Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  The most impassive of the drivers gathered around in Moatize that morning were the black Rhodesians. They’d heard the same story often enough, both prior to hostilities and now that conflict had enveloped much of the region.

  We got to know some of them in the days that followed and they were a resolute group. ‘Riding shotgun’ – which, they reckoned was preferable to saying they were being guarded by Portuguese colonial troops – was their way of putting bread on the table and though they weren’t happy with the risk, they didn’t complain. We were to discover that there were moments when they possibly knew the ropes a little better than their youthful Portuguese Army escorts. Some had lost colleagues on this road and each one was out to ensure that mistakes of the past wouldn’t be repeated. Their heavy vehicles, many with their company names painted on them – Swifts, Watson’s Transport, United Transport, Heinz and others – stood at the vanguard of the procession.

  The great bridge straddling the Zambezi at Tete, two days travel by road north of Lourenco Marques, today Maputo. From here on northwards, all movement was by convoy. (Author’s collection)

  A 10-ton Albion truck from United Transport’s Malawi office headed the civilian column. The driver said he was carrying Caterpillar spares and was headed for Zaire. He’d travelled the route for almost two years, he disclosed, and for reasons of his own he preferred to travel right up front.

  By 10:00 that morning, the first army truck that would provide our escort rumbled past. It was a hefty Berliet, heavily sandbagged around the driver’s cab. Because the hood had been removed, we could see more sandbags fitted around the wheel cavities. We only learnt later that Portuguese convoys rarely moved about with their hoods intact. Too many troops had been decapitated by these steel sheets, which were sometimes blown sideways by detonations.

  A short while afterwards, another squad of troops arrived, all in regulation camouflage uniforms. Each was armed with Heckler & Koch G-3s, standard issue in Lisbon’s African war zones, most times casually slung over their shoulders. There were also some MG-42 LMGs around. A few more troops had mortar tubes, a bazooka or two and, here and there, bundles of shells neatly slotted into canvas carrying bags that they humped over their shoulders like back-packs. Just about everybody had additional belts strapped onto their webbing with grenades and extra ammunition.

  The newcomers seemed lively and animated, though there were those among them who were clearly nervous; they stayed that way until they got into the swing of things. One or two looked as if they still had a couple of years to go to make 18, never mind the ripe old age of 20.

  The unit sergeant-in-charge – he was also to take his orders from Viera – was 22 and had already been in Africa for two years. Over a couple of drinks on the second night out he told us that in a stupid patriotic moment he’d voluntarily cut short his university studies to fight, but now couldn’t wait to get home.

  A short while later more army trucks roared past and pulled up nearby. An officer disembarked and, barking into a walkie-talkie, gave somebody at the other end a string of orders. We were ready to move, said Chagas.

  The column rolled forward, a sandbagged Berliet as the vanguard. One of the Unimog troop carriers moved into position towards the middle of the convoy, about five vehicles ahead of us. Its soldiers were clustered around a heavy machine-gun mounted on a fixed tripod on the back. An imposing width of steel plating swung about as the weapon rotated on its pivot. Moments later there was a clicking of bolts down the line as soldiers tested their weapons.

  With another Berliet bringing up the rear, we were relieved to be on the move, but it was a tedious process, covering perhaps 12 miles that first day. Almost from the start, there was evidence of conflict in the area to the north of Moatize.

  Barely five minutes from the railhead, our cherished tarred road ended abruptly, making for a smooth transition from a relatively level surface to rattling corrugations and potholes that might have swallowed a goat. Once on the dirt, huge swathes of dust enveloped just about everything – trucks, soldiers, civilian cars and their passengers, up our noses, into our ears and across the windscreen, which needed to be swiped every ten minutes or so.

  The ‘brown-out’ seemed to be suspended above ground for the duration and in that heat, thirst became our most constant companion.

  Minutes later we passed an abandoned, broken-down villa, its faded, off-white walls pock-marked by shell holes and splinters of many actions. It was a scene symptomatic of all of Portugal’s wars in Africa and is still the kind of scenario you’re likely to see these days on CNN the BBC in news reports about rural Afghanistan.

  The bush around us was a riot of tropical overgrowth that sometimes hung over the road for miles at a stretch. It was so thick that the guerrillas might easily have taken up their positions within touching distance of our vehicles and we probably would never have known.

  Minutes later, another building came into view, also partly blown apart. Chagas pointed at a window-sized gap that yawned across one of the front walls, probably caused by a mortar shell or an RPG-2. The building might have been used for training by the Portuguese Army, he suggested.

  Suddenly more such derelict buildings came into view and quite a few displayed evidence of hasty evacuation. There were broken beds and burnt roof timbers spread untidily about outside and, occasionally, a burnt-out pick-up or tractor abandoned around the back. This was no training ground, I retorted, and Chagas didn’t reply.

  Minutes later the truck immediately ahead of us, still dutifully following the convoy track, skirted a large round hole in the middle of the road. Strips of crumpled metal lay scattered along the verge. We spotted the buckled front suspension of a truck that lay discarded in the nearby bush. The rest of the vehicle had apparently been removed by an army recovery unit. Chagas offered no further comment: he had no need to for the crater in the middle of the road said it all.

  The further north we travelled there were more holes along the tracks, more of the detritus of war. Twice the convoy stopped and we sat and waited as the sun beat down from a brassy sky. Even a light breeze might have eased the discomfort, but for the majority, it was sauna time. Sweat rolled off our foreheads in translucent droplets.

  ‘They’re checking for mines’, said Chagas after talking to one of his colleagues who, contrary to orders, was making his way down the column on foot. And that was when he told us that he’d lost three members of his unit from mines in the past eight months, all of them while on patrols in open bush country. The tally included a close buddy with whom he’d gone through training.

  The convoy started to roll again, but our progress was even more laboured than before. Delays, we were aware, were to be expected, but this was ridiculous. In the final two-hour leg that first afternoon, we were never able to gather enough speed to shift into third gear.

  Finally, we slowed to a crawl and it got so bad that somebody on foot might easily have outpaced the convoy. We futilely tried to catch a glimpse of the countryside through the tall elephant grass on both sides of the road and there was little conversation.

  At one stage we passed an abandoned corrugated-iron tsetse fly control station – it, too, pitted with holes. ‘More training?’ I asked. All Chagas could do was smile.

  Small wonder then that tsetse bothered us. Each time one of these insects entered the cab, there was a furious session of flapping round. Anything that came to hand became an improvised fly-swatter and for good reason, as the tsetse’s bite is as painful as that of a horse fly.

  Chagas would view our antics with amusement. To him this was just another convoy and in any event, he said, there were more tsetse flies at his base in the interior than anybody had cared to count. For the rest of the time, Lieutenant Chagas would bury his nose in the English-language papers and periodicals we’d brought with us from the Cape.

  As we progressed, the rigmarole became stultifying. It was a constant round of stop and start again. We’d go a few hundred feet and the column would a
gain slow to a crawl. In the initial leg, we might have covered perhaps three miles in the first three hours. Then the pace slowed still further.

  It could have been worse, someone said, at least we were on the move. Once the sun reached its apex the heat became intense. There was no other way we could go, because we were still in the Zambezi Valley.

  Finally, a man in uniform guided the trucks into a clearing alongside the road. The heavier vehicles were pulled into an oblong laager, completely surrounded by bush, some so close to the jungle that there were branches pushed hard against their cabs. Buses and passenger cars were pointed to a position towards the centre, but we found a spot to park the Land Rover on the perimeter under some shade.

  Meanwhile, our escort troops spilled out in groups and disappeared into a low building where only three of the original walls still stood. It had probably been someone’s home in the long and distant past.

  The structure was rickety, its roof about to collapse. In normal circumstances nobody would have gone near the place. However, what was left of it offered a modicum of cover in an otherwise primeval terrain.

  The following day started early. Even before the Portuguese soldier nearest us had been able to dismantle his mortar, the Rhodesian drivers were running their engines. We’d been warned the night before that it would be another long haul.

  There had been activity elsewhere during the night. We’d heard a few blasts in the distance and then, several times, bursts of automatic fire. It was nothing definitive, or anything to which the lieutenant might venture an opinion. It happened all the time, he shrugged, the war…

  Barely five minutes out of our bivouac, the convoy stalled to a halt. Unlike previous hold-ups, this was a lengthy delay, culminating in a heavy blast up ahead. ‘Another land mine’, said Chagas. ‘They must have blown it’. For the first time while with us, the officer displayed a little enthusiasm. ‘You will see later when we hit a real minefield how they do it’, he said, his eyes burning with anticipation.

  We travelled into the morning for several more hours and all the while the possibility of the column encountering more landmines remained the principal preoccupation for everybody. Every few miles the column would stop while the soldiers scratched the dirt with their picas, or dug small holes in the road in the perennial search for bombs.

  Air assets in Lisbon’s three African colonies that were battling insurgency were minimal. Ground support roles in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea were sometimes provided by these World War II vintage T6 Harvards, which dropped either napalm or ‘dumb’ bombs on real or suspected ‘terrorist’ positions, usually with little real effect. (Author’s collection)

  Towards noon, another explosion followed, much bigger than before and Chagas said something about it probably being an anti-tank mine. Possibly a TM-46, he said, the Russian version of the wartime German Tellermine 42. Word came down the line that it had been detonated by the troops in the lead Berliet.

  So it went on, the stops and starts that centred not so much on the people who laid these bombs – though they were around, of course – but on the mines themselves. We’d come upon holes in the road, some huge and perhaps three feet deep. Others were barely larger than potholes. Or perhaps they were potholes, somebody would quip.

  Occasionally we’d spot scraps of steel and rubber scattered about the road; tell-tale evidence of some previous carnage. There was never talk about casualties, though obviously they happened.

  In one area, near a bridge that had been partly demolished by Frelimo guerrillas, the remains of a burnt-out truck lay on its side alongside the road, its cab ripped apart by what must have been an awesome blast. Alongside the dusty track – yards away – lay the wrappings of army field dressings, empty plastic plasma bottles and wadding. Some of it was tinged black with coagulated blood. There were flies everywhere.

  It was clear that the dressings were relatively fresh, which suggested that it might all have happened a day or two before, probably on the southbound convoy and certainly before the last rains, which would have washed away all this evidence.

  The next time we stopped, one of the troops told us what had happened. He’d been on that southbound convoy and had joined us on the way north again; it was his job to search for mines. He explained that a black Rhodesian driver working for a transport company out of Salisbury had been caught in the blast. His legs were badly mutilated and he had large gashes in the head and arms. Because he was losing blood, they had radioed to base for instructions. Fortunately, the air force had one of its gunships deployed in the area and they pulled him back to Tete. The driver lived, we heard later, but he went on to lose a leg.

  What was noteworthy, the soldier said, was that within a couple of hundred yards of the incident, several dozen more landmines were uncovered in an operation that involved many soldiers and took more than a day. The bombs were mostly anti-personnel types, but there were no more casualties. ‘Not that time’, he smiled. The truck had toppled over onto its side after two more TM-46s had been detonated in situ during that operation.

  Then for us, on this hot February morning, the inevitable happened. Quite suddenly, we were involved in an event that might have had serious consequences for one or more of the vehicles if a Portuguese Army scout, perched precariously on the roof of the lead French Berliet, hadn’t spotted something on the road ahead.

  There were human tracks that had caught his attention, we heard afterwards, as we were in an area where there hadn’t been anybody living for who knows how long.

  Having stopped the column and dismounted, the soldier moved slowly ahead, as close to the edge of the road as the bush would allow in case anti-personnel bombs or booby traps had been laid. That was when he spotted wires. Moments later, a volley of shots rang out from a gully on the far side of the convoy: it was automatic fire and it came in bursts.

  For three of us in the Land Rover, squeezed as low onto the floorboards as our bulk would allow, the conflict had suddenly become interesting. None of us had any idea where the shooting was coming from or who might have been the target. Seconds later the rattle of more shots rang out from another position towards the rear. This was what the Portuguese drivers had earlier referred to as Flagelacau, a whipping burst of gunfire and a quick getaway.

  As the firing continued, our military escort retaliated with enthusiasm. From both ends of the convoy they ripped off a stream of tracers in a broad arc across the bush. The heavy machine-gun on the Unimog followed, together with several dull mortar plops. Then, every few minutes, three or four more…

  Though we’d been ordered to stay put, it didn’t take us long to emerge from our cramped vehicle and we found ourselves close enough to watch a clutch of detonations a few hundred yards away in some heavily foliaged jungle country. By then our tracers had already ignited several fires in the dry brush and within minutes the entire area was enveloped in smoke.

  Viera, our youthful sergeant, meanwhile moved through the periphery shouting instructions. He ordered a squad of black soldiers to take up positions along the length of the column; they were to lie prone in the bush, he told them, and face the direction from which the first shots had been fired, Lieutenant Chagas explained.

  ‘Terroristas’, he muttered dismissively.

  Several of the troops took their chances and opted to cross stretches of gravel that hadn’t been cleared in search of better vantage points. Because of the problems ahead and the uncertainty of the strength of the guerrilla force, the next hour or two saw a lot of movement up and down the length of the column. There was so much movement along the road that some of the troops barely bothered with following in each others’ tracks. The mine threat had become secondary, though Chagas reckoned that some had almost certainly been laid in the area.

  One of the officers from the lead Berliet came down the line and indicated to our lieutenant that the insurgents had laid an as-yet undetermined minefield ahead, which was when we were ordered to get back in our vehicle and stay p
ut. The entire area first had to be cleared, he explained. Worse, it could take the rest of the morning.

  There were several more bursts of automatic fire from the insurgents. Then they fired several clutches of mortars, which landed way off target behind us. It had taken us almost half a day just to get this far.

  The army eventually cleared the minefield, though it took hours longer than anticipated. A total of 14 mines, two round metal TM-46s and a dozen anti-personal bombs, were detected and detonated. There were no casualties – on either side in all probability – because by now I’d set no great store in the ability of the troops guarding us. It was a job they had to do, but they displayed little relish.

  For our part, we gambled on the notoriously bad marksmanship of the enemy.

  While Lieutenant Chagas viewed most of what was going on around with what appeared to be an amused detachment, his approach was very different when we moved a few paces from the vehicle. It didn’t matter that that was our only option in heat that had become crippling. When we found the shade of a large fever tree preferable to the Land Rover, he marched briskly across to where we had taken up station.

  ‘You are taking chances,’ he said sternly. ‘unnecessary chances… this area hasn’t been cleared… and we don’t know where they are.’ We had no option but to return to the truck.

  Then he surprised us all by going off towards the head of the column, in a huff, we thought. He returned with a smile on his face, telling us that he’d asked permission for me to come forward so that I could watch the demolition process. I was the only news-gatherer in the group, so the request made sense, he reckoned. Moreover, I’d watch the goings-on from the gun platform of the lead Berliet, he stated. Apparently, he’d explained to the lead commander that I’d covered the Angolan War and that I wanted to ‘compare notes’. I grabbed my Nikons.