by Al Venter
Salkowski, who had been behind the bar uplifting the beers, then apparently came running out between the sergeant and the private, who by then had his hands up, and yelled: ‘Don’t shoot him; he’s one of my men!’ Although they spent the rest of the night locked up, they were lucky not to be charged, the apparent explanation for this leniency being official reluctance to initiate disciplinary proceedings as these would inevitably have been publicised in Australia at a time when involvement in the war was becoming increasingly unpopular.
Now long out of the Australian Army, ‘on the wagon’ and in his early sixties, Peter Salkowski had built his own catamaran yacht, a Grainger 38, which he christened Zosha. As Nellis remembers him, Salkowski was ‘a short, stocky, well-tanned man with a great turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humour’.
He was ‘living his life as he liked’, adds Nellis—somewhat wistfully. ‘He’d sail from place to place, tie up alongside and stay as long as he felt comfortable and then move on. If things got too hot with social contacts, he’d set sail again.’ Nellis continued:
Pete has the ability to talk to anyone and wherever we went … there was always someone who would greet him and we would have a temporary halt while they chatted. I think he had been to just about every bar in Miri, and there would always be a flock of girls seeking his attention, more often because they knew he would buy them a drink so they could fulfil their quota for the night. Life with Peter was never dull!
The trouble is, unwanted ‘social contacts’ cannot always be escaped as easily as Peter managed it. When Nellis was working later in South Africa, one such contact made in Sarawak—who had possibly read more into their brief friendship than he intended—kept on sending him one SMS after the other with ever-more insistent suggestions that he convert to Islam and wed her. The was nothing necessarily wrong with that, but if your counterintelligence skills are getting a bit rusty and you keep leaving your cellphone around for your current partner to check out the competition, things can get a tad fraught!
The way Nellis puts it is:
I formed a friendship with a masseuse who was managing a hotel spa adjacent to the Ship Café. She was one of three Indonesian girls there. It was the first time I’d ever had a professional massage. It was not a ‘happy-ending massage’ and when I brought that up they were quite offended.
Heliborne medic attends to a patient after he was pulled out of a remote jungle village by Nellis in Sarawak. Photo Neall Ellis
The Ship Café is one of the finest bars I have ever been to. The music was solely Country and Western, piped during the week, and on weekend nights, a live band played. It was a bit incongruous to walk into a bar in the middle of Borneo and be surrounded by cowboys and cowgirls all wearing clothing straight out of a Western movie … without the hardware of course. However, it was a fun place and the locals were incredibly friendly. I never once saw or felt any sign of aggression, and whenever I walked into the bar I felt quite welcome. The best part about the bar was that few expatriates would frequent the place so it was a great place to get to know the local native population. Likewise, there would be very few Chinese. It was also a place where a single woman could have a drink and ask a man to dance, without fear of harassment or expectations. It was a dark, smoky bar, with a great atmosphere. The clientele was mainly 30-plus, so you did not have to sit around and watch the silly adolescent antics of the hip-hop crowd.
One thing Nellis quickly learned about Malaysian women was that they are not free with their sexual favours.
In fact, because of the Muslim influence, there is a very high moral standard. According to information explained to me, if you end up in bed with a Malaysian woman, it means she is in love with you and is expecting a marriage commitment. If you get into bed with a woman on a casual basis, don’t accept an invitation to visit the family … unless of course you want to marry her!
In Sarawak itself, apart from the ‘ladyboys’ on the streets, I saw very little evidence of female prostitution. If one needed sexual release, there were spas that dealt in sex for payment, but I never went to one so I had no experience of the underground night life.
Nellis found the people of Sarawak to be very tolerant, particularly the Iban who live along the rivers and waterways, and the Bidayuh, or inland Land Dayaks, who prefer the fertile highlands.
Seton’s business partner in Sarawak is Patricia Simbit, a very beautiful Bidayuh woman in her early forties, who looks not much older than thirty. She has a passion for life and one of the most effer vescent personalities I have ever known. At her age she is still running the weekly Kuching HASH (social harriers) and in her spare time takes friends out on the river for kayaking trips. She’s an amazing woman and, often, when on night stops in Kuching, we’d go out for dinner and spend the evening chatting over a bottle of red wine.
Nellis observed that Indonesian contract workers appeared to be treated as cheap, unskilled labour with few rights. Referring to one he got to know socially, he said:
Laila’s boss would take her passport, and only return it on the completion of her contract. However, unlike some other foreign employees she had relative freedom, but she never had a day off. They paid her a pitiful salary of 500 ringgit a month, plus 15 per cent commission, so if she was lucky she might end up with 1,000 ringgit [approximately US$300] a month.
It says a lot that Laila did not work in a bar. She was the masseuse and, as Nellis recounts, he got to know her very well. ‘She was definitely not into offering any sexual favours.
While in Miri, Nellis used to frequent the Globe Bar, where he learned something about the harsh economics of the bar hostess business.
There were two Filipina girls, one of them fluent in English. She had a bubbly character … aged about twenty-one or twenty-two … beautiful. [She was] on a five-month contract. They were on duty from seven in the evening until the last customer left at, say, four in the morning. Then they were imprisoned in their rooms and the gate was only unlocked at four that afternoon to let them out to do whatever shopping they needed. They weren’t allowed to have any relationships with men.
With a basic salary of just 500 ringgit, their whole purpose was to encourage patrons at the Globe to buy them so-called ‘ladies’ drinks’. These were just watered-down orange cordial, costing 15 ringgit [a bit more than four U.S. dollars], but they had a target of, say, 3,000 ringgit-worth of ‘ladies’ drinks’ sales a month. That works out at about three drinks an hour and so, every twenty minutes, the senior hostess would go around, tap on the bar, take a glass and indicate that a hostess must get the man she was with to buy another drink.
Inevitably, and despite the ‘locked barracks’ accommodation for these contract Indonesian hostesses, the rules occasionally got not merely bent, but busted wide open. ‘One of the guys we knew had managed to form a relationship with a rather attractive woman’, notes Nellis. ‘She visited his lodgings, and then one afternoon her boss found out about it. She was physically abused, never received her salary, and for a month wasn’t even allowed to leave the premises to buy toiletries and so on.’ It was, he says, a case of ‘semi-slavery’, made worse by the fact that the mainly Chinese employers seemed to treat the Indonesian contract workers as a lower form of life.
Despite all this, if you were passing through like Peter Salkowski, or selling your skills in Sarawak like Neall Ellis, there was much to enjoy. Fuel, before the price shot up internationally, was a mere 1 ringgit 50 sen per litre (US$1,70/gallon).
‘We never had to cook; every night we had food at one of the restaurants … Chinese or Malay-style’, recalls Nellis. The cost of living was low, but for those trapped there by birth or by their lack of skills, it was a far less attractive place. That is perhaps why, said Nellis when he looked back on the experience afterwards, he could perfectly understand why some bar hostesses were desperate to forge links with foreigners who might be willing to help them escape.
From Sarawak, Nellis went on to do forest fire protection work in Transkei o
n South Africa’s Eastern Cape. He had done such work for a couple of years and though the flying was different from that of a war zone, it was no less dangerous. Neall comments that ‘it was almost as dangerous as flying combat in Sierra Leone.’ He’s referring to the dangers of flying high in the Eastern Cape, where at several thousand feet above sea level the air was less dense, carrying a full load of fuel. The fiery heat made the air, through which his machine’s blades had to claw their way, even less dense and buoyant as he flew up dead-end, no-safe-exit valleys and on wooded mountain slopes running up to sheer cliff faces, all the while dangling two tons of water below, ready to drop onto a raging forest fire. Nellis adds: ‘of course, without the danger of getting shot at.’ Then he smiles wryly: ‘though there was that too, I suppose. Farmers didn’t always appreciate when you took their precious water to fight a runaway forest fire.’
The law permits the use of anyone’s water to fight a fire threatening life and property, he explains. However, for a farmer whose livelihood is constructed around a delicately balanced equation of grass plus water equals livestock, such law doesn’t always make sense, which is why a few potshots could sometimes be loosed off from a farmer’s old hunting rifle. It was much less dangerous, of course, than a 12.7mm DShK anti-aircraft machine gun or a SAM. However, it was still capable of being deadly if a round hit the wrong part of a rotor assembly, or even one of the crew. In the United States, airborne firefighting is considered, outside of combat, to be the most dangerous flying there is. In California particularly, at the time of writing, there is a strong debate about whether the extent of the inherent dangers are sufficiently recognised. ‘During the 2003 Southern California infernos, for instance, pilots coped with smoke, wind shear and debris such as kids’ play pools and full sheets of plywood careening past them at 1,500 feet.’ reported the Oakland Tribune of 9 May 2005.
Although the Mi-8P Nellis was flying was originally designed to carry up to 28 passengers, that was in cold, dense-air European conditions. ‘For every degree change in temperature above 20 degrees Centigrade, we forfeited or gained 70 kilogrammes’, Nellis explains:
With a 2,000-litre Bambi Bucket, if the outside air heated up by 10 degrees, that meant the aircraft could lift 700 litres less. Also, we would start off with 1,000 litres of fuel on board, so burning off fuel meant we could carry more water to put out fires. The whole time, I had to be mentally aware of weight, air density and altitude parameters.
We were flying continually at our limits, at the aircraft’s maximum all-up weight. Of course, generally fires happen in dry, hot, windy conditions, and we were called out when the ground crews couldn’t put out the blaze. Some 95 per cent of the time we were working up on the slopes of the mountain that vehicles and people on the ground couldn’t access. In gulleys, and on the sides of cliff faces, there were associated updrafts and downdrafts, plus extreme turbulence.
In one incident, when fire penetrated into the forest, the flames, says Nellis, were intense. Sometimes such flames could shoot well above the 30-metre-tall trees, perhaps even another 15 metres up, even higher than the aircraft was flying. Dense smoke could add to the difficulties. Then there was the danger posed by the aptly-named ‘widow-makers’, the leafless trunks left after a tree had died, possibly in an earlier fire, that were hard to spot against the ground.
To fight that specific fire, Nellis and his crew had to empty their bucket into a gulley, while flying up the overall slope of the land, but at the same time going downwind. Normally, to disperse the water load properly, they aim to drop at around 100kph. Nellis recalls:
But now we were trying to concentrate the load. We had to slow down, and it became very unsafe. Should we have lost an engine, we would have gone right into the side of the mountain. It felt as though the wind was picking us up and throwing us into the mountain. I remember thinking: If I don’t do this right, I’ll have to do it again.
With the revs of the two Klimov turboshaft engines unable to provide enough power to prevent the main rotor revolutions from drooping, Nellis was ‘trying to mentally pull the controls up to get that little extra bit of height’. The Bambi Bucket hung 10 metres below the helicopter, meaning the aircraft needed to fly at 15 metres above ground level. It took fine judgment as the ideal was to drop water from some 5 metres above the fire and it had to be released along the line of the fire. If the aircraft was flying too fast, then the water would be too spread out and dissipate. If it was too slow, or low, then the rotor wash would fan the flames. At the same time the massive bucket posed a danger of its own to the aircraft. In a commercial forest, not only are there trees all around, but also power lines as well as the ever-present ‘widow-makers’. ‘Ideally speaking, we should have dropped and picked up another load within two minutes’, says Nellis. ‘But the water could easily be five to ten minutes’ flying time away, adding to the difficulties.’ He continues:
We did some very strange aerobatic manoeuvres to get out of trouble that day. Altogether, we completed about 12 drops, with the fire spreading through the forest and threatening the sawmill itself. A Kamov Ka-32, normally based at Ugie, slinging a 4,000-litre bucket was brought in to assist. There was smoke. It was extremely dangerous flying. That’s why we got paid a bonus for each hour of flying—people didn’t like to say it was a danger allowance, but it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TANZANIA
Neall Ellis tells his own story during his detachment to East Africa to help with the three-month Presidential election campaign.
For those of us who have spent most of their working lives in Africa, the appeal of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ can be irresistible despite all its problems. To some, it’s the call of the wild.
Therefore, when my tour of duty in Afghanistan finished in the summer of 2010 and I was asked by the Titan Operations Department to go to Tanzania, I jumped at the chance. I had never flown in East Africa before. In fact, Dar es Salaam was little more than a name to me, even though most of the insurgents I had fought against over years in Rhodesia, Namibia and Angola had been routed to their respective war fronts through the Tanzanian capital. The offer was an opportunity I simply could not miss. Consequently, at the end of August that year, I was on my way back to my beloved Africa.
The Tanzanian contract was for two months. We were to fly the incumbent Tanzanian leader, President Kikwete, together with a fairly hefty entourage, around the country on one of the biggest election campaigns the country had experienced. A vast, underdeveloped and mostly under-exploited region, Tanzania had its own set of problems, but after seeing those of Central Asia, they were minimal. At least there would be no Taliban aiming their guns at us.
For the duration, there were three helicopters set aside for the programme: an AS-350B3 French-built Squirrel; a Bell 205 from Aeronautical Solutions, a South African-based helicopter company; and an Mi-8P from Titan Helicopters, which I would fly with Braam Wessels and Johnny O’Neil as crew. I was happy working with both men because we’d all worked together on firefighting deployments in South Africa. However, the choppers we’d been given to complete the task worried me, the Hip especially.
In a word, the machine was tired or, more aptly put, exhausted. The last time I’d flown this helicopter, its main rotor blades, as it is phrased in the lingo, were almost ‘calendar life expired’. The engines weren’t much better. I was concerned that Titan had never bothered to replace either the engines or the rotor blades after I’d first reported these shortcomings to their head office in Johannesburg two years earlier.
When I had last flown the helicopter on firefighting missions in South Africa two years earlier, its engines were not performing well. Since then, it had been on a contract in support of government elections in Mozambique, and who knows what else had happened in the interim? Moreover, the machine had no sand filtering for the engines, which meant that every landing in dusty zones was likely to cause compressor blade erosion and subsequent loss of power. From what I’d heard even before
I arrived in Tanzania, there were very few paved runways or landing areas outside the country’s main centres, which meant that a large proportion of our touchdowns and take-offs would create dust, probably in abundance.
Nellis’ chopper stuck in the bush during his deployment in Tanzania. The pilots some - times needed tractors to haul them out. Photo: Neall Ellis
One needs to look at the background of this helicopter to understand what was at stake. The Mi-8P is the passenger version of the MI-8T, a first generation model of the Mi-8 helicopter. Their TB2-117 engines use relatively antiquated technology compared to those installed on today’s choppers. They produce only 1,500SHP compared to the 2,200SHP produced by the TB3-117VM engines on the newer generation Mi-8MTV.
Put another way, the ‘P’ model has a MAUW of 12,000kg compared to the 13,000kg of the MTV. The MTV is quite capable of operating with a full load in ‘hot and high’ conditions, whereas the ‘P’ model is a bitch to fly in those conditions and even thinking of touching the collective causes the main rotor revs to drop. In other words, to use a phrase first used by one of my American aviator friends, it is a machine that any pilot has to have his arm out of his arsehole to fly without killing himself and crew.
I was also aware that the helicopter in which I’d be flying the president of Tanzania around is what some experienced airmen would regard as unforgiving. As the pilot at the controls, I wouldn’t be able to relax for a moment if I wanted to stay alive. Even tail rotor effectiveness is far less than the MTV. The bottom line, then, is quite simple: in hot and high conditions, the ‘P’ model is challenging to fly. However, because I had quite a lot of experience flying the same helicopter while fighting fires in South Africa, I was not too concerned. What did surprise me, though, was that Titan should have chosen this decrepit old bird to fly the head of state of an African nation about on duties that would take him to some of the remotest places on the continent.