by Al Venter
We’d observed many new faces in the central areas of the city, young men and boys, who were obviously out of place, standing on the street corners watching us as we drove past. They were all rebels of course. We saw the way they looked at us when we passed in our vehicles; the aggression on their faces was naked and uncompromising. Of course they wanted us dead. However, we went nowhere without our requisite stock of firearms, which included a little Czech fold-up stock sub-machine gun under the dashboard and an AK-47 next to the seat.
We finally decided to evacuate our house in the military officers’ quarters on the outskirts of the Freetown. The house stood on a back road that led to Regent and Waterloo so we decided the best move would be to return to the Cape Sierra Hotel.
A day after the move I got a call in the middle of the night from the duty Nigerian officer at the ECOMOG headquarters. I knew the man quite well and appreciated the warning. The rebels were on their way to Aberdeen and Cockerill Barracks, he warned. I walked outside on the veranda of my room and could hear the sound of gunfire coming from the town. I woke up my guys and told them all to pack and get ready to leave. It was still too dark to fly so we left the hotel, which was already frantic with activity, at first light.
As we approached the barracks, I could see that things were not right. We hit the first of several roadblocks and were stopped. We were within sight of the main office block and some of the Sierra Leonean officers were screaming at the guards to let us through. ‘They’re pilots!’ they shouted, over and over again, but it made no difference. Finally, Commodore Medani, one of the few Sierra Leonean general staff still around at Cockerill, came down and let us through.
We found conditions at Cockerill to be tense and the place was pretty much deserted. Most of the troops who had been guarding the barracks were out fighting, only too aware that if they were overrun, they would all be slaughtered. Walking about the base you couldn’t help but get the impression that the prevailing atmosphere was that the war had already been lost. However, I accepted that if we were to survive, there was a job to do.
At this point I went to my helicopter, sat in my usual pilot’s seat but didn’t switch on the engines. Instead, I got on the radio and spoke to Brigadier General Kholbe. After a few brief preliminaries, I asked him whether we should go up and have a look. I reckoned we’d be able to assess from the fighting how deep into Freetown Sankoh’s men had penetrated. He gave me the go-ahead and minutes later we were in the air, taking serious fire almost immediately.
I took the helicopter up to about 1,000ft but the firing continued. It was mostly small arms but there were barrages of RPGs as well. Fortunately, there was no heavy stuff. I was still worried about the prospect of Sam-7s, though.
We could see almost immediately that most of the rebel movement was coming from the eastern side of town but what made things difficult was that both sides were wearing almost identical uniforms. Also, both forces were walking in the same direction— towards Cockerill Barracks. We searched for targets but, in the end, it was Fred who suggested that we get the hell out of there because we were taking an inordinate number of hits. Fred had a point; it was time to give up and return another day
What we did establish, as I was able to tell Kholbe, was that the rebels were within a couple of kilometres of Cockerill Barracks. Moreover, they weren’t static, but moving forward at a steady pace. I also said that it was pointless staying there, and that we’d take ‘Bokkie’ across the bay to Lungi International Airport. We packed our gear, landed alongside the hotel to fetch our things and then took off again.
At Lungi we were able to check on damage and it was worse than we’d anticipated. A round had gone through one of the helicopter’s rotor blades and punctured the titanium spar, releasing the nitrogen inside. Anything bigger and the rotor would have separated: we’d been lucky.
Fortunately, Sindaba was able to recover a blade from one of the American government choppers with similar weights and ‘delta angle’, but it took him the rest of the day to fix it, so there was no more flying until the following morning. One of the problems to subsequently emerge from the repair was that the blades were not from the same set, and we ended up experiencing vibrations, which became worse with time.
The situation deteriorated steadily from them on. We were aware that there were thousands of Lebanese nationals trapped behind enemy lines. Most of these people had been traders or miners, involved in the diamond trade or professional people. While the rebels killed quite a few of them, they hadn’t yet become a prime target.
Almost overnight, Freetown had become traumatised. There was no food and all water had suddenly become suspect. There were many incidents of Lebanese women and their daughters being raped. Everybody wanted out, and for the next few weeks, we were out there bringing groups of people across the bay to safety from where they were flown by international groups to Conakry.
We’d been joined by Hassan Delbani, who was Lebanese and until then had been working with Juba. An enterprising young man, he was pretty adroit with an AK and a good organiser. I was pleased that he had decided to stay with us in Freetown. Between us, Hassan and I worked out a pattern. We would take the Hip into a target area where we had been told there were civilians (mainly Lebanese) still trapped behind rebel lines. I would put down in a relatively secure position and Hassan and his hand-picked Kamajor fighters would go out into the night, find these people and lead them back to the chopper in the dark. Such operations sometimes lasted hours and were conducted always under considerable threat from the rebels. There were many shoot-outs in these outlying villages and many rebels killed, with not a single prisoner taken. Hassan was usually at the vanguard of these operations. He was quite fearless and on his own he must have killed scores of the enemy.
To keep our heads above water, we charged a flat rate of $25 per person—the only other helicopter still operating belonged to another private company called Soros and they asked $100. The result was that once the fighting was over and the city was able to revert to normal, the people we rescued never forgot what we had had done for them.
In order not to conflict with ECOMOG’s objectives, we were able to negotiate a deal whereby we would have free rein for two hours a day. During those hours we could bring out refugees and get them to Lungi. It became standard procedure: we would do our thing every day from noon until two in the afternoon and we never turned anybody away. Those who couldn’t pay because they had lost everything, or simply had no money left, were never stopped from boarding. In the end, things got so bad that almost nobody had cash and we flew them all for nothing anyway.
Operating out of Lungi, away from the drama taking place in almost all of Freetown, should have given us a respite from what was going on in the country. However, it wasn’t long before conditions deteriorated there as well. There was no power or water at the international airport and it wasn’t long before nobody had any food either.
We stayed free at the Lungi Hotel but we had to haul water up to our rooms. For food we’d go onto the streets looking for sidewalk vendors who still had the occasional can of sardines for sale. Bread was an almost unheard of luxury, although rescue aircraft coming through from Conakry would sometimes bring in supplies.
That situation prevailed for 10 days, after which things started to improve following the entry of troops from the Republic of Guinea into the war. Guinea had been observing things across its southern border since the start of hostilities and it was clear that if the rebels won that war a domino effect might occur and they might be next. Therefore, they sent in troops, to prop up the collapsing Freetown hierarchy, together with a sizeable force of armour. Once that happened, we returned to Cockerill and were really back in the saddle again and flying constantly.
The Guinean Army entered the country in the north, through the town of Kambia. Initial elements included some tanks and BM-21 Katyusha multiple rocket launchers (MRLs). Nellis recalls flying out ammunition to the new arrivals shortly afterwards.
One of the worst experiences that Nellis and his people lived through took place in January 1999. That was a time when the rebels were making a concerted push towards Freetown.
Their advance parties had already reached Waterloo, and if they were able to achieve a breakthrough there, there would have been very little between them and Freetown because ECOMOG and the Sierra Leonean Army—or what was left of it—were already overextended.
It was touch and go for several days, recalled Nellis. The extent of the fighting, which covered a large front, could be gauged from the fact that an army contingent from the Republic of Guinea, attached to the ECOMOG force, had deployed a squadron of Russian-built T-55 tanks, and they were almost overrun at one stage. From the start it was a tough, tenuous fight to maintain positions in strength, and both sides took heavy casualties.
Then Nellis was called on to do a re-supply flight, bringing in ammunition to the Guinean battalion who were north of Freetown, not far from the border with Guinea. It meant taking the Hind into a situation that was not only uncertain, but also speculative from a safety point of view. Added to that, he could speak no French and the Guineans couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, understand any English. He recalls: ‘I’d asked for a sitrep on their status and what the rebels were doing. They came back on the radio and said that all was “Charlie Charlie”—in other words, cool and calm.’
At this point Nellis laughed. He explained:
Executive Outcomes started their Sierra Leone operations from the military headquarters at Cockerill Barracks: conditions were primitive from the start. Author’s photo
My experience in that war was that whenever anybody reported that conditions were cool and calm, it meant that their faces were cool from the wind while running away from battle. The calm aspect would emerge after whoever was doing the reporting got to an area where there was no fighting!
Nellis explained that under normal circumstances, the Hind would have had one of the Guinean Army liaison officers on board, a man called Benson who spoke good English and who accompanied the chopper whenever they re-supplied positions held by Guinean soldiers. However, on that day, for some reason, Benson suddenly found half a dozen excuses for not flying when the South African suggested he go up with them. Nellis recalls:
Obviously, I couldn’t help but smell a rat … I certainly sensed that something untoward was happening. So we took off. As usual, the Hind was loaded to the max with ammunition, but I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that there was something wrong. Still, the men on the ground where we were heading said that all was fine and, who knows, perhaps it was.
However, we were acutely conscious of the fact that quite often government or ECOMOG troops in the interior wouldn’t tell us when they were under attack. It was a logical reaction, I suppose, because they felt we might not bring in the supplies they urgently needed. They would act this way in order to get what they had asked for, and most of the time they were pretty desperate because almost always there was a shortage of ammo.
Nellis was circumspect about any such deception. It was his view that he and the crew were exposed to real danger on just about every flight and that it wasn’t necessary to compound the issue by lying about the situation. In this case, though, the trip was a short hop across the hills and he had been into that LZ before. He reckoned they’d be in and out before anybody knew they’d arrived.
However, there was a problem with getting to the LZ at Waterloo. It lay between two rows of hills, which meant that there was only one route in and out of the place, which was over the town itself. If the rebels were in the area, as they were, everybody on board was aware that there would be a tough reception.
An interesting sideline to the sortie was that the crew had recently had to fork out some of their own money to buy new flying helmets. These were state-of-the-art pieces of kit and had come in a barter deal from ICI. Nellis found that while the helmets were the best things since sliced bread, they did tend to deaden external noise, especially the crack of bullets passing close to the helicopter.
On that mission, just as I came into the flare for the landing, I heard a variety of noises coming towards us. All were very loud and it was obvious the helicopter was taking some serious fire. Just then, though, I was committed to land and there was no going back, especially with three tons of ammo on board. So it was a question of ignoring the incoming fire and concentrating on getting our wheels on the ground.
As Nellis tells it, the surface of the LZ had been in regular use by both helicopters and vehicles for several weeks and had been churned into a fine powder. The presence of a squadron of Guinean tanks didn’t help either. Therefore, just as the helicopter came into the hover, its rotors caused the entire area to be enveloped in a brownout, which was just as well, he thought, because the enemy couldn’t see what they were shooting at either.
However, once down, it seemed as if all the ground troops had either taken cover or were exchanging fire so there was nobody to help offload the three tons of explosive cargo. Worse, said Nellis, none of them would leave their trenches:
This meant that we were left, too heavy for take-off in that confined space, and just had to sit there. After a while a couple of soldiers arrived and gave Fred and Mohammed a hand, but it was tense. Again, one of my greatest fears was, as always, that we’d be hit by an RPG. So I kept the rotors going and kept up churning the dust as we needed all the cover we could get.
Getting the ammunition away took longer than the crew might have liked and, once finished, Nellis again had to pass through a hail of small arms fire to get clear of Waterloo. Fred did well, he said. Immediately after lift-off he managed to kill a rebel, who was about fire an RPG, before he could launch the rocket. ‘We were going through transition and moving relatively slowly and he slotted the guy as he was about to pull the trigger.’ Both Nellis and Hassan were emphatic that were it not for Fred’s skills with his GPMG, they’d most probably have been taken out.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE WAR GATHERS MOMENTUM
The small town of Daru in the east of Sierra Leone had become quite notable as a strong government ‘hold-out enclave’ against rebel advances and Nellis and his crew, once again flying from Cockerill, were supplying the Nigerian Army there twice a week by air. Colonel Kholbe and his people insisted that the Air Wing stick to a strict routine. They left at the same time each Wednesday and Saturday and returned before dark.
For obvious reasons, I insisted on varying this. The rebels had become familiar with our routine and they would be waiting for us. If they were expecting us, when we’d get overhead they would let go with everything they had in their armoury in the hope of bringing us down.
The Nigerians thought otherwise. They insisted that they were paying Nellis and his crew enough to accept their orders. As he was flying an average of ten hours a day at $2,000 an hour, Nellis couldn’t really argue. This meant that he had to stick to the routine.
One thing that Nellis was well aware of was that fighting in remote regions sometimes made for strange bedfellows. Just then, getting in and out of Daru was no exception.
There would sometimes be a journalist or two asking for a ride to the front, and although I would have liked to help—usually in the interests of creating what I reckoned was ‘a more realistic image of what we’re doing’—it often wasn’t possible. Other times we would need to use what help was available, particularly in the early days, and curiously, there was always some willing hand hanging around the base who hoped that he could
get involved with us.
One of those who came along was George Yazid, a gangling, confidant young man with long-boned walker’s shanks. Although born in Sierra Leone, he had grown up with one foot in Ireland and the other in Africa. Jesuit-educated in Canada and trained in electronics, he was a useful addition to the crew, especially when some of the pernickety things that could go wrong with a helicopter, did.
As Nellis tells it, Yazid apparently had something of a military background, but what he and the boys were doing was all new to him. ‘Anyway, as he told us all one night at Paddy’s, he thought he could learn something if he could attach himself to us.’
Yazid had mentioned to Nellis that if he were stuck for help then he’d fly with him. As it happened, round about that time Nellis was suddenly seriously short-handed. After recovering from his last bout of malaria, Juba had gone off to Europe, ostensibly to buy another helicopter, so Nellis was flying the Mi-17 on his own.
The only armour available in Sierra Leone through the war was a handful of battered old Soviet BMP-2 armoured personnel carriers that Executive Outcomes mercenaries had to try to keep operational if they were to be of any use. Photographed in Angola while with EO by the author
On their first sortie together, Nellis and Yazid flew to Daru, which, as luck would have it, lay at the far end of the helicopter’s fuel limitation envelope. As Nellis recalls, the place was close enough to the Liberian border to mean trouble and the only people there were some Nigerian soldiers and a squad or two of Sierra Leonean Army troops who were so doped that they didn’t know day from night.