‘His own stupidity!’ said the officer, obviously annoyed at the loss of one of his men which he regarded as unnecessary. ‘He should have looked! Each one of them has been trained for that kind of thing.’

Lieutenant Soto’s men were a mixed bunch. Some carried 31/2½inch bazookas, the same M20 ‘Super Bazooka’ that Jane’s Infantry Weapons describes as being of ‘elderly design’. Nevertheless, they were useful weapons in this kind of primitive country and if not always adequate for retaliation, useful in a tight spot.

While the rebels had the more versatile RPG-7, the men with the M20s were pleased with what they’d been issued, especially since the weapons were made of aluminium and relatively light. Also, they could be dismantled when not in use. According to the instruction manual, the maximum practical range was a bit more than 1,100 yards, though I’ve yet to see it hit anything at that distance.

There were also a number of M60 general-purpose machine-guns spread along the length of the column. Those hauling them would spread-eagle their 7.62mm ammunition belts across their chests and over their shoulders. To the casual observer, it looked glamorous, but was it practical? Probably not, but as in most Third World conflicts, the image was appropriately macho and the men had faith in their Gringo weapons, though with all that ammunition, these were inordinately heavy loads to lug across mountains.

When questioned about an enemy presence, the lieutenant was candid. There was no doubt there were guerrillas around, ‘but you won’t spot them easily’, said Soto. He swung an arm expansively about the countryside. ‘There!’ he pointed across a rare stretch of open ground at a tree-line some distance away. ‘And there’, indicating a valley at the edge of our vision, ‘and there’, at the mountains nearest us. ‘Everywhere!’ he added with emphasis and we had to smile because the way he talked, we were surrounded…

‘You saw what took place this morning?’ he asked. We nodded. ‘Well it can happen again. It will, if not today, then tomorrow. Or the day after… that’s the way this war goes’, he declared.

Lieutenant Soto was not the typical Central American conscript officer. Well-educated and reflecting some of the attributes of the class into which he’d been born, he intended to become an architect when the war was over. ‘Much to rebuild!’ he said.

His was a rich family, with land in the west. He’d been to a private school in Mexico City where English was compulsory. After having been commissioned in the army he’d done a few months at an American military school on the East Coast, but wouldn’t say where. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d have liked the rebels to get to know about, as if they didn’t already.

‘What’s the strength of the rebel force here?’ somebody asked. Soto was vague: a hundred, maybe 200. He had his ideas, but there was nothing specific.

The FMLN was obviously in the region in some strength, for when we passed through a little village in the afternoon and his men asked the usual questions, the campesinos were uncooperative. Some were aggressive, every face a portrait of grief. They told us only enough to get us on our way again.

‘You see for yourself what they think of us’, he said after we’d taken off again. ‘They are frightened… the guerrillas are nearby.’

I was glad to be out of there.

Once we’d begun walking, it became a hard slog. I’d taken the trouble to get myself into shape, but already I felt done-in and it was only midday. I had to compete with men half my age who’d been nurtured from childhood in these mountains: most were local boys.

We followed no determined route. Soto indicated to the north-east on his map and the man at point went off in that general direction. He wanted to reach a particular village before nightfall: Carlos somethingor-other. He knew the people there and said it was safe, or reasonably so.

Nothing in the war, he stressed several times then and later, was really secure. It was all a question of degree, he suggested. And preparedness. He’d been instructed by the colonel back in San Miguel to see us through it all safely and he was taking no chances.

So we walked. Within three hours I had my first cramp. I sat down for a little while and said nothing because you don’t want to let the side down. The undulating hills were the worst. We often had to climb out of gulleys and ravines using our hands. There was also the heat, a hothouse clammy humidity that made my clothes stick to my body, as if I had been doused by a bucket of warm water.

There came a moment when I sought the first bit of shade ahead and lingered. Then one of the soldiers nudged me on. There was always a note of urgency in their voices.

The column marched at good speed considering that it was supposed to be a ‘casual’ four-day patrol. Once they were on their way, the men stretched the pace. Taking pictures became difficult. I was beginning to lag and it worried me. That’s when Paul came to my rescue and took my pack, the one that MacKenzie had offered to carry earlier. I declined the offer the first time but I didn’t hesitate when he suggested it again.

Every hour or so, the column halted. Then some of the men would light up a cigarette or throw themselves to the ground for a ten-minute break while others spread about on the perimeter. We all sought shade and even in those few minutes some of the troops would fall asleep: these youngsters had adapted well to a rigorous routine and they made good use of sparse opportunities.

When we reached the intended village late that afternoon, I was exhausted. In about 90 minutes it would be dark. Lieutenant Soto dispersed his men carefully and indicated strongpoints and who would be responsible for what. Wrist watches had been allotted to section leaders before the squad left San Miguel (very few El Salvadorian soldiers could afford such accoutrements, even if they were essential) and the men knew their duties. But first, he sent out several patrols to look for evidence of an enemy presence: fresh tracks or food wrappers would be enough, Soto reckoned.

We ‘slept’ – for want of a better word – that night in a tiny hamlet of about 20 adobe and leaf-roofed buildings clustered round a small square. The village, one of the older settlements, lay on a gentle slope in the foothills surrounded by some big trees that ran in a ragged line along what would have been the main drag. Some of these were traditional forest giants, gnarled and scarred. Others had been stunted by wire, or had spikes driven in to hold a cable or to support a wall. Bunches of onions hung between the leaves of those closest to ‘town’.

Pigs were everywhere. Since the rebels like to help themselves when they passed through, I was surprised that there were still so many around. Once there had been cattle, herds of them everywhere, but now there were few left, which was a pity because, as in Africa, livestock in Central America is a moveable asset.

As it got dark, a marvellous aroma enveloped us all: wood smoke mixed with the scent of frangipani and bougainvillaea. The air was suddenly fresh and cool. Elsewhere, someone was frying eggs. The village was poor and not at all clean; but I felt, as I sat in the gathering dusk, that it would have been a great place for a few days’ rest. Not just yet, though.

There weren’t more than 60 people in the place, all of Indian or mixed stock, which wasn’t that unusual in a country where more than 90 per cent of the population was officially listed as mestizo. Before the war, in UN demographical studies, only one in a hundred El Salvadorians had the dubious distinction of being classified ‘white’. Until then, I’d thought that only Israel and South Africa still categorized race.

My first impression of these people was that while many looked frail and emaciated, they’d done very well for themselves for many centuries without outside help. It was the white man who had brought his usual afflictions, including smallpox and STDs as well as his guns and rum. Like those across the water to the north, these natives too had suffered.

Nevertheless, as rustic as they may have looked to us interlopers, they seemed a good deal happier than their compadres in the cities. They were a lot more content and possibly more sedate, and that in spite of the troubles. They smiled when we arrived and were still at it when we left early the next morning.

As promised, the army fed us – beans. There was pork-and-beans, tomato-and-beans, greens-and-beans, beans-and-beans! In fact, we were treated to beans for breakfast, lunch and supper. After four days of it I was beginning to get a little tired of the menu. However, I still like beans, especially with plenty of chilli. Besides, now and again, there was a bottle of warm beer that one of our team had stowed in his bags, to wash it all down.

How did these people manage? I asked Soto. They were friendly to the army, yet this was bandit country.

‘This is a protected village. They defend themselves. They ask us for weapons and we give them to them.’ At first the rebels had tried to force their own stamp of authority on them and other communities and there were many fierce exchanges. Afterwards, when it seemed pointless to lose people for a cause that would be settled anyway after the glorious victory, the FMLN tended to avoid the place. However, any campesino caught in the open or unarmed was killed, always, as was explicitly stated, as an example to others.

‘It’s a price they pay’, he said. The villagers were most vulnerable when they went into town, as they sometimes needed to do for medical, family or other reasons. ‘Then the rebels set up road blocks… they murder anybody they suspect of having dealt with our people… quite brutal’, said the lieutenant, and added:

It’s merciless. It can also be impersonal and cold blooded, which is what has really caused so many of these peasants to revolt. Talk to them yourself… you’ll quickly see that it’s the system that the guerrillas are trying to impose that they despise. One and all. That and the fact that they’re all Christians…

The Church in El Salvador, we’d learnt even before we arrived, was opposed to most things linked to government, often diametrically, so. It blamed the politicians for the war and in a sense, the priests were right because it was greed that lay at its roots. That said, there is hardly a country in the Western Hemisphere that is not battling corruption in all its forms, though everybody was aware that El Salvador was probably a lot more crooked before hostilities started. For this and other reasons, the Church – or the Liberation Gospel as it came to be called – seemed to have a ready ear both for the revolution and the rebels, especially in some of the rural areas.

The argument propounded went along the lines that the FMLN offered a better prospect for change. But nobody could reconcile the peasants’ fundamental belief that Marxism was anti-Christian; not even the Holy Fathers. Some of the more passionate ideologists, the so-called ‘worker priests’, tried, but they never really succeeded. To these simple people, a communist was an atheist. End of story.

One got the impression after a few weeks in the country that it would take a lot more than a guerrilla war to change many of these deeply entrenched beliefs, which went back centuries.

It all came out while we sat talking about the war after dark. Often we were joined by some of the NCOs and one or two officers, none of whom could speak much English, so Soto would translate. There were probably guerrilla groups doing much the same thing in the mountains within sight of us that beautiful moonlit night. The people with us in the village were as curious about us as we were about them.

As an aside, many of these simple folk, some of whom might see a single movie a year – and then on an open screen in the countryside with a small generator providing power – were admirers of the American movie hero and cult-figure Rambo. Even among the peasants of remotest South and Central America, this kind of ubiquitous and inescapable junk-culture prevailed.

Next day we reached Santa Cruz, one of the three or four towns by that name in the region, which was all very confusing to us strangers.

The going had been hard on us all from early in the day, first marching in a thick clinging mist that obscured everything and later, in rain and mud. It was miserable. I badly needed a shower and I also seemed to have been the only one to have been the focus of mosquitoes, almost the entire night.

After a brief stop for something to eat (beans again) we climbed slowly up a long path leading into another series of foothills. Twice, single shots rang out. The soldiers would hurry forward in the direction of the sound, but they wouldn’t see anything. The bush was too thick and any kind of response was out of the question, reckoned Lieutenant Soto. At times, he said, if he had an idea of where the firing was coming from, he’d lob a few mortar bombs. But not this time…

Ghosts walked by night in Santa Cruz, the troops said. It had been abandoned for a year by the time we got there. There had once been a new administrative block and what appeared to be a fine, two-level school, complete with playing fields and a boarding establishment for children who would arrive from outlying districts. The buildings echoed voices eerily and one of the walls in front had a huge hole in it. It was creepy.

Santa Cruz had been heavily damaged by both sides as hostilities progressed. There was as much graffiti on the walls as shell-pocks. Artillery must have been used at some time or another, or was it rocket fire from the ‘Mikes’?

A rebel had written in red paint across one of the open spaces of the main building the words, a foot high: Joven Ingresa a la Escuela Militar del FMLN. They’d apparently used it as a training base and there were ammunition cases and cartridge shells everywhere. A Cuban party had even lodged there, another of the officers said.

‘Why did you let them keep the town for so long?’ I asked Soto. ‘Once you knew they had it, why didn’t you take it again? Or at least try to do so?’

‘Ah’, he said smiling, his usually infectiously convivial self. ‘Thereby hangs a tale.’ Using his bush hat with a red band around it to shade his face against the sun, he pointed down the valley from which we’d just emerged. ‘You see where we came through… it’s all tough country like that around here. The approaches too… very difficult… lots of jungle… and the mountains behind us. Look!’ A large range of hills did indeed undulate from one horizon to the other and there was only one road leading up from the floor of the valley and that was a good 20 clicks away. It wasn’t metalled either, which suggested mines.

The guerrillas have all the cover that they need. Working as they constantly do from improvised positions, they have the initiative, here, at least. Anyway, when we arrived they just withdrew: tactical retreat… good communist procedure. They’d wait until we’d left, then they’d come back. Once we depart tomorrow, they’ll be here by mid-morning again.

‘So why didn’t you stay here; in force? Occupy the place? Permanently.’ He replied:

Because then they would fight like hell to drive us out. They did it two, three times. It became a point of honour. They shot down one of our helicopters and killed the three men in it. Although the crew survived the initial impact, they were executed on the spot. They displayed their bodies in a public place… wouldn’t let anybody bury them.

It was a bad mistake, he said, because such barbarism didn’t go down with these simple village people, who know instinctively what is right and wrong.

That was when the military commanders in San Salvador decided: ‘Enough! If we cannot keep a permanent force occupying Santa Cruz, then the guerrillas won’t use it either.’ Soto had warned earlier that none of us should wander about unaccompanied and it wasn’t the enemy he was concerned about just then: his mines were laid about in the dirt outside, he intimated.

It was a pattern that had become all too common throughout the country where regions or large towns were being contested. Santa Cruz, close to the Honduran border (which remained a conduit for men and arms as long as the war went on), retained a high priority for both sides.

Steve Salisbury, an American journalist friend who covered the war in those parts for several years – and was still around when I last heard – told me of another village that was destroyed by the rebels. The town was Cinquera, which lay about 50 miles north of San Salvador and, at the time, was being defended by a squad of soldiers. All the men and boys who could carry a rifle had been formed into a makeshift selfdefence unit, but they had received little or no military training. Like much else in this war, it was all half-cocked, he reckoned.

While there, he’d met Maria Lydia Solis, a widow who had gone to fetch money and who had not only lived through it all but had survived.

The battle kicked off at sunset and went on all night, with the rebels entering the town in the morning. Although there had already been many casualties – including a dozen women and children – the rebels lined up the survivors and killed them all. Only a handful of women and children were spared and Maria Solis was one of them.

‘We begged the soldiers not to kill us all but they said we must pay. They took everything of value.’

FMLN cadres stayed four days and then left and there were any number of horror stories afterwards. Since Cinquera was only an hour’s drive from San Salvador, that sort of thing inevitably lead to questions being asked by the populace: what was the army doing all this time?

‘The worst were the wounded that they executed’, reckoned Salisbury. ‘The mayor and his secretary [who was Mrs Solis’ husband] were both badly hurt. Señor Solis had stepped on a mine some weeks before so he was already in a bad way, but no matter, they dragged him outside and shot him in the head.’

The survivors abandoned Cinquera for good as soon as government forces eventually arrived and the place remained deserted until the end of the war. Few who knew it before were eager to return.

We didn’t stay long in Santa Cruz either. For one, Soto wasn’t happy. Also, he was worried about us. Radio intercepts had disclosed that the FMLN knew that a bunch of Gringos, some with cameras, were with the column. Once before he’d been mortared while passing through: his platoon had lost a couple of men. He didn’t want that to happen again.

So we picked up our things and went off again, if only to keep out of trouble.

In the old days coffee had been a source of wealth to the people who worked these uplands. There was much evidence of the old plantations, although most of the smaller bushes had long ago gone to seed.

The graceful haciendas that hugged hillsides and offered magnificent views over the surrounding countryside were still intact, although their owners had fled. None of the old homes we passed were occupied, and from what was lying about, it was evident that guerrillas had been there too.

‘Be careful where you walk’, Soto said earnestly whenever we came to an area that had formerly been inhabited. ‘They see us coming from a long way off… then they lay their mines and set booby traps… just like in Vietnam.’ Worse, he maintained, the guerrillas had plenty of time to do it.

‘So, let my men search the place before you start filming or taking pictures because we don’t need to be calling in a chopper to haul your body out of here…’

While MacKenzie and Foley were nonchalant, we civvies tried to follow instructions. We’d follow the soldiers and, where possible, try to step in their footprints, but it wasn’t easy.

We could see from the trappings that life in the old days must have been good. It had probably been a tasteful combination of opulence and a feudal tradition that went back centuries. Naturally, there had been servants galore; their quarters invariably clustered tidily behind the main residence.

I asked Soto what would happen after the war. Would he and the other landowners go back to the old ways? He evaded the question; it was clearly embarrassing. But then he himself had been a member of the privileged class so it was understandable.

Of course, the plebeian soldiers who served under him knew it, but in some countries other than communist ones, officers still command more respect if they are gentlemen. Even the Russians, having destroyed the old upper class, found it necessary to invent a new one.

Some of the farmhouses, though ransacked, were remarkably well preserved. One, on a hill-top that commanded views all the way across to the distant mountains, lay only a short hop by helicopter from San Miguel and looked as if it had been abandoned only recently. In fact, it had been standing empty for years. We weren’t allowed in there because of booby traps, and didn’t complain.

I heard afterwards that some government troops on another farm, not too far down the road, had been badly burnt by a phosphorus grenade set above a bathroom door. It was triggered by the light switch, even though there hadn’t been any electricity there for years. Old habits die hard, it seems.

When the time came, getting us out of what had once been a minor paradise wwas a risky exercise. Again, it would be by helicopter, the colonel in San Miguel had decided.