Night times were not much fun: I lay prone and damp in my sleeping bag, straining to hear the dry scuttle of the spiders and scorpions that wormed their way into my dreams. I got into the habit of banging my boots out every morning, and never putting my fingers anywhere that I couldn’t see was free of venom.
Supplies ran low. We’d been on the road for two weeks. We drank the last tea I’d brought from home, stirred in the last sugar cube and opened the last tin of sardines. What little we had, we gave to the women who cooked for us. Our rice ration fell, and our stew arrived with either no meat, or worse, rotten meat.
Six days after we had arrived in Fassama, Deku took his AK off into the forest. He returned in the afternoon with a huge smile and an Abyssinian hornbill under his arm that he’d practically blown to bits. Its long, blood-soaked, gloss-black feathers had collected red dust kicked up from the village paths; its bulbous red throat-pouch sagged onto its breast. They can live up to forty years – when they don’t meet rebel soldiers – a far longer life expectancy than the fighters that would now devour it. The meat, which was divided equally between me, Nick and the commanders, tasted like spicy lamb. Both mouthfuls were delicious. It was the last meat I would eat for two months.
Later that day, Nick, his patience tested by interminable games of gin rummy, organised some target practice. We fired his AK into a strip of corrugated zinc that we fished out of the ruins of a house on the edge of the village. I stuck on a piece of paper torn from my notebook as a target. At fifty yards, I managed to group my shots into a circle the size of a saucer. Nick, meanwhile, put most of the rounds through the same expanding hole. None of the rebels could hit the paper; most missed the four-by-three sheet of zinc entirely. In between shots, Nick explained how the rifle worked; how to hold it safely; work the bolt; move the safety catch; extend the stock. It felt heavy in my hands, deafening in my ears. Its simple function – to kill as efficiently as possible – may have been grotesque, but the power of it, and the rejection of compromise it promised, were undeniably seductive.
We returned the Kalashnikov to the hut to clean the barrel. As we ambled through the heat of the afternoon, Nick commented that I hadn’t been a bad shot, that my weapons-handling was safe. He was impressed, and I felt absurdly proud.
‘There’s only so much you can do with these sights,’ he said, pointing at the AK’s open iron sights, set to their general combat position of 200 yards.
I nodded, but felt obliged to admit my weapons-handling hadn’t always been so good.
As we reached the hut, I told Nick that I was well known in the South London comprehensive school I attended for my fascination with war. Aged fifteen, to my dread horror, I was given a semi-automatic pistol by a menacing gang of older boys. They wanted to know how it worked.
‘I ejected the empty magazine very carefully,’ I recounted. ‘It sounds ridiculous, but I’d read how to do it in a book my grandfather gave me for Christmas. I pulled back the top slide, to clear the breech, and cocked it.’ I mimicked the hand-action of loading a pistol as I had done a thousand times in my childhood games. ‘And then – I still can’t believe I did this – with the barrel pointing right into this group of kids, I pulled the fucking trigger. Click. They all laughed, but it was loaded.’
Nick gave me a sideways glance.
‘Seriously. I pulled back the slide again, and a cartridge jumped out. It must have been stuck in the breech.’
I’d given the pistol back in silence. Perhaps they thought I’d done it on purpose. I wasn’t certain it was a live round, but none of them ever bothered me again.
Back inside the hut Nick showed me how to field strip the AK. My hands fumbled with the unfamiliar parts. Before long I reeked of gun oil. I did it again, and again. It was fun. When I set my mind to something, I have a tendency towards perfection – an obsession that drove other people – Rachel for one – to distraction. Once I’d sussed it out, I tried with my eyes closed.
‘How come you know the AK so well?’ I asked, as proud of my efforts as any DIY enthusiast. ‘I thought you used R4s and R5s in the South African Army?’
‘Well, that’s what we were issued with. They were good rifles, modified Israeli Galils which we made ourselves. But the guys we were fighting all used AKs, and we couldn’t carry enough ammo on long-range patrols – so we started using AKs, too, and using ammo captured from them. It was much easier.’
Introducing me to the workings of the rifle proved an excellent way to take my mind off the heat and boredom of the village. And then it dawned on me. Nick was putting me through this drill because he thought I might need to know for real. In the event that we were overrun, or left to fend for ourselves, I would be expected to fight. At what point exactly, I wondered aloud, would things have got so bad that he’d like me to start shooting people?
‘When your life depends on it.’ It was an obvious answer to a question he clearly thought redundant. ‘But you won’t have to. Like I said, I’ll make enough space for us to get clear.’
Nick’s frankness encouraged me to ask another question that had been troubling me: if we were captured, would we be arrested or would we be executed?
‘You should be okay,’ Nick tried to comfort me, ‘as long as the guys who take you don’t get too excited. Once the Government have you, there’d probably be a show trial or something, like they planned with that other crew, and then you’d be released.’
He didn’t stress the ‘you’, but the inference was clear: they might not shoot a journalist, but a captured mercenary could expect to be shown little mercy.
Evening settled on the hut; thin wisps of wood smoke curled up under the door and through the window, infusing our den with earthy incense. Our earlier conversation had been weighing on me.
‘Nick?’ He looked up at me from yet another hand of rummy. ‘Were you ever taken prisoner?’
‘No, I’d be dead. They didn’t take prisoners.’ He paused. I looked at him, expecting more. ‘I had a very narrow escape once, though … in Angola.’ He rearranged the cards in his hand as he spoke. ‘I jumped in with my guys from Namibia. We used to HALO in from twenty-four thousand feet, so we’d land without them hearing the engines. The ’chute opens at about a thousand feet. No one knows you’re coming. The target was a camp where they were training …’
‘Was that SWAPO?’ I interrupted.
‘Ja. Actually, they weren’t all that bad as fighters.’ He put his cards on the table. ‘We thought we had the drop on them by this kraal. It was evening, almost dark. You could just make out the outlines of the huts on the far side. One of my guys stayed outside, and two of us went in the kraal to surprise them. Vok, it was a trap. They were hiding in the bushes around us. The guy next to me went down straight away. He was hit hard. I jumped the thorns around the kraal and they shot me through the calf as I was running. The other guy was killed as well.’
‘How close were they, how near when they fired at you?’
‘Ag, about ten yards.’ My jaw dropped. How could anyone survive that? Nick carried on, oblivious. ‘I just kept running. Luckily, the bullet went straight through the muscle. I ran all night. Eventually, I climbed up the tallest tree I could find and waited for a chopper to come and get me. The pilot found me the next morning. Vok, there were too many branches above me to get close enough so he sat the Puma on top of the tree and crushed all the loose foliage at the top. Then he brought it in next to me. I jumped and the crew chief grabbed me. That’s why I never wear a flak vest. You can’t run with them, and so far no one has shot me in the chest.’
Later, I fell asleep to an imaginary gun battle, re-playing the scene as my imagination directed it, of Nick escaping as a hail of machine-gun fire erupted around him. It was time to accept that I was a little jealous of my bodyguard and his life at war.
In the morning – the third Sunday in June – I filmed a church service in the village, and was then asked to address the congregation. The pastor whispered that the people in the town were
keen to know who we were, and what our ‘mission’ was. Liberians were punctilious about extending every courtesy to their guests, even potentially unwanted ones whom they had to feed, and I felt obliged to explain myself. The congregation was Pentecostal and enthusiastic, their singing and good humour weirdly at odds with the apocalypse that consumed the country outside. I gave a simple account of myself – emphasising that I wasn’t a soldier – and told them I was here to tell their story. Everyone clapped. Someone said ‘Amen!’ I thanked the gathering of women and elderly men – dressed in their finest, or only, clothes – for their hospitality. They sang hymns, and I filmed some more. Then Conneh’s press secretary gave them a lecture on the righteousness of the rebels’ cause. No one clapped.
Outside, I shot a detachment of soldiers drilling, singing songs, preparing to move out to fight on the front at Gbarnga. I began timidly, Nick’s advice about not straying too far from the hut uppermost in my mind: it was calm, boring even, in the village – but the enemy, as I couldn’t help but think of them, could be squatting in the bush, watching every step we took. As I became more accustomed to using Dudley’s camera, I slowly came to see the rebels for what they were. It was easy to dismiss them as a disorganised rabble, but in reality they had a strong sense of self-identity. The songs they sang, the catechisms they chanted, bound them tightly as a single fighting force. They took orders from a drill instructor – indeed, the mere fact that they were drilling at all was unexpected.
The fighters ignored me and let me move around them, taking whatever pictures I liked. Many of the rebels had been with us since Voinjama, or Zorzor, and they were getting used to me wandering around.
Feeling pleased with myself, I moved on to the village square, where I saw a man – a rebel fighter – being stripped naked and held down over a table. Other fighters gathered round and began to beat him savagely with canes and a hide whip. He was shouting, and I could see his muscles straining as he tried to lever himself clear of the table. I raised the camera and turned over a few seconds of tape before stopping. My gut instinct told me not to film. They looked over at me and said nothing, before resuming the beating. I left them to their bloody business and went back to the hut, shaken. The national chairman’s guarantees notwithstanding, God only knew what they would do if they decided they’d had enough of me.
I found Nick back at the rondavel, writing in his notebook.
‘They’re giving someone a hell of a hiding out there. They’ve got this guy pinned down over a table in the square.’
Nick looked up.
‘I didn’t film it,’ I added quickly. ‘It was quite intense. I didn’t want to piss them off.’
I’d seen fist fights in London, but this looked more like torture. The guy didn’t stand a chance.
‘Ja, they have their own rules. African people is quite violent, sometimes. Deku was saying to me that the elders here have been complaining about the young guys stealing food. Maybe it’s a punishment for them. They need the support of the people here or they’re finished.’
I hadn’t thought of it like that. He was right. The rebels could coerce and commandeer only so much. At a basic level, they had to have the support of the people they claimed to be fighting for.
‘Best to stay out of their way. Keep around the hut,’ he advised, ‘especially when they get excited.’
I was finding it harder to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘practical’. Liberia was a world away from the cocktail terrace where I’d first met Nick, and further still from life at home in Britain. The people I was now deeply embedded with were frightening and sinister. I’d always baulked at the idea that ‘African people’ were anything other than individuals, even though most of the Africans I’d met were either at war, or in a state of oppression. In Eritrea I’d taken photographs along the front line with Ethiopia as the tiny nation squared up to the massive losses inflicted by a devastating trench-based war; in Zimbabwe I’d spent weeks with opposition supporters, running the gauntlet of Government attacks and intimidation. Despite the fact that Sierra Leone had been on the road to recovery when I arrived at the end of the war, I’d photographed countless numbers of people terrified that the rebels may yet come back and hunt them down.
Liberia was different, though. There was no front line marked with barbed wire, no righteous opposition movement and absolutely no prospect of a peace agreement. I had no idea what ‘ordinary life’ in Liberia might look like, and there was no one to ally with except Nick.
Worse, I reflected that my sympathies towards the man being whipped had been tempered by my eagerness to film the event. Only later did I wonder what might have happened to him, and consider the justice of summary physical punishment. West Africa pulled like iron on the needle of my moral compass. I was struggling to keep it pointing true.
Over the two days that followed we made forays into the neighbouring villages – me with the camera, Nick with his rifle. The threat of attack was ever present. I had imagined that we were travelling to a front line, but in truth we were ourselves the front line. Every time the little bubble of our group – me, Nick and the rebels – percolated through the jungle, we risked confrontation with Government troops similarly on the move. This may have been the rebels’ controlled area, but the forest was criss-crossed with dozens, hundreds, of bush paths and hunters’ tracks, and it was impossible to guard them all, stop infiltration. We stayed only as long as it took to film.
I found the locals to be a curiously naïve bunch – urban, even – despite being isolated in the middle of the bush with no infrastructure to support them. I asked one old man, marooned by severe arthritis on an island of shade under a tree, what creatures lived in the forest. ‘Tigah,’ came his surprising reply. ‘Dey very dangeros,’ he added, unnecessarily. The rebels agreed.
‘And what about the rivers?’ I wanted to know. ‘Are they dangerous, too? I mean, do they have dangerous creatures in them, like poisonous snakes?’
‘Mos’ de snek in de bush ’ere poisonos. One bweh, dey wi’ kill you. An’ alligator’ plenteh in de swam’. Dey wi’ ea’ you raw.’
Nick smiled at me. Tigers and alligators do not live in the wild in Africa. The locals confessed to never leaving the paths in the jungle, and made obscure references, perhaps harking back to the slave trade, to ‘white devils’ that lived among the trees and snatched children.
In the village of Garbi – a collection of dusty straw huts clustered around a beaten-earth square – I interviewed Tetema Howard, a 48-year-old mother of ten, as she threshed the last of her rice with bare feet on a rush mat. She spelled out her predicament as she rolled the chaff and grains beneath her heels. She was living on the remains of a harvest gathered more than two years ago; her eldest daughter fled when Fassama was attacked six months before; she was the sole provider for her family, and had no land of her own. Seemingly oblivious to the stinging midday heat, her husband, ill, lay unstirring in the hut behind her. She told me, bluntly, that she was hungry. What, I asked, would she do when this rice ran out? She remained silent for a long time, her eyes searching my face for an answer. Eventually, she looked at the ground and murmured, in an almost inaudible whisper, ‘I lea’ mah ow’ way Go’.’ It’s in the hands of God.
God Himself seemed strangely absent. There was no medicine, no clinic to go to, no one to turn to for help except us. Nick gave out quinine tablets for malaria, strapped up long-broken limbs and distributed the last of his precious boiled sweets to the children that tugged at our sleeves as I practised how to film. Many of the younger ones had not seen white people before and stared at us amazed, before plucking up the courage to touch us, or, more commonly, hide in terror. I smiled a lot, and a little of the romance of Great European Explorer returned – something to cling onto, absurdly, in the face of the rebels’ increasing amorality.
All the time Nick scrutinised the bush around us, took GPS readings of paths and villages, and stayed carefully out of camera shot. In the evenings I played the pictures back on
the mini-VCR, and decided I was just good enough, professionally speaking, to shoot the film I was here to make. We were starting to carve a routine for ourselves. Every morning, at ten to nine, Nick and I sat glued to the morning’s classic serial: Robert Graves’s memoir of the Great War, Goodbye to All That. Not only was it a cracking yarn about hope in the face of overwhelming odds, it reminded us that, however bad our life seemed in the Spider Hut, it was luxury compared to the privations of the trenches.
I was surprised to find that Nick had a very different view of the First World War from my own. Whereas the horror of that conflict had been drilled into me at school, it did not figure highly in the collective historical consciousness of Afrikaners. Instead of the mud of Flanders, for Nick and his countrymen the twentieth century was christened by the blood of the Second Boer War.
‘Those guys’, he opined, ‘really knew how to fight. You could really learn something from them.’
He propped his AK against the wall, and sat naked to the waist on his sleeping bag, swatting mozzies, chatting the day away. There was nowhere to go. Enthralled by the account given by Graves, Nick first questioned my attitude to the First World War, and then we turned our attention to the Second Boer War – what he called ‘the English War’.
Between 1899 and 1902, a ragtag collection of sharpshooting Afrikaner farmers (or Boers, in Dutch) and local black Africans took on the might of the British Army, and at first won convincingly. Arguably the world’s first modern war – a total war – the fighting saw two new forms of tactics crystallise. As the British retaliated, concentration camps were built to house Afrikaner civilians, tens of thousands of whom died of malnutrition and disease; crops and farms were burned in an unrelenting scorched earth campaign that deliberately targeted the families of the Boer fighters; and prisoners of war were exiled by the thousands. The battles left the free Boer Republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State crushed. Hitler and his generals would study the tactics of the British in South Africa closely, and employ them with even more murderous enthusiasm a generation later.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 8