Danny Roxo
Francisco Daniel Roxo was a big-game hunter and safari guide in sub-Saharan Africa who found himself on the front lines of one of Africa's most brutal military conflicts, and ended up forging one of the greatest modern military legends in the history of both the Portugese and South African armies. A twenty year vet of ferocious bush war fighting, Roxo commanded a hand-picked commando unit of elite African soldiers known as "The Infernal Column" that struck fear into the hearts of his enemies. He’s also one of those rare guys who's received the Medal of Honor of two different countries – he was the first foreign-born soldier to ever receive the South African Honoris Cruz, and the Portuguese government issued him two Cruz de Guerras even though he never even officially enlisted in the Portuguese military.
This guy also choked a leopard to death with his bare hands once, wiped out a column of 11 guys single-handedly after they’d already got the drop on him, and his last words were to just calmly and silently smoke an entire cigarette while bleeding out on the battlefield underneath the wreckage of a burning tank.
Weird side note, I married a Brazilian woman (I try to bring this up in conversation as much as possible) so I've been trying to learn Portuguese, and "Roxo" is the Portuguese word for purple. It's pronounced "Hoshu", which is weird and makes no sense and when I came across that I almost quit studying the language immediately.
Danny Roxo was born in the mountains of Northern Portugal on February 1, 1933. At the age of 18 he moved to Mozambique, which was a Portuguese colony at the time, and he took a job working as an admin on a railroad. That job blew goats, of course, so he bailed on it pretty much immediately to become a professional big-game hunter, park warden, and wildlife safari guide. Trading a desk job for a profession where you're literally surrounded by enraged man-eating wild animals for most of your work week has its advantages, sure – Roxo loved being out in the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, tracking and hunting, and enjoying the natural beauty of the land, but it also had its occasional easily-overlooked drawbacks… like the time Roxo was camping and he got fucking pounced by a gigantic-ass leopard and had to choke that fucker to death with his bare hands like Carl Akeley.
But yeah, getting mauled by half-ton cats with fangs the size of graphing calculators and dodging Hippo attacks like he was on the Jungle Queen ride at Disney was great and all, but Roxo's profession also ran him afoul of a much deadlier enemy than the lions and beasts of the safari – they brought him into direct conflict with some incredibly vicious human poachers. As a warden of the land, Roxo took it upon himself to chase these dickweeds off when he found them, usually by cranking a few warning shots over their heads with his rifle, and for the most part they got the idea and left him the hell alone. And so, for the next 10 or so years, Danny Roxo lived a happy life of a Mozambican Ron Swanson, wandering the wild grasslands of East Africa hunting for his meals, growing his safari business, and enjoying life. He even eventually settled down, married a Mozambican woman, and had six children.
Then the War came, and shit went sideways.
Roxo with two of his six kids.
In 1964 rebel forces in Mozambique rose up and revolted against Portuguese rule. There's a lot going on here, and it's a stupidly-complicated geopolitical situation so intense that it tracks back to like the 15th century, but basically the gist of the thing is that a lot of Sub-Saharan Africans had been annoyed with the Portuguese since the days of Nzinga Mbande, and when European countries started granting freedom to their colonial holdings after World War II the people of Mozambique were pretty righteously pissed that they weren't included in the action. Cuba and the Soviet Union saw a good opportunity to spread Marxism to new corners of the world, equipped and trained rebel forces across Africa, and everyone started shooting. A lot of really horrible shit happened on both sides of the conflict, atrocities escalated, and Danny Roxo and his family were soon caught right in the middle of a suddenly-raging warzone in a conflict where the rules of the Geneva Convention were about as reliable as the alternator on a 1994 Geo Prism.
When Roxo's poacher teams started animorphing into terrifying raiding parties of AK-toting Marxist revolutionaries, Roxo grabbed his elephant gun and sprung into action immediately. He got together the guys who worked with him – other hunters, wilderness guides, and trackers, and recruited them into a makeshift reconnaissance unit that could go into enemy territory, scout out troop positions, and report back to Mozambican Government forces. He did this for a while, gathering a small but elite cadre of roughly 100 guys to help on his mission, but this crew quickly got frustrated because they were putting together all this badass intel but the Portuguese and the Mozambicans weren't doing shit about it. Eventually, he said, fuck it, and decided his was going to train his team for war.
The Infernal Column was born.
O Coluno Infernal
It started with a small cadre of the guys Roxo had been working with in the safari business – badass hunters and trackers who knew the savannah like their own backyard and could handle a rifle like they'd been born holding onto one, and before long those guys became an elite military guerilla force capable of traveling long distances very quickly, in complete silence, and then attacking the enemy suddenly and viciously when they least expected it. Equipping his men with captured Soviet weapons and gear wherever he could loot it, Roxo's Infernal Column became this kind of weird paramilitary militia that would attack Communist installations, liberate prisoners of war, rescue hostages, destroy supply depots, attack convoys, and I'm assuming like climb radio towers or search for diamond cases but that's probably just because I'm getting a real hardcore Far Cry 2 vibe from all this.
One cool thing is that when Roxo would defeat an enemy force, he'd offer the vanquished troops an interesting choice – be taken as Prisoners of War, or join him and become part of the Infernal Column. Roxo knew that most of the men he was fighting were conscripted into service at gunpoint (he once said something along the lines of "conscription is a little too formal a word for what was going on here") so, rather than send these defeated enemies to a POW camp or prison, he'd offer to have them join up with him instead. And a lot of them did – which worked out great for him, since not only did they provide valuable intel, but this was also the only way he could replenish his forces. It made his unit completely self-sustaining, as long as they could recruit more guys than they lost. Kind of like a pirate crew, only with LMGs, rocket-propelled grenades, and a mortar platoon.
Roxo trained his guys hard, drilled them day and night in live-fire situations, and built the Infernal Column into the most feared unit of the Portuguese military in Africa -- which is impressive considering that they weren't technically part of the Portuguese military. Roxo received two Cruz de Guerras for his service across various guerilla campaigns, Communist forces put a $100k bounty on his head, and, when the fighting finally came to an end in 1974, Roxo claimed that his unit had more confirmed killed than the entire rest of the Portuguese Army combined.
He was probably right.
Ok, so in 1974 there was a non-violent coup in Portugal which overthrew the dictatorship that had been in power since the 1920s. The people, and the new leaders, were tired of the mini Portuguese Vietnam that was going down in Africa, and as soon as the new regime took over they immediately resolved to pull all Portuguese forces out of Angola and Mozambique. Roxo was more than a little annoyed that he'd been fighting (and winning) a war to defend his homeland for the last ten years only to have his government bail on him, and he knew he certainly couldn't stick around and just hope that the new Mozambique Marxist regime would forgive him for blowing up all their bases and killing all their dudes. So Roxo took his wife, his kids, and any of the Coluna Infernal guys who wanted to come, and he fought his way out of the country towards South Africa.
It was a long, arduous journey, and when he got to South Africa, all Roxo wanted to do was sign up to keep fighting. He enlisted in the South African Defense Forces, applied for Special Forces, and successfully made it through the grueling Commando training school even though he was 41 years old – roughly the age of the rest of the recruits' dads.
Mozambique is the dark tan country on the right. Roxo had to fight through Rhodesia, into South Africa, and then ended up being deployed to the border of Angola with the South African Special Forces.
Roxo was assigned to Bravo Group, which might be the web address for a South African furniture company today but at the time was the beginning of one of South Africa's most elite Special Forces units – 32 Battalion. He was sent to Angola, which had just gone through something realllly similar to Mozambique, and was tasked with bringing his, uh, unique talents to fighting the Cuban and Soviet-backed Marxist rebels who threatened the Angola–South African border. Using similar tactics as the Coluna Infernal, Roxo and his battle-scarred vets conducted sabotage, espionage, and rescue missions deep behind enemy lines, trying to help refugees flee the civil war that now raged across Angola while also fighting to keep the conflict contained within the borders of that country.
It was super effective! Commanding his platoon, known as "Os Terriveis" ("The Terrible Ones") and made up almost entirely of Portuguese-speaking soldiers, he continued using his irregular tactics with great success in Angola.
The action that made Roxo a legend in South Africa came in December of 1975, when he was ordered to recon a bridge in advance of a South African push north into Angola. Sergeant Roxo brought his platoon up, supported by a couple APCs, and, for a moment, it looked like the coast was clear. Roxo crept up alone, crossed the bridge, noted that it was too fucked up and destroyed for an armored column to cross, and then looked out the corner of his eye to see a Cuban soldier sneaking up to try and capture him. Roxo blasted that dude with his FAL rifle, wheeled, and saw another ten Cuban and Angolan troops leaping out to try and fuck him up. He stood his ground, gritted his teeth, and pulled the trigger.
The first element to report back to HQ were the armored cars. They'd bolted as soon as the enemy started firing machine guns and dropping mortars and artillery shells on to the bridge, and they'd bolted and left their infantry behind to get smoked. Bravo Group's commander lost his shit and screamed at the APC drivers to get their ass back there and pick up the infantry, but the APC guys were like, yeah, no fucking way.
Then, from the smoke, fire, and explosions, emerged the infantry. Led by Danny Roxo. He'd killed eleven enemy soldiers single-handedly, fought his way off the bridge, re-organized his team, and fearlessly led his guys through a raging warzone of artillery, mortar, and RPG fire. The Communist forces suffered between 100 to 200 casualties during the course of the fighting for Bridge 14.
Os Terriveis had lost just 4 guys.
Ghost of the Forest
The Border War would rage on, and Roxo was consistently at the front of the action. Officially, it didn't end until 1990, making it the longest conflict in the history of the African Continent (which is saying something), but Roxo wouldn't be around to see the end of it. On August 23rd, 1976, Sergeant Roxo was on a scouting mission into enemy territory when his truck hit a mine and exploded. Two of the guys in the truck died in the blast, but Roxo was thrown from the vehicle, which flipped and then landed on him, crushing his spine and his legs. His men ran to his side, called in medevac, and tried desperately to lift the armored vehicle off him, but it was no use.
So, his body crushed, knowing his death was imminent, Danny Roxo just lit a cigarette, smoked the entire thing, and then died. As his commanding officer put it, "Roxo, in keeping with his dauntless character, decided to make the best of things, lighting a cigarette and smoking it calmly until it was finished, then he died - still pinned beneath the Wolf. He had not complained once, nor uttered a single groan or moan, although the pain must have been excruciating."
He was 43 years old. He’s still considered a legend in South Africa and Portugal today.
Links:
Sources;
Breytenbach, Jan. They Live by the Sword. South Africa: Lemur, 1990.
Breytenbach, Jan. The Buffalo Soldiers. Alberton: Galago, 2004.
Nortje, Piet. 32 Battalion. South Africa: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2010.
Van der Waag, Ian, and Albert Grunlingh. In Different Times. South Africa: SUN Press, 2019.