In the late 1970s, about four hundred white American men, mostly Vietnam veterans, traveled to Rhodesia and Angola to fight as mercenaries. Convinced that the US government was too weak to counter the spread of communism in southern Africa, they took matters into their own hands. By picking up arms, these men hoped to continue their wartime crusade against America’s enemies abroad while reclaiming the economic and social power they believed they had lost to African Americans, women, and other groups at home.

The rise of the Right is usually told as a domestic tale. But the story of US mercenaries in Africa shows that right-wing Americans were also part of a larger international anticommunist mobilization that spanned the Cold War era. Drawing upon arguments pressed by US conservative leaders, they enacted a shadow foreign policy that linked overseas conflicts to domestic struggles, leaving legacies that resonate today.

Although most US mercenaries had a marginal impact on the wars in Rhodesia and Angola, the circulation of violence — both real and imagined — between the United States and southern Africa helped radicalize domestic paramilitary groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And the ideas and impulses that animated these American mercenaries helped generate new forms of privatized warfare.