Bob Denard, the role model for mercenaries everywhere and mastermind of a dozen coups beat a French jail sentence by talking a walk with the grim reaper.
Military men are sometimes larger personalities than is good for them. This is seen in Patton, Napoleon, Foch, Montgomery, etc etc etc. To this category could be added Bob Denard.
Good old Bob was quite a character. Born in 1929 he served in the French military in Indochina (that’s Vietnam to those of you who are scratching your heads) and Algeria before becoming a colonial policeman in Morocco. When a French president leaned a little to far to the left for Bob, he tried to rub him out and wound up serving a little time for it.
This meant that he was blackballed from working as a legitimate soldier so he became a merc, a dog of war, a paid gun (we call them private military contractors today) who specialized in Africa. He became a Moslem for the polygamist angle (eight kids by seven wives, most concurrent). He hung out with the infamous Mad Mike Hoare, worked in Katanga, pulled some time in Iran on the Shah's dime, lead a coup in Benin, fought in Rhodesia, worked in Yemen and Saudi Arabia doing things that never made the papers, and oh yeah overthrew the government of the Comoros Islands no less than four times in twenty years. It was alleged that old Bob was the bagman for the French government’s interests in Africa and at times for other western countries.
Bob, like all colorful soldiers, could not in the end defeat the reaper. He has just passed and left us with enough stories to fill a dozen footnotes in military history.
Word is that the grim reaper didn’t like the competition.
