Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  This is no one-off fad: in 2009 Armor Express was awarded a fiveyear contract by the Pentagon to supply the United States Marines with combat jackets for use in hot spots like Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. That is in addition to concealable body armour contracts from a host of law enforcement agencies throughout North America.

  I put the idea to Richard, at very short notice, of the two of us of travelling to Croatia to do a survey of what landmine clearing entailed and he met up with me in London.

  Being the more enterprising member of this two-man expedition, he flew in from Detroit with 800 pounds of excess baggage, almost all of it large sheets of Kevlar. These, he explained, would be used to fashion a ‘robe’ which, though not fully protective against a limited landmine blast, might increase the odds of the victim surviving more or less intact.

  With bags, baggage and enough Kevlar to make hundreds of ‘vests’, we were finally ensconced in two of the finest suites in one of London’s best hotels. Meanwhile, I prepared travel plans for the next leg.

  Obviously, with Croatia having just emerged from years of conflict, it wouldn’t have been wise to fly into Zagreb on a scheduled flight. All that Kevlar in our baggage – six or seven bales of it – would almost certainly have triggered questions. We could only imagine what kind of reaction our luggage might have generated among local customs officials: ‘Kevlar? Landmines? Clearing bombs…?’

  This sort of thing was still very much restricted where we were heading, the domain of the sanctioned few whose job it was to deal with those problems. Ostensibly, because we didn’t have official permission for the task ahead, we intended to declare ourselves as tourists. Kevlar or not, we’d come to see the sights…

  Finally we managed to work out something feasible. We’d go all the way across Europe by train, first by EuroStar to Brussels where we’d link up with the overnight express to Vienna. From there we’d take one of the smaller lines, across the mountains, through Slovenia and into Croatia. Our friends would be waiting for us at Zagreb.

  It was one of the great journeys of my life, which says something because I’ve travelled a lot. We never skimped on porters and from London’s Victoria Station we were safely ensconced in a first-class compartment only minutes after a couple of black cabs had dropped us off.

  It was the same in Brussels. The only difference then was that we had our own personal railway carriage for the duration, complete with mahogany-panelled deluxe suites and Fritz, a uniformed butler-type factotum, to attend to all our needs. He stowed the Kevlar, made up our beds, served drinks before dinner and then prepared a five-star meal which, when we eventually arrived at Vienna the following day, earned him a five-star gratuity.

  One of the memorable occasions was throwing open the shades of my suite the following morning on the final leg east of Salzburg. We were high in the mountains and, it being summer, everything was lush and green. I was still in bed, drinking coffee that Fritz had served from a silver tray when I was suddenly greeted by a herd of deer pulling away from the train while racing up a fairly steep incline. What a magnificent sight: both unexpected and inspiring.

  The tiny rail link across the mountains from Vienna to Slovenia’s Ljubljana was even more spectacular. It’s a beautiful part of the world, barely accessed by tourists even in high season. In places the incline was so steep that we might have stepped off the train and walked alongside our coach.

  Many of the towns and villages were totally destroyed, like this one near Gospic. The trouble was that some of the ruins had been booby-trapped, or mines had been laid in the vicinity. (Author’s collection)

  The next stop was Zagreb and, as promised, the guys from the South African mine-clearing company Mechem were waiting for us at the station.

  We started early the next day with a briefing on landmines and it was instructive.

  There is simply no magic bullet for clearing these things, we were told. In order to do the job effectively, those involved needed to draw from a ‘toolbox’ of three fundamental disciplines. These were human and mechanical de-miners, as well as dogs that had been trained to find the bombs.

  The instructor went on: ‘None of these assets on their own can do the job properly. You need one to check the efficacy of the other.’ Nor are these disciplines either free or cheap. ‘It is expensive to run and maintain a de-mining operation. So too with the specialists who are doing the job: they are paid good money to do a good, if dangerous job.

  ‘So is insurance to cover them in case of accident. Similarly, you constantly need to train more people because nobody stays long in this kind of business. That too, costs money’, he stated.

  There were then a number of countries clearing mines in the Balkans, all of them involved in seven-figure dollar contracts linked to foreign aid. In Croatia, the Russians were followed by Italy, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, the United States (Ronco) and Mechem of South Africa. That mix varied with time, but it set the scene. There were also a dozen or so Croatian firms, though their numbers increased with time and gradually took over the bulk of the work, not because they were eager to experience risk, but because of the kind of cash involved. By Croatian standards, these were big bucks. One of the firms involved was Mungos, one of the largest Balkan companies specializing in this sort of work.

  Mechem, to whom we were attached – following contracts in Angola and Mozambique – operated with a project leader plus seven others: two team leaders, two dog handlers, a driver/mechanic and a couple of demolition specialists. A former member of the Koevoet counterinsurgency group active in the Border War ran the show. He explained that all his men had good Special Forces military experience and, not to make too fine a point of it, all were trained medics in trauma medicine. ‘There have been moments when these attributes have come in pretty handy’, he reckoned.

  The men worked seven days a week until the contract was complete, in this case, a 60-day signing. To save money, everybody lived rough, usually starting at six and working through to seven or eight at night. They had a meal in the morning before they started and the next time the crew saw food was when they’d finished for the day. Time lost to rain was made up afterwards.

  Operating under contract with this foreign mine-clearing team were 40 Croat de-miners headed by four team leaders. Additional crew (according to Croatian law) included two each of doctors, medics, drivers, dog handlers and ambulances plus an interpreter, all of whom had to be paid for by the contract company. Other companies were similarly bound by red tape, which most foreign contractors reckoned was a legacy of the old political system. It didn’t take any of us long to see that the majority of ancillary personnel were superfluous and, therefore, a total waste of resources.

  Foreign mine-clearing specialists with whom we spoke said that while the quality of Croatian mine-clearing was good, their clearance rate was mediocre. Their lethargic approach to the issue reflected a typical communist attitude to hard work, he suggested. Almost all the expatriates maintained that if they’d been able to bring their own people into the country to do the work, they’d have been able to cut operating crews by half. Others believed that were that to happen, the job would have been done in half the time.

  There were several categories of mine-clearing in the Balkans. The first was humanitarian. Because almost everybody was broke, there was precious little money available for mine-clearing areas immediately adjacent to residential areas, often with consequential disastrous results, especially for the younger generation. Most effort was invested in commercial projects, with economic goals such as the one around Gospic, about 100 miles south of Zagreb. This involved the clearing of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines around the only rail link running from the capital to the southern coastal cities of Split and Dubrovnik.

  Contractually, the problem at that stage was that landmine clearance only extended to 15 yards or so on either side of the line. It meant that minefields that fringed the line – some of them several acres in extent – remained hazardous because t
here was no money to penetrate further. By the time we got there, the World Bank had given Zagreb a $7m loan for clearing the bombs, but because the money eventually had to be repaid, the Croats weren’t falling over themselves to get the job done.

  Thus, while mine-clearing teams had a good handle on what was needed, the civilians who lived and worked in these areas didn’t. Their casualties were significant, and after a while, some of the incidents didn’t even make the news. In other parts of the country mine detonations occurred just about every week and the consequences were rarely anything less than horrific.

  A few days before we arrived in Gospic, one of the local residents was killed after tripping a PROM-1 about 100 yards from the railway station: he’d been walking home from work. A huge hole gouged from the turf was still visible when we got there and we were still able to watch mine-clearers working around the spot.

  While driving on isolated country roads around Gospic, we were told that another problem facing mine-clearing teams was a rather obvious lack of patience among local residents to get the job done. Pointing to fresh tractor tracks on both sides of the road, our guide explained: ‘Quite often the farmers don’t even wait for us to finish. They just ride around and occasionally they’ll trip a TMRP-6 (anti-tank mine) which can reduce a three-ton truck to a heap of scrap.’

  Or, he reckoned, farm animals would do it for them. The Gospic countryside was littered with the bones of dead cattle and horses. Apparently, it was the same in Kosovo, where locals were anxious to get their lives together again.

  One of the more difficult problems in the central Balkan regions was coping with heavy undergrowth or bush, especially in summer. After five years of waiting for mines to be cleared, some parts of what had once been farmland had all but reverted to forest. Before clearance work could be attempted, trees, stumps and other detritus had to be removed so that teams could bring in heavy equipment.

  Also, it was dangerous. Everybody involved in this business was aware that mines laid a decade before didn’t simply disappear with time. Nor did they become inert because they simply weren’t manufactured that way. There are cases on record where landmines laid during the Vietnam War are still being accidentally detonated by civilians.

  One of the Mechem technicians considered hiring a Caterpillar, though he wasn’t sure what the authorities would say, or, as he admitted over a couple of pints, exactly how its owner might react.

  One of the more telling observations during our visit was that because the town of Gospic lies on a main road heading towards the Dalmatian Coast on the Adriatic Sea, it was often crowded with German and Scandinavian cars heading south for the summer. Very few of these transients were aware that there were mines in the surrounding countryside, or even right alongside the same roads where they’d sometimes stop for a break or to let the kids run around.

  The reason for this ignorance was simple: Zagreb did not allow signs to be displayed that might have warned the many thousands of visitors who passed along these roads that the area had once been a war zone, and that there could be landmines. Such signs might affect the tourist industry, the bean-counters argued back at headquarters.

  Consequently, said a UN official, most people passing through the country had no idea that they might have stopped on the verge of a minefield. ‘Sometimes I see cars parked with children playing in nearby fields. It’s only a question of time before there is a disaster’, he intimated.

  Richard Davis spent several days trying to devise some system that would protect mine-lifting personnel from injury. It wasn’t something new. Others had tried and failed, the most common impediment being that crews worked unprotected, out in the open and almost always in the final stages of clearing an area, on their feet. If a mine was tripped, there were no barricades of steel or vehicles to hide behind.

  Mines, we discovered soon enough, were there in abundance. But too many of them lay beyond the 15-yard cordon that this and other companies were being paid to make safe.

  On an afternoon stroll along a mile or so of rail lines to the south of Gospic, Richard and I – carefully choosing to walk on the rail ties, rather than beside or between them – came to a field where, over several years, dozens of anti-tank mines had been exposed by rain.

  There was simply no ignoring these perfectly round, bulky cheeseshaped steel bombs with their screw-pin detonators sticking out on top, all clear as day and lying randomly out in the open. The only problem for the Mechem team was that they lay beyond their designated contract area. Somebody else would eventually have to be brought in to dispose of them.

  For the personal protection of individual mine-clearers, Richard initially believed that he might have something of a solution by designing a ‘wrap-around’ Kevlar robe that would protect the technician, literally, from the ground up. It was a huge sheet of the material that completely surrounded the man. Also, it opened out on top, above his head, the idea being to deflect the blast upwards. Amour-plated glass would have to be sewn into the front area to allow for visibility.

  Possibly the single biggest problem facing the modern-day mineclearer is that while there is good quality padded protection available for the job, none of it is perfect. Also, it can be bulky or unwieldy. In summer, anything constricting quickly becomes intolerable.

  In any blast – where temperatures of about 3,000° Centigrade might be generated – the head of the individual involved is the most exposed and, obviously, the most vulnerable part of the body. Also, helmets normally worn by mine-clearers when out in the field (and which resemble the kind of gear used by welders) are open along the bottom where this protection sits on the chest. Obviously, that would mean that any kind of blast from below would totally envelop the head. Even worse, such high temperatures usually result in the victim’s eyes being vaporized.

  Richard believed that by making a single-piece garment that the clearer slipped on over his head and reached all the way down to the ground would eliminate that threat. Obviously the arms would have to be accommodated, a simple matter to somebody who was already making a huge range of body amour in his Central Lake factories.

  While in Gospic, Richard made a number of sketches. He even got one of the local women to stitch something together for him. While it was light and pliable enough even if it did look like something out of Star Wars, the new development didn’t fit the bill. In fact, a single garment, for all its other advantages, impeded the kind of sensitive touch needed for detecting and uncovering landmines.

  There were several other computations considered, usually in consultation with some of the mine-clearers, but nothing feasible emerged. In any event, after a week, it was time to go.

  Richard intended returning to Croatia a couple of months later with one or two more prototypes, but before we knew it, Mechem had completed their contract and were out of there. Some of the men who had hosted us were heading either for Angola or Cambodia.

  As for the body armour project for mine-clearers that Richard David had initially been focused on, he tried to get something going but there were no takers either in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, or anywhere else in the Balkans. We’d taken half a ton of Kevlar to the region as baggage, in itself worth a small fortune, but in the end, nothing happened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

  Balkan War Joint-STARS Offensive

  The Joint-STARS, or more correctly, the Joint-Surveillance Target Attack Radar System concept, has been described by an American pundit as having the potential for doing for modern warfare what the Internet achieved for communications. He reckoned that real-time display of movement on computer consoles on board aircraft would ultimately change the way that wars are fought…

  GOING INTO A CONFLICT WITH the US Air Force must be one of the great experiences in any war buff’s life. My turn came in the Balkans in the summer of 1996 when Operation Joint Endeavour was drawing to a close. It involved sorties in Joint-STARS – an airborne battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnai
ssance platform – as well as a series of in-flight refuelling operations in regions adjacent to where the war was being fought.

  The primary mission of Joint-STARS has been described as the ability to provide theatre ground and air commanders with ground surveillance to support attack operations, and targeting that contributes to the delay, disruption and destruction of enemy forces.

  As explained by one of the officers on board our modified 707-300 series former commercial jet, which had once been used to haul cattle in the Mid-West (the other in Frankfurt at the time had ended its commercial career with Qantas), the aircraft had, in a sense, not only been modified, but ‘remanufactured’. With the requisite radar, communications, operations and control sub-systems required to perform its operational mission, it allowed field commanders to see, as he succinctly put it, ‘well beyond the other side of the hill’.

  As might have been expected, Joint-STARS operations have since been seen as a feature of other conflicts, including all of those currently taking place east of Suez. This activity has also been very substantially upgraded, and was sensitive and secret enough, at the time, to be guarded by armed personnel who were posted alongside these aircraft whenever they were parked on the apron at Frankfurt. Their orders, we were told at our first briefing, were explicit: ‘If any unauthorized individual approaches Joint-STARS aircraft, shoot to kill…’

  As my informant explained, ‘given the acknowledged dependence of armies on wheels [or tracks] for much of their mobility, heavy firepower, armoured protection, supplies and engineering support, the ability of the Joint-STARS system to detect, locate and target these assets in any sort of weather or cloud cover must be a huge advantage that today’s armed forces must still fully exploit.’ Ultimately, he added, it would involve a totally different approach to warfare itself. It would affect how armies and air forces are eventually deployed in combat and even how they might be equipped.