APPENDIX A: MY WAR IN EL SALVADOR

BY PETER G. KOKALIS

The below article, which appeared in the November 2000 issue of SOF, provides an intensive insight into the type of training that SOF volunteers provided to various units of the Salvadoran Army.

I went to El Salvador to fight the Evil Empire twenty one times, more than any other member of the SOF staff. It became personal, very personal. My first trip was in 1983. My last occurred in 1992; just before the peace accord was signed. My decade in El Salvador was the seminal experience of my life. I wrote about my experiences fifteen times in Soldier Of Fortune. Although nothing I wrote could ever convey the emotions and memories I hold so close to my heart, what follows is a brief more or less chronological summary of my training missions, including the issue of SOF in which my account appeared.

SEPTEMBER 1983

The first and last words of the first article I ever wrote about El Salvador bear re peating as they eerily set the tone for my entire decade in that tormented land.

“Four companies of men pile out of new, tan-colored Ford, three-ton trucks and fall into formation in front of the headquarters building at Ilopango Airport, El Salvador. The usual grunting and straining is accompanied by the clatter and banging of field equipment and infantry weapons.

“My attention is drawn first to their cammies, a pattern I do not recognize.

My eyes sweep upward and lock on their faces—regal Mayan features, covered by death masks applied with black face paint.

“Who are they?” I ask, turning to the Mil Group adviser standing next to me. “The Atlacatl Battalion,” he replies. “Bad asses, the toughest unit in El Salva dor—an immediate-reaction battalion. They really kick ass. When they move in, the Gees [guerrillas] move out or die.”

“. . .While forever attracted to its implements, God, how I loathe war. And yet . . . no wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation.”

My first full day in country I trained the antiaircraft/perimeter-defense battery at Ilopango Airport on the disassembly-assembly/cleaning and maintenance of the M16A1 rifle. The following day I worked with the doorgunners of the heli copter squadron and their M60-D guns. Afterwards, I walked over to where the company from the Atlacatl Battalion was assembled and began to examine and work on their badly abused M60s. That evening 1st Lt. David Koch of the Atlacatl Battalion stopped by the hotel and asked if I could help them with Las Cincuentas, as they called the .50-caliber Browning M2 HB. The next day I did and the day following I worked with the Atlacatl M60 gunners. It was the beginning of my long association with the Atlacatl Battalion. Under the command of Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa Barrios and their executive officer Major Jose Armando Azmitia Melara they were without doubt the finest combat unit in El Salvador.

JANUARY 1984

I conduct an intensive three-week retraining cycle for the elite Atlacatl Battalion. Since its inception on 1 March 1982, the battalion has seen more combat than any unit in El Salvador. I trained the battalion armorers, conducted a section weapons seminar for all the officers and NCOs, trained the M60 GPMG and .50 caliber Browning M2 HB crews in depth, and conducted intensive ambush/ counter-ambush drills.

MARCH 1984

Assignment to Salvadoran Cavalry Regiment—work with French AAT 7.62 NFi GPMG, coaxial gun on the Panhard AML (Automittrailleuse Legere) Armored Car, and the earliest version of Heckler and Koch’s HK21 GPMG, as well as the Ar gentine FMK 9mm submachine gun.

DECEMBER 1984

I had spent two weeks prior conducting weapons research and repair with the Atlacatl battalion. I also conducted trials comparing the M79 and M203 40mm grenade launcher. While the M203 when mounted on an M16A1 returns a rifle-man to the platoon, its principal sighting system is a plastic quadrant sight that mounts to the left side of the M16A1 carrying handle. It’s entirely too fragile and would return from 90 days in the bush in a paper bag. It was my recommendation to Major Azmitia that they decline the replacement of their M79s with the M203. He concurred.

MARCH 1986

Flying combat missions aboard the ancient AC-47 with three AN-M3 .50 caliber Browning machine guns mounted in the two windows adjacent to the left cargo door. Circling in “pylon turns” and blasting communist guerrillas to pieces was a rewarding experience, but after firing no more than 2,300 rounds all three of our original guns had failed and we were forced to call upon the spares. The mean rounds between failure was less than 700. There were also more than one dozen feed stoppages—cleared almost immediately by manual cocking. Why all these problems with the usually incredibly reliable Browning?

After the mission I spent a day in the air force armory inspecting mainte nance, repair and calibration techniques used on these weapons. Not instructed otherwise, the Salvadoran armorers submerged the back plate assembly, without disassembly, into the cleaning solvent. Solvent seeped into the buffer housing and got trapped between the Belleville washers that then acted as a solid wall during the gun’s recoil cycle, robbing the system of all buffering action. The consequent stress overload on the reciprocating components caused parts to break with alarm ing frequency. The immediate fix was to disassemble the back plate with the cor rect spanner, remove the solvent, dry and lubricate the washers and all recipro cating parts in the bolt and feed assemblies with the proper lubricant. As a con sequence, the number of failures were reduced to acceptable levels.

AUGUST 1986

Training the Salvadoran Airborne Battalion I am afforded a rare opportunity to examine and study captured small arms.

MAY 1988

Working with the “PRAL” a highly secret clandestine infiltration group funded by the CIA and based at Ilopango, I study a wide range of land mines, anti-person nel and vehicular, but mostly improvised. They range from the Mina Atlacatl (named after the Atlacatl Battalion which first encountered it), Mina Anti-Trans-porte Arce-I (named after the Arce Immediate Reaction Battalion), Rayo de la Muerte (Ray of Death), Papa (Pope or potato), to the Mina Caza-Yanqui (Yan kee-Chasing Mine).

While the U.S. left-wing press never ceased its cacophonous chant about the so-called human rights abuses of the Nicaraguan contras, they remained totally silent about the thousands of innocent campesinos maimed and murdered by Marxist mines in El Salvador.

NOVEMBER 1990

I designed an intensive five-day course for the Equipo de Reaccion Especial (Special Reaction Team or ERE) of El Salvador’s Policia Nacional (PN), which would provide training in the handgun, MP5 submachine gun, combat shotgun, and M16A1.

SEPTEMBER 1991

Consisting of 50 enlisted personnel and one officer, ERE’s mission included sniper incidents, barricaded terrorists with hostages, VIP protection and counterterrorist operations in general. In addition, the ERE continued to raid Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) safe houses on an almost daily basis, capturing terrorists and large caches of weapons, munitions and explosives. All of these scenarios pro vided potential applications for highly skilled marksmen with scoped rifles. A three-day course was developed for the ERE that would offer Level 1 training in basic marksmanship, maintenance and the urban tactics required of police coun-tersnipers.

MARCH 1992

Back in country to provide Level II countersniper training to the ERE, we partic ipate in a house search that included 26 ERE members. No war that I participated in before or since, including Afghanistan, Angola/Southwest Africa or Bosnia-Herzegovina came even close to the total commitment I gave to El Salvador and its people. It was my war. Siempre Atlacatl. God, how I loved them!

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POSTSCRIPT—Several years subsequent to the above events, the Director General of the newly formed Policia Nacional Civil (PNC), Rodrigo Avila, who I had met during the war, asked me if I would be willing to come to El Salvador again and help him with the several different SWAT teams of the PNC. They were in the midst of fighting the deadly street gangs, collectively known as Mara Salvatrucha Trece (aka Las Maras) and desperately needed training. Assembling a team of vol unteer professionals, I accepted his invitation and went down numerous times until The FMLN candidate, Mauricio Funes became president of El Salvador on 1 5 March 2009. At that time I left another country whose war we had won only to lose the peace.