by Al Venter
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Dirty Distant War: El Salvador
El Salvador is a small, Central American country bordered by Honduras, Guatemala and the Pacific Ocean. In recent years, it has been plagued by violence and poverty due to over population and class struggles. The conflict between the rich and the poor of the country has existed for more than a century and while the military struggle has ended, disparities remain.
I WENT TO WAR IN El Salvador with former Vietnam War veteran Bob MacKenzie, a good choice because Bob had originally been a captain in the Rhodesian SAS. He managed that achievement despite having a crook arm from a war wound that got him invalided out of the United States Army. Some years later he fought with Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique. Bob had also worked as a mercenary in the Balkans, where he trained Serbs in the esoterics of insurgency warfare.
This always-smiling, unflappable American freebooter – by then a colonel – went on to become the first white officer for many decades to head a West African fighting group. In a remote area adjacent to the Malal Hills in Sierra Leone, he was killed and eaten by savages, who ambushed the pathetic bunch of bush warriors he’d been trying to mould into something of an effective fighting force. In the Central American guerrilla war, however, he was the unit’s star.
The conflict in El Salvador was a very different conflagration from most other insurgent struggles. There were several reasons, the first being that both the Soviet Union and Cuba had a marked influence on its outcome. As might have been expected, Washington backed the noncommunist side, not only politically but with men, machines, hardware and whatever else was needed to keep San Salvador, the country’s capital, from becoming a Comintern clone.
A lot of people died in the terrible conflict that totally ravaged this tiny Central American state, but in the end, with solid US and Latin American support, a peace of sorts was negotiated. Against all odds, it survived the strains of some of the most convoluted and conflicting Cold War interests in the hemisphere. Critics called it a loveless, arranged marriage, but in the end, it worked. At least the shooting stopped and more recently El Salvador sent 11,000 of its troops to fight in Iraq.
Not bad for a country of only eight million people.
The country’s civil war took an atrocious toll, not only in lives, but also on an economy that was stripped of just about everything. After almost a decade of fighting, there were about 75,000 people dead and several million exiles, more than a million of them in the United States.
Looking back, it would seem that El Salvador had always laboured under a tyranny of sorts. By the time we got there, the country reflected hope and desperation in equal parts, always a recipe for revolt. Its real misfortune – like that of Nicaragua next door – was to become a pawn on the great international chess board.
In Central America, it all began as a domestic quarrel. In 1980 a group of landowners and coffee traders in El Salvador launched a military coup. They were supported by the police, the judiciary and obviously, the military. The reason for the putsch was a wish to perpetuate the old system that kept the establishment rich and the rest of the people on the breadline.
As one paper phrased it at the time, ‘those sweaty, growling masses who opposed the plotters – including many churchmen – were murdered, exiled or driven into rebellion’. Small wonder then that the Russians and their Cuban surrogate friends – quite justifiably in hindsight – armed the oppressed and took over the revolution, for that was what it was.
Such was the leaden symmetry of the Cold War that that old warriorleader Ronald Reagan chose El Salvador as the place to ‘draw the line’. He was doing so, he said at the time, ‘against communist encroachment in the Americas’.
With the benefit of hindsight, he probably did the right thing. In the end, however, it cost the US taxpayer six billion dollars, not much by today’s standards when the American taxpayer doles out hundreds of times as much in Iraq, but in those not-so-long-ago times, it was a sizeable sum.
Washington’s tactics in El Salvador included a grand strategy to sap rebel support by fostering democracy, land reform and civil rights. To some extent these moves, while moderating the homicidal propensities of the army, didn’t altogether stop them. The Rand Corporation, in a report to the US Department of Defense, calculated that in 1981 alone, the army and its agents murdered 10,000 people. The new dispensation that followed – a truce of sorts between the government and the guerrillas, almost a decade later – was effective enough to reduce that figure to roughly a hundred-a-year, though for a long time there were bloody incidents in and around the city after dark.
The El Salvador Army was mainly conscript and composed largely of young indigent peasant who had more in common with the guerrillas than a corrupt government. It was American training of men like this that eventually turned the tide. (Author’s collection)
In so many different ways, the civil war in El Salvador resembled a hundred civil wars before. It was mostly the unarmed, the dispossessed and the despised civilian mass that were at the receiving end. They suffered first from a succession of corrupt and brutal governments and later from a guerrilla force that began with laudable intentions, but which ultimately became no less murderous and oppressive.
To the grandly named Farabundo National Liberation Front (FMLN) you were either for the revolution or against it. There was nothing in between. ‘No greys’, as one American adviser tried to explain to me after a bibulous diplomatic function in the capital.
The war in El Salvador made one lasting impression on this observer; nowhere else had I seen so many young men who had been crippled by landmines. Even the guerrilla struggles in Rhodesia and Angola were nowhere near as bad. Yet few of the correspondents ever mentioned that dark aspect of the war when they left this Central American crucible of violence; it was almost as if those casualties did not exist.
In retrospect, they were there for all to see. In every military base I visited, there were young men who had lost a foot or a leg, and sometimes more. They hobbled about with a crutch or a stick – it was a sad spectacle.
In El Salvador, the prosthetically endowed were a rarity. There was simply no money for such extravagance. Most of the national budget was devoured by hostilities that not only started at the edge of the country’s biggest city but, with assassinations of prominent people, also sometimes inside it. It was a tragic business when you observed it from nearby.
My lasting conclusion was that if ever there was a case against any mother sending her son to fight for a foreign cause, right or wrong, this was it. The war, it seemed, was pointless. Yet ideologies (strange that they seem so facile now) played a powerful role. Not everybody recalls that the Cold War was a cauldron bubbling over an open fire pit less than a generation ago.
The mines that crippled the majority of these men were small antipersonnel bombs, or ‘APs’ in the terminology, usually buried a few inches into the dirt near a path or stream that might be frequented by the enemy. Many were little, round PMN-2s, which weighed a few ounces and could fit comfortably in the palm of a man’s hand; they were invariably made in Russia or somewhere east of the Elbe.
‘Black Widows’ they were called in Vietnam, though widow-makers would have been more appropriate.
Then came the TMA-3 or TM-57 anti-tank mines (the former Yugoslav, the latter Soviet). These were bigger, heavier and more difficult to hump in any kind of significant number across mountains, but the guerrillas managed it and the devices took a steady toll. These days insurgent movements prefer the anti-personnel version of the bomb: you can get more of them into the ground, cover a greater area and achieve more widespread devastation.
The conventional wisdom about such things in this kind of insurgency is that it is better to maim your enemy than kill him. A wounded comrade needs three or four others to tend to his needs and, quite often, haul him out of the combat zone: that means more manpower tied down when soldiers in the field might have been fighting. Nor is that the end of it, because s
till more effort, time and money must be spent treating this casualty; all this is solid revolutionary economics.
Sadly, as we now know, anti-personnel mines eventually caused many times the number of casualties among civilians than they did among the troops in this Central American state, just as they’ve done in dozens of African conflicts. Children were the worst affected. They were everywhere in this war and were thus far more likely to trigger a mine. It was a process to be repeated in Afghanistan when the Soviets were there.
However, in all the time of the conflict, I read no more than a handful of articles on the effects of mines in the American press which makes one think that if Princess Diana had been around a little earlier, things might have been different. The landmine threat was all but ignored by the correspondents of the Washington Post, Britain’s Guardian or Time and Newsweek. One needs to question why this was so.
In the eyes of some American and European reporters, the guerrillas – or ‘Gs’ in local lingo – could do nothing wrong. They were the good guys. Good guys just didn’t lay mines, was the thrust of it.
I had long intended to go to El Salvador. The only man that I knew who could get me and my cameraman, Alwyn Kumst, into that war was Lieutenant Colonel Robert K. Brown, owner and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine which the New York Times in February 1996 said had ‘carved out and dominated a unique editorial niche’ for itself over the past few decades. It wasn’t called ‘The Journal of Professional Adventurers’ for nothing.
Sensing opportunity, I had taken Brown on his first African safari in Rhodesia some 20 years before to cover that conflict. To get into Central America, I called in a favour.
My first stop was at the offices of the magazine on Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder, Colorado where I found an entrance with a small sign:
Stop before entering: Fill out a card saying where you want your body shipped otherwise it will be used for scientific purposes.
Brown’s office was part of the image, the bravado. There were photographs on just about every wall, even in the toilet, of foreign legionnaires, of Bob Brown with South-East Asia’s Montagnards, Bob Brown in Colombia (or was it Peru?), Bob Brown in Rhodesia and, among scores of others, a much younger Bob Brown in Vietnam, where he had completed two tours.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert K. Brown (seated on the right) – Bob to his friends – took a group of us into the war in El Salvador. Pictured here at one of the army bases in the interior with the author is former US Marine underwater demolition specialist John Donovan (on the left). Peering over our shoulders (top right) is Bob MacKenzie, who went on to become the first white man to command the Sierra Leonean Army after rebels had invaded most of the country. MacKenzie was killed and eaten by said West African rebels shortly afterwards. (Author’s collection)
Other walls in the building were lined with pictures of him with any number of army units, on assignment in Afghanistan sitting behind a captured anti-tank missile or back from a hunt in the Zambezi Valley complete with rifle and trophy, in this case, a splendid sable.
Wherever you looked in the offices you found hardware. These included carbines with stacks of 30-round magazines, hunting rifles, .45 ACP pistols (usually complete with loaded clips) and even more revolvers. In between lay a variety of all-purpose Special Forces blades including WWII K-Bars and a host of survival knives. The entire arsenal was thrown about in disarray, usually on the floor or leaning against cupboards, behind doors and even in an alcove under one of the stairs.
The lasting impression was that Lieutenant Colonel Robert K. Brown really did cater for the professional adventurer. His rigmarole was gung-ho and very much in keeping with Brown’s macho image. Unfortunately, these Rambo-type sentiments also resulted in several spin-offs, not all of them welcome, especially where there were people murdered as a result of ‘do anything for money, legal or otherwise’ advertisements that were carried by the magazine in the early days.
Bob Brown soon put a stop to them, but the consequences were severe and ultimately cost both him and his company millions. A couple of legal cases included actions brought by families because a husband or a mistress had been shot by someone who had placed an advertisement in the magazine. One of these was headed ‘Guns for Hire’.
It was obvious that Bob Brown attracted his share of crazies, especially since Soldier of Fortune made an issue of extolling the virtues of Vietnam vets. Consequently, there was invariably an aspiring wannabee knocking at the door at 7535 Arapahoe Avenue just about every day.
For the trip to El Salvador we went to Brown’s house in Boulder in November 1985. There we were joined by Bob MacKenzie and John Donovan, a powerful, bald-headed chap with a neck like a professional wrestler, a sport which, I gathered afterwards, he’d also tried. Donovan’s forté in those days was trying to punch holes into concrete walls with his bare fists. Interestingly, ‘Big’ John was a major in the United States Army Reserves.
Bob Brown, our host and Paul Foley, who had spent 12 years in the French Foreign Legion, headed the team: ‘My A-Team’, Bob explained with a wicked smile.
Foley, in his fifties, was a tall, sinewy man who thought nothing of a 30-mile hike through the mountains as a preparation for a Saturday night thrash. Most of the time he was quiet and reserved, but that could change when he’d been at the bar a while. Then he could spring into action in a moment, whether eating dinner with us or in one of the bawdy bordellos that the men liked to frequent in the seedier parts of San Salvador.
I’d followed Foley’s progress over the years and frankly, I doubt whether the man would ever have been comfortable in anything but a military uniform. He was decorated for bravery when he jumped with the Legion into Kolwezi in Zaire at the time of the Katangese invasion. As he tells it, it was an attack by rebels that left scores of Belgians, including many women and children, dead. Les Paras whipped them in 48 hours. Those few rebels still alive, fled back to Angola and as is the custom in these African uprisings, very few prisoners survived the night.
We flew in a group, eight or nine of us heading first to Houston, where we’d been booked on an airline that I had never heard of before: TACA. To me, that wasn’t reassuring, considering that we would be arriving at El Salvador in the dark and I’d been told by one of the men that there had been several foul-ups involving commercial airlines in the mountains that surround the country’s main international airport in recent years, especially during bad weather. It was raining when we left Texas…
Our route included a stop in Belize, a former British colony that was regularly used for tropical warfare exercises by elite British units such as the SAS and the SBS. In those days, Belize was constantly under threat of attack from Guatemala, its bigger and more belligerent neighbour, which regarded the little stretch of mangrove swamp and jungle fringing the Gulf of Mexico as its own.
Arriving after dark in any country where there is a war usually presents a unique set of conditions that you’re usually warned about beforehand.
For one, you don’t wear camouflage when you travel. Second, you never travel with an empty pistol holster on your belt. Some of our group had both, even though we were being met by American military aid personnel who were already working there, including Harry Claflin who was in-country, having volunteered for an assignment with the El Salvador Airborne Battalion, Reconnaissance Platoon. Among his other duties was involvement with the so-called ‘PRAL’, a clandestine infiltration group funded by the CIA and based at Ilopango, the country’s largest military air base.
‘Great group of young kids’, said Harry when we asked him about his job, ‘But they’ve had no training in Recon’.
We’d barely entered the airport concourse before it became clear that we were scheduled for a grilling by the authorities. A bunch of officials viewed us warily, with good reason, I suppose. We certainly weren’t your usual run-of-the-mill tourists, even if there were any coming to El Salvador in wartime.
‘These boots, of yours’, said an official dressed in a k
haki uniform, also with a holster on his belt but with the appropriate hardware, ‘are they for climbing montañas?’
‘Yes’ I said.
‘Which montañas?’
Of course I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know. I wasn’t even certain that El Salvador had any accessible mountains, and in any event, this was no holiday jaunt.
‘We’re here to see action against the Gs’, interjected Brown in Spanish. He’d fought for a while with Castro in the Sierra Maestra, but that was before the Cuban leader had begun to refer to his intimates as camaradas.
It was to be expected that the airport functionary would view this very vocal, crapulous bunch of Gringos with suspicion, especially since Donovan had warned us earlier not to take anything for granted. He made the point – valid as it turned out – that while America supplied El Salvador with all manner of assets, the severest critics of El Salvador’s civil war also had American passports.
Another customs man found a pair of Vietnam combat boots in Foley’s baggage. This caused the arrival of a new lot of officials. Brown then identified himself and produced a letter from the El Salvadorian Minister of Defence, at which point all the officials went into a huddle. Calls were made to their superiors and in an hour, we’d become heroes. That done, and after more beers, we set out in a decrepit old bus along a deserted road: we were heading out on the first stage of our journey to the city of San Salvador.
One of the reasons for all this kerfuffle, apparently, was the discovery some time before of combat gear in the luggage of a Scandinavian mercenary on his way to join the FMLN guerrillas in Nicaragua. His travel agent had unwisely booked him through El Salvador. Instead, he should have gone to Managua. We never did discover his fate.