Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  So it was that Mackrory was suddenly faced with a potential crisis, involving almost a thousand Zulu warriors, who had already left a number of tribesmen dead. Also, he was very much aware that the two groups had deadly intent and if something wasn’t done, there could be a lot more of them killed, women and children, too. His job, as a police officer, was to try to put a stop to it.

  He flew low over the next hill. Moments later he banked and headed back towards the two Zulu regiments. First some of the Ngcengeni scattered. Then a few of the Sijozeni militants gave way. By the time he had gained enough height to try to make an assessment, both groups had started to regroup. Because the local police station was only a few minutes away by vehicle, Mackrory made a last pass over the Impis. Meanwhile, he radioed base. Time was short, he stressed and while this wasn’t exactly war, it was close.

  The South African Police Services BO-105 helicopter, while ideal for police ‘search and spot’ work, was never intended to be employed as a trooper. Normally this chopper carries a crew of two, heat and height permitting.

  ‘So I had to act pretty smartly,’ Mackrory recalls. ‘By now, I’d been speaking to the ground commander. We decided even before I’d landed that we needed to get some of our guys between the two groups. Obviously that was a tricky option but it was worth a try’, he reckoned.

  As soon as I touched down, two of our guys were waiting to board. Each was armed with R4 rifles, standard SADF issue in .223 caliber. That was all very well, but we were aware that the two groups probably had quite a few AKs of their own. The more immediate problem, once these first two men had been dropped, was that they’d be isolated in the middle of two groups of fighting men. Worse, the majority were tanked up and the rest high as kites on pot.

  It was clear that they’d been partying all night in anticipation of the battle. It was imminent, he radioed base.

  ‘While there was a slim chance that nothing would happen until I was able to bring in more troops, we faced the prospect of the two groups moving in on them,’ Mackrory explained.

  Finally, after he flown 20 more police across from the station, it was all over bar the shouting. Observing small squads of well-equipped paramilitary police being dropped along several high points that surrounded the potential killing grounds caused the warriors to think twice. That was when the two groups started to disperse.

  The colonel believes that his initially buzzing the two groups possibly helped to disorientate them. ‘Also, many Zulus had served in the army in Angola… they probably weren’t certain whether the BO-105 was armed like a helicopter gunship. Of course we weren’t. But it helped to have a few gun-barrels protruding out of the open door while we circled…’

  South African security services have been fighting a low-intensity struggle in the lush farmlands of KwaZulu/Natal for quite a few years. As in Northern Ireland, issues are intense enough to sometimes involve the army and the South African Air Force. Arriving at the scene of some of the battles afterwards, the authorities might find eight dead in one village, 20 in another. Then, a week or six months later, another attack: payback time.

  Those not hacked to death in these vendettas are shot with a variety of firearms, many of them homemade. Some are so basic that any firearms specialist might regard them as hazardous to fire. However, since these guns can be made in any backyard and are being used in domestic crimes, personal attacks and robberies, it’s important to take a close look at them.

  As one ballistics specialist declared: all are lethal. Many are adaptations of the ubiquitous American ‘Saturday Night Special’.2 Others are cheeky adaptations of 12-bore shotguns, which have been the most popular weapon of choice in less-developed regions because of the spread of fire. Used at close range they are almost always deadly as, in close quarters, it is difficult to miss whether you are high or not. More significant to the perpetrators, the rationale among those using shotshell is that there are few tell-tale ballistic ‘fingerprints’ for the police to work on afterwards. About half the weapons brought in while I worked with the police were shotguns. Ammunition was plentiful: just about every farmhouse has a box or two of shells.

  Quite a few members of the police with whom I was associated during several tours of operation in South Africa had taken fire from improvised weapons. One police officer had a Remington 870, 12-bore shotgun fired at his chest at a range of a few feet. Even though he was wearing body armour, it knocked him out cold. Apart from a bruise the size of a plate that stayed with him for months, he wasn’t badly hurt. A foot higher, he reckoned, and he would have taken it in the face.

  There is no question that, despite an increased security presence in KwaZulu/Natal, dissident groups are active in the territory and as long as the SAPS hunt them, they are obliged to turn to their own resources to acquire more weapons, which has resulted in many remarkable adaptations.

  Technical expertise, while basic, is largely Heath-Robinson. It rarely involves machines. In the mountains, where most of the workshops are situated, there is often no electricity and tools can be as basic as a hammer, a hacksaw and a file, together with an umfaan to provide the muscle to drive a set of cowhide bellows over a primitive charcoal fire.

  One starting pistol I was allowed to handle had been made into an effective single-shot weapon. It was .22 long-rifle calibre and had been used in a political assassination that was big news at the time. A prominent member of the largely Zulu Inkatha political establishment had been shot behind the ear from point blank range. The man died instantly.

  Using some of the weapons was nothing short of perilous. One or two had fairly large gaps between the receiver and the barrel. In some, the cartridges were so loose-fitting that the gun emitted a sheet of flame from the breech.

  ‘Often, if the piping is too big for the cartridge, a short length of wire is wound around the base of the brass to keep it in position’ my source, Mike P., a veteran police ballistic expert, stated. This was often the case with 9mm Parabellum pistols.

  The most basic system employed by these improvisers was to have two lengths of piping, one that fitted neatly into the other. A small, sharp piece of metal – the firing pin – would be soldered to one end and with the cartridge in place, you literally banged one end against the other. Obviously, you needed to be sure where the barrel was pointing just then.

  ‘Tricky, but it works, though not always if you’ve been drinking, which is often the case’, said Mike P. Also, you had to know how to hold it. Fingers had been severed in the past by not paying enough attention at that critical moment.

  A new development, he said, had been to take toy pistols or revolvers, drill out the barrels to make them look authentic and use them in bank hold-ups, for which South Africa is now the acknowledged world leader. If, for instance, an AK is not available, the 9mm Para is still the preferred calibre. Another armourer reckoned that such basic devices would work for five or six rounds, after which the barrel tended to split.

  The best homemade weapons, it was generally accepted in Natal were made by a fugitive known to the police as ‘Dum-Dum’ Dumisane. He was appropriately named. Having eluded the police for years, he taught his associates how to nip off the tip of a bullet to create more serious wounds.

  Dumisane was also a shotgun boffin. One of his creations was recovered while I was still around. It was 12-guage and was fired as a handgun. Those who have tried it have said that you needed strong wrists!

  Curiously, there are an astonishing number of military carbines about – AKs, South African Army R4s in 5.56mm calibre (the South African hybrid of the Israeli Galil), an occasional FN 7.62mm, often leftover from Rhodesia’s guerrilla war, or a former Portuguese Army G3 – also in 7.62mm calibre – that might have been brought across the border from Mozambique. As army-backed police operations start to take effect, this illegal arsenal is thinning, but as long as supply doesn’t keep pace with demand, more guns will arrive from somewhere.

  Most of the people living in South Africa’s embattled zones
agree. Barely a week goes by when farmers and, increasingly, their families, aren’t killed or wounded in road ambushes or attacks on isolated homesteads. Many of those involved maintain that as the attacks increase – with scores of rural people killed each year – it’s little more than a concerted effort to drive them off their properties. They point to the fact that along the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, Mpumalanga (formerly Eastern Transvaal), Limpopo to the north and elsewhere, some farms have already been abandoned by their former owners, especially those with young families.

  What is certain is that the hyperbole associated with the killings has been heightened by the death toll. It’s difficult to police a situation barely a step removed from anarchy.

  Over the years the SAPS Air Wing has had many experiences involving shoot-outs with criminals, such as the time, shortly before the Tugela Ferry incident, when the Air Wing was called upon to react to a fire-fight on the coastal road north of Durban. Because it was election time, political tempers were frazzled.

  Then, while trying to arrest the occupants of a stolen car, a police unit in the Umzinto area, to the south of Durban came under sustained AK-47 fire. Barely 30 minutes before that, an armed gang had robbed a store, which is why the alert had gone out in the first place.

  Shortly afterwards, explained one of the officers:

  we were told that the group had originally been linked to Inkonto we Zizwe – the military wing of the African National Congress – a grouping not always favourably regarded by people of Zulu extraction. If that were the case, one of the offices confided, these people were dangerous. They would possibly have received military training abroad.

  About 20 minutes later, a police helicopter arrived over the scene. The pilot spotted three men armed with AKs in a sugar-cane field below, almost surrounded by a squad of security personnel. Circling, he ventured lower. Suddenly the helicopter shuddered. Then it happened again, almost as if somebody were banging on the fuselage with a hammer. There was no mistaking the impact of bullets, some of which had struck his rotor.

  ‘The 105 started to vibrate and I knew that we’d been hit. But when a round struck my joy stick, I looked for a clearing to put down.’

  The fire-fight ended after two of the robbers had been killed and the third wounded. There were seven guns between them, including three AKs together with almost a thousand rounds of ammunition. The police officer said he was lucky to be alive because of the volume of fire had been intense. Only later were they able to establish that the bullet that hit his joystick had exited the cockpit within a whisker’s-breadth of his face.

  While flying police choppers in South Africa might not be everybody’s idea of fun, it has its moments.

  In one of the several occasions that I was with the Police Air Wing operating out of Durban, we were involved in car chases. There was also a body search along a remote river valley off the Tugela River after a flash flood, where we found a cadaver and airlifted it out. That was followed by a couple of robberies that left criminals dead and, ultimately, the recovery of three men killed on a mountaintop. These were all black Eastern Cape farmers who had been gunned down in an ambush by soldiers of the Lesotho Armed Forces.

  The three men were part of a 26-strong group of local ‘vigilantes’ who had been frustrated by government inaction following earlier stock raids out of the neighboring country and decided to do something about it themselves. They’d been following stock thieves who, with the stolen herd, had moved over the mountains into Lesotho.

  Although the bodies lay across an international divide, it was left to one of the 105s to haul them out. That too was touch and go because Lesotho at the time was still smarting from a South African military invasion that had left 60 Basotho nationals and eight South African troops dead.

  As for the future of the South African Police Air Wing, nobody is certain where it is heading. The respective squadrons are still up and kind of running in all the major urban centres, but African politics has played a significant hand in thinning the numbers of professional aviators.

  Senior Police Superintendent René Coulon arrived back at the Air Wing to find that a former desk sergeant with no experience either in flying helicopters or in aviation generally had been appointed over his head. He queried the issue with Police Headquarters in Pretoria and was peremptorily told that the woman was effectively ‘running the show’. No explanation was given and nor did René ask for one. He submitted his resignation from the force the same day. Then, just before the 2010 World Cup, he was reinstated. Things seem to happen that way in Africa. Other officers to whom I spoke mentioned similar problems. The government wants more black pilots and whether they are professionally qualified or not, they will hire these individuals. Already there have been some serious accidents and as a consequence, lives have been lost.

  Postscript

  Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover,

  Breath’s aware that will not keep,

  Up, lad, when the journey’s over,

  There’ll be time enough to sleep.

  A. E. Housman

  ENDNOTES

  Prologue

  1.

  After leaving the Rhodesian Army, Nicholas Della Casa spent some time travelling around South Africa. One journey took him into Botswana where he left a locked trunk with a friend. He didn’t disclose that it contained military items, including explosives, at a time when security in Southern Africa was at an almost paranoiac level. Once Nick had left Botswana, his friend’s house was one of several raided by the Botswanan Police. The baggage was opened, the stuff found and the man charged. As a consequence, he was to spend time in a Botswanan prison. Yet, a simple letter from Nicholas to the Botswanan public prosecutor – Nicholas was abroad at the time, so they wouldn’t have been able to touch him – could have circumvented this disaster. Instead, without good reason, he chose to do nothing.

  2.

  Al J. Venter, War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars, Casemate Publishers, US and UK 2006, pp 445–460

  3.

  Chris Munnion, Banana Sunday, Ashanti Publishers, Sandton, 1992. This is a marvelous book that encompasses a wealth of stories collected by the author from journalists who worked the African beat, as well as other Third World outposts of the former Empire.

  4.

  Peter Younghusband, Every Meal a Banquet, Every Night a Honeymoon: Jonathan Ball Publishers, Cape Town, 2003

  5.

  Arkady Babchenko, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, Portobello Books, London, 2007. This book, though harsh and uncompromising, is a brilliant exposition of this kind of experience. It should be required reading for everybody going to war.

  6.

  Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Despatches – The Best of Two Centuries of South African Journalism, Ashanti Publishing, Johannesburg, 1990

  Chapter One: Getting to a Lebanon at War

  1.

  Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001

  2.

  I deal with the revolutionary role of the Pasdaran, which became the forerunner of present-day Hizbollah, as well as its role of fostering terror both in the Middle East and the West, in great detail in my book Iran’s Nuclear Option, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia, 2005, cht 12, pp 253 et seq

  Chapter Three: Levantine Woes

  1.

  Al J. Venter, ‘General Lahoud’s Rise to Power’, Middle East Policy, Washington DC, Volume VI, Number 2, October 1998

  2.

  As the civil war progressed and car-bombs became commonplace, that situation changed radically. Although there are few cities as clogged as Beirut (parking had always been impossible, anyway) all Christian hotels started using security barriers for protection and we often had to look elsewhere. When that happened, you needed a permit to get anywhere close to the main structure: that meant more questions, more controls. The cycle was eternal, with one means of destruction supplanting another as soon as solutions were devised to counter them.
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  Chapter four: Lagos and an Army Mutiny

  1

  Only after the Biafran War was the Nigerian capital moved to Abuja, a totally artificial city erected in the jungle that emulated what had taken place years before with Brasilia.

  Chapter five: Biafra: The Build-Up

  1.

  Other countries involved in boundary disputes that led to conflict in the postindependence years included Uganda and Kenya, who had differences over the Mount Elgon area of East Africa; Chad and Libya; both Congos (involving differences about who owned the oil-rich enclave of Angolan Cabinda); Botswana and Zimbabwe, who were involved in shooting matches over territory along the Upper Zambezi; Morocco and Algeria (Polisario claimed stretches of former Spanish Sahara); and, perhaps the bloodiest feud of all, which took place quite recently between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and which claimed tens of thousands of lives. The Bakassi issue continues to fester and both Nigeria and the Cameroon have moved troops close to their respective frontiers.

  Chapter six: Survival in a West African Conflict

  1.

  Al J. Venter, War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars, Casemate Publishers, US and UK, 2006

  2.

  Qat or Khat is a DEA-classified drug that contains the alkaloid cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant which causes excitement and euphoria. About 70 per cent of the population of Africa’s Horn and many people in the Yemen are addicted to it.

  Chapter nine: A Central American Conflagration

  1.

  Al J. Venter, The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa, Stackpole Books (US), Greenhill Books (UK) and Southern Books (South Africa), 1994

  Chapter ten: Somalia: Wars of No Consequence