by Al Venter
San Salvador, the capital, lies about 35 miles from the airport. There were several army roadblocks and, not all that surprising, precious few streetlights along the way. Guerrilla ambushes, we’d been warned, had been frequent. Not long before we got there, three American nuns and a lay worker had been killed on that very same route by a rebel group. It was an accident; the FMLN told a newspaperman in Managua afterwards, they’d believed they were army.
Anyway, somebody else declared, they shouldn’t have been travelling that road at night.
Harry Claflin eventually saved the day. He’d brought along to the airport half a dozen M16s and enough ammunition to start a war. With these passed around, the men settled themselves comfortably in the bus at seats alongside open windows, each one of them hoping desperately for an ambush which never came.
Brown’s crowd were an odd bunch, not all of them likeable. It was their whim to look for trouble wherever it might be encountered and they did so in South and Central America, Asia, the Middle East, parts of Europe during the Balkan troubles and, of course, Africa. Their yarns over the years were the stuff of schoolboy fiction, but let it be known that Brown also made a good living from this kind of vicariously tipped armchair adventure.
In the 40 years of the existence of the magazine, quite a few people associated with Soldier of Fortune had been killed, not all of them in action. Bob MacKenzie was one. Another was Craig Nunn, a former Special Forces sergeant and a streetfighter in Chicago. While he was with the magazine, Craig was its art director and would listen to Bach and Bartok at full volume in his studio with a pair of earphones over his head. Craig was killed in a motor-cycle crash in the Rockies.
Harry Claflin, former American Special Forces operative-turned El Salvadorianmercenary, made most things happen for us while we remained in country. He was attached to US Military Group, El Salvador while in country, or USMILGPEL. (Author’s collection)
Some years before, Soldier of Fortune martial arts editor, Mike Echanis – while chief military advisor to Nicaraguan President Samoza – was killed when the Aero Commander in which he was travelling was sabotaged in mid-flight shortly after take-off from Managua.
Another freelancer, Lance Motley, was working on a story for the magazine when a Burmese mortar exploded close to where he was standing: he was covering the extended campaign being fought by a group of Karen rebels operating out of Cambodia. The poster in Bob’s office back in Boulder encapsulated it for that particular bunch: ‘Happiness is a Confirmed Kill’.
Also in the group was ‘Sweet Michael’, the only psychopath with whom I’ve knowingly travelled to a combat zone. A particularly menacing individual, we soon discovered, that he liked to present a world of silent intimidation that was always tinged with violence. ‘Sweet Michael’ didn’t fly into El Salvador with us, because he’d been ‘doing a job’ and considered it more opportune to take the roundabout route. However, he was waiting for us at our hotel.
A burly, surly, pale creature whose eyes you avoided because he was usually playing with an open, double-edged blade that every now and again he’d throw across the room, ‘Sweet Michael’ was the ultimate reallife bad ‘un. He narrowly missed me with the knife twice and I didn’t like it. It was evident from the first moment that the guy was in trouble with the law and, after a few days in El Salvador, we were to discover that he’d made a living of sorts doing ‘jobs’, some of them for the Mafia. True or false, we were hardly likely to ask him directly, especially when he was drunk, which was most of the time.
‘Sweet Michael’ liked to flash a big roll of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket anytime there was somebody around. Bob indicated that he’d recently done some ‘wet work’ that had left a widow and two kids behind and for which he’d been paid $10,000. Like other jobs handled by this misfit, payment came in cash.
He would frequently hint at something devious that he had just ‘accomplished’. Then he’d take out his roll and utter something like ‘where the hell d’ya think I got this load’. He was a loathsome man, and Alwyn and I always avoided him if he was around. Brown would comment when the psycho started to get to you, that he was ‘one of the boys’, which was why he’d invited him along.
While ‘Sweet Michael’ might have been just the man to ice people back home in New Jersey or Georgia, he never went out in the bush in El Salvador. Frankly, he didn’t seem to have the balls for it, said one of the others. I agreed. As they say, he might have been interesting specimen, but his presence tended to be fortified by a generous slug of booze. Always a difficult bastard, last heard, he was doing time for a Federal offence. They never apparently got him on any of the murder raps.
Not yet, anyway…
The city of San Salvador in those days was not a grand place in the tradition of Rio or Havana. Nor is it today.
It snuggles untidily between two rows of hills in the Valle de las Hamacas – the Valley of the Hammocks – and while there, it seemed to be the only city in Latin America with no colonial buildings left intact.
Once it had been the capital of the United Provinces of Central America. Then there had been plenty of fine old buildings erected by the successors to the Conquistadores, but all were destroyed by a succession of earthquakes and floods which had levelled the region several times during the past few centuries.
I’d expected to find a modern, progressive kind of place. I was disappointed, as were others who also hadn’t been there before. Of course there were plenty of tall buildings, as there are everywhere in the New World. However, San Salvador was no Manhattan. Most of these stunted, unattractive glass and concrete blocks looked like they’d been plopped down at random in the expectation of another catastrophe.
Driving into town from the Sheraton was like going back to earlier decades, because there was pollution everywhere. Also, the streets were full of splintered packing cases (all new cases were used to build shacks in the barrios) together with more garbage that one would have thought possible. Street urchins – dirty, unkempt and clearly homeless – came running whenever we stopped.
The traffic, sometimes on the wrong side of the road, was a perpetual problem. There was no visible control like we know it in Europe or America. Cars were speeding, dodging, cutting in front of others, often through dangerous intersections or lines of traffic or alternatively, like teenagers at a rave, intent on playing chicken or dodgems.
I’d seen something similar in Beirut when that city was at war with itself and somebody commented that it was a symptom of a war psychosis. Trouble was, it only got worse as hostilities progressed.
On the whole then, San Salvador was not the most attractive place in which to find yourself for an extended stay, though Harry Claflin told me afterwards that having spent nine years there, the place had kind of grown on him.
Our hotel, the Sheraton, was situated in one of the better hillside neighbourhoods and from our rooms we could observe the whole untidy sprawl. Thankfully, while we could see it, we couldn’t smell the stench or hear the noise. Yet, the hotel was an interesting experience in itself and it’s surprising that none of the visiting correspondents devoted a line or two to it in the New Yorker or Rolling Stone, since almost everybody who reported on the war found themselves there, if only to use the bar.
San Salvador’s Sheraton had a rough resemblance to the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, or Meikles in Salisbury. After the Presidential Palace it was the most heavily guarded structure in the country.
On arrival we were carefully frisked by security guards. There was no problem with the weapons we were carrying, they told us, but we ought to be discreet. If anybody was to be shot, it should be left to them to do the shooting, was the gist of it. Also, we were warned, no strangers were allowed into the hotel compound unless they had good cause to be there. Rebel bands, they told us, had put a price on the heads of certain Americans and four US Marines had been killed with grenades in a bar not far from where we were sleeping each night. That had happened only a few months before.
All this rigmarole comprised the visible layer of security at the Sheraton. There was a less obtrusive, ‘covert’ layer underneath and that, I discovered by accident.
One evening I needed to get some film out of the cool room next to the kitchens for the next day’s shoot. I barged through a door into a corridor that led off the main lounge, straight into the muzzle of a submachine-gun. I backed off quietly, trying to explain my presence in English to somebody who spoke only Spanish. The wielder of the gun said nothing, but he wasn’t happy. Once somebody had explained to him why I was there, he ordered me with a nod of his head to get on with it. Gringos were to be forgiven such gaffes. Thereafter, I took a good look before entering any other area of the hotel and I’d usually first inform the front desk of my intentions.
Later I was to find out that there were half a dozen of these G-men on duty around the clock. They were apparently all members of the country’s Equipo de Reacciòn Especial, or ERE, which might have been roughly equivalent to America’s Secret Service, though obviously, far more active militarily as befitted their security role. But for them, I’m certain, there would have been many more murders in San Salvador’s hotels.
Security in the city must have been horrendous for those in charge. Every senior government official, every military officer above the rank of major, every minister and his staff had his or her personal bodyguard. Even short journeys between the suburbs sometimes required two or three vehicles, most of the time travelling in convoy. The guards were usually dressed in mufti, which was deceptive, and still didn’t detract from the fact that San Salvador was an armed camp. There were even soldiers patrolling the botanical gardens.
The houses or apartments of all these functionaries were guarded around the clock. There must have been thousands of men so employed. Kabul at its worst never deployed that kind of manpower in protection roles.
Even so, there were still attacks taking place, if not all the time, then regularly enough to cause unease. On the second night of our stay, the rebels hit a house a few blocks from the hotel. We could hear the firing and the battle went on for some minutes. A few of Brown’s entourage emerged from their rooms, one of them with an M16 in one hand and spare clips in the other. They were all keen to join in but the hotel guards had other ideas.
When cameraman Alwyn Kumst asked about it next morning at Army Headquarters, he was told that one of the guards had had a malfunction with his automatic weapon. It was an unlikely story and symptomatic of the kind of obfuscation that passed for propaganda. The El Salvadorians eventually became masters at disinformation, and little of what they offered was even vaguely plausible.
The government of El Salvador incensed many correspondents both with their lies and a level of censorship that was intrusive. Quite a few of my colleagues were journalists with years of experience of other wars. Some, like Holger Jensen of AP and later Newsweek, had been wounded several times. We all knew the rules, and in general we worked by them. But it didn’t help that there wasn’t a single member of the media who wasn’t initially treated like a juvenile.
When we responded accordingly, there was fury on both sides, though eventually things did ease up.
Covering the war in El Salvador was different from working in most other Third World ‘brush fire’ conflicts. For one, because there was always something happening, it was never boring.
When we were in the interior we went on operations in the mountains and the valleys of the east, flew over the jungle on air strikes or went on naval patrols in the Gulf of Fonseca, all well within sight of the Nicaraguan coast and some of the biggest maritime defences in the region. In those brief weeks we were sniped at, managed to avoid the odd landmine, and ‘survived’ at least one ambush (which distressed some of our budding heroes).
The best part of it was sleeping under the stars, usually within the constraints of some really rough conditions in isolated villages in the foothills. As the sun set, we ate beans and chillies, shared a few beers with the campesinos as they stood guard at the edge of their settlements and, now and again, listened as attacks or ambushes were taking place in the distance. There were people dying out there, we knew.
While on patrol in the interior, life went on for the locals, much as it always had done. Our patrol was sniped at several times and after dark, out in the open, the threat of a concerted attack by the guerrillas was real enough for the troops to take guard duty seriously. (Author’s collection)
We never felt personally endangered, whether at base or on patrol, but the fact is that this was one guerrilla war in which the rebels remained undefeated on the battlefield until the Americans stepped in with their MilGroup aid programme. This clandestine operational group involving Special Forces became Washington’s uncompromising Central American Cold War initiative and finally turned this war around.
Whatever the ultimate consequences, it would have been a great thing for the FMLN insurgents to have been able to kill or wound one of us extranjeros; a propaganda victory that could have been significant, especially if the link to Soldier of Fortune were to be exposed. The ‘mercenary’ syndrome was never distant in minds of any of us, since Bob Brown was financing some of his own people to train irregular units in other wars. The government in San Salvador was aware of this and as a result the army and the air force took good care of us.
We were all ‘carrying’ and none of us took chances. The majority in our ranks had the advantage of having had good combat experience.
The daily events of conflict in El Salvador were close enough for us to be acutely aware of them.
Once, while being ferried in a Huey towards a hillside village to the west of the Volcan de Conchagua, we were fired at from the ground, but the pilot couldn’t see where it was coming from. On a second pass, tracers could be spotted rising from a thick clump of tall trees.
Later that day, Fuerza Aérea – the El Salvador Air Force – tried a ploy of their own. They sent in as a decoy one of their little two-seater Bell scout choppers, with the intention of drawing fire and then have their Huey ‘Mikes’ (circling nearby) rake the area with their Gatlings. A few thousand rounds in five- or eight-second bursts would do the necessary, was the way an American air force officer attached to a local squadron briefed us. While it sounded simple enough, it wasn’t. Such attacks were precision-guided and needed luck. Several times one of the Bell pilots offered me his observer seat but I declined with thanks, though Alwyn was happy enough to go up with him once and was halfdeaf from blast for days afterwards. He declined the offer of a subsequent flight with a smile.
At other times, it seemed that the guerrillas were conspiring against us personally. Perhaps they were. They would wait until after we’d left an area before hitting a target. They certainly knew we were around because some of their leaflets specifically mentioned us.
It wasn’t direct contact with the enemy that Alwyn and I feared. Indeed, we would have welcomed a bit of action, especially when others were doing the fighting and we had to keep our heads down. What worried us the most was that we might be mistaken for Americans, with a good chance of a bomb being lobbed through the window of a bar or restaurant where we might have been eating.
There was also the prospect of taking a hit while eating lunch with Colonel José Rodriques of the Arce Immediate Reaction Battalion in a little bistro along one of San Miguel’s backstreets. Five or six soldiers always took up defensive positions with automatic weapons at the windows and doors of any bar he frequented. Still, the rebels would try. Drive-by shootings seemed to have had their origins in this war. The ploy was probably devised by the Sandanistas and later exported to the streets of Los Angeles and Washington DC.
I didn’t appreciate how dangerous San Miguel was until I began to
take photos in the centre of the town on the morning of my third day there. I’d gone out alone and wandered down some side streets looking for options. What did surprise me was that there were almost no soldiers around. Within minutes, while focusing on the twin steeples of the cathedral, two Jeeps screeched to a halt alongside where I was standing. Out tumbled a squad of soldiers who fanned out round the courtyard. The officer in charge ran towards me.
‘You come!’ he demanded, seizing me by the arm. He was wearing one of the El Salvador Army battlejackets.
‘Give me a couple of minutes’, I begged. ‘I’m nearly finished.’
‘No, come now! This place is very dangerous… there are campesinos everywhere… some have been turned…’
Although he was barely 20, his face was surmounted by a pair of bushy eyebrows that gave him the severe expression of somebody much older. I complied.
Back at base, the camp commandant had apparently received a call from one of his informers in town that I was wandering about on a private jaunt. I’d been through San Miguel often enough by then for just about everybody in this frontline town to know that I was working from the Arce Battalion base with the rest of Bob’s troupe.
The main entrance to the Arce Battalion barracks in San Miguel. I was struck by the number of young men who were semi-permanently housed there who had lost feet or sometimes their legs to landmines. (Author’s collection)
Obviously annoyed, the commander told me that the rebels had shot at (and missed) an English couple working as missionaries in one of the government schools a few weeks before. It was obviously a case of mistaken identity, for the rebels rarely intentionally killed those ‘helping the cause’.