 1939, just weeks after the novel was published, the real Kern County removed the book from its schools and libraries because it was a “smear” on the area.

Brave New World
, by Aldous Huxley. The science-fiction book is set in a dystopian future in which people are controlled with mind-altering drugs and mindlessly engage in promiscuous sex. It was taken off of the high school reading list in Miller, Missouri, in 1980 because it made sex “look like fun.”

In July 2008, former British Army officer and admitted mercenary Simon Mann was sentenced to 34 years in prison for attempting to overthrow the government of the African nation of Equatorial Guinea. It made us want to know more about mercenaries in general—and this is what we found
.

B
ACKGROUND
Mercenaries—foreign soldiers who fight for money rather than for a moral or legal attachment to a country or cause—have been employed by warring governments for thousands of years. History’s best-known wars, from ancient Greece and Rome to World War I and every war since, have seen “soldiers of fortune” on both sides—the practice was commonplace. It wasn’t until modern times that fighting and killing for nothing more than money—and the corollary, paying people to fight—has come to be seen as something immoral. The word “mercenary” itself has negative connotations. Most countries today have banned the use of mercenaries, but they do, of course, still exist. The following is a rundown of just some of history’s most intriguing and infamous soldiers of fortune, starting more than 4,000 years ago.

Weni the Elder was one of ancient Egypt’s most renowned military commanders. Serving under Pharaoh Pepi I (2283 B.C.), he instituted many changes that affected Egyptian—and regional—armies for millennia. One of them: hiring foreign fighters to bolster his forces. Many were from Nubia, to Egypt’s south, and among them were the
Medjai
, seminomadic desert people revered for their fighting skills and their courage. Numerous sculptures, paintings, and engravings depict these distinctive fighters: dark-skinned Africans wearing short, skirtlike garments and carrying bows and arrows. For more than 1,500 years, the Medjai culture interwove with the Egyptian, so much so that during times of peace the Medjai stayed in Egypt, working as bodyguards for royalty. The word “medjai” itself even later became associated with a police force within Egypt itself. If you’ve seen the 1999 film
The Mummy
you’ve heard of the Medjai. They’re depicted as warriors that have
been guarding the mummy’s tomb for millennia, since the ancient Egyptians first hired them to do so. (Except in the film…they’re Caucasian.)

In the late 1800s, several ancient writings were discovered on the Nile River island of Elephantine in the south of Egypt. The “Elephantine Papyri,” as they’re known, were written in the 5th century B.C., when the Persians ruled Egypt. They tell of a community of Jewish mercenaries—and their families—living on the island. Exactly when they first got there is unknown. Some historians believe they may have been loaned to an Egyptian Pharaoh by an earlier king of Judea (part of modern-day Israel), perhaps as early as 700 B.C., and that they later remained as mercenary soldiers when the Persians conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. Several generations of the foreign fighters lived on Elephantine for at least 200 years as a well-established and respected class of citizen.

Most people are probably familiar with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who led an army and several elephants across the Alps around 210 B.C. and almost conquered the Romans. What you probably don’t know is that at least 3,000 of his soldiers were Celts, better known today as ancestors of the British. Celtic people actually settled in numerous regions throughout Europe and Asia Minor starting in the 600s B.C. And wherever they went, it seems, they earned a reputation as some of the fiercest and wildest fighters in history. When they weren’t fighting for themselves they were often fighting for someone else for pay. That included ancient Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians in the Middle East; the Spartans, Macedonians, and other Greek city states before the Romans conquests of 146 B.C.; and very often the Romans (who, remember, they also fought against), until the Roman Empire fell, around 400 A.D.

In 1259 Aed O’Connor, prince of Connaught in the West of Ireland, married a princess from the Hebrides islands of Scotland. She arrived in Ireland accompanied by 160 Scottish warriors who
became known as the
Galloglaich
(pronounced “galloglas”), meaning “foreign young warriors” in Irish Gaelic. Organized, experienced, well equipped, and brutal, they and their descendants became a large and vital part of Irish armies that fought the English for the next 350 years. By the 1500s, more than 5,000 Galloglaich were fighting in Ireland. They were well respected
and
well paid: Records show that each soldier got 12 cattle per year, as well as food in the form of butter and grain. Commanders got even more, often including land, and many became wealthy and lived as Scottish lords on Irish soil. By the late 1500s, however, methods of warfare were changing drastically: Muskets and cannons were becoming more common, and the hand-to-hand combat the Galloglaich specialized in became obsolete.

It’s ironic that the nation now known as a permanently neutral bastion of peace once bred some of the most organized and brutal mercenaries in history. From the 1300s through the 1500s, if you had a war to fight in Europe, you called the Swiss. Local
cantons
, now Swiss counties but then controlled by regional lords, kept large contingents of
Reisläufer
—“ones who go to war”—ready to rape and pillage for the right price. Hire them, and your enemy would encounter a massive and deep column of men with
pikes
(thick, long, pointed sticks) and
halberds
(a combination pike and axe) who would put their heads down and rush into battle, slaughtering everything in their path. In 1515 the Swiss began their famous tradition of neutrality, and the days of the Reisläufer were over.

Whom did the Americans fight during the Revolutionary War? The British, of course. And the Germans. King George III made deals with German lords to have German soldiers shipped to America to help fight the rebels. An estimated 30,000 German soliders made the trip, the majority from the region of Hesse, hence the name. One of the war’s most famous battles, in fact—the Battle of Trenton—involved Hessians: When General George Washington led his troops across the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 (picture the painting), on a sneak attack of a garrison
in New Jersey, the soldiers he met were Germans—1,400 of them, commanded by Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall. Washington’s men won in a rout and more than 900 Hessians were captured. (The famous “Headless Horseman” from Washington Irving’s 1820 tale,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
, was based on the tale of a ghost of a Hessian soldier from the Revolutionary War.)

Thomas Michael Hoare was an Irishman, born in 1920, who served the British in North Africa during World War II. After the war he moved to South Africa, where he became one of the most notorious mercenaries in modern history. He lived the high life in South Africa in between stints leading his “Wild Geese” mercenary troops in wars in the Congo, Angola, and South Africa from 1961 though the 1970s. (They were the inspiration for the 1978 film
The Wild Geese
starring Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore.) Hoare’s downfall came in 1981 when he and a force of 43 soldiers made a botched attempt to overthrow the government of the island nation of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. They ended up hijacking a plane to get back to South Africa, where all of them were arrested. Hoare served four years in a South African prison—not for attempting to overthrow a government, but for the hijacking. An inquiry later found that South African Defense Force officials, and possibly French and American intelligence officials as well, were involved in the planning and financing of the attempted coup.

If you are in need of some hired killers with a respectable corporate feel—these are your guys. EO was incorporated as a “private military company” around 1990, just after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The first leader of the group: Eeben Barlow, former leader of South Africa’s eerily-named Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert group whose job it had been to perform “black ops” against black South African organizations. EO didn’t just have a few mercenaries to offer: they claimed to have more than 3,000 highly-trained soldiers, plus weaponry including guns, anti-aircraft missiles, tanks, planes—you name it. They were a war waiting to happen…for a price. In the 1990s, they fought
battles in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Indonesia, to name just a few. They were also hired by multinational corporations for “security,” including—allegedly—De Beers, to protect diamond mines, and Chevron and Texaco, to protect oil drilling operations in Africa. EO disbanded in 1999 (maybe).

SIMON MANN