Ted Braden Redux
Remember Ted? The SOG trooper who mysteriously left Vietnam in 1966 and later reappeared in the Congo, only to be arrested and shipped to Ft. Dix, and then five years later was widely rumored to have stolen an airplane...?
There is a fantastic new movie out that touches on Braden's experience in the Congo. "The Siege of Jadotville" is out on Netflix and it re-visits the five-day battle of resistance when a 155-man UN infantry company from the Irish Defence Force fought a 5,000 force of French mercs, local gendarmerie, and corporate "security" guys. Basically, the politics were extraordinarily mixed, with the UN getting played by many factions of groups who wanted to control the copper, cobalt and uranium mines in Katanga Province - a struggle that continues to this day. It was, and is, the central lynch-pin to the interminable civil war that rages in the Congo, and was what Braden was part of in the late 60s.
Another wonderful Netflix docu, "Viranga," gives the current story of struggle in central Africa.
I've later found out that my first girl friend was part of this early conflict, as she had to escape from the Congo in 1961 in the middle of the night as a ten-year old girl. Her father, it appears, was a CIA operative. They later relocated to Brussels. NATO? Belgian mining interests? After all Brussels is NATO HQ, but the Congo was once called the Belgian Congo and the white guys in Katanga were all Belgian.
