by Al Venter
With these thoughts in mind, an hour or two in the rain-sodden bush, perched as we were alongside a fast-flowing river, sometimes seemed to last half the night. There were two watch spells for each of the two groups: McGrady and I covered the first three hours of darkness, followed by the other two and then us again. The routine would be repeated until dawn and the process would be reversed the following night. After we’d discovered that the Greek had dozed off over his rifle, none of us got any real rest.
I asked the American what we needed to do to remedy a situation that could become critical. His reply was unequivocal: ‘shoot the bastard the next time it happens’, which was what he’d already told the man the first time he’d kicked him awake while he was supposed to be on watch.
The presence of goats didn’t help either as they added to our edginess. In the dark it was easy to mistake their deep, throaty grunts with a human cough, or possibly somebody clearing his throat. When that happens, you sit up, move your finger across the slide towards the trigger and try to peer through the fog of night to see what’s going on.
Also disconcerting were the screams of a baboon troop in the bush after dark. Were they fighting or was it a leopard on the hunt? With so many of these big cats about, one would have thought the primates would have preferred not to broadcast their presence…
It seemed like an eternity before they would move on.
There was also a mysterious wild creature that would wake us with a start every hour or so when it would jump into the water within yards of where we were stretched out, usually accompanied by a loud splash. It was probably a water monitor and the noise would startle those who weren’t already lying there with their eyes open. It would take a minute or two for the muscles to slacken again. Meanwhile, the mind would remain taut.
‘As tight as a guitar string’, was how McGrady succinctly phrased it.
By first light, we were up. By then, Gunter had usually already crammed his soggy sleeping bag into his pack and shouldered it. He’d hang about and wait for us to get ready. Almost every morning we were out, he’d complain that the weight of his pack had doubled, which was when one of us would remind him about the rain. McGrady would shrug and mutter something about us putting our lives at risk with this man…
Cursory patrolling of an intended bounty-hunting area was usually done from the back of a Land Rover, a system that had built-in disadvantages. The vehicle could be, and was, ambushed by the guerrillas. (Author’s collection)
Minutes later, on that third morning, we were on our way towards the improvised bridge we’d crossed the night before, a narrow tree trunk that hovered precariously above the current. One by one, with the others covering, we worked our way across. On the other side, McGrady took point with the tracker following. I followed up in the rear because I needed photographs.
Once on the far bank, the American pointed to a fresh set of boot prints in the dirt, hours old. Montgomery slowly lifted his head and, with the kind of gesture that comes with experience, sniffed the wind. ‘Nothing’, he said quietly. Then he turned to the Greek and quipped in his quaint, fractured English: ‘Dey long time gone…’
Since there wasn’t a whiff of those who’d come in the night, we had something more with which to occupy our thoughts as we trudged through a succession of broken forest country that stretched back all the way to the Zambezi. For some reason – clearly inexplicable but of immense consequence to us – our unknown ‘visitors’ had wavered in taking those final few steps across the water. Probably a gook reconnaissance team, McGrady ventured.
What had stopped them? We pondered the matter when we halted briefly for a break. There were no conclusions, though the incident sharpened everybody’s senses. By now we were moving even more cautiously than before, each one of us intent on putting more distance between them and us in the tall elephant grass that dominated large open areas adjacent to some of the clearings. We didn’t exactly expect to be ambushed – that was to have been our job – but there wasn’t a man among us whose safety hadn’t been flicked off in anticipation of what we believed to be inevitable.
After being on the road a few hours, the rest of the trail seemed clear. Several times it meandered towards clusters of tall rocks that you could see at a distance above the flat terrain. Even to this unseasoned eye, these landmarks were distinctive.
About noon that day, McGrady pointed towards a rocky outcrop ahead, much bigger than the rest. It was used as a collection point by groups of insurgents who entered from Zambia, he’d been told. He underscored its position on the map that he’d kept in a waterproof holder tucked into his webbing.
For the rest of that day’s patrol we kept well within the tree line. If there was any spotting to be done, we’d do it from the kind of cover that our Rhodesian Army friends embraced. Then, to be doubly sure, McGrady decided that we should occasionally double back on our tracks. We did that several times, but found nothing.
About an hour before sunset on that third day, we halted briefly for the customary snack. The march had been difficult and the heat had slowed our pace, but there was no stopping, not this deep into a totally unfamiliar terrain.
Dinner was simple: tea and kudu biltong,4 bought before we left civilization from the small fresh-produce store behind one of the big hotels in Bulawayo. It was enough to sustain a man for a ten-hour march.
‘It’s the only food I carry, light and full of protein and best of all, it never spoils in the sun’, said McGrady.
South Africa, and home, I felt, were suddenly rather distant, even though it had taken us only nine hours by road to reach the place which was to be our stomping ground for the next eight or ten days. Almost nothing goes to plan in wartime and the Rhodesian War was no different. It was the same with our patrol. By that third day, the hunt had lost its allure. In the words of the Greek, ‘it has become a totally fucking bore… I came here to kill and all we do is walk through this shitty bush country. We find nothing and then we walk some more.’
McGrady with one of his earlier bounty-hunting ‘successes’. He always liked to work with one of his trusted African assistants. (Author’s collection)
The rain poured down intermittently, often in buckets, and that didn’t help either. In fact, there were times when it never seemed to stop. We’d trudge a while, always moving silently along the bush trail, stopping occasionally to rest, and McGrady would compare compass bearings with the map. Then we’d take off again and a few hours later, the routine would be repeated. It was tedious, but that’s how these things happen in this kind of irregular conflict.
Several times we crossed human tracks that might be fresh if the rain stopped long enough, but of their owners, we saw nothing!
We’d brought enough food to keep us happy for about a week. Gunter had suggested prior to setting out that we might possibly shoot something for the pot, but the American vetoed him. ‘Fire off a shot in this bush and they’ll pick it up five miles away… maybe more… then they’ll end up tracking us’ was his comment. When the mood took him, McGrady could be acerbic and pretty much to the point. To which he added: ‘I’d imagine that by now, they already know we’re in the area. Perhaps not our exact location, so let’s just keep it that way.’ He didn’t hang around to debate the issue.
Our single biggest problem from the first day out was keeping Gunter and the Greek from continually chatting while on the march. McGrady’s demands were basic and the need for silence in that remote bush country, where sound can travel for miles, was number one. It would be that way throughout the march – no talking – especially towards nightfall when nobody was certain who or what was out there. He wasn’t asking much, but those two had great difficulty in complying: they’d always be nattering among themselves and it was usually a gripe.
On the third day, when the Greek decided at sundown to cut down some branches to make a fire, which was not only absurd, but under the circumstances risky, his clumsy efforts caused the American to lose his cool. It was the only ti
me I was to see him angry. Grabbing the cocky little Greek by the throat, he told him that if he continued with this kind of bullshit, he’d cut him loose and leave him to the deal with the enemy on his own. There was no argument and, to be fair, things did quiet down a lot afterwards.
From then on, McGrady, Montgomery our guide and I slept a good few hundred yards downwind from the other two. We’d prepare our own meals and stand our own watches. If there were going to be problems because those two couldn’t keep their mouths shut, said the American, they could handle it for themselves. He phrased it in typical McGrady fashion: ‘Then we slip away and pretend they never existed. I don’t think they’d be missed…’
By the fifth or sixth day we knew it was over. We were getting nowhere. Nor was there any prospect of a decent ambush, not once the locals had become aware that we were around. That and the fact that we’d spotted gook tracks in our area… there was no doubt that by then they’d seen ours.
The fact that Gunter and the Greek couldn’t bring themselves to slot into a fairly tough regimen, finally put an end to it. That, together with Gunter’s constant demands that he fill his water bottles while rain pounded down around us, was the final straw. We’d head for the pontoon and the farmhouse the next morning, McGrady told the other two before dark. He came back to our position with the news that they seemed quite happy with the change of plan and it pleased him.
Before noon the following day, within sight of the old farmhouse across the river, we fired off three shots. Little more than an hour later I was under the shower and the old man’s cook was preparing lunch. Gunter and the Greek were nursing their blisters and wondering aloud what was on the menu.
It was a year later that I would get the full story of our little escapade. Apparently we were lucky to have ‘got out of there without having been attacked’, as one Rhodesian officer phrased it when he collared me afterwards in Johannesburg. In his view, we’d been on a military operation that was not only stupid but was hare-brained. He believed we were saved only by the fact that the insurgent group in the area was equally dumbstruck, the gook commander simply didn’t know what to do about us.
The Rhodesian who passed on this news had spent some time at Wankie with the man who temporarily commanded the regional Joint Operations Centre, more commonly known as the JOC. He’d admitted that the army was aware of what we’d been trying to do: they’d actually intercepted a message from the insurgent leader to one of his squads that was active in the Tribal Trust Land after we’d gone in.
In brief, they mentioned to their superiors in Zambia the presence of ‘four members of the security forces, two of them bearded, together with a black scout’.
The gist of that radio report was that the guerrilla group initially thought we’d been sent in by the Rhodesian Army to lure them into an ambush. They believed that there were possibly other Rhodesian Security Forces in the area waiting to strike; feints and counter-feints that took place often enough in this conflict, for such is the essence of this kind of counter-insurgency in Africa. They were right about the ambush, which had been our original intention. Fortunately for us, they were wrong about everything else.
As I was told during that chance meeting a year later, on the sixth morning of our patrol – the same day that we decided to call it quits – the ZANLA squad that had sent the original message received an order from Lusaka to take us out. In fact, said the officer who confided these details, they were perhaps a half-a-mile behind us by the time we boarded the pontoon. They were on their way to get us, a squad of about 20, every one of them well-trained and armed with more weapons than we would have been able to shake a stick at.
That wasn’t the end of the story. The head of Rhodesian forces in that specific area – headquartered in Victoria Falls, not being aware that we’d crossed the river and were comparatively safe – went on to send a platoon of troops, all members of the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR), into the Lupani Tribal Trust area in a bid to search for us. There was also talk of using spotter planes to make contact, though I’m not sure how successful that might have been in the thick bush country of the north-west.
The RAR troops arrived in the area in two trucks, which were promptly ambushed on the way in. Twice! Only after an RLI Fire Force call-out was pressure finally lifted, but by then there had been casualties on both sides.
It was as a result of that little escapade that I was banned from entering Rhodesia ever again, though I was to get over that little hurdle a year later.
As Dave McGrady will tell you today, more than a quarter century after leaving Southern Africa, things were reasonably relaxed in Rhodesia in the early days of the war. For much of the duration of hostilities, nobody gave the guerrillas a cat’s chance of winning anything, never mind taking over the country.
Also, he was glad that he hadn’t joined the Rhodesian Army. Towards the end of the war, the desertion rate among Americans who had joined up was something like 50 per cent. One of his comments about the period was:
Initially, I knew that I could get a job guarding someone’s ranch or farm from attack. I did a few jobs, but nothing much, probably because most farmers were just not prepared to pay a few hundred bucks a month even though I was quite happy to split whatever bounty I made with them. Most were broke themselves… the war.
All I really wanted was an opportunity to help fight terrorism. I knew, once I’d made contact, possibly registered a few kills and so on, that the word would get out that farms in that area were no longer easy targets. I believed it might deter future attacks.
It was a naïve approach, but that’s been the way that McGrady has always rationalized. In any event, nobody took him up on his offer, which was why he drifted into the Department of Health.
The last quarter of 1977 saw McGrady volunteering to look after the vast open land of several ranchers nearer Bulawayo, a region that had seen a considerable escalation in terrorist activity. Some of these ranches had been abandoned, others temporarily vacated and quite few stayed unoccupied for many years after the war ended. For long stretches McGrady was the only white – with several hundred African labourers – in an area of roughly 200,000 acres.
A letter he wrote at that stage read:
For the past month I’ve been doing farm security work on a ranch 60 clicks north of B [Bulawayo]. Plenty of terrs. Same ‘ole problem though; no can find, and believe me, I’ve been out looking. Been laying night ambushes on known terr paths leading from the TTL [Tribal Trust Land] and also doing bush patrols during the day. So far no luck…
Insurgents there certainly were, only McGrady never found any – not then, anyway – probably because he’d been working on his own.
When he set up his one-man night ambushes, he had no one to help him share the load.
Another letter followed:
A few days ago our neighbour’s African boss boy’s pick-up truck was ambushed by three terrs. Armed with AKs, they fired on the truck, stopping it. They then dragged the black guy out, before setting it on fire to spite the rancher. The fuckers made off into the bush, though the good news is that they didn’t kill the driver. The night before they burned down this same guy’s hut and rifle butted his brothers to put the fear of God into them… he told me that as many as 30 terrs will be crossing the Shangani River soon to attack the ranches. So I’m expecting them at any time.
While McGrady went about his business on the ranches, the drama of war continued to unfold on an almost daily basis, some of it in the vicinity of the ranch. A subsequent letter reported:
Last week a ranch and an Internal Affairs ‘Keep’5 were attacked on separate nights. Also had another ambush in the Wankie Game Park on a South African family’s car. You probably read about that one in the papers.
Then two nights ago I heard a heavy explosion while sitting in the house… next day found out it was an Army vehicle that’d hit a TM-46 landmine; one soldier killed, two wounded pretty badly… these attacks took place just a short distance from where I
’m based at present.
It was that incident that prompted McGrady to provide protection for the ranchers in Matabeleland. It was soon afterwards, that I wrote to him and enquired whether Gunter, the Greek and I could join in on one of his patrols. The rancher with whom he’d been staying had been ambushed in a dry river bed not far from the house. There were eight or nine guerrillas who fired on the farmer and his son while they’d been driving in their Land Rover.
The old man was shot in the arm and back. His son was hit in the head, but luckily it was only a scalp wound. He ended up concussed. The attackers also fired an RPG but it missed.
While the Land Rover was still rolling forward the old man fell out. As he was lying in the sand a terrorist came up to within three or four yards of him and started firing away with his AK… full auto. Shows how well these fuckers shoot… the terr missed the old guy every time. Instead, he was splattered with sand thrown up by bullets landing all around him.
At that moment, according to McGrady, the farmer managed to unholster his .22 calibre pistol and shot his attacker in the stomach. ‘The gook buckled over and then took off with the rest of his gang…’ The next day, the rancher and his son returned with a British South Africa Police (BSAP) stick, followed a blood trail and found the terr. He was dead, having been finished off by his comrades. The rancher proudly showed McGrady the terr’s cap insignia that he’d claimed as a souvenir.
To McGrady, that incident was part of a war that was becoming increasingly brutal. It was his contention that hostilities had devolved into a no-holds-barred affair and that too much of it, as far as the Rhodesian Security Forces are concerned, was being fought ‘by the book’.
‘But not the enemy’, he wrote in one of his letters. ‘They were pretty damn ruthless… stopped at nothing to achieve their aims… savage brutality is only a small part of it.’ And that, he added, was probably why he was still in Rhodesia, still looking for what he liked to call gooks.