‘I mean, it makes you think – this could be even worse,’ I suggested, slipping on the slimy tendrils of a half-buried tree root. ‘He survived for weeks on end on nothing but his wits, pursued by the entire Japanese Army.’
‘They were tough old guys, that generation. They fought a proper war. I wonder what they’d make of our friends here?’ A rebel with spiky dreads and a radio with dying batteries playing wonky reggae jogged past us in flip-flops. ‘They can move, though, that’s for sure.’
My grandfather imparted his hard-won wisdom to the wide-eyed boy who sat, enthralled, at his feet. For hours I would listen to him, and to my mother’s father, Don, as they talked modestly about their wars and their heroic though unsung adventures – in Asia and fighting the Germans in the deserts of North Africa.
As I explained to Nick, it was from Martin – a professional soldier from one of Ireland’s most respected families – that I first heard the word ‘mercenary’. On three occasions he had wanted to fight as a professional soldier: in Spain in 1936; in the Congo in the early 1960s; and again in 1968, by then aged fifty-four, in Biafra. On each occasion his ambition was thwarted, respectively, by the lure of the East and the British Army, the demands of a young family and, finally, age and ill health.
The mercenary life ran deep in my family. Much to Nick’s amusement, my grandfather’s aspirations were certainly not without precedent – soldiering for foreign armies was in my family’s blood. ‘Brabazon’ is the English version of a Frankish clan name that means, simply, ‘mercenary’. By the Middle Ages, my surname became a generic word for a European soldier of fortune. It was with hundreds of our mercenary clansmen, led by my manytimes great-grandfather Jacques The Mercenary, at his side that William of Normandy defeated Harold near Hastings.
By the time my grandfather set foot on the quayside at Liverpool in the Great Depression a thousand years later, dozens of family fortunes had been made and lost. Martin arrived with the clothes he stood up in, and an old violin. Boarding houses in the nation that had once been subjugated by his mercenary clansmen greeted him with signs that read: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.
Exile was a family preoccupation. Another ancestor – Arthur Dillon – commanded an Irish Jacobite regiment in France. In what came to be known as ‘The Flight of the Wild Geese’, fourteen thousand Catholic troops fled en masse from Ireland to France at the end of the Williamite War in 1691. The Irish regiment bearing the Dillon name – which served in Spain, Italy and Germany, and fought on the American side at the Siege of Savannah during the American Revolution – helped to define the notion of the romantic mercenary in popular consciousness. When Irish mercenary officer ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare – whom my grandfather admired for being ‘a wild card’ – launched his most high-profile operation in the Congo in 1964, he named his unit ‘The Wild Geese’.
In the early 1980s, when I was still a boy, the African mercenary action thriller of the same name was shown on television. I watched it as an exciting homage to my own family’s bloody history and convinced myself that it elevated the mercenary to contemporary moral crusader. One crucial fact escaped me: mercenaries were not volunteers. If there was one episode of my childhood that distilled my ambition for adventure into a moment of clarity, it was Richard Harris running for his life along a runway, pursued by a bloodthirsty African militia.
Although it was clear from looking into the histories of mercenaries in the Congo that ‘liberating the people’ was often a thinly veiled excuse for military campaigns characterised more by murder and theft than by any humanitarian considerations, Hoare’s real Wild Geese did at least save the lives of hundreds of civilians trapped by ruthless Simba rebels. And what Martin had sought – by wanting to sign up to fight in Spain or Africa – was to volunteer for causes that he had believed in passionately, not to find employment as a professional killer. The rise of fascism in Spain, and the wholesale targeting of civilians by the Nigerian Federal Army in Biafra, appalled his sense of what was just and righteous. A hugely experienced soldier, he believed he could make a difference, and regretted into old age that he had been too ill to fight.
Now I was cutting my own path with a real live mercenary, though what Martin would have thought of my bodyguard I wasn’t sure. He had always professed a deep-seated hatred of apartheid and of the mentality that spawned it. There had as yet been no moment to ask Nick about his tenure as a professional soldier, but his past, or my perception of it, hung in the air between us. As an adult, my only actual experience of mercenaries had been in Sierra Leone with Cobus, where the little I knew about the victory of Executive Outcomes over Revolutionary United Front rebels made me appreciate how beneficial unleashing soldiers of fortune had been for an undefended civilian population. Cobus had spoken frankly about the dark side of his war, too. Of the few RUF fighters taken alive, several were tortured for information. That hadn’t seemed to unduly disturb the residents of Freetown, though. Painted on the rear bumpers of taxis in the capital had been the legend: In God We Trust, but EO is our Saviour.
By the time I’d arrived in Sierra Leone in 2001, the country was in the shaky grip of the world’s largest deployment by the UN: 18,000 troops had been deployed for around $1 billion a year. Militarily they had achieved no more, and often much less, than EO had done six years earlier. The mercenaries had been willing to do what the UN had not – pick sides, take casualties and use lethal pre-emptive force. Indeed, the much-maligned Blue Helmets were only able to deploy effectively at all after the British Army aggressively secured Freetown, mimicking in many respects what EO had done before them.
I felt buoyed to have told Nick something of my antecedents, and happy that what I had to say about conflict seemed to be of genuine interest to him. I was happy, too, that I was finally living the life of my grandfathers, whom I admired so much. I stepped onwards with a growing sense of pride in my own endeavour; but the line between the stories of my childhood and the reality of the civil war I was here to report started to blur. The rebels around me played the parts of the soldiers my grandfathers had served with; their war struck me as a struggle for liberation against an unjust, ignoble regime. I was using the dreams of my childhood in the same way I had when I was growing up: as an escape route – then from the disturbing legacy of my parents’ marriage, and now as a respite from the violence I imagined was over the horizon.
That night I slept outside with the others, our bellies still empty after the meagre bowl of rice Deku had served us. The walk had drained me more than anything I had ever done and I was beckoned into a restless kaleidoscope of dreams, each one complete with a grand moral purpose – the young Great European Adventurer saving a troubled African country from itself.
More unconscious than asleep, I came to fitfully in the dead of night to witness a weird scene played out in the firelight. A group of young rebels, their identities hidden in silhouette, took turns to sodomise one of the porters in front of the fire. There was no noise, just a deep murmur of voices and the spit and crackle of burning greenwood. Then I slipped back into troubling dreams.
The next morning the march continued through villages and settlements freshly burned, some completely razed. What walls still stood bore the names of the rebels and Government troops who last occupied them: first we picked our way through the remnants of the rebel Wild Dog Battalion HQ, and then those of the Last Battalion, who had been reportedly slaughtered shortly before our arrival. The few civilians who remained greeted us warmly, breaking with us bitter kola nuts, which were eaten in traditional welcome. I scoured the bushes (in vain except for scraps of torn clothes) for the mortal remains of the Government’s defenders – but it seemed that the jungle consumed the casualties with frightening speed and purpose. The villagers believed the souls of the dead lingered in the trees. It was not so much the Kingdom of Heaven as the Forest of the Damned.
As the day rolled on, the trees thinned and the canopy broke above us. Now we walked under a naked, burning sun. My knees started to
buckle; Dudley was limping; Mandla, stoic and uncomplaining throughout the march, had shed most of the skin on his feet as giant blisters welled up and sloughed off into his shoes. Nick ploughed on, silent. Our walk had taken us more than a hundred miles towards the coast. As we reached the village of Fassama, we passed the wrecks of logging machines. Like dinosaur skeletons, the rusting remains of great Caterpillar half-tracks sprawled by the side of rotting mountains of timber – yet more evidence of Liberia’s descent into economic catastrophe.
We were told to rest, and wait for the diesel (coming from Bopolu, a town further south) that would take us and two of the LURD’s very few vehicles onwards to Tubmanburg, and the front line. The porters, exhausted and half-starved, vanished into the village.
For two days we played cards, smoked and let Nick nurse our injuries. Nick coated Mandla’s open sores with iodine, a small boy who hung around our thatched mud hut wafted the flies away with a switch of palm frond in return for food and clean water.
Eventually it became clear there was no diesel, nor would there be any.
After forty-eight hours, Deku announced that our departure would happen ‘maybe soon’. Even the other rebels looked downhearted by this prognosis. Dudley shaved his head for want of something to do. I paced the floor with a growing sense of despondency. We still had no film.
Apart from their failing health, Dudley and Mandla posed another problem: they were only on the books for another week and it would take them that long to get back to Conakry, if they were lucky. Endless satellite phone calls were made to the production company in Kenya, and to South Africa. It had been our working understanding that, if push came to shove, their contracts could be extended. But this was apparently no longer the case. Dudley was due back at work at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and nothing short of his resignation could have kept him in Liberia. I pleaded in vain for another week.
‘It’s just not possible, James,’ our man at the SABC told me. ‘Dudley would lose his job.’
‘But I thought …’
My final protest petered out. What had I thought? That they would ‘make a plan’, as I’d been promised? The project was slipping through my fingers. I had been foolish not to see this coming from the outset.
Dudley became downhearted. He wanted more than anything to see the project to its conclusion. Yet he and Mandla appeared seriously injured by the walk, and it seemed to me that buried underneath their dissatisfaction at having to return home there was also a pervasive sense of relief. I didn’t blame them, but I felt betrayed nonetheless, and nervous about the conversation I would have to have with the rebels.
In the end, perhaps sensing my agitation at the prospect, Nick volunteered to broach the subject with Deku. He stressed his own continued commitment to get to Tubmanburg, as Conneh – the LURD’s national chairman – had promised we would. Deku agreed to appoint an escort team for them. A detachment of fighters would turn around and march Dudley and Mandla all the way back to Zolowo. I couldn’t leave until I’d found a way to rescue the project. Nick, of course, would stay with me.
Dudley and Mandla packed their bags and readied themselves for the long walk back. Dudley gave me the professional Canon mini-digital video camera, twenty tapes, three batteries and a charger. This, with the addition of my satellite phone and charger, a tiny amateur Handycam, a pocket stills camera and a small video tape player with a built-in screen, was the extent of my equipment. I stared at them like an illiterate gazing at the pages of a novel. I had no idea what to do with any of it, but there was no time for a lesson now. We embraced, and Nick bade them farewell in Afrikaans. Then Dudley remembered something. From out of his bag he pulled a small booklet.
‘Here’s the instruction manual for the camera,’ he said as he handed over the smudged white bible. ‘Good luck.’
4
SPIDER HOUSE RULES
‘You’re who? With what rebels? Where are you calling from?’
An incredulous BBC producer took the call. An hour later a BBC World Service presenter called me back to do a pre-recorded interview. Before we started, he wanted to get a couple of things clear.
‘Can you talk freely? I mean, do you have a gun to your head?’ He sounded genuinely concerned. ‘Are the rebels forcing you to make this call?’
The satellite phone crackled. I assured him I was able to talk unhindered. There were, however, two things I did not want to discuss, for the sake of my own personal security.
‘I can’t talk about how I got into Liberia. I need to protect that route so I can get out again. The other thing is Guinea. I don’t want to talk about Guinea at all. The rebels are very sensitive about it, about their relationship with Guinea. They’ve asked me specifically not to discuss it, and my security depends on agreeing to that for now.’
The presenter told me quickly that I could explain that myself, and began the interview.
‘So how did you get into Liberia? How did you meet up with the rebels?’ the presenter asked.
I flushed with anger and embarrassment at my own naïvety. I repeated there were some things I couldn’t discuss for my own safety. Second question: ‘President Taylor has alleged that the rebels he claims are attacking his government are backed by neighbouring Guinea. Have you seen any evidence of that? Where are they getting their weapons from?’
I was livid, but picked my way carefully. I had seen caches of brand-new weapons near the Guinea border, but had not seen any weapons physically cross the frontier. I repeated that the LURD claimed only to use weapons captured from Taylor: all that was true.
Eventually, the interview began to take a more benign course. What were the rebels’ aims? Did they have the support of the local population? Did they intend to attack the capital?
When it was over, I hung up and felt immediately apprehensive. I realised I’d been shaking. Dudley and Mandla would not yet be out of the woods, and one slip could be enough to inflame the rebels. I was finally doing my job as a journalist. That would have consequences – I just could not imagine what they might be.
As the sun dipped beneath the tree line encircling the village, Nick and I switched on the radio and sat in silence with Deku and a couple of other fighters, listening to the broadcast. Distractions of any sort were hard enough to come by in Liberia. The radio was a particularly good one. At five o’clock every evening, without fail, the entire village tuned in to the Africa Service of the BBC World Service on a collection of tiny, almost-broken shortwave radios. It was a ritual I had observed wherever we’d stayed with the rebels. The Focus on Africa programme was the rebels’ link to the outside world, and the main conduit by which they gleaned information about Charles Taylor’s government.
As soon as my interview had aired, Conneh called me. He was full of congratulations. Deku offered me one of his precious Ronson cigarettes (a rough local smoke that made Marlboro Reds taste like menthol lights) and shook my hand with joy.
‘Jay, you’ real journalis’! On BBC! Taylah wi’ be cryin’!’
I had proved to the outside world that the rebels existed, that they were armed, and serious: suddenly, they were famous. Over the next hour or so, practically every rebel soldier in Fassama came and shook my hand and shouted my name – which they all pronounced Jay, almost completely swallowing the ‘m’ and dropping the ‘s’ – as I sat and smoked on the doorstep to our hut. The next day I discovered I was famous, too. One of Charles Taylor’s cronies gave a counter-interview, dismissing me as a rebel propagandist who had illegally entered the country to help their terrorist agenda. The rebels went wild. I was one of them. They celebrated a re-run of my initial interview with bursts of gunfire; village elders presented me with a carton of 200 cigarettes – worth a king’s ransom in barter – in thanks for my ‘effor’ ’.
Nick was fascinated by the effect that the radio had on the LURD.
‘Boetie,’ he approved, ‘that is fokken lekker.’
The radio had been transformed into a weapon, my weapon.
Nick liked that, and so did I.
It didn’t look like we were leaving Fassama any time soon, so Nick and I made home as best we could. We didn’t have much to work with, though. We were shacked up in a stereotypical African rondavel meant for an entire extended family – fifteen feet in diameter, with rough whitewashed walls and a thick rush thatch supported by gnarled hardwood beams. It felt cramped with just the two of us. There was one bed, which Nick insisted I have, and a simple wooden table and two chairs just right for playing cards. The thatch roof was a nesting ground for half a dozen spiders the span of my hand, who clung from cloud-like webs supporting thousands upon thousands of tiny eight-legged progeny. I dreaded the day when they would descend the walls and consume us.
‘I knew this guy in the army. He got bitten,’ Nick warned me. ‘It was a strange wound and we couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. There was this little circle of red dots, and the skin in the middle just wouldn’t heal. One day, when we thought it was looking better, it just collapsed into a hole in his thigh, completely rotten. He nearly lost his leg. That’s a fokken spider bite for you. Better leave them alone.’
In addition to the spiders, our hut was home to an iridescent blue emperor scorpion as large as a langoustine. It made a nest under the front step, and fraternised with the bunch of young rebels who hung around our stoop. They let it climb up their arms, and posed for photos with it. They found another one, smaller and black, and tried to make them fight. Sensibly, the two scorpions refused.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 7