At first glance, the youthful American, then in his late twenties, appeared to slot perfectly into his new-found job. He had brought his own stock of firearms and boxed ammunition to Africa, and having done his homework – he was an avid reader – he’d arrived reasonably well prepared. The work was tough, but he was in superb physical shape. That, a solid sense of bush craft, and a level of stamina rarely found outside the ranks of the Green Berets made for an enviable package. Certainly, his physical ability and fairly recently acquired bush craft put the rest of us to shame.

From the start, we were aware that McGrady was certainly not prone to that common failing to which most Americans are susceptible: underestimating the enemy:

I know what I’m up against. I also know what they can do as well as what they’ve done. So, before I get involved in a scrap, I scratch everywhere for background research on the particular brand of gook active in the area in which I’m going to operate. And in the broader picture, I like to make sure I’m supporting the right cause… can’t do something you don’t believe in.

Then I get to try to understand their culture, which is essential if you’re going to avoid misunderstandings which are most-times unnecessary. And when I’m on ops in the bush, I kind of go into what I like to call my sixth, ultra-alert sense… keep’s me alive and well.

He had his own personal philosophy about motivation: why he was there. It went something like this:

Both the ZANLA and ZIPRA terrorist groups are pretty brutal when it comes to killing anybody who might be opposed to what they stand for. Here I emphasize the ‘might’ part of the equation because you can die very easily for what they think you might be thinking, not what you really are. It’s the same kind of totalitarianism that we’ve seen in Cambodia and parts of Lebanon: the ‘all or nothing syndrome’.

If you’re not for them, it is assumed you must be against them… it’s all black and white and not a single grey…

He’d long ago learnt that the insurgents, on average, killed a dozen or more blacks to every white. He was opposed to that kind of anarchy. He went on:

I’m not in Rhodesia to keep the power in the hands of the white minority. I just didn’t want a despot taking over and making life miserable for everyone.

Those bastards will take a village chief from his hut, cut off his ears, his lips and sometimes other parts and force his wife and other family members to eat those body parts. Then they’ll murder him and often deal with the rest of the family in the same way, simply because they’re family.

We’ve had some of the white people captured who have been similarly brutalized; women were raped, babies hung from trees and bayoneted. Not the kind of people that I’d ultimately like to see running any country…

The first few days out in the wilds had been difficult. The immediate difference between the American and us was that McGrady had his bush legs and it was all us city folk could do was to keep pace. But then he’d been doing this kind of thing for a while. He’d been trying for months to get himself a kill, or as he phrased it, ‘a terr, two preferably, both dead.’³

That kind of jargon was pretty specific to the bars around Salisbury. A dead gook could bring in $1,500 in Rhodesian dollars from the authorities, or at least that’s what the posters promulgated, only in less abrasive lingo. Moreover, this American wanted a piece of the action.

McGrady acknowledged that while it all sounded fine, it was a two way street. ‘They’ might get him first, he conceded, which was why he’d invited us along for the ride. And then, when things started going sour with the other two, he thought the better of it.

‘Bad mistake,’ he would comment, usually late in the day. ‘Could have done better on my own…’

He was annoyed that the Greek didn’t know how to move silently through the bush. Worse, he couldn’t keep his trap shut, especially towards sunset when the bush went quiet. Or that Gunter – whom he called the German – demanded to fill his water bottles each time we crossed a stream.

Gunter wasn’t actually a German as his name suggested. He’d been born in South Africa and for a fitness freak who was supposed to have spent time with the Recces, he didn’t strike us as being among the sharpest of Special Forces honchos. On the second night out, about half way through his watch, McGrady spotted him standing tall in the moonlight doing windmill stretching exercises to limber up. Eyes rolling, the American wondered out loud if the man had ever been anywhere near one of South Africa’s crack reconnaissance regiments…

Also, his constant need for water worried us. The man perspired like a hog. We’d walk a mile and his entire uniform would be soaked: clearly, that wasn’t normal. Whereas the rest of us could manage on between three and five water bottles a day, he needed 20. Only later did we hear that it was a medical problem that had precluded him from long-range ops with the army. A couple of years after our little jaunt in the bush, we heard that Gunter had died of a heart attack, which was unusual because he was otherwise fit and strong.

Those first few days were tough. Though it took time, we adapted quickly and were able to keep pace with McGrady from the second day. Like the American, we soon became accustomed to this strange and sometimes curiously muted world, where conflict had intruded like no other modern-day influence. To those involved, McGrady included, it was almost a game: men on the hunt, intent on destroying each other. In another sense, the chequerboard had enveloped us all: an uncompromising game, as someone called it, ‘Them or Us’.

Some, like McGrady, did it for a cause. Others were into it for the money. These new-style Africa-bound bounty hunters could make a good deal of cash. Moreover, it was all tax-free.

Our first-night ambush position near the Gwaai River wasn’t ideal. Rushing water from the adjacent stream tended to conceal any noise we made, but then, as McGrady pointed out, it would do so for the enemy as well if they crept up on us.

While the position alongside the river wasn’t too exposed, there were fresh tracks in the vicinity and they worried him. Earlier, we’d crossed an even bigger waterway, the Shangani River, swollen now by six weeks of heavy rain to a torrent that defied crossing in anything but the improvised pontoon we’d used to get to the other side. It was a bulky and unwieldy device made of 55-gallon drums which barely floated properly and which we had to propel across with a long pole.

A local Rhodesian rancher took us across the river and his four African employees had to push hard against the current.

‘When you get back, fire three evenly spaced shots and we’ll come and fetch you’, the rancher told us. ‘It’ll take me about 45 minutes to round up the crew so don’t be in too much of hurry’, were his parting words to us.

The rancher said nothing about what we should do if we were on the run, possibly with a squad of rebels at our heels. Because of crocs, swimming wasn’t an option, or shouldn’t have been, although I hadn’t yet totally rejected the idea. No question they were around, because the rancher had almost lost one of his dogs a few days before we got there when it jumped into the water and swam across to be with its master.

In the days that followed, we saw a lot of tracks. Some reflected the linear chevron design that distinguished ZIPRA from their Mozambique-orientated ZANLA counterparts who owed their allegiance to Robert Mugabe.

Occasionally, McGrady would lay his assault rifle on the ground as an improvised measuring stick to pick up the spoor after it had trailed off into different directions. It was another aspect of the game: nobody walked in a straight line any longer than they had to in this kind of counter-insurgency warfare.

We also noticed a few figure-of-eights left in the deep mud by recent visitors wearing Czech boots. They worried McGrady because the Czech-trained insurgents had already garnered a reputation for stealth and ruthlessness. The American estimated that because of the rains, none of the tracks were more than a day old. Our black tracker, who boasted the illustrious name of Montgomery, concurred.

Obviously, while we saw nobody in that vast Rhodesian bush, we weren’t alone. On the face of it, the entire region looked abandoned, or possibly just sparsely inhabited because of the war. However, there were people about and, as McGrady suggested when the Greek thought otherwise, that had to be expected on the fringe of Rhodesia’s Lupani Tribal Trust Land. Whoever and wherever they were, he quietly declared, he hoped we’d find them before they spotted us. I liked that about the man: few things fazed him, and in the bush he took nothing for granted.

As the American ruminated after our little jaunt was over, just about wherever you go on the continent of Africa, ‘there’ll always be a face somewhere, peeping out of the bush at you…’

The second night out, we’d taken up a position further towards the north. The sun had barely set before the drums started. Obviously emanating from one of the villages we’d circumvented, they were closer than we’d initially suspected. That accentuated our problem.

Gunter wanted to know if this was a warning to other villages that we were in the area. ‘We’ll know the answer to that one if they attack’, McGrady retorted.

Which meant that none of us slept easily that night.

There was another issue. We were all aware that the war had entered a new and more aggressive phase than before. Even cursory evidence of an army presence in an area might have set the infiltrators on the run in the past. As hostilities progressed, things changed. By the time we arrived in this remote region north of the main highway between Bulawayo and the Zambian border post at Victoria Falls, those doing the hunting, we’d heard, were increasingly becoming the hunted.

Barely a week earlier, McGrady had lost one of his Rhodesian buddies in just such a counter-attack. It had come as a surprise, if only because nobody believed that such a small guerrilla unit could be quite so assertive: there were only about six or eight of them. The man’s unit had been following tracks, but the enemy they were after doubled back. They attacked at sunset just as the four-man ‘stick’ settled down for a night ambush.

The event was instructive and McGrady made the rest of us take note: we were no longer dealing with a bunch of amateurs, he averred.

‘They’re good, these guys… bush savvy… this is their land and they’re familiar with just about all of it. They get the locals to be their eyes and ears, even if it needs a little coercion from the business end of a barrel. If that happens, we’re going to have no option but to reckon with them.’ For once there were no questions from either Gunter or the Greek.

With these thoughts in mind, an hour or two in the rain-sodden bush, perched as we were alongside a fast-flowing river, sometimes seemed to last half the night. There were two watch spells for each of the two groups: McGrady and I covered the first three hours of darkness, followed by the other two and then us again. The routine would be repeated until dawn and the process would be reversed the following night. After we’d discovered that the Greek had dozed off over his rifle, none of us got any real rest.

I asked the American what we needed to do to remedy a situation that could become critical. His reply was unequivocal: ‘shoot the bastard the next time it happens’, which was what he’d already told the man the first time he’d kicked him awake while he was supposed to be on watch.

The presence of goats didn’t help either as they added to our edginess. In the dark it was easy to mistake their deep, throaty grunts with a human cough, or possibly somebody clearing his throat. When that happens, you sit up, move your finger across the slide towards the trigger and try to peer through the fog of night to see what’s going on.

Also disconcerting were the screams of a baboon troop in the bush after dark. Were they fighting or was it a leopard on the hunt? With so many of these big cats about, one would have thought the primates would have preferred not to broadcast their presence…

It seemed like an eternity before they would move on.

There was also a mysterious wild creature that would wake us with a start every hour or so when it would jump into the water within yards of where we were stretched out, usually accompanied by a loud splash. It was probably a water monitor and the noise would startle those who weren’t already lying there with their eyes open. It would take a minute or two for the muscles to slacken again. Meanwhile, the mind would remain taut.

‘As tight as a guitar string’, was how McGrady succinctly phrased it.

By first light, we were up. By then, Gunter had usually already crammed his soggy sleeping bag into his pack and shouldered it. He’d hang about and wait for us to get ready. Almost every morning we were out, he’d complain that the weight of his pack had doubled, which was when one of us would remind him about the rain. McGrady would shrug and mutter something about us putting our lives at risk with this man…