THEGUERRILLAS HIT THE NAVAL base at La Unión on the Gulf of Fonseca along El Salvador’s Pacific coast some months before we got there. They killed dozens of young conscripts for the loss of a handful of their own.
It was a remarkable victory for the rebels. Their fighters entered the base some time after midnight and they’d evidently reconnoitred it very carefully over a long period and knew exactly what obstacles had to be overcome. First they cut the throats of the guards. Without firing a shot, they moved quickly among the barracks buildings and hurled grenades into open windows before anyone could even begin to assess the threat, or how to counter it. The raid made a great stir throughout the country.
A year later, in March 1987, a similar raid was carried out on the headquarters of the 4th Brigade at El Paraiso. Altogether 20 soldiers were officially said to have been killed, though the actual figure was something more like 70.
An American instructor, Sergeant First Class Greg Fronius, died while trying to rally a defence after their El Salvadorian officers had abandoned their charges. Guerrillas attempted to overrun the camp and kill everyone there, but they weren’t as successful as they might have been.
Once it was over, enemy losses, said Harry Claflin, were estimated to be close to 100, though the actual number remains in dispute because in keeping with revolutionary ideology, the guerrillas would always try to take their casualties with them. The reason for doing so was to avoid giving their adversaries any kind of moral or propaganda advantage.
While these attacks happen every now and again, the consequences were seldom as critical as at La Unión. Some people believed the attack on the naval base might have been the turning point of the war. There were those who claimed that the FMLN had gained an almost irreversible advantage.
The reality was that the attack was admirably coordinated. Even with more moderate losses, it would have been the kind of operation that any guerrilla commander would have been proud of. For the Salvadorian Estado Mayor (General Staff), it exposed a critical lack of order and discipline that was demoralizing and one of the reasons why the base at San Miguel was on such a high alert while we were around.
Following those developments, one of the American military observers suggested that the attacks made clear that government forces were getting very little real-time intelligence. He made the point in a report that was widely circulated that nobody in the country knew what was going to happen next. The comment, objective and clearly wellintentioned, resulted in his being labelled a guerrilla ‘fellow traveller’ and his reports were subsequently viewed with scepticism. But of course, he was perfectly correct.
The fact was that the FMLN had executed the La Unión raid with great precision, preceded by months of excellent planning. They had come undetected across the broad waterway between the two countries after dark in several small boats, which meant that their radar images must have been minimal and were probably not picked up by shore monitoring stations. And even if they were, the operators did not report in. Also, their weapons were waiting for them in safe houses on shore. There was nothing tell-tale that might have alerted anybody on watch at the time.
One of the immediate consequences of the La Unión debacle was that it sharpened American resolve to take a more active part in the war. There were gaps in the defences of El Salvador that Washington proposed to plug. Ultimately, it did.
Many of the men with solid experience of other wars in South-East Asia, whom I encountered in remote places, were sent to Central America on training missions. If they got into a few scrapes in the course of their duties, or accounted for a few gooks along the way, ran the argument in certain Washington circles, then so much the better. Each time it happened, the authorities tended to look away. There were no Gringos involved in this Central American war…
The media was another story. American journalists made a thing of ‘aid’ people with weapons in their baggage arriving in El Salvador, much as they might have done with us had there been somebody from the New York Times or one of the other major American dailies when we touched down. It would probably have been front page news in both Washington and New York the next day, especially if it were also shown that one of our members was a member of that ultra-exclusive little band of warriors known as USMILGP-EL, or in the lingo, US Military Group, El Salvador.
In our circles, we would use the phrase Mil Group – or MilGroup – among whom Harry Claflin was one of its more successful members. In the end, American veterans attached to units of the El Salvadorian Army under MilGroup’s auspices did outstanding work. Effectively, they had a hand in turning the war around.
Harry Claflin had done solid time in South-East Asia, which included two tours with US Marine Reconnaissance in I Corps, where he ran recce patrols along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. Certainly, he had his own views on what was going on just then in Central America. I shared a room with him at Ilopango Airport during some of our forays and was aware that he’d been badly shot up during one of his ‘Nam tours of duty in 1966. You couldn’t miss it when he got dressed.
Harry’s ‘home from home’ at Ilopango was pretty simple as digs go, but it was secure. Though on a military air base, we were unlikely to take ‘incoming’ so close to the capital. More importantly, it cost us nothing. When we didn’t go out, we pulled out a few boxes of Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs) – ubiquitous, any-army meals that are ready for immediate consumption. All I had to do each morning was roll up my sleeping bag.
Harry – with loads of combat experience – and never one for chitchat, was as terse about his personal background as he was about what was going on around him. ‘Sometimes you win and there are times when you lose’, were his words. But in El Salvador just then, he suggested, ‘the insurgents are starting to get hurt’.
Years later he and I shared a few retrospective notes and his revelations are interesting.
Claflin stated:
I worked with these local troops about a year and though it took a while, I gradually brought them up to speed. The stuff that I’d originally done with Recon Platoon came to the attention of quite a few people. In fact, the MilGroup people took a lot of interest. So did the El Salvador Chief of Staff, which was probably why I was asked to put together a programme to train a reconnaissance type element for the El Salvador Army’s 4th Brigade.
The idea was to prepare the guys for special missions and they gave me a free hand. I suggested that I prepare the men by combining two programmes that the Marine Corps had run in Vietnam: the Stingray Project and the Small Unit Action Forces Program. Stingray was run by Force Recon, and in its day was pretty damn successful.
It was on this basis that I finally helped to create GOE, or Goupos de Operaciones Especiales. By the time we were done, we’d trained them from their bootstraps to their eyeballs. I can tell you now, they were sharp!
Other, similar GOE units followed and no doubt these initiatives helped shorten the war. Claflin also commented:
You must remember that by 1983 – when Washington first sent military advisers to help the El Salvador Military – the country, like all Central American states at this time, was simply not prepared for war. Two years later, because of US assistance, the El Salvador Military was up to the task of kicking the shit out of the gooks.
What our 55 American advisers did, was to take a Third World army and remould it into a modern combat force. The success of the military with which we were involved at a very basic level (and here we’re talking about 1989) – led to what the media termed the Final Offensive. By then many FMLN cadres were getting desperate.
Their leaders, sitting comfortably way back behind the lines – most of them in Sandinista country anyway – wouldn’t believe any of it. They couldn’t accept that a tiny nation like El Salvador was fielding seasoned troops and getting results. This was a real blunder on the part of the enemy, because they’d started to believe their own bullshit.
They actually still held out the ideal of the people rising up in unison with them and overthrowing the government… didn’t happen… couldn’t happen. Those same people on whom the guerrillas were counting had had more than a gutful of the FMLN.
We ended up destroying the FMLN Military Wing. It was never again to become as active as it had been in the past.
As to the Political Wing, the first Presidential elections in which the FMLN was able to participate, the results said it all. Because of the peace accords, they carried only one percent of the vote… a single percentage point! So much for the glorious fucking revolution…
And today, into the New Millennium, many years after the fighting has stopped, El Salvador is by far the most modern of the Central American countries and certainly the biggest friend we have in the entire region.
Our Huey pilot approached La Unión with circumspection at dawn a few days after we’d been lifted out of a position in the hills north of San Miguel. He circled twice before landing and looked carefully in all directions as he did so. It wasn’t that he was nervous, he said: in fact, he would have welcomed the chance to give his gunners something to shoot at.
Only afterwards did he confide that one small guerrilla unit – an elite bunch of fighters – had taken to firing at Air Force helicopters from the foothills each time they flew over. Nobody could get a fix on their position in order to retaliate. Even worse, he suggested, the FMLN had got their hands on some SAM-7s. It was not impossible that this same bunch of operatives had them too.
That, in itself, was a good deal less disconcerting than it might have been 12 months earlier, because South Africa had become a clandestine partner in the war. There was already some cooperation between Pretoria and Military Headquarters in San Salvador and some of the lessons learnt fighting Russian-backed insurgents in Angola had been passed on. One of these was that if a pilot saw a SAM-7 coming, he had perhaps a second or two to take evasive action. It had been proven often enough that it was easier for a chopper to get out of the way of a ground-to-air missile than a fixed-wing aircraft. Another pointer was that if there was a real, or suspected, anti-aircraft threat, tree-top level flying was the preferable option. It is extremely difficult to get a bead on an aircraft if you only have it in view for seconds, never mind still knock it out of the sky, the South Africans explained.
From the ground, as we drove through the town on the way to the naval base, we found that La Unión was very different from how it appeared from the air. It should have been a big place, with coffee factories and warehouses on the outskirts. The suburbs were modern, extensive and well laid out, though quite a few had been abandoned because of the war.
With its distinctive red tiled roofs, friezes and Spanish architecture, La Unión before the war had been allowed space to grow. There was none of the congestion of San Miguel or some of the other conurbations in the region.
On closer inspection, it was smaller than we’d expected. Also, it was run-down. The harbour, by contrast, was relatively new; because of the war it had been renovated and extended. Nicaragua lay across the bay and the port clearly had a certain strategic value. One also got the impression that La Union must have been an active commercial harbour before hostilities. On our visit there were only fishing boats and half-adozen naval craft tied up alongside. No small cargo boats or oil tankers, like we saw at La Libertas farther to the west.
Some of the smaller fighting boats were US Navy Island Class patrol craft; high-speed aluminium boats with crews of 14. They’d all been delivered to El Salvador after the attack on La Unión, which underscores the assertion about war changing the nature of conflict in a particular sphere, sometimes irrevocably.
Apart from soldiers on patrol, La Union was hardly a town at the business end of an increasingly acrimonious civil conflict. All the buildings in the central business district, many with plate-glass windows, were still intact. Also, we found that early in the day, life seemed slower than elsewhere in the country, though things were happening: shops and cafes were opening, a postman started his rounds and a group of kindergarten children were being taken to school. To many of its residents, if there was any fighting, it might have been taking place on another continent.