Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  The reality was that the attack was admirably coordinated. Even with more moderate losses, it would have been the kind of operation that any guerrilla commander would have been proud of. For the Salvadorian Estado Mayor (General Staff), it exposed a critical lack of order and discipline that was demoralizing and one of the reasons why the base at San Miguel was on such a high alert while we were around.

  Following those developments, one of the American military observers suggested that the attacks made clear that government forces were getting very little real-time intelligence. He made the point in a report that was widely circulated that nobody in the country knew what was going to happen next. The comment, objective and clearly wellintentioned, resulted in his being labelled a guerrilla ‘fellow traveller’ and his reports were subsequently viewed with scepticism. But of course, he was perfectly correct.

  The fact was that the FMLN had executed the La Unión raid with great precision, preceded by months of excellent planning. They had come undetected across the broad waterway between the two countries after dark in several small boats, which meant that their radar images must have been minimal and were probably not picked up by shore monitoring stations. And even if they were, the operators did not report in. Also, their weapons were waiting for them in safe houses on shore. There was nothing tell-tale that might have alerted anybody on watch at the time.

  One of the immediate consequences of the La Unión debacle was that it sharpened American resolve to take a more active part in the war. There were gaps in the defences of El Salvador that Washington proposed to plug. Ultimately, it did.

  Many of the men with solid experience of other wars in South-East Asia, whom I encountered in remote places, were sent to Central America on training missions. If they got into a few scrapes in the course of their duties, or accounted for a few gooks along the way, ran the argument in certain Washington circles, then so much the better. Each time it happened, the authorities tended to look away. There were no Gringos involved in this Central American war…

  The media was another story. American journalists made a thing of ‘aid’ people with weapons in their baggage arriving in El Salvador, much as they might have done with us had there been somebody from the New York Times or one of the other major American dailies when we touched down. It would probably have been front page news in both Washington and New York the next day, especially if it were also shown that one of our members was a member of that ultra-exclusive little band of warriors known as USMILGP-EL, or in the lingo, US Military Group, El Salvador.

  In our circles, we would use the phrase Mil Group – or MilGroup – among whom Harry Claflin was one of its more successful members. In the end, American veterans attached to units of the El Salvadorian Army under MilGroup’s auspices did outstanding work. Effectively, they had a hand in turning the war around.

  Harry Claflin had done solid time in South-East Asia, which included two tours with US Marine Reconnaissance in I Corps, where he ran recce patrols along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. Certainly, he had his own views on what was going on just then in Central America. I shared a room with him at Ilopango Airport during some of our forays and was aware that he’d been badly shot up during one of his ‘Nam tours of duty in 1966. You couldn’t miss it when he got dressed.

  Harry’s ‘home from home’ at Ilopango was pretty simple as digs go, but it was secure. Though on a military air base, we were unlikely to take ‘incoming’ so close to the capital. More importantly, it cost us nothing. When we didn’t go out, we pulled out a few boxes of Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs) – ubiquitous, any-army meals that are ready for immediate consumption. All I had to do each morning was roll up my sleeping bag.

  Harry – with loads of combat experience – and never one for chitchat, was as terse about his personal background as he was about what was going on around him. ‘Sometimes you win and there are times when you lose’, were his words. But in El Salvador just then, he suggested, ‘the insurgents are starting to get hurt’.

  Years later he and I shared a few retrospective notes and his revelations are interesting.

  Claflin stated:

  I worked with these local troops about a year and though it took a while, I gradually brought them up to speed. The stuff that I’d originally done with Recon Platoon came to the attention of quite a few people. In fact, the MilGroup people took a lot of interest. So did the El Salvador Chief of Staff, which was probably why I was asked to put together a programme to train a reconnaissance type element for the El Salvador Army’s 4th Brigade.

  The idea was to prepare the guys for special missions and they gave me a free hand. I suggested that I prepare the men by combining two programmes that the Marine Corps had run in Vietnam: the Stingray Project and the Small Unit Action Forces Program. Stingray was run by Force Recon, and in its day was pretty damn successful.

  It was on this basis that I finally helped to create GOE, or Goupos de Operaciones Especiales. By the time we were done, we’d trained them from their bootstraps to their eyeballs. I can tell you now, they were sharp!

  Other, similar GOE units followed and no doubt these initiatives helped shorten the war. Claflin also commented:

  You must remember that by 1983 – when Washington first sent military advisers to help the El Salvador Military – the country, like all Central American states at this time, was simply not prepared for war. Two years later, because of US assistance, the El Salvador Military was up to the task of kicking the shit out of the gooks.

  What our 55 American advisers did, was to take a Third World army and remould it into a modern combat force. The success of the military with which we were involved at a very basic level (and here we’re talking about 1989) – led to what the media termed the Final Offensive. By then many FMLN cadres were getting desperate.

  Their leaders, sitting comfortably way back behind the lines – most of them in Sandinista country anyway – wouldn’t believe any of it. They couldn’t accept that a tiny nation like El Salvador was fielding seasoned troops and getting results. This was a real blunder on the part of the enemy, because they’d started to believe their own bullshit.

  They actually still held out the ideal of the people rising up in unison with them and overthrowing the government… didn’t happen… couldn’t happen. Those same people on whom the guerrillas were counting had had more than a gutful of the FMLN.

  We ended up destroying the FMLN Military Wing. It was never again to become as active as it had been in the past.

  As to the Political Wing, the first Presidential elections in which the FMLN was able to participate, the results said it all. Because of the peace accords, they carried only one percent of the vote… a single percentage point! So much for the glorious fucking revolution…

  And today, into the New Millennium, many years after the fighting has stopped, El Salvador is by far the most modern of the Central American countries and certainly the biggest friend we have in the entire region.

  Our Huey pilot approached La Unión with circumspection at dawn a few days after we’d been lifted out of a position in the hills north of San Miguel. He circled twice before landing and looked carefully in all directions as he did so. It wasn’t that he was nervous, he said: in fact, he would have welcomed the chance to give his gunners something to shoot at.

  Only afterwards did he confide that one small guerrilla unit – an elite bunch of fighters – had taken to firing at Air Force helicopters from the foothills each time they flew over. Nobody could get a fix on their position in order to retaliate. Even worse, he suggested, the FMLN had got their hands on some SAM-7s. It was not impossible that this same bunch of operatives had them too.

  That, in itself, was a good deal less disconcerting than it might have been 12 months earlier, because South Africa had become a clandestine partner in the war. There was already some cooperation between Pretoria and Military Headquarters in San Salvador and some of the lessons learnt fighting Russian-backed insurgents in Angola had been passe
d on. One of these was that if a pilot saw a SAM-7 coming, he had perhaps a second or two to take evasive action. It had been proven often enough that it was easier for a chopper to get out of the way of a ground-to-air missile than a fixed-wing aircraft. Another pointer was that if there was a real, or suspected, anti-aircraft threat, tree-top level flying was the preferable option. It is extremely difficult to get a bead on an aircraft if you only have it in view for seconds, never mind still knock it out of the sky, the South Africans explained.

  From the ground, as we drove through the town on the way to the naval base, we found that La Unión was very different from how it appeared from the air. It should have been a big place, with coffee factories and warehouses on the outskirts. The suburbs were modern, extensive and well laid out, though quite a few had been abandoned because of the war.

  With its distinctive red tiled roofs, friezes and Spanish architecture, La Unión before the war had been allowed space to grow. There was none of the congestion of San Miguel or some of the other conurbations in the region.

  On closer inspection, it was smaller than we’d expected. Also, it was run-down. The harbour, by contrast, was relatively new; because of the war it had been renovated and extended. Nicaragua lay across the bay and the port clearly had a certain strategic value. One also got the impression that La Union must have been an active commercial harbour before hostilities. On our visit there were only fishing boats and half-adozen naval craft tied up alongside. No small cargo boats or oil tankers, like we saw at La Libertas farther to the west.

  Some of the smaller fighting boats were US Navy Island Class patrol craft; high-speed aluminium boats with crews of 14. They’d all been delivered to El Salvador after the attack on La Unión, which underscores the assertion about war changing the nature of conflict in a particular sphere, sometimes irrevocably.

  Apart from soldiers on patrol, La Union was hardly a town at the business end of an increasingly acrimonious civil conflict. All the buildings in the central business district, many with plate-glass windows, were still intact. Also, we found that early in the day, life seemed slower than elsewhere in the country, though things were happening: shops and cafes were opening, a postman started his rounds and a group of kindergarten children were being taken to school. To many of its residents, if there was any fighting, it might have been taking place on another continent.

  Naval patrols became a vital adjunct to the war effort in El Salvador as they combated the smuggling of personnel and war materials to the guerrillas from Nicaragua. There were few questions asked: if an unknown vessel was suspicious or acting strangely, it was sunk. This policy eventually caused huge logistics problems for the FMLN. (Author’s collection)

  There were no formalities when we reached a gunboat attached to one of the El Salvadorian Navy ‘Reaction Force’ flotillas. The blue and white flag on the mast bore the words Dios, Union y Libertad across its broad, white horizontal stripe.

  Within minutes we were heading out towards the far side of the gulf. The shores facing us, said the youthful captain, Byron Roberto-Rivas Alfonso Pinto, were Nicaraguan. Having passed round his card, as protocol demanded, he suggested that we call him Captain Bob. With Brown and MacKenzie, we now had three Bobs onboard.

  The 110ft naval patrol boat was immaculate. The crew probably knew we were coming and had prepared accordingly. There were two .50-cal Browning machine-guns, mounted fore and aft, and the weapons were well greased. There were more automatic weapons mounted alongside the bridge. Aft, strapped down, was a 14ft Zodiac. It performed a double function: as a lifeboat and for use in shallow inshore patrols among the mangroves. The crew was dressed in camouflage, with nothing to distinguish sailors from soldiers; no formal whites anywhere. Best of all, the heads down below had been scrubbed.

  Life on board consisted almost solely of patrolling a fixed area out to sea. They would intercept and stop small boats and fishing smacks that crossed the bay, which, at its widest was about 30 miles across. These craft were sometimes searched for weapons and illegal entrants and if the crew had a bit of luck, the captain told us, they got themselves an insurgent or three.

  ‘We can’t search every boat or arrest every suspect. But we know that the other side are using these waters to bring across their people and their weapons. It’s a very active area’, he told us through an interpreter.

  ‘Sometimes, when we’re sure, we let one or two of the suspects pass to see where they lead us. But that’s a big operation and it can get complicated… it needs lots of men on the ground to follow through. And the enemy is not stupid.’

  We were offered breakfast, American style, with bacon and eggs and a gritty grey bean paste instead of hash browns. The coffee was percolated, local and good.

  Captain Bob told us of something that had taken place a month before. He’d stopped the same shallow-draught boat for the third time in about as many weeks. It was always in the same area, usually towards sunset. ‘We were even on nodding terms with the crew of two,’ he declared.

  This time she had her lines out and somehow, I sensed something wrong. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but I felt it… in my bones… these hombres were up to something. But they were too clever for me. I knew it…

  So, the third time I came on them, I did something I hadn’t done before. We had some soft drinks and I offered them some. So they came on board. We talked a little: about the weather, the fishing, the war, even about Nicaragua. And since it was getting late, the taller of the two men, a young fellow with sharp eyes and not much to say, offered me his hand. He had to go, he told me.

  They shook hands and the pair turned to go. Then Captain Bob realized that the hand he had grasped was not the callused paw of a fisherman. The palms were soft, the grip flabby. This was no tarry sailor.

  ‘I had him, I knew. But we had to be careful.’ We steamed on, but not too far away. Meanwhile we inspected several other boats, keeping our suspect in sight. I radioed to headquarters and asked for a helicopter and a couple of marine commandos with diving gear.’ An hour later most of the support team was ready and waiting at La Unión, but the helicopter had to come from San Miguel and that took a little longer.

  The fishing-boat didn’t move, but light was now fading and the commander feared that they would lose them since it gets dark quickly in the tropics.

  ‘The one advantage that we had was that the sea was calm and there was no wind.’ Not long afterwards the familiar roar of the Huey could be heard. It approached from the shore, directly towards them. ‘We told it to lower a winch, and in two minutes I was in the air. Meanwhile the officer of the watch kept the boat in his sights. We made straight for it.’

  Still in touch with the naval craft, a lookout said that the two men were hauling in their lines. In another minute they would have made off.

  ‘We had only seconds to drop a marker. My vessel was following as fast as her 26 knots allowed.’

  What happened next is in the record books in San Salvador. The helicopter dropped its marker alongside the boat and the two men, now covered by a twin-barrelled 7.62mm machine-gun, were ordered through a loudhailer to sit tight and await the navy while two frogmen went into the drink.

  They found a weapons cache wrapped in double plastic bags that had been attached to the fishing-boat. The two on board had slipped the cable the moment they spotted the inbound chopper. Too late: they hadn’t counted on navy divers. The sea was barely 15 feet deep.

  This particular pair had been smuggling weapons into El Salvador from Nicaragua for months. On a previous occasion, when things looked like going off kilter, they’d simply jettisoned their cargo and it sank to the bottom without trace. Never mind: they would go back to Nicaragua and get more. At that time the Sandinistas were getting all the weapons they needed from Cuba.

  The manner in which the hardware was being shipped is interesting. Attached to the harness that held the loads, there were two small flotation bags that supported them just below the surface. In a cu
mbersome manner the ‘fishermen’ were able to tow their loads ashore. If challenged, it was easy to turn over a bag and lose it.

  In those calm waters they had enough warning. Visibility was invariably excellent and when your engines weren’t running, you could hear a man talking a mile away.

  Every boat working the area between El Salvador and Nicaragua had to be checked. It was a bit like the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean with the Israeli Navy. (Author’s collection)

  We were never told what happened to those caught trying to infiltrate the country from Nicaragua, either as smugglers or combatants. Harry Claflin let slip at some stage while I was staying with him at the Ilopango air base that it was unlikely that they would have survived.

  ‘They make them talk’, he told me one evening, ‘and then they disappear… just like that…’ he declared

  Towards the end of the decade, the Americans became much more involved in interception work along the coast, especially off La Unión. US Marines were brought in to man island-based electronic observation sites in the Gulf of Fonseca.

  SEAL teams were also drafted. These crack navy specialists, the equivalent of Britain’s SBS, would probe Nicaraguan defences, which, at the time contravened both American and international law. The United States was not at war with that country and in any event, the US Constitution didn’t allow for such things. However, that didn’t seem to bother President Reagan. In those days the American defense establishment could do such things and get away with it. Most times, anyway…

  At one stage, Washington even sanctioned the mining of the Nicaraguan port of Corinto, which had become a major FMLN staging post for the struggle in the neighbouring country. The US Navy LST Sphinx was detached for this purpose and there was much damage caused.