by Al Venter
By his own admission, much of what he had learned in the African bush came from the process of trial and error. He admitted to some serious blunders which, under different circumstances, might have cost him his life.
‘But I learnt and had to do a lot of it on my own because there’s usually only a modicum of input from others, mostly from some of the guys who have been doing similar kind of work.’ Most sobering, he acknowledged, was the fact that he was strictly a bounty hunter and could count on no military support from the Rhodesian authorities.
That means, whatever happens, I’m on my own. I can’t call in for any support. No air strikes if I run into the enemy… no RLI, no Fire Force… even if I’m completely surrounded. Nothing! Obviously once I’ve made contact and I’m able to put the word out, they’ll come running. But how do you do that without radio comms?
And considering all that, I don’t exactly think I’ve fallen down on the job. Some of the folks out here believe that I’ve been into this business a lot longer then I have and, judging by results, I reckon I’ve been pretty damn successful.
On that point McGrady refused to elaborate, except to say that in previous months he’d been active in several areas in Matabeleland that had been declared ‘hot’ by defence planners back in Salisbury.
In a sense, this American had become a thoroughly competent military man. He was a perfectionist who relied solely on both instinct and his natural skills to stay alive. Had he remained on in the United States and perhaps turned his talents to crime – something he admits crossed his mind on occasion – he would almost certainly have given local law enforcement agencies grief. McGrady was also determined not to add his name to the long list of mercenaries and other adventurers who had perished in Rhodesia.
His one lasting regret was that he’d never fought in Vietnam. He knew it would have provided training and experience to make things easier in Africa. ‘It’d have to be one of those Special Forces units’, he said. ‘I’m too much of a loner to put up with this grunt-bonding crap. Give me the essentials and leave me to my own devices.’
It was his eyes, he explained. Bad eyesight had prevented him from being drafted to South-East Asia. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam was winding down, ‘so the draft board was rejecting guys like me… but it hasn’t held me back from doing my thing here in Rhodesia’.
Rhodesia’s war, which had sporadic beginnings in the late 1960s, finally developed into a full-blown guerrilla struggle in December 1972 when insurgents attached to the Mozambique-based Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) attacked Altona Farm in the Centenary area north of Salisbury. The conflict that followed lasted seven years. Soon the entire north-east of the country was grappling with an escalating insurgency that resulted in the country being mobilized for war.
Militarily, the conflict in this Montana-sized African state spread from the north-east and then towards the south of the country. Finally, with Zimbabwe People’s Republican Army (ZIPRA) guerrillas coming in from the west, a new front was to open that used Zambia as a staging post.
However, for all the numbers of trained insurgents, financial and material aid from China and the Soviet Bloc, together with vaunted claims that were sometimes reminiscent of Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts to Britain in World War II, the terrorists were never able to capture or even properly infiltrate a single Rhodesian town.
Essentially, the war was largely contained by the country’s miniscule armed forces, but after years of fighting and huge demands made materially and time-wise upon the tiny white community, many of these people ended up voting with their feet. That was followed by the insurgents managing to gain footholds in some of the Tribal Trust Lands, which became no-go areas for the security forces. As a consequence, some bitter battles ensued.
In the overall combat situation, the insurgents were rarely a match for the professionals. In the final phase of the war (sandwiched between the election of the Muzorewa government in April 1979 until the ceasefire arranged by Britain in December that year), the few hundred men in the Rhodesian Light Infantry’s four commando units killed almost 1,700 enemy troops. Then it became what some observers liked to call a ‘numbers game’: there were just too many of the enemy.
In one of my last discussions with former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith at his home in Harare – prior to his move to Cape Town where, in 2007, this former Battle of Britain pilot died – he said it was the flow of whites leaving Rhodesia that got to him in the end.
‘Once I found I was losing the equivalent of a company of fighting men a month, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sustain the war indefinitely. I had to settle it, and that had to be done by talking with these people, something that London eventually facilitated.’
What motivated that development was the harsh reality that by 1979, the last year of real hostilities, there were about 2,000 whites leaving Rhodesia each month. With almost nobody moving the other way, the country had become seriously stretched with the inexorable loss of skilled and trained manpower. At the same time, Smith admitted, it was a pretty close-run thing.
The guerrillas took heavy losses in the final stages of the war. They had thousands of their comrades killed in combined-operations, crossborder strikes into Mozambique. The first cross-border raid in August 1976, for example, was headed by the Selous Scouts at Nyadzonia, a ZANLA camp, and ended up with 1,200 enemy killed. At the same time, enemy morale plummeted. Their leaders had told this very substantial insurgent army that Salisbury would soon capitulate, but it wasn’t happening.
Also, the surrounding states, at first eager to help in what was first termed in Dar es Salaam ‘The Liberation Struggle’ (which had already seen off Lisbon’s rag-tag armies in Angola, Portuguese Guinea and Mozambique), were becoming increasingly nervous of being dragged into an all-out war with the ‘White South’.
Zambia was already playing host to something like 25,000 fighters. Apart from Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA troops, these included forces from South Africa’s ANC as well Namibia’s SWAPO, and like those fighting in Rhodesia, they got their succour from Moscow and Beijing. What made President Kaunda touchy was that these foreign combatants actually outnumbered the Zambian Army by a ratio of something like three-to-one.
One of the sentiments that emerged in Lusaka only afterwards was that if things didn’t go the way it was expected with the war then being waged in Rhodesia, the presence of these insurgents could ultimately threaten the political stability of Zambia. It was an issue, we now know, that was even discussed with guerrillas leaders at a fairly high level by Moscow.
Dave McGrady had no illusions about the kind of work in which he’d be involved in Africa. Or that his limited experience of a sophisticated guerrilla struggle might impede this mission. In the brief time he’d spent in this guerrilla struggle, he’d developed an appreciation for the wilderness that a year before might have been as alien to him as the jungles of Brazil and which sometimes takes others decades to assimilate.
Three members of our four-man ‘stick’ that went into an area adjacent to one of the Tribal Trust Lands in Rhodesia’s north-west. After being dropped by Land Rover, we crossed the river and from there on, we marched through a huge, sparsely populated region looking for insurgents. (Author’s collection)
At first glance, the youthful American, then in his late twenties, appeared to slot perfectly into his new-found job. He had brought his own stock of firearms and boxed ammunition to Africa, and having done his homework – he was an avid reader – he’d arrived reasonably well prepared. The work was tough, but he was in superb physical shape. That, a solid sense of bush craft, and a level of stamina rarely found outside the ranks of the Green Berets made for an enviable package. Certainly, his physical ability and fairly recently acquired bush craft put the rest of us to shame.
From the start, we were aware that McGrady was certainly not prone to that common failing to which most Americans are susceptible: underestimating the enemy:
I know what I’m up aga
inst. I also know what they can do as well as what they’ve done. So, before I get involved in a scrap, I scratch everywhere for background research on the particular brand of gook active in the area in which I’m going to operate. And in the broader picture, I like to make sure I’m supporting the right cause… can’t do something you don’t believe in.
Then I get to try to understand their culture, which is essential if you’re going to avoid misunderstandings which are most-times unnecessary. And when I’m on ops in the bush, I kind of go into what I like to call my sixth, ultra-alert sense… keep’s me alive and well.
He had his own personal philosophy about motivation: why he was there. It went something like this:
Both the ZANLA and ZIPRA terrorist groups are pretty brutal when it comes to killing anybody who might be opposed to what they stand for. Here I emphasize the ‘might’ part of the equation because you can die very easily for what they think you might be thinking, not what you really are. It’s the same kind of totalitarianism that we’ve seen in Cambodia and parts of Lebanon: the ‘all or nothing syndrome’.
If you’re not for them, it is assumed you must be against them… it’s all black and white and not a single grey…
He’d long ago learnt that the insurgents, on average, killed a dozen or more blacks to every white. He was opposed to that kind of anarchy. He went on:
I’m not in Rhodesia to keep the power in the hands of the white minority. I just didn’t want a despot taking over and making life miserable for everyone.
Those bastards will take a village chief from his hut, cut off his ears, his lips and sometimes other parts and force his wife and other family members to eat those body parts. Then they’ll murder him and often deal with the rest of the family in the same way, simply because they’re family.
We’ve had some of the white people captured who have been similarly brutalized; women were raped, babies hung from trees and bayoneted. Not the kind of people that I’d ultimately like to see running any country…
The first few days out in the wilds had been difficult. The immediate difference between the American and us was that McGrady had his bush legs and it was all us city folk could do was to keep pace. But then he’d been doing this kind of thing for a while. He’d been trying for months to get himself a kill, or as he phrased it, ‘a terr, two preferably, both dead.’3
That kind of jargon was pretty specific to the bars around Salisbury. A dead gook could bring in $1,500 in Rhodesian dollars from the authorities, or at least that’s what the posters promulgated, only in less abrasive lingo. Moreover, this American wanted a piece of the action.
McGrady acknowledged that while it all sounded fine, it was a two way street. ‘They’ might get him first, he conceded, which was why he’d invited us along for the ride. And then, when things started going sour with the other two, he thought the better of it.
‘Bad mistake,’ he would comment, usually late in the day. ‘Could have done better on my own…’
He was annoyed that the Greek didn’t know how to move silently through the bush. Worse, he couldn’t keep his trap shut, especially towards sunset when the bush went quiet. Or that Gunter – whom he called the German – demanded to fill his water bottles each time we crossed a stream.
Gunter wasn’t actually a German as his name suggested. He’d been born in South Africa and for a fitness freak who was supposed to have spent time with the Recces, he didn’t strike us as being among the sharpest of Special Forces honchos. On the second night out, about half way through his watch, McGrady spotted him standing tall in the moonlight doing windmill stretching exercises to limber up. Eyes rolling, the American wondered out loud if the man had ever been anywhere near one of South Africa’s crack reconnaissance regiments…
Also, his constant need for water worried us. The man perspired like a hog. We’d walk a mile and his entire uniform would be soaked: clearly, that wasn’t normal. Whereas the rest of us could manage on between three and five water bottles a day, he needed 20. Only later did we hear that it was a medical problem that had precluded him from long-range ops with the army. A couple of years after our little jaunt in the bush, we heard that Gunter had died of a heart attack, which was unusual because he was otherwise fit and strong.
Those first few days were tough. Though it took time, we adapted quickly and were able to keep pace with McGrady from the second day. Like the American, we soon became accustomed to this strange and sometimes curiously muted world, where conflict had intruded like no other modern-day influence. To those involved, McGrady included, it was almost a game: men on the hunt, intent on destroying each other. In another sense, the chequerboard had enveloped us all: an uncompromising game, as someone called it, ‘Them or Us’.
Some, like McGrady, did it for a cause. Others were into it for the money. These new-style Africa-bound bounty hunters could make a good deal of cash. Moreover, it was all tax-free.
Our first-night ambush position near the Gwaai River wasn’t ideal. Rushing water from the adjacent stream tended to conceal any noise we made, but then, as McGrady pointed out, it would do so for the enemy as well if they crept up on us.
While the position alongside the river wasn’t too exposed, there were fresh tracks in the vicinity and they worried him. Earlier, we’d crossed an even bigger waterway, the Shangani River, swollen now by six weeks of heavy rain to a torrent that defied crossing in anything but the improvised pontoon we’d used to get to the other side. It was a bulky and unwieldy device made of 55-gallon drums which barely floated properly and which we had to propel across with a long pole.
A local Rhodesian rancher took us across the river and his four African employees had to push hard against the current.
‘When you get back, fire three evenly spaced shots and we’ll come and fetch you’, the rancher told us. ‘It’ll take me about 45 minutes to round up the crew so don’t be in too much of hurry’, were his parting words to us.
The rancher said nothing about what we should do if we were on the run, possibly with a squad of rebels at our heels. Because of crocs, swimming wasn’t an option, or shouldn’t have been, although I hadn’t yet totally rejected the idea. No question they were around, because the rancher had almost lost one of his dogs a few days before we got there when it jumped into the water and swam across to be with its master.
In the days that followed, we saw a lot of tracks. Some reflected the linear chevron design that distinguished ZIPRA from their Mozambique-orientated ZANLA counterparts who owed their allegiance to Robert Mugabe.
Occasionally, McGrady would lay his assault rifle on the ground as an improvised measuring stick to pick up the spoor after it had trailed off into different directions. It was another aspect of the game: nobody walked in a straight line any longer than they had to in this kind of counter-insurgency warfare.
We also noticed a few figure-of-eights left in the deep mud by recent visitors wearing Czech boots. They worried McGrady because the Czech-trained insurgents had already garnered a reputation for stealth and ruthlessness. The American estimated that because of the rains, none of the tracks were more than a day old. Our black tracker, who boasted the illustrious name of Montgomery, concurred.
Obviously, while we saw nobody in that vast Rhodesian bush, we weren’t alone. On the face of it, the entire region looked abandoned, or possibly just sparsely inhabited because of the war. However, there were people about and, as McGrady suggested when the Greek thought otherwise, that had to be expected on the fringe of Rhodesia’s Lupani Tribal Trust Land. Whoever and wherever they were, he quietly declared, he hoped we’d find them before they spotted us. I liked that about the man: few things fazed him, and in the bush he took nothing for granted.
As the American ruminated after our little jaunt was over, just about wherever you go on the continent of Africa, ‘there’ll always be a face somewhere, peeping out of the bush at you…’
The second night out, we’d taken up a position further towards the north. The sun
had barely set before the drums started. Obviously emanating from one of the villages we’d circumvented, they were closer than we’d initially suspected. That accentuated our problem.
Gunter wanted to know if this was a warning to other villages that we were in the area. ‘We’ll know the answer to that one if they attack’, McGrady retorted.
Which meant that none of us slept easily that night.
There was another issue. We were all aware that the war had entered a new and more aggressive phase than before. Even cursory evidence of an army presence in an area might have set the infiltrators on the run in the past. As hostilities progressed, things changed. By the time we arrived in this remote region north of the main highway between Bulawayo and the Zambian border post at Victoria Falls, those doing the hunting, we’d heard, were increasingly becoming the hunted.
Barely a week earlier, McGrady had lost one of his Rhodesian buddies in just such a counter-attack. It had come as a surprise, if only because nobody believed that such a small guerrilla unit could be quite so assertive: there were only about six or eight of them. The man’s unit had been following tracks, but the enemy they were after doubled back. They attacked at sunset just as the four-man ‘stick’ settled down for a night ambush.
The event was instructive and McGrady made the rest of us take note: we were no longer dealing with a bunch of amateurs, he averred.
‘They’re good, these guys… bush savvy… this is their land and they’re familiar with just about all of it. They get the locals to be their eyes and ears, even if it needs a little coercion from the business end of a barrel. If that happens, we’re going to have no option but to reckon with them.’ For once there were no questions from either Gunter or the Greek.