Some South African pilots who had been at Ilopango said it was like having a photograph of somebody’s lungs who had died of cancer in front of you while you were enjoying a cigarette. ‘You knew there was danger; there was always danger’, he told me, ‘but you learnt to live with it’, he added nonchalantly.

A number of aircraft were shot down over enemy lines in this war; both helicopters and fixed-winged machines. If a crew survived the crash, they were not treated kindly. In one attack, long after we’d departed, ground fire brought down a Huey ‘Mike’ outside the village of La Estancia about 12 miles north of San Miguel, the same area where we visited derelict coffee plantations while on a ground patrol. The enemy did to the air crews what government troops did to the guerrillas: they were almost always executed after having been made to talk.

The senior pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Dan Scott, was taking Lieutenant Colonel David Pickett, Officer Commanding (OC) of the 4th Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment back to his headquarters in Honduras. He’d been on a staff visit to El Salvador and, as a shortcut, had flown from San Miguel towards San Francisco Gotera, and then tacked towards the north-east.

That way, he had reckoned, they’d reduce flying time and slip inside the established ‘Green Three’ route into Honduras that led directly to Soto Cano.

The twin M60s with which the Hueys were customarily armed, were strapped to the floor of the machine because officially, American air crews could not fly with guns mounted. Thus, for the duration of that trip they were inoperable. Again, it seems, the Yanks were the only guys in the street playing by the rules. The fact that the helicopter traversed a hotly contested region of conflict didn’t appear to matter and, in any event, nobody told the guerrillas that the helicopter wasn’t armed. They shot it down anyway.

As the war dragged on, the FMLN endured some formidable casualties. In the first six months of 1985, the El Salvadorian Armed Forces were responsible for about 3,200 insurgent losses (out of about eight or nine thousand). That included more than 1,500 of the enemy who’d surrendered. In the same time period, government forces lost 810 men killed, wounded or missing.

When the war began the El Salvadorian Air Force barely existed, even on paper. By 1983 it had 20 operational helicopters; less than two years later there were 60. Obviously, with that kind of potential, pilots had to come from elsewhere, which was when quite a few foreign aviators entered the picture, including a number from South Africa, all of them true-blue mercenaries.

This kind of escalation must have put enormous pressure on the guerrilla command. The attrition rate to their forces was clearly unacceptable. Like it or not, there came a time when the FMLN had to answer to the families of the dead. This was a people’s war.

It was consequently no surprise that Nidia Diaz, a seasoned guerrilla commander with years in the field who was captured by an Air Force helicopter hunter squadron (it combined air operations with special ground forces missions), was found with a document showing that the rebel command had already abandoned all hope of an outright military victory. The gist of it was that a negotiated peace was the only way and some cadres were already beginning to say so publicly. Still, it took almost seven more years of fighting before that happened…

The ‘Permanent Offensive’ by the government compelled the rebels to reduce their forces from battalion-sized units to sections of anything from five to perhaps a dozen men. This transition became more marked when their objectives started to become more economic than military. What followed was an intense round of sabotage: bridges and power lines were knocked down; assassinations increased; there were ambushes in the field and agitation among students and labour movements.

As we flew between Ilopango and San Salvador we could observe some of the consequences. In one area, close to the capital, there were long lines of power pylons, each knocked over by an explosive charge laid at each concrete base. Also, we flew over numerous bridges that had been blown up. At one stage we were able to land where a huge structure straddling the Trans American Highway had been destroyed. It had once been a bridge, but it had been so badly blasted that little of its original form remained intact. Because of mines, we weren’t allowed to move about.

By then about a third of the population was unemployed and in spite of governement military successes, conditions had deteriorated economically. That happens when so much of the army is tied up in guarding static assets, like bridges, electric plants, dams and so on. Consequently, more ordinary people were voting with their feet and taking their money with them. Things couldn’t continue like that much longer.

The rebels, despite heavy losses, remained active till the end. Throughout, they showed remarkable versatility, coupled, in true Castro fashion – the Cuban leader was one of the architects of what was called the ‘People’s Struggle’ – with an utter ruthlessness of purpose.

There are those counter-insurgency pundits who consider the FMLN, in its day, as one of the best unconventional armies of the time. They reckon, even now – and despite having lost the war – that when the guerrillas fought, there were no restrictions. They waged their war in the age-old traditional manner of using every means at their disposal to harm the enemy. There was never a question of its having one arm tied behind its back, and the fact that the international press gave them tacit support counted for an awful lot.