ENDNOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1 Gomos are bald, granite kopjes, or hills that are a feature of much of the country, and which would be of such importance when a youthful Neall Ellis, by then a helicopter pilot, later fought there during the guerrilla war.

CHAPTER TWO

1 Majors Charles M. Lohman and Robert I. MacPherson, Rhodesia: Tactical Victory, Strategic Defeat, U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Marine Corps Development and Education Command, Quantico, Virginia, 1983.

CHAPTER THREE

1 Man-portable air-defence systems (MANPADS or MPADS) are shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

2 Paul Els, Ongulumbashe—Where the Bushwar Began, Privately published by paul@who-els.co.za, Pretoria, 2008

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Jannie Geldenhuys, A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace, Cape Town,

2 Al J. Venter, How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs, Ashanti Publishing, Johannesburg, 2008

3 Details about arms manufacturing by the South African weapons company Denel can be found at http://www.denel.co.za. For more advanced weapons systems, see http://www.deneldynamics.co.za/. Denel was formerly Armscor: Armaments Corporation of South Africa

4 At that stage peace negotiations, which never developed into anything concrete, were between Angola and South Africa. Only at the end of the war when Washington, Moscow, Lisbon and the combatant nations sat around the table at the behest of the Americans, was a peace plan finally thrashed out.

CHAPTER SIX

1 Koevoet was also known during the 1970s and 1980s war as ‘Operation K’, or officially as the ‘South West Africa Police Counter-Insurgency Unit’ (SWAPOLCOIN). Strictly a police counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet was the single most effective para-military unit deployed against SWAPO fighters and had a higher ‘kill rate’ than any other military unit deployed during the course of the war.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1 In Afrikaans, Suidwes Afrika Polisie Teensinsurgensie.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1 ‘Natasha’ is a synthetic female voice information and reporting system (VIFR) that warns pilots if they are flying too low, if the engine malfunctions or the aircraft is running low on fuel. In American fighter planes it is called ‘Bitching Betty’.

CHAPTER NINE

1 Al J. Venter deals with the Executive Outcomes Angolan operation in considerable detail in his previous book on the subject of mercenaries: War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia U.S. and Newbury U.K., 2006, Chapters 15 to 19 pp349–444.

CHAPTER TEN

1 It’s worth mentioning that once Mobutu’s regime had been toppled, all three black officers topped Kabila’s ‘most wanted military and civilian suspects’ list, but that was only after they’d ensconced themselves in lavish homes in Johannesburg. When Baramoto fled, he took with him a hundred million dollars in American currency and bags full of raw diamonds, some of them checked through at the airport as luggage. He also took his five wives, an indeterminate number of children and a multitude of freeloaders who seemed to form part of his extraordinarily extended family-in-exile

CHAPTER TWELVE

1 The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, or ECOMOG, was a West African multilateral armed force established by the Economic Community of West African States. Essentially, it was a formal arrangement for separate armies to work together, its backbone being the Nigerian armed forces. Its financial resources and sub-battalion strength units were contributed by other regional members including Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

2 See Al J. Venter, War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia U.S. and Newbury UK, Chapter 18 ‘Taking Angola’s Diamond Fields from the Rebels’, pp425–444

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1 Hamish Ross and Fred Marafono, From SAS to Blood Diamond Wars, Pen and Sword Military, 2011

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1 Al J. Venter, War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars, Casemate Publishers, U.S. and U.K., 2006: Chapter 6 ‘The United Nations Debacle in West Africa’ pp131–154

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1 Late 2001, during the UN mandated cease-fire, Nellis’ original Hind did come down after its main engine seized while on a sortie in the interior. It crashed in a clearing and a British Army major was killed on impact. Nellis and crew had to revert to using the Sierra Leone Air Wing’s ‘semi-serviceable’ reserve Mi-24 with its 80mm under-wing rocket pods. Without air conditioning in the tropics it was a bit of bind for those who flew in her.

2 Major Phil Ashby, Unscathed: Escape From Sierra Leone, Pan Macmillan Publishers, London, 2002.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1 Tim Butcher, The Daily Mail, London 29 August 2010

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1 ‘Taliban Missile Downed Helicopter’: Daily Telegraph, London, 27 July 2010, p 5

2 U.S. Army Colonel Lester W. Grau deals with these attacks in some detail in his book The Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 1998