Barrel of a Gun Read online

  BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR INCLUDE:

  Report on Portugal’s War in Guiné-Bissau

  Under the Indian Ocean

  Africa At War

  The Zambezi Salient

  Coloured: Profile of Two Million South Africans

  Africa Today

  Handbook for Divers

  Challenge: South Africa in the African Revolutionary Context

  Underwater Mauritius

  Where to Dive: In Southern Africa and Off the Islands

  War in Angola

  The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa

  The Iraqi War Debrief: Why Saddam Hussein Was Toppled

  War Dog: Fighting Other Peoples’ Wars

  Iran’s Nuclear Option

  Allah’s Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons

  Cops: Cheating Death: How One Man Saved the Lives of 3,000

  Americans

  How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs

  Dive South Africa

  The Road to Nuclear Armament

  Diving With Sharks (2011)

  Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa(2011)

  NOVELS

  Soldier of Fortune

  Dirty Bomb (2011)

  Published in the United States of America in 2010 by

  Casemate Publishers

  908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083

  and in the United Kingdom by

  Casemate Publishers

  17 Cheap Street, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 5DD

  © 2010 by Al J. Venter

  ISBN: 978-1-935149-25-5

  Digital Edition ISBN: 978-1-61200-0329

  Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress and from the British Library (LCCN: 2010930564).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For a complete list of Casemate titles, please contact

  United States of America:

  Casemate Publishers

  908 Darby Road

  Havertown PA, 19083

  Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.casematepublishing.com

  United Kingdom:

  Casemate Publishers

  Telephone (01635) 231091, Fax (01635) 41619

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.casematepublishing.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Dubious Life of a War Correspondent

  1 Getting to a Lebanon at War

  2 Death of a Young Man

  3 Levantine Woes

  4 Lagos and an Army Mutiny

  5 Biafra: The Build-Up

  6 Survival in a West African Conflict

  7 A Dirty Distant War: El Salvador

  8 Patrol in No Man’s Land

  9 A Central American Conflagration

  10 Somalia: Wars of No Consequence

  11 Air Operations in the Horn of Africa

  12 Somali Aftermath

  13 Search and Destroy in the Eastern Mediterranean

  14 Israel’s Border Wars

  15 Marj’Ayoun and the South Lebanese Army

  16 Uganda: Africa’s Killing Fields

  17 Bounty Hunt in Rhodesia

  18 On the Ground in Rhodesia’s Bush War

  19 Zaire: Road to an African War

  20 Into the Congo’s Cauldron

  21 Jailed for Espionage in Lubumbashi

  22 Isolated in a Congolese Prison

  23 ‘Kill all Infidels – Allahu Aqbar!’

  24 Tete Convoy in Mozambique

  25 Serengeti Must Not Die

  26 The Balkan Beast: Landmines in Croatia

  27 Balkan War Joint-STARS Offensive

  28 Helicopter Drug Raids in Zululand

  Postscript

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  For the two women in my life, Madelon and Marilyn, without whom this book would never have happened.

  I began my history at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war…

  Thucydides

  Anybody who believes that the pen is mightier than the sword hasn’t spent time in Somalia, or in Beirut in its bloody heyday. Or even Baghdad or Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in more recent times.

  Al J. Venter

  The best of military professionals thrive on what is unambiguously termed ‘the incontrovertible system of the seven Ps’: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

  Andy McNab in Seven Troop

  PROLOGUE

  The Dubious Life of a War Correspondent

  It wasn’t all guts and ‘derring-do’, but it was certainly fun while it lasted. As John Miller, one of the better-known Fleet Street foreign correspondents, was heard to comment from his almost permanent seat at the bar of the Royal Cape Golf Club, ‘this is actually a hell of a lot better than working…’

  DANGER IS A MARVELOUS TONIC once you accept your limitations; the trick, I imagine, is to know how far you can push the envelope. Unfortunately, the lady doesn’t always smile and I’ve lost a few friends over the years, some of them professional news gatherers who were simply doing their job.

  In my case, I’m only alive because I’m the original coward. When the shooting starts I get my head down. Damon Runyan had it about right when he said something about life being a case of six-to-five against…

  Not so with some of my colleagues. The tally of those who went to what British journalist Jim Penrith likes to call ‘that great scriptorium in the sky’ includes Mohammed Amin who died brutally in an Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet that had been hijacked by zealots and came down in the sea alongside a tourist beach in the Indian Ocean Comoros Archipelago; Ken Oosterbroek, ‘accidentally’ shot by soldiers of the old apartheid regime in South Africa; George De’Ath, with whom I covered Israel, South Lebanon and Beirut and whose death also raised questions; and the incomparably romantic Nicholas Della Casa, who was killed in the aftermath of the First Gulf War by his Kurdish guide.

  Let us not forget Danny Pearl and Michael Kelly, both more associates than friends, with whom I exchanged notes. The film A Mighty Heart – about Danny’s murder in Karachi by Islamic fanatics – was a good rendition of what took place. It also serves to underscore some of the issues that correspondents face in these countries: different mindsets, different norms as well as seemingly irreconcilable cultures. More often than not these disparities come along with diverse homegrown values. Kipling reminded us of these alienable differences a long time ago when he wrote: ‘East is east and west is west… ’

  Before Oosterbroek and Pearl there was Priya Ramrakha, another East African colleague with whom I shared a few events in West Africa’s Biafra, and, a while before that, George Clay, who was shot in the head while accompanying one of ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare’s mercenary columns in the approaches to Stanleyville in the Congo – known today as Kisangani. George and former British Army colonel, Hoare, that indomitable unconventional tactician who headed up 5 Commando in the Congo, became quite good friends. That happened despite the fact that this military maverick – who not long afterwards went on to launch an aborted attempt to unseat the legal government of the Seychelles – had a strong aversion to members of the Fourth Estate.

  Years later, Miguel Gilmoreno arrived on the scene, in this case, Sierra Leone. He gave up everything as a Barcelona-trained lawyer to follow the action and worked as a cameraman for Associated
Television News. He died in the same West African ambush as Kurt Schork, a former Rhodes Scholar who was at Oxford with Bill Clinton.

  I am aware that the kind of work that journalists do today is often dangerous. It sometimes feels like death follows in your footsteps, or perhaps it could be said that we are following in the wake of the Reaper! Either way, you sometimes see things that you would afterwards not like to recall.

  I know that I’ve been instrumental in the deaths of two young men, one of whom, a young Lebanese combatant by the name of Christian, has his tragic story detailed later in this book. Indirectly, the tally is three, if you count former British television personality Nicholas Della Casa, who would probably still be alive if I hadn’t hired him early in his career as an apprentice sound man.

  Tall, good-looking and insouciant, this young Englishman, who had served in the British Army, was the definitive man about town. As the saying goes, he could charm any bird out of a tree. One of the women who moved about in our circle, and with whom Nicholas briefly shared a relationship, made the comment that his eyes were set in the kind of face that drew attention when entering a room for the first time. They were alternately fierce and vacant, depending on what took his fancy.

  Nick was a most intriguing character. After he’d gone, the circumstances surrounding his death acquired the kind of cult status that centres more on legends than on facts, not all of them substantiated. In an alluring way, Nick was also a bit of shit who, like Denys Finch Hatton of Out of Africa, allowed his derring-do reputation to make his fecklessness into something of an art form. One of his friends ended up in a Botswana prison because of a reckless action that might ultimately have had far more serious consequences.1 There has even been a book written about him.

  Distinctly of upper class British, Italian aristocratic and Argentinean stock, he was fluent in half a dozen languages. Small wonder, then, that it didn’t take him long to come to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service, and probably several other intelligence organizations as well.

  Illegitimi non carborundum, he would comment with nonchalant indifference when things got tough, which was often enough when we worked in Africa: don’t let the bastards get you down.

  Nicholas’ CV included a spell with a Special Forces unit about which he was always vague. He’d opted out and gone on to fight as a mercenary in the Rhodesian Army – again, it is said, under British auspices. That was followed by time spent in several other Third World conflicts including a period with Renamo rebels, eager to displace the government in Mozambique. The first time his mother phoned me she had a desperate request for help in getting him out of that country after he had been arrested by the rebels. They had accused him of being a spy. One of the men who came to his rescue was former CIA operative Bob MacKenzie, who was later to die brutally in Sierra Leone.2

  Before all that took place, I’d given Nicholas his first job as an assistant on a television shoot in Senegal. He loved it enough to go on doing that sort of thing for the rest of his short life, until he, his lovely wife Rosanna and her brother Charles Maxwell were shot and killed. All three disappeared following a dispute about wages with their Kurdish guide. The SAS was eventually tasked with the search, because, as tradition allows, the regiment looks after its own. The bodies of the two men were found buried under an open fire pit. However, Rosanna’s body was never found.

  So, while I was not directly implicated in those grisly deeds, the odds are good that Nicholas would still be alive had he not been delegated to assist cameraman Henry Bautista, another resolute character out of the recent past who went on to make a name for himself with CBS in the United States. However, I digress.

  The first of the young men to die – because I was there at the time – was a guerrilla who had been fighting South African occupying forces in Southern Angola. I’d been on board one of the South African Air Force (SAAF) helicopter gunships after the Battle of Cuamato, the kind of cutand-thrust operation that delineated much of a conflict that would occasionally go conventional.

  Looking over the shoulder of the ‘tech’ onboard a South African Air Force Alouette helicopter gunship deep inside Angola. (Author’s collection)

  What was evident the first morning of the battle was the volume of Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft firepower that the Angolans were able to hurl at circling South African Alouettes. With a number of Cuban regulars in their ranks, the Angolans fired salvoes that accounted for several lives, all lost during the ground attack on what was termed an ‘enemy’ military base.

  Initially, the South Africans had hit a fairly large military concentration in some pretty ragged bush country near the Angolan hamlet of Cuamato. They were in search of insurgents, I was told. However, the intelligence boffins were wrong, and instead the heavily fortified encampment belonged to FAPLA, the Angolan Army. Its presence in this desolate open country that the Portuguese, centuries before, had dubbed Terras do fim Mundo – Land at the End of the Earth – was perfectly legitimate.

  The battle lasted for two days. For my part, it included a series of infantry assaults through Angolan Army trench lines, with the rest of the time spent in helicopters looking for what some of the aviators like to call ‘targets of opportunity’.

  One of the pilots with whom I flew was Heinz Katzke, an easygoing professional who seemed to enjoy any challenge while at the controls of a gunship. If he could manage it, I suggested, I’d like to get my hands on a bayonet, preferably for a Kalashnikov.

  ‘No problem’, was his reply. ‘Let’s see if we can find you one’, and off we went. A short time later, we spotted the body of an Angolan soldier lying kind of half-secreted under a tree, his AK at an odd angle across his knees. We were aware that these troops all carried bayonets, though in Africa they were rarely attached to the barrel. Most were tied to their webbing, prominently displayed, almost like a badge of courage.

  ‘Looks like he’s not going to need his AK any time soon’, said Heinz half jokingly as he lost altitude and went into the hover. ‘Or his bayonet’, the gunner behind us added with a chuckle.

  We were still at about 300 feet when Heinz decided to bring the chopper down onto an open clearing in the bush a short distance from our man. Over the mike – to which all three of us on board were connected – he told the gunner that he would put down about 20 paces from the body. ‘I’m taking her down just south of that large tree to the south’, he said pointing.

  ‘Roger’ was the reply. By then the gunner was already unstrapping himself. There was no question of telling headquarters what we were doing because it was illegal. Instead, Heinz just went in: it was that kind of war.

  Once on the ground, the helicopter’s gunner – a sergeant who was normally crouched across a 20mm cannon protruding from the portside hatch – undid his last safety belt, took off his helmet, grabbed his issue carbine and sprinted towards the ‘gook’.

  He was perhaps two or three yards from the Angolan when the ‘dead man’ suddenly sat up, took hold of his AK and lowered the barrel, but he wasn’t quick enough. The gunner killed the combatant with a short burst of automatic fire. Wasting little time, he turned over the body, ran his hands over the now-dead man’s uniform and, having found the blade, sprinted back towards the helicopter. Perhaps 30 seconds later, we were back in the air. Nobody said a word while we soared back up to operational height and I was able to check my newfound trophy in its red-baked Bakelite sheath.

  About then the gunner came through on the mike. ‘He wasn’t wounded, Captain… very far from dead, in fact’, he told Heinz Katzke.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Patted him down, Sir… there were no other wounds on him. He was playing possum… probably would have made a run for it as soon as the sky was clear.’

  A silence followed, none of us knowing what to say…

  ‘Well’ said the captain after a little while, motioning with his left hand in my direction, ‘at least you got your bayonet… and what’s another dead fucker between friends
?’

  ‘But just don’t tell the colonel about it when we get back… ’

  As Chris Munnion, the former Daily Telegraph correspondent in Africa, says in Banana Sunday, the effort was heroic.3 Some of the yarns that surfaced are legend, and so are a few of the hangovers! As Chris comments, in inimitable Munnion style, rarely was there a life lost. These scribes ‘rushed about from riot to revolt, from the back-andbeyond to the front, from palaces to prison cells to telegraph, telex, phone, pigeon post and the use of many other ingenious ways to get the unfolding story of Imperial Retreat back to their newspapers’. They seemed to do so with impunity.

  The old order of those days – the 1960s and the 1970s – has long since gone. It’s been replaced by much distress and violence. Indeed, things are much worse now than during earlier decades. Then the international community wasn’t only genuinely interested in what was happening in Black Africa, but Europe and the Americas were directly engaged. They trusted the new black leaders of Africa, people like Nkrumah, Tubman, Hastings Banda, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere the Tanzanian President, Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa and Modiba Keita of Mali, which in almost all cases was a bad mistake.

  Now, well into the new millennium, the game has changed once more. The Cold War is over and there is no need to gratify the demands of some psychotic tyrant because if you didn’t help him the Soviets would (though that, too, could quickly change if Beijing becomes too pervasive). Few cared if deaths in Rwanda were measured in thousands or, in reality, in hundreds of thousands. It’s all old-hat, or in the minds of some, it should be, though recent events in Darfur have rekindled that nightmare.

  Instead, today’s headlines are more concerned with shrinking budgets, the latest goings-on in the White House, chaos on the outskirts of Kandahar or possibly some obscure outbreak of violence south of the Urals or a Moscow suicide bombing. If Africa does get a mention, it’s usually because some company’s commercial or mining interests are at stake. Sadly, Africa has reverted to darkness and cold night.