8

Mixed Fortunes of War

‘… Sometimes in Africa a heavy machine-gun can be as effective as ten tanks elsewhere …’

Lt-Col Tim Spicer, former chief executive of Sandline and author of
Unorthodox Soldier

Of all the soldiers we were to meet in Angola, Chaplain Lieutenant Jorge, a Roman Catholic priest, was probably more intimately associated with the problem of refugees than anyone else in the country. In June 1968, he was awarded the silver medal with palm clusters for bravery under what was termed ‘exceptionally dangerous conditions in the field’.

His story was not only interesting, it had an almost Walt Disney resonance about it; single-handed, almost, he’d managed to rescue several thousands of people from their abductors in the jungle near Sao Salvador in the north. With a platoon of commandos, it had been his job to follow a group of civilians estimated to be about 6,000-strong and who had been taken hostage by the rebels. If they were to be forced to cross the Congolese border, the majority would be irrevocably compromised; many of the males of whatever age would end up waging war against the Portuguese.

Though small numbers of Kazombo tribal folk had managed to escape from the main body, they, in turn, had been captured by Portuguese forces following up.

The Kazombos told the Portuguese that the rebels in control numbered perhaps 400, not all of them armed. More important, the entire column was critically short of food and quite a few of the civilians had already died of starvation. Privations apart, the guerrillas were vigorous in their efforts to hustle these people across the border. Apparently they were headed for an area just east of Matadi, the main Congolese port and an often-used refugee transit-point.

With that information in hand, the Portuguese High Command ordered that a company of Special Forces be dropped into an area adjacent the frontier, hopefully, just ahead of the convoy. Two more companies of soldiers set out by road from Sao Salvador with the intention of creating a pincer movement and trying to cut the main body off.

Had the Portuguese forced the insurgents to fight, the results might have been catastrophic. In the heat of battle, in those primitive circumstances, it would have been impossible to distinguish civilians from guerrillas. Moreover, as with irregular struggles in other parts of the globe, ‘human shields’ had already become a reality and Angola was no exception in the late 1960s.

Such confusion would result not only in unnecessary deaths but also in many of the guerrillas using the disorder to escape into the jungle. This had already happened twice earlier that year under circumstances that were much the same, though this was the largest group of civilians yet.

Padre Jorge volunteered to approach the improvised jungle camp on his own in a bid to make contact with the elders. He was familiar with the area from which they had originated and could speak their native Bakongo. As a priest, he was confident that he might be able to persuade the villagers to force a halt to the march, even though it would take time and effort, and possibly, several such visits. Essentially he needed to win confidence within a community that was not only terrified of what was taking place but distrustful.

His logic was that with a Portuguese Army right behind, any kind of delaying action might compel the insurgents to abandon their charges and high-tail it, possibly into the arms of the waiting commando unit. And while they might kill some of the dissenters, they couldn’t murder them all. Anyway, if any real shooting started, the army would move swiftly.

On his first night, Lieutenant Jorge tentatively approached a small party of villagers camped on the edge of the larger group. It was a risky venture, he knew, because he could just as easily have been betrayed. Having been taken by road some distance towards the camp by his own troops, it was still a two hours march through the bush on his own, much of it in the dark. Because the guerrillas posted guards, he couldn’t use lights, though it helped that the moon was full.

Eventually he was able to creep close to a group that he discovered had originally come from Quitexe, a village near Carmona where he’d previously been stationed. Some of the men recognised him as they had been educated in the local mission school.

A couple of dozen of the villagers were initially sceptical, which was to be expected, the lieutenant conceded, but they could see that he was unarmed. He talked a while and then told them briefly why he had come. He offered them his blessing and said he would return the following night.

On the second visit, the priest talked most of the night. By now the group had been joined by some of the headmen from other nearby camps and, as might have been expected, that made the situation still more hazardous. Their guards, everybody knew, weren’t stupid, though it helped that everyone took turns in keeping a lookout.

The priest told them that the Portuguese were right behind. They were ready to attack the people holding them hostage. The priest promised safe passage to all who agreed to return to their former homes. They would be helped financially by the government to reestablish their sanzalas as well as their schools. Since everybody was aware that the entire area had been laid waste by the guerrillas after they had been abducted it was a reasonable offer. They’d have a market for their crops and the presence of soldiers to protect them in the fields.

Most important, he told me, the Portuguese authorities understood that they had not voluntarily joined their abductors.

In their native tongue, he warned that there was a good likelihood that some of the civilians might be killed. His people, he explained, were ordinary soldiers. While they might be efficient fighters, they simply had no means of distinguishing between their abductors and civilians, especially since few of this particular group of rebels wore uniforms. Each time prior to leaving them he would offer all those present blessings.

Every unit had its crest, proudly displayed on the parade ground. This kind of symbolism had much to do with trying to maintain morale among troops sent to Africa for years at a stretch and who had very little interest in what they often referred to as ‘this foreign war’. (Author’s photo)

The priest returned on the two following nights. The last time one of the elders asked that they start with prayers and not end with them. The priest complied.

As he recounted these events afterwards, Chaplain Lieutenant Jorge admitted that he’d reached the conclusion very early on that whatever the outcome, this would probably be one of the events of his life.

‘I can only believe that my faith in God and in the basic goodness of these people helped me through. I admit that there were moments when I wavered: it seemed incomprehensible that I would succeed. If I’d been caught, they would have cut my heart out, end to the story’, he told me earnestly.

On the fourth night he was brought before the council of headmen. The meeting had been arranged beforehand and it went quickly.

‘It was a terrible night of thunderstorms and lightning. You could have fought a battle near by and not have known the difference. I arrived about two hours after dark and I knew immediately that this was when I would either save these people or be killed myself. By now I was certain that the enemy must have been aware there was something afoot.

‘Five chiefs sat in a row, all men of importance because they carried their office with the dignity for which the Kazombo are known.’ They all spoke in Portuguese, as was the custom with these formal events.

They asked only one question for me: ‘How do we know that you are telling the truth? How can we be sure that we won’t all be killed if we return?’ It had happened before, I knew, and I couldn’t argue. But I also told them that those events had taken place in the early days of the war.

‘I could only give them my word. I said it was the word of a man of God’. The group went into a huddle for a few minutes and their leader emerged. He didn’t smile or have much to say except that they accepted the offer to return to their homes. At which point he asked what the next step should be.

Some real problems then emerged. There were still more than 5,000 refugees in the group that stretched over several kilometres. How to get them out of the control of their captors? The chaplain said that there would have to be a plan as simple as pie since these were not sophisticated people. He told the headmen that they had already had something in place, but that its implementation – with such a large number of people that included some very old and very young – would have to wait until the following day.

‘The idea was for the villagers to create conditions suitable for a small-scale sit-down strike the following morning at dawn. They’d argue that they couldn’t go on, that there were too many sick and too many of their number were either dead or dying.

‘This would give me enough time to get back to my troops and organize the unit so they could strike simultaneously. It was a tight schedule, with only about an hour to spare either way. There would be only one chance to make it all happen.

‘We would attack simultaneously—from all sides’, he said.

Meantime, the civilian leaders quietly went to work, though with a determination that he said surprised him afterwards. All the men fit enough to fight brought out what weapons they had—mostly catanas – long knives or machetes – a few spears and a few kitchen implements. The others had hoes, or had fashioned crude spears from pieces of dried wood. A few settled for wooden clubs.

The attack started at first light. The Portuguese forces held back only long enough for the civilians to make an initial impact. They then rapidly moved in.

There had been a good deal of shooting to start with. Quite a few villagers were killed, but it was the preponderant numbers of the captives together with the efforts of the army troops that turned the tide in the end. It took about an hour before the rebels were overwhelmed, though many did manage to escape into the bush.

Always a favourite tactic of rebel leaders in Third World struggles (and more marked in the early days of the Angolan war), was to move entire civilian communities, or more colloquially, sanzalas, out of their rural settlements and into the jungle.

In Uganda, as we approach the end of the first decade of the Millennium, the Lords Resistance Army is still taking hostages by the score, in part to bolster their numbers. In the process entire villages are being massacred, largely among communities that reject the demands of the self-appointed LRA leader.

The same has been taking place in Darfur in the Sudan and with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

In Angola, each time, the rebels took hostages, they would force these primitive communities across the border at gunpoint; it would be a lock, stock and cooking pot affair. If they could manage to haul along a few goats, they would take those as well; they’d need fresh meat along the way in any event.

The guerrillas had good reason for dominating the civilian population. By shifting local African communities into their domain, they were taking a large proportion of the work force out of the economic equation and that often included almost all the labour needed by Portuguese-controlled farms and plantations in order to survive. It was something that Mao had successfully incorporated into his overall plan against the Japanese, and, subsequently, against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

The immediate effect of this guerrilla tactic was to bring the economy of a region to a halt and in so doing, Mao’s people were astonishingly successful. So too, coincidentally, were ZAPU and ZANU guerrilla groups in Rhodesia’s seven-year bush war. Essentially, it was the reverse of the ‘protected villages’ agenda that the British had instituted in Malaya and which was ultimately instrumental in bringing that emergency to an end.

The Portuguese tried it themselves with their so-called aldeamentos programme [in Rhodesia protected villages were called ‘Keeps’] but in Angola and Mozambique, these Latin administrators were neither as thorough nor as systematic as their European counterparts. The bottom line was that the programme known as reordenamento rural looked fine in theory but didn’t work as well as it should have in practice.

In spite of enough barbed wire to encircle all of Africa, coupled to untold numbers of machine-gun turrets and patrols, the rebels had almost as much access to these ‘gated’ civilian communities as before. Most times they’d wait until the workers went out early in the day to till their crops: contact would be made and food, medicines and the rest would be passed along.

Taking a civilian community hostage, and setting off into the sunset with thousands of people was a different proposition.

At one stage during the height of the 1963 campaign, these measures had such a severe effect on coffee production in the north that there were shortages in most centres in Angola, never mind the collapse of the export market. This was a time when espresso could only be had at black-market prices, despite a world glut of the bean.

More important, by taking into custody a large group of civilians, the insurgents would have had access to a steady flow of new recruits. While able-bodied men were shanghaied into the rebel army, so were young boys barely into their teens. There were promises of food, bounty and the glory that would await them once they had conquered the country. Women in the party were obliged to cultivate crops for the group, though, as we were to see with South Africa’s expatriate ANC military camps in Angola, Tanzania and elsewhere, they served other purposes as well.

In theory, had the rebels managed to ferret the entire Angolan population—at that stage nearly five million people—into the Congo, they would probably have succeeded with their objective. What they hadn’t bargained for was deteriorating social and economic conditions to the north.

After independence in 1960, the Congo took a series of mighty knocks, not least the mutiny of the Force Publique, on which the security of the nation depended. Within months the country was in the hands of a small but ruthless band of anarchists, among them Patrice Lumumba, friend and confidante of Holden Roberto who headed the UPA/FNLA faction of Angolan rebels.

The immediate consequence was that almost the entire white population fled. That was followed by the collapse of the country’s financial, commercial and industrial sectors. No money, no factories and no production meant no jobs.

The country never recovered from that exodus because the Belgians were even more remiss in educating their subjects than the Portuguese had been. By the time Brussels handed over power to the Congolese in 1960, there were only six university graduates in the entire country.

Consequently, even at the height of the war, Angola – with some exceptions like Sector D to the north of Luanda – was still a better place in which to live than the former Belgian colony. Then – and now, as we have since witnessed – the Congo was being disrupted by civil and military unrest.

As one army officer put it: ‘We had war, yes. But if civilians came to us, we gave them protection. In the Congo a man had to be mad to ask the Armée National Congolaise for any kind of assistance. They’d rob you first, then protect you with a grave.’

And in all likelihood, as one of the officers succinctly commented, ‘they’d get somebody else to dig it first and throw him into the hole as well…’ He was joking, of course, but point taken …

The Congo seemed always to have been in turmoil. Since the 1960s, there were many violent changes of government, Leopoldville had been renamed Kinshasa and unemployment peaked. There were times when food was in such short supply that there were riots in the streets. Mobutu’s soldiers – a vicious a bunch of thugs – didn’t hesitate to use live ammunition to put a stop to it all.

Add to that conundrum the perpetual fear of cross-border napalm and bombing raids on wandering bands of Africans by the Portuguese Air Force and it was small wonder many former Angolans chose to stay put in and around Leopoldville.

Others, disenchanted at what they found in the Congo, took their chances and went back into the bush. There, they’d wander about for a while, cross the frontier again and return to their old homes in Angola. Those caught doing so were shot by self-appointed bands of armed youths, the dreaded Jeunesse who patrolled these undermarcated frontier regions and thought nothing of killing a man because they wanted to get at his pretty wife.

Zemba was the nearest camp to Santa Eulalia. It lay about 20 kilometres to the south-east.

The country in between, like most of the terrain south of the Dembos, was thinning out, in part because of the logging and because the rains had been bad for a year or two by the time we got there. There was more open grassland than jungle across much of the terrain we covered. We flew across to the camp in one of the Portuguese Air Force Dornier Do-27s used in spotting roles in the sector.

Overlooking Zemba from the south was a massive bald mountain that stood out starkly from the surrounding country. It was a bit like Rio’s Sugar-Loaf, or some of the larger ‘gomos’ in Zimbabwe.

‘That’s a very bad mountain,’ said our pilot, a young air force pilot who seemed to be coming to grips with some of the navigational vagaries that his colleagues encountered in Africa. He explained that the insurgents often climbed half-way up and fired down into the camp.

‘I like to keep clear of the place. There are dangerous cross-currents around the peak. Once the terroristas opened fire on me with some heavy stuff as I flew past – somehow they’d hauled a machine-gun up the foothills and into the surrounding bush and ended up giving us a few headaches. We bombed them, but I don’t think it did much good … too much jungle’, he explained.

He told me the mountain had once been used by local tribesmen for ceremonies or sacrificial purposes. That was before the Portuguese colonized the area, but it was still considered sacred by the animists who live in the vicinity.

‘They also slaughtered a number of Portuguese civilians on the rock in the early days of the war. We don’t know what they did to them, but the heads of some of the women were found stuck on stakes’, he said.

The atmosphere and lifestyle at the Zemba military base differed markedly from what went on at headquarters. You sensed there were things afoot that were not immediately apparent. For a start, the camp played host to a large contingent of Portuguese Special Forces.

At Santa Eulalia you got the impression that the place was run with a quiet efficiency, the kind you’d expect to find in a large office block in any city. At Zemba, in contrast, there was something indefinable about the place, especially since the war was only a rifle shot away. Situated on fairly high ground, everybody came into the sights of a rebel sooner or later.

Apart from the paratroopers, the rest of the troops at Zemba appeared a fairly independent bunch of conscripts, bustling about on one task or other. They were alert and very much aware that the place had seen some serious fighting in the past. A Portuguese journalist who visited the camp a short while before, wrote that ‘… the men [at Zemba] carry themselves like lithe, wary animals. At any moment you expect to see them break into a sprint and rush for the nearest machine-gun turret.’

He suggested that it could have been because the base came under fire as often as it did. Since the start of the campaign in Sector D, Zemba had been fired on virtually every week.

‘Yes, we have things a little tougher than at Santa Eulalia’, Captain João Salvatori told us shortly after we arrived. ‘But that’s the way it goes in this war that is not really a war. He smiled at our reaction and said he’d explain later.

This still-youthful professional soldier, originally from Lisbon and who admitted to having joined the army to experience the extent of Portuguese possessions in the world, was Zemba’s commanding officer. It was a temporary posting because the camp rated a lieutenant-colonel, but he’d gone to Luanda on a staff course.

After lunch, Captain Salvatori led us towards his operations room, situated in a bunker not far from the base living quarters. It had been constructed partly underground to avoid enemy fire which had been much more severe in the past and included heavy mortars. Even so, there was one wall left open to the elements – the enervating tropics demanded some kind of improvised air conditioning in an environment where you were already bathed in sweat before you got out of your bunk in the morning.

The Captain spent an hour detailing the kind of war that he fought. He told us that the sector was much more active than other bases in the sector, in part, because they suspected the presence of a major terrorist headquarters in the vicinity of the camp.

‘We know it’s there, fairly nearby, but we’ve never been able to pin-point its exact location, not even with the help of captives. Also, those people are pretty good and they’re never permanently based. In fact, they can pick up everything and move it a day’s march away if they chose to do so – radio equipment, supplies, prisoners, the lot.’

‘What we do know is that they like to keep themselves on the move. One day their command post will be behind that big mountain nearest us, the following day behind the next … all very shrewd …’

The forces facing his men were largely MPLA, a very different proposition from the unruly UPA rabble. They knew what they were doing, were adequately equipped and supplied and in his view, streets ahead of the rest when it came to insurgency.

‘But it ends there, because I doubt whether they plan very far ahead. They have their own systems which are known only to their leaders. We have not been able to make a breakthrough yet, but it’ll happen with time.’ It was interesting, he told us, that this particular bunch of irregulars drew heavily on the experience of the Vietcong in such matters.

‘We have about a dozen vehicles here’, the officer explained. ‘We patrol the surrounding area either on foot or we go out in trucks – Unimogs, German built, but assembled in Portugal. As the country is a little more open than further north, we have a slightly less chance of being ambushed, but it happens, more frequently than I would like’ At the same time, he suggested, the same conditions allowed the insurgents to maintain better look-outs.

‘What we really need here, of course, are helicopters – permanently stationed at Zemba, about half-a-dozen of them. But that is not going to take place any time soon. With half a dozen Alouette gunships I could change the course of this war in a week’, the captain reckoned.

I’d heard the same argument from a number of Portuguese officers, both in Luanda and in Sector D. I was to hear it subsequently in Cabinda and on the eastern front, near the Zambian and Caprivi borders. There wasn’t a senior Portuguese Army officer who did not believe that helicopters were the ultimate weapon of war for this kind of struggle. It was almost as if it had been purpose built for counter-insurgency use, some of them would argue. Which was what the Americans were proving just then in Vietnam, they would add mournfully.

The trouble was, with three African wars, that kind of sophisticated equipment was expensive for a small, impoverished nation like Portugal. It was also in exceptionally short supply in Angola¹.

‘It’s ridiculous really, each time the guerrillas attack, they disappear into the bush the moment we make a stand. They’re gone before we can bring our men up—never mind calling for reinforcements. With helicopters we could be over the enemy position within minutes … we might drop men behind them and cut off their retreat.

‘Then they would be forced to fight’, a staff officer added.

Captain Salvatori: ‘Give me three decent battles involving these aircraft and we will give them enough to talk about for a year in the Congo or wherever else they drag the survivors to.’

The captain was confident that in any evenly-matched engagement, his men could kill in the ratio of six to one. ‘Six terrorists killed for every Portuguese casualty—killed or wounded.

While his critics might have regarded him as possibly over-confident, this was the actual statistic then being applied to Portugal’s military campaign in Mozambique.

In the subsequent Rhodesian bush war, it was eight or ten times that.

The Portuguese Army at Zemba followed strict patrol procedures. Groups of about 30 soldiers were sent out daily into the surrounding bush, usually led by an officer with three sergeants to assist.

They stayed out from three to five days, sometimes longer, depending on whether contact was made. Other times they’d follow guerrilla trails through the bush. As spotters, there were customarily black Portuguese soldiers at the van since they excelled in such things: most had grown up in the bush and were able to follow a 48-hour old trail for days at a stretch.

‘We keep another squad ready for any eventuality—including attacks which sometimes come out of nowhere’, the officer explained.

I asked him about the black troops. They clearly served in the majority of camps that we’d visited. In Luanda a large proportion of the troops wandering about the city on furlough were African. It seemed peculiar to find black troops in Portuguese army uniform when the enemy was the same colour as themselves, was the thrust.

West German-built Dornier DO-27 spotter planes were a valuable asset, both in locating enemy positions and in supply or casualty evacuation missions. (Photo Richard McIntosh)

Africans were conscripted in Angola like anybody else, including local Europeans, the officer said. Like their counterparts from Portugal, they were required to spend two or three years in uniform¹. They wore the same uniforms, earned the same money as soldiers from Europe, lived in the same barracks, and, when wounded, were evacuated as any other troops might have been. He stressed that there was no colour bar or segregation and certainly no apartheid.

‘It’s not as strange as it might seem,’ the officer said. ‘Remember, these people have lived under the Portuguese flag for more than five centuries. They would not consider themselves anything but Portuguese.’ He suggested I ask them myself.

Integration, as I was to discover, was indeed complete. The two races lived in comparative harmony, under conditions that were a lot more amenable than might have been the case in the United States in the 1960s or 1970s, or even years later.

As one young alfares put it to me through an interpreter, the two groups simply had to trust each other. Their ideals – right or wrong – he said, were based on ‘a mutual conviction’. This was a dependence that not only worked quite well, but simply had to for the community to survive in the long term.

Another time, a black-faced junior officer who had learnt his English at a mission school when his parents had spent time in Zambia asked me: ‘what else am I but Portuguese?’

He went on: ‘I speak from experience because I have seen things beyond these borders. I am aware that the British and the South Africans may not be able to understand the fact that I am as Portuguese as the next man in this camp, but these are my colleagues and they accept me … we fight together and occasionally we die together’. At which point he just smiled.

The youngster wasn’t exactly pleased by my approach. In retrospect, he probably had good reason. His fellow soldiers had taken his blackness for granted, but as an inquisitive journalist, I had not.

The fact remained, the three Portuguese armies in Africa were more multi-racial than any other comparable military element in recent history.

History has some interesting footnotes about multiracial African units. There were black troops from Senegal and Equatorial Africa in the French Army during both world wars, and they were almost all white officered. The same with the King’s African Rifles, whose two divisions included East African, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and South African troops. All saw active service not only against the Germans but also against the Japanese in Burma and their combat record was exemplary.

The Ugandan leader Idi Amin had made sergeant in the King’s African Rifles in Kenya and by all accounts, was regarded by his white superiors as a fine NCO. It was only when he took power that he went berserk, or as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely …

Before that, during World War I, there were thousands of locals recruited by Imperial German forces in Tanganyika under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. He and his Askaris ran the allies ragged throughout East Africa and only surrendered after the war was over in Northern Rhodesia, or what is Zambia today. Among those on his tail were thousands of South Africans who, for part of the time, were commanded by General, later Field-Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, or ‘Oom Jannie’ as he was affectionately known to his people.

What was interesting about the German experience in Tanganyika in World War I, was that all the black troops were locally recruited, particularly the Askaris. Once Portugal got involved in her own colonial wars, this was regarded by the tacticians in Lisbon as highly positive.

One of the more interesting statistics to emerge from that 1915 bush conflict that covered an area larger than France was that General von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops were composed of 2,200 Europeans, 11,100 regular African soldiers and 3,200 irregulars. All were ranged in two dozen companies, each with roughly a dozen whites and 300 Africans.

It was one of the classic campaigns of World War I has and been the subject of several war histories. The one that stands out is They Fought For King and Kaiser by James Ambrose Brown, originally published by Ashanti in Johannesburg in 1997, a stunning read.

In Portuguese Africa, it took the 1961 invasion from the north to give black soldiers with the right educational qualifications the opportunity of becoming officers. The respect these men receive from their charges, black or white, was no different to that of any officer with a European background. If there was a difference, the Portuguese military code dealt with it, and very smartly too. There was detention barracks for insubordination.

An interesting aspect of camp life at a remote posting like Zemba was that it was reasonably well-stocked with just about everything the soldiers needed. Food was adequate, so was reading matter and, later, weekly films were the norm.

While wine came with the meals, they could buy local Cuca bottled beers at the canteen at a third of the price in town. If they preferred aguadiente – the local triple-distilled ‘fire water’ or even scotch – it was also available.

Despite the otherwise austere tropical backdrop, Zemba’s officers’ mess had been made into a cosy little ‘home-away-from-home’ for those using it and I found it was one of the most comfortable in the region. Exotic Portuguese sea dishes were a once-a-week must, as they were elsewhere in these remote operational areas.

Though hundreds of clicks from the sea, we were offered bacalhau and cuttlefish, both prepared in the traditional Iberian manner, in wine. I enjoyed my very first presunto, a delectable wafer thin smoked Parma-like ham at Zemba and ended one meal with the fondue-like queijo de azeitao.

I could just as easily have been at one those delightful little street-side restaurants in the Belem District back in the metrópole.

To some, it could be a good life if you didn’t weaken and the Portuguese took a certain pride in being able to offer their guests the best available under the most primitive surroundings.

Although Lisbon was fighting a series of African bush campaigns that, like Vietnam, was claiming lives by the day – though not nearly as many as the Americans were to suffer – mealtimes were always a ritual. Officers questioned about these superficial gastronomic luxuries in the bush would maintain that food was their one link with the civilization to which they had been accustomed. In a way, I suppose it made sense.

‘Two years out here in the jungle with few women about and we’re left with only our wine and our food … the guitar and music follow afterwards … Fado’, our host chuckled.

Another officer, a little more ebullient than the rest admitted that food had actually been the undoing of more than one encounter with the enemy. ‘They know that if they have to make a mark at all during daylight hours, the best time to hit us is during the lunch break, which can sometimes last two hours. Defences are slackest during meals and the siesta hour immediately afterwards’, he confided.

He told us of an attack on Villa Teixeira de Sousa, a railway town in the east near the Congolese frontier. It was a typical example of the kind that took place, he suggested.

The entire population and the local garrison had just sat down to their Christmas lunch – the usual celebratory affair, but much more so on the devoutly Christian Iberian Peninsula – when the first mortar bombs started coming across.

They hit the native quarter first. ‘That gave the others some warning and they were able to get to their weapons. Had the enemy initially attacked the European sector they might have done a lot more damage … it could have been a catastrophe’, he confided, because there were women and children from the town in the party, he said.

During the visit to the camp we were taken on a number of patrols. I’d requested the experience to provide me with an insight as to how the Portuguese Army operated on foot and was seconded to a unit headed by a captain together with a 30-man squad to escort us out. This was the same group of soldiers that routinely worked together.

‘These troops remain in the same detachment for the duration’ he told me. Each man had a specific function. He also had to be familiar with the duties of the two men immediately in front of him and to the rear. If one of them was incapacitated, wounded or killed, he would automatically take over their roles, be it with the mortar or radio, or feeding the machine-gunner with additional belts.

Procedures were standard. On patrol, the men moved about in single column, usually allowing for a good space between individual combatants to avoid bunching. An individual was required to hump everything that might be needed and enough food and water for five days in his pack. They were also tasked to carry one extra item, which might be a collapsible stretcher, extra mortar bombs or perhaps the weapon itself. Several in the group hauled knapsacks with bazooka shells. At that stage rifle grenades had only begun to make an appearance in Portugal’s wars.

Three machine-guns were issued to each patrol. Each gunner ‘spoke’ a reasonably fluent sign language with his hands; he was expected to understand, given the sign, whether to proceed left or right, pull back or advance. Or perhaps stay where he was and maintain a defensive position.

Ancillary touches included canvas boots with rubber soles. Since the countryside was heavily foliated, most units could march as silently as the enemy, though talk was never tolerated on the move.

It was ideal type of country for clandestine guerrilla operations. There were no twigs to snap on the track that might alert someone listening and few rocks on which to stub your toe. The foliage all around was an almost incandescent green, and the rest was putrefying; the eternal cycle. The British writer Spencer Chapman had it right when he originally penned his classic work The Jungle is Neutral.

While his book deals with the war against Japan in the Far East several decades before, many of the precepts on which this erstwhile academic elaborated, applied equally well to Portugal’s African campaigns, particularly in places like Portuguese Guinea and Sector D in Angola. It is worth a read because the book delineates some of the parameters involved in these remote and mostly isolated conflicts.

For instance, metal items that might knock against each other during the march were bound with strips of cloth. When a patrol stopped in a clearing for a hastily prepared meal or a short rest, few soldiers had anything to say. Nor was there ever a fire lit. The men just did what was needed and got it over with. Always, there was a third of the squad standing guard, always on the fringe of the clearing.

During a five-day patrol through heavily overgrown jungle country a patrol might cover as much as 100 kilometres. They sometimes managed a good deal more in the east of the country where there were more clearings and the forest gave way to savannah.

Most times, the group would follow specific paths, risky because of mines but essential if there was to be any progress. On the immediate trail of a group of insurgents, they would try to follow alongside, rather than on the already broken trail, for obvious reasons.

They did this to avoid booby traps, the officer said. ‘But sometimes the undergrowth is so thick that we’re obliged to follow in the tracks of the enemy. That’s when I start to worry

His adversaries used a variety of ruses, he explained. These ranged from Chinese antipersonnel mines similar to those used by the Vietcong, to improvised mines made from a grenade ‘If it’s a straightforward grenade, you’ve got perhaps three or four seconds to get clear’, the captain stated. ‘If it’s an OZM-4, then that’s it!’

The OZM-4, he explained, was a metallic bounding fragmentation mine, the original ‘Bouncing Betty’. Designed to kill the person who sets it off, this cylindrical mine body is initially located in a short pot or barrel assembly and activation detonates a small explosive charge, which projects the mine body upwards.

The officer said he’d been lucky. He’d had a few scrapes, and added that it was strange, ‘but when you’ve tripped a wire, you just knew it immediately. Everything else swings into slow motion, almost like it happens when you’re in a car that rolls…’

Even worse, a tripped grenade could sometimes signal the start of an ambush and then things can get serious.

‘You’ve rehearsed the signal a dozen times with the boys. With so much at stake it seems almost inadequate … you just hope the guys behind you have dived as low into the bush as you’re doing at that moment …’

During the course of the previous eight months, the captain had had two encounters that involved hand grenades that had been used to prime booby traps. Both times he and his men had been lucky …’we had only minor injuries and there were no ambushes.’

A colleague in Mozambique, in contrast – also a captain, attached to the Comandos Africanos (an elite, mainly white-officered, African unit) – had both his legs blown off by a mortar bomb that had been attached to an anti-personnel mine.

‘It took both his legs off just below the knee, and everything between them as well … also an ambush. The others were in a very strong position overlooking the killing ground and they hit them with RPG-2s, mortars and grenades.

‘Reports later stated that it was the worst battle of the month in the East African territory. Government forces took 13 casualties, five killed and eight wounded, two critically, including the captain … bad for a patrol of 20 men’, he reckoned.

The captain had since learnt to walk again with prosthetics. The President of Portugal awarded him the highest military honour and the newspapers were full of it at the time.