ACCLAIMED RHODESIAN WAR MEMOIR "FIRE FORCE" RE-ISSUED IN ALL FORMATS; RECOUNTS AUTHOR'S HARROWING EXPERIENCES Barely out of his teens, 18-year-old Chris Cocks got swept into the Rhodesian Light Infantry and distinguished himself in four years of harsh campaigning. Upon passing the rigorous training course for a commando unit, Cocks served with distinction in what became Africa's dirtiest war during the 1970s. "As a 20-year-old lance-corporal, I found myself in command of a troop (a platoon)," he recalls. "As a junior NCO, I never lost a man in combat, but I think that was luck. But I'm still proud of that." But the horror and intensity of the fighting against communist guerrillas did catch up with him, eventually. "When you came out of the army, you were not debriefed on how to become a civilian. You were not decompressed," Cocks says. "You take with you all that killing-ness. It's bad." Now, 32 years after its first printing Fire Force: A Trooper's War In The Rhodesian Light Infantry is being reissued with a new cover in all formats. "Over the last three decades, the book has undergone around five editions with various publishers, some good, some not so good," Cocks explains. "I decided therefore to re-write the book and take out a lot of fluff and waffle, and then self-publish." Cocks' experiences in the RLI were all too common during the Rhodesian Bush War (1966-1979) when a white-dominated government led by Ian Smith defied the world and fought off a revolutionary insurrection led by the ZANU and ZAPU rebels. When peace was settled in 1979 what used to be Rhodesia transitioned to Zimbabwe, a country that is still struggling with its violent past. But in the dusty trails and breathtaking highlands where the bush war raged it was soldiers like Cocks who bore the brunt of the vicious combat. As part of an elite "fire force," or a small infantry unit tasked with hunting down guerrillas, Cocks had more than his fair share of horror stories. Years later, having been discharged from the RLI, he struggled to put his life in order and hammered out a war memoir in his late 20s. Since its publication in 1988 Fire Force has gone through several printings and emerged as a well-regarded volume in Rhodesian war literature. Reflecting on his memoir three decades since, Cocks believes the events that engulfed Rhodesia have ended up in history's dust bin. "It is effectively a forgotten conflict," he says. "After all, 'only' some 50,000 people died over a 15-year period." Eschewing sentiment and any nostalgia for what he went through, the author of Fire Force never set out to rewrite history when he set his experiences to writing in the mid-1980s. "Essentially, we lost not only the war, but our country," Cocks reflects. "For what? I needed to record that, somehow. To be honest, I just started writing, with no particular end point in mind. It all came tumbling out." The resulting memoir has been praised as a tour de force and is used as a reference by many current and former military leaders on African counter-insurgency. Fire Force's strongest praise was for its unforgettable pathos and humor, as it recounts face-to-face combat in the bush and death at point-blank range. Cocks is also an editor and publisher. He is the author of Survival Course, which continues his life's story in Zimbabwe, and the novel Deslocado Redemption.