Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  All these forces coordinated their activities under the auspices of Harry Claflin’s MilGroup, run from a discreet San Salvador headquarters by one of those shadowy figures of the Cold War who, years later, is still regarded with respect and fondness by those who worked with him. John Waghelstein, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, even got on well with us scribes.

  ‘Teflon Warrior’, American author Jim Morris called him. One of his attributes was that he liked to speak like a real person and not in the anodyne sound bites of the staff college. Last heard, Waghelstein – or ‘Waggie’ as his friends and colleagues called him - was lecturing at the Naval War College at Newport, Virginia.

  By the time we arrived in El Salvador, in the mid 1980s, the country was in a state of upheaval. It was going through a period of transition from possibly the worst army in Latin America to one of the best. Jim Morris’ old pal Waghelstein was to play a pivotal role in behind-thescenes command and control.

  Other Americans who saw service there remember the epoch as a period of confusion. Still more regarded the dedication of some Americans involved as foolhardy. There were crazy missions into rebel territory that shouldn’t have worked but did. Had they been launched anywhere else in the world, they might have been regarded as suicidal. Some of these operations were well behind enemy lines, usually linked to possibly killing one of the combat commanders or perhaps destroying war materials recently arrived from either Cuba or the Soviet Union.

  Even the medals these brave young men were awarded were the peacetime equivalents of the Bronze Star or the Meritorious Service Medal. It was an insult. Every one of these individuals was a dedicated volunteer to a cause.

  Conditions weren’t helped by the fact that it was all surreptitious. If any of these irregulars were taken captive by the enemy, they were peremptorily warned, neither the Pentagon nor US government would know anything about them, never mind their clandestine roles. As it was, operations in most Third World countries in which American nationals were involved or possibly implicated were disavowed by Washington. There was simply no other way with a Congress that was hostile to any form of American military involvement abroad.

  Certainly, it was a peculiar era. Colonel Oliver North had direct access to the Oval Office and, looking back, it couldn’t last. Nor could Ollie.

  In Central America, Ilopango Air Force Base on the outskirts of San Salvador enjoyed the kind of mystique that had previously enveloped Da Nang and, possibly, Ondangua in Namibia’s northernmost region of Ovamboland, adjacent to Angola. All had been operational air force bases and, in their day, had enjoyed a certain notoriety, in part because nobody knew for sure what aircraft or other assets such as advanced munitions were at hand.

  The same was true of Ilopango, where some strange events took place: midnight flights, squadrons of gunships lifting off or landing around the clock, helicopter airlifts involving large numbers of troops – who could usually be clearly seen sitting at the open doors of Huey ‘Mikes’ – together with an occasional ambulance, sirens wailing, that would mysteriously arrive and depart. We knew that attack C-130 gunships with Gatlings and heavy guns provided ground forces with powerful top cover after dark, but these aircraft were very rarely spotted on the ground in El Salvador.

  Under normal wartime conditions, we shouldn’t have been allowed near the place. However, our party was ‘protected’. Our patron was Señor Bob Brown and he could go anywhere! So, in effect, could we.

  Other Americans also frequented the place; grey, nameless entities with grey nondescript faces, who did not communicate with anybody.

  Part of the problem in El Salvador as hostilities dragged on, was that both sides became steadily more desperate to make some kind of mark. At the same time, Washington was openly reviled by the rebels. Any Americans in El Salvador at the time – whatever their politics – were linked to the ruling junta, which wasn’t difficult to comprehend since there were so many Gringos in the towns and bases of the interior and, most of all, in the capital itself.

  Few were tourists or journalists. A number were closely shorn members of the Outer-Beltway Establishment. The majority were attached to military missions or acted as diplomatic ‘observers’ and almost all enjoyed dubious cover. Here and there were the usual pairs of CIA ‘twins’.

  I am not sure whether it was the official policy at Langley or not, but each time I ran into CIA staffers in remote places like the CongoBrazzaville, Tanzania, Islamabad or the Namibian border with Angola, they always seemed to wander about in pairs, in itself a giveaway. The same was true when I handled a contract for Langley in Afghanistan in 1985: I never ever met either of my handlers singly while the job was in progress.

  The reality about the tendency of duplication is that while a couple of interlopers might find each other’s company comforting in a hostile area, it also presents the enemy with a double target.

  We had a remarkably free rein at the Ilopango Air Force Base considering that it was the nerve centre of the war. Decisions were made by the Chiefs of Staff at military headquarters in San Salvador, the country’s capital, but it was at Ilopango that these orders were put into effect. Nothing happened without close air support, which included TacAir squadrons of A-37 Dragonflys.

  It was strange indeed that Alwyn Kumst and I were allowed to wander about the base with our cameras and take whatever footage we pleased, which would be difficult in any other conflict these days. Even in Somalia during that early 1990s ‘rescue mission’, I was stopped from taking photos by an Italian Air Force unit at Mogadishu Airport and, later, by some Turkish soldiers on board armoured personnel carriers.

  In El Salvador, by contrast, the authorities didn’t even ask to see what Alwyn had shot. Since they had only Brown’s word for it, everything we filmed could just as easily have been handed over to the guerrillas and nobody would have been any the wiser. However, Bob had known me for a long time.

  To one side of Ilopango there were several helicopter squadrons, mostly Huey ‘Mike’ assault choppers, several armed with 7.62mm twinbarrelled guns: the Escuadrón de Helicopteros. In our time they flew raw; no Kevlar floor matting to protect their crews or anything vital round the engines or hydraulics. Later, specially designed and mounted engine armour was added; also AN/ALQ 144 infra-red jammers to deflect SAM missiles.

  We’d head out in single-aircraft sorties, which didn’t excite me. In the Angolan War all sorties into the distant beyond were handled by two-ship operations, sometimes more. My first question was who would get us out if we went down? The second was, if we went out on our own, without backup, who would know where we’d gone down…

  When the El Salvadorian Air Force began to lose more of its machines to ground fire, they adopted the two-ship practice as well, in part, because as the South Africans had explained, it was the more secure option.

  As in other wars in less-developed countries, it was air power that finally tilted the balance towards the government, for no other reason than that the FMLN had nothing to counter it. As we were all aware, no guerrilla force can indefinitely withstand continual pounding by combat helicopters or even what was thrown at them from fast-aging AC-47s with their clusters of heavy weapons, usually AN-M3 .50-cal Browning machine-guns mounted adjacent to the cargo door.

  These antiquated ‘Puff the Magic Dragons’ would arrive within the hour if a unit in the interior considered itself under threat, although they usually worked at night, circling in ‘pylon turns’ from above 10,000 feet, or just beyond SAM-7 range. They would sometimes be supplemented by C-130s, flown in from what we suspected were other locations in the region, usually Honduras.

  Any Vietnam vet who has spent time at the Sharp End will tell you that the average C-130 could put down enough saturation fire to wipe out half a battalion at a time.

  It took a while, but we eventually familiarized ourselves with the various systems, like the pattern of fire laid down by a DC-3 being evenly spaced with one bullet or flechette every eight inches or so. If the guerrilla le
aders weren’t unnerved, their men in the field must have been. Those in charge in San Salvador told us so, and ultimately they were proved right.

  Also based at Ilopango were a couple of squadrons of A-37 lightsupport jet fighters. Designed as trainers, they provided solid ground support, often swooping in low and dropping ordnance where needed. I was made aware that they used napalm, but the authorities denied it; it was uncivilized, they suggested. The insurgents in the mountains who were at the receiving end would have agreed.

  Moving about with the ‘Mikes’ had its moments, especially in the eastern mountains. There was one particularly well-defended hilltop position near the Honduran frontier that the government liked to attack. However, the rebels were well entrenched. It must have taken a lot of effort but they’d built a defensive system that included caves and trenches and were able to beat off several onslaughts.

  Gunner on board one of the El Salvadorian helicopter squadron’s Hueys searched for targets of opportunity while we were heading towards the east of the country. (Author’s collection)

  After a Huey had been lost to ground fire there, some of Brown’s troupe suggested that we go out on one of the operations then being planned. It would be an in-depth strike to unseat the enemy. ‘Get some kills too’, reckoned one of his number.

  Brown would have none of it. ‘We’re not here to try to get ourselves killed’, he said when the issue was raised for the third time. An old soldier – Bob Brown was a reserve half-colonel by the time he retired – he could pull the guys up sharp when he needed to do so.

  For me, flying in helicopters in El Salvador was always interesting. I’d done it over much of Africa and written a book on the subject, The Chopper Boys. At one stage I had thousands of helio combat shots on file.1

  In El Salvador, I was soon to discover, helicopter warfare was quite different from elsewhere. The same machines were employed but the terrain was dissimilar: much of it was intermittently jungle-covered mountain. Also, we were up against a more resilient adversary.

  In the earlier period, the Hueys would fly at an altitude that the Americans liked to call ‘avoidance radius’; a planning figure used to determine the distance that an aircraft should keep from a particular air defence weapon or system to avoid effective fire. It sounded complicated. Yet, looking back, it seemed that we must have presented fairly easy targets. At 4,000 feet, we were certainly well within range of any of the SAM-7s that we knew the other side had acquired from Moscow.

  We were also well within range of any heavy enemy machine-guns, such as the 12.7mm DShKA or the 14.5mm KPV, both of which the FMLN had in abundance. While the equipment was hauled in on foot, invariably on the backs of men and occasionally mules, the rebels never appeared to be short of ammunition. They even brought in some multibarrelled ZSUs of the kind that had awed me in Beirut and elsewhere in the Middle East often enough in the past.

  Still, while the guerrilla gunners didn’t appear to be all that well trained, they chipped away steadily at the resources of the Fuerza Aérea. The losses were never made public and one only heard about particular incidents on the grapevine, usually after a Huey or some other helicopter had been lost. Waghelstein’s MilGroup knew exactly what had gone out. They also kept tabs on what came back to base, but they weren’t telling us scribes.

  One of the advantages of being airlifted in these choppers with their side-doors open was that, because of the noise, we never really knew if we’d become a target. We only really became aware that something was happening when tracers were spotted, quite often heading in our direction.

  One of the pilots once said that if they really counted the number of times they’d been fired at from the ground, the majority of air crews would probably have looked elsewhere for work. Another commented that it was all part of the fun. He actually meant it, because he and some of his buddies had come to relish the tension that had become part of the everyday drill.

  None of it was easy, though. By the time we’d arrived in 1986, it was clear that most El Salvadorian air crews were under strain. That was when Washington stepped in and brought in the ‘Pigs’: American aircrews working in rotation from Honduras in 45-day tours of duty. The name came from their referring to themselves as ‘Danger Pigs’. They called the Hueys ‘Pigs’ too, because by then those choppers were out of date. Obviously, they would have preferred a few of the same Blackhawks that their colleagues sported in Honduras, where a lessintensive guerrilla war was underway.

  The Americans came into El Salvador as B Company, 4th Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment in July 1987, but their home base, for the duration, was Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras. It was a clever piece of diplomatic sleight of hand to keep the US Congress off their back, even though officially these people didn’t fly combat missions. As Harry Claflin reckoned, their main role was to ferry about MilGroup personnel.

  Door gunners were drawn from the 193rd Infantry Brigade and they did tours of six months. While in San Salvador, this very committed group of individuals lived in a ‘safe house’ which, some say, was the third best-defended structure in the capital. The crew were discreetly taken to work at Ilopango and back home again in a van with heavily armour-plated tinted windows.

  All these Americans followed complicated procedures that soon became part of the daily routine. Targets were jointly assessed by MilGroup and the Chiefs of Staff. The crew would then assemble on the night before an assignment to discuss routes, intelligence reports and other relevant information. Each team used a complex assessment matrix to project the level of danger likely to be experienced, whatever that might be.

  It was superior military training, organized and implemented by American advisors, that swung the war in favour of the government in the end. It took a few years, but El Salvador eventually emerged with one of the best military establishments in the region. Here, a patrol moves warily through one of the towns in the eastern part of the country. (Author’s collection)

  Some South African pilots who had been at Ilopango said it was like having a photograph of somebody’s lungs who had died of cancer in front of you while you were enjoying a cigarette. ‘You knew there was danger; there was always danger’, he told me, ‘but you learnt to live with it’, he added nonchalantly.

  A number of aircraft were shot down over enemy lines in this war; both helicopters and fixed-winged machines. If a crew survived the crash, they were not treated kindly. In one attack, long after we’d departed, ground fire brought down a Huey ‘Mike’ outside the village of La Estancia about 12 miles north of San Miguel, the same area where we visited derelict coffee plantations while on a ground patrol. The enemy did to the air crews what government troops did to the guerrillas: they were almost always executed after having been made to talk.

  The senior pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Dan Scott, was taking Lieutenant Colonel David Pickett, Officer Commanding (OC) of the 4th Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment back to his headquarters in Honduras. He’d been on a staff visit to El Salvador and, as a shortcut, had flown from San Miguel towards San Francisco Gotera, and then tacked towards the north-east.

  That way, he had reckoned, they’d reduce flying time and slip inside the established ‘Green Three’ route into Honduras that led directly to Soto Cano.

  The twin M60s with which the Hueys were customarily armed, were strapped to the floor of the machine because officially, American air crews could not fly with guns mounted. Thus, for the duration of that trip they were inoperable. Again, it seems, the Yanks were the only guys in the street playing by the rules. The fact that the helicopter traversed a hotly contested region of conflict didn’t appear to matter and, in any event, nobody told the guerrillas that the helicopter wasn’t armed. They shot it down anyway.

  As the war dragged on, the FMLN endured some formidable casualties. In the first six months of 1985, the El Salvadorian Armed Forces were responsible for about 3,200 insurgent losses (out of about eight or nine thousand). That included more than 1,500 of the enemy who’d surrendere
d. In the same time period, government forces lost 810 men killed, wounded or missing.

  When the war began the El Salvadorian Air Force barely existed, even on paper. By 1983 it had 20 operational helicopters; less than two years later there were 60. Obviously, with that kind of potential, pilots had to come from elsewhere, which was when quite a few foreign aviators entered the picture, including a number from South Africa, all of them true-blue mercenaries.

  This kind of escalation must have put enormous pressure on the guerrilla command. The attrition rate to their forces was clearly unacceptable. Like it or not, there came a time when the FMLN had to answer to the families of the dead. This was a people’s war.

  It was consequently no surprise that Nidia Diaz, a seasoned guerrilla commander with years in the field who was captured by an Air Force helicopter hunter squadron (it combined air operations with special ground forces missions), was found with a document showing that the rebel command had already abandoned all hope of an outright military victory. The gist of it was that a negotiated peace was the only way and some cadres were already beginning to say so publicly. Still, it took almost seven more years of fighting before that happened…

  The ‘Permanent Offensive’ by the government compelled the rebels to reduce their forces from battalion-sized units to sections of anything from five to perhaps a dozen men. This transition became more marked when their objectives started to become more economic than military. What followed was an intense round of sabotage: bridges and power lines were knocked down; assassinations increased; there were ambushes in the field and agitation among students and labour movements.

  As we flew between Ilopango and San Salvador we could observe some of the consequences. In one area, close to the capital, there were long lines of power pylons, each knocked over by an explosive charge laid at each concrete base. Also, we flew over numerous bridges that had been blown up. At one stage we were able to land where a huge structure straddling the Trans American Highway had been destroyed. It had once been a bridge, but it had been so badly blasted that little of its original form remained intact. Because of mines, we weren’t allowed to move about.