Anybody on the wrong side of sixty who believes that he can contribute something by going to war in a helicopter gunship in one of the most remote corners of the globe has got to be a little crazy. Or he’s into what aficionados like to term “wacky backy.” In my case, neither condition applies.
For five hectic weeks in the summer of 2000 I did exactly that, flying combat in West Africa with a bunch of mercenaries against rebels trying to take over the country of Sierra Leone. Although I was shot at as often as the others, my role was not as a combatant. Officially I was an observer, reporting for various publications in the stable of Britain’s Jane’s Information Group, including Jane’s International Defence Review as well as Jane’s Defence Weekly. In doing this, I was strapped into the gunner’s seat just ahead of the pilot on a rickety old Russian-built Mi-24 that leaked when it rained.
The commander of that bird was Neall Ellis (whom we affectionately called Nellis). We had flown together twenty years earlier during the bloody Angolan War. In those days he flew a French-built Alouette helicopter, the same type of gunship that had played such a significant role at Cuamato, a small town inside Angola that witnessed the hard hand of war from both the ground and the sky. In those days the gunships were flown by people like Arthur Walker and Heinz Katzke. These aviators made a name for themselves in a conflict that escalated several notches beyond a simple counterinsurgency. Their goal was to oppose the aggressive activities conducted by communist forces led by Fidel Castro’s Cuban Army and Air Force. The operations in that remote southern African theater took the form of irregular battles that one rarely read about in news reports of the day.
The fighting in Sierra Leone was different—and much more so after the turn of the millennium. Every day of the week, Sundays included, we’d fly one or more strike missions a day, taking the gun-ship sometimes deep into the jungle interior of a country roughly the size of Ireland. Other times we’d strike at targets not far from the capital Freetown itself.
The war was especially brutal on the ground where most of the victims were innocents. Aloft, we were the masters and it stayed that way as long as a batch of white-painted United Nations helicopters that had arrived a short while before I got to Freetown had not yet been armed. A fully equipped squadron of the more potent Indian Air Force Mi-24 variants that eventually became part of the UN detachment was still being assembled at Hastings, one of Sierra Leone’s smaller domestic airports, not far from the capital.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, our problems arrived in battalions. While the rebels attached to Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) did not have an air force of their own, they made do with what they could cadge from those who supported their cause. As we were to constantly observe from radio intercepts, there were a number of foreigners who backed Sankoh’s revolt and were not averse to using their more sophisticated hardware when it suited their purposes. An occasional Mi-8 flown by South African and Russian mercenaries would slip into Sierra Leonian airspace from Liberia, usually headed for rebel outposts in the northern part of the country.
The ostensible object of these flights was to haul men and material, but the real reason behind their presence was diamonds. Tens of millions of dollars in raw stones were being illegally mined under rebel supervision in the northern Kono region. The rebel-backed helicopter gunships zipped in and out of the country, fast and low, to snatch large diamond parcels. The existence of Sierra Leone’s precious stones was the primary reason Liberian President Charles Taylor provided the RUF with military support. A cunning and ruthless operator, Taylor—who had come to power after a lengthy civil war—had but one purpose in mind: helping the rebels to take Freetown. By doing so, all of Sierra Leone’s diamond fields would eventually have been under his control.
By any yardstick, flying combat in Sierra Leone was an experience. The rebels had the run of almost everything beyond Freetown. Also, it was accepted by everyone onboard that if we were shot down or forced to land behind enemy lines, we would probably not survive. With our weapons—including a pair of belt-fed GPSG machine guns—we would certainly have been able to keep going for a while, assuming, of course, that we would survive the initial impact. But we were under no illusion that beyond the confines of Freetown and its environs we would be in our adversary’s back yard. They would have had the additional advantage of numbers: the four of us, no matter how well-armed would hardly have been a match for a squad of guerrillas, no matter how badly trained or doped. Personally, had I been faced with the options of a fight or making a run for it, I would probably have taken the gap towards the Guinea frontier. Its most distant point—considering that Sierra Leone is only fractionally bigger than New Jersey—the trudge through the jungle could never have been more than a hundred miles: perhaps three or four days on foot. One tends to think about such things when flying over endless stretches of tropical forest when you have the prospect of what might be a pretty bloody confrontation ahead.
Certainly, each one of us was also aware that Ellis had a price on his head: at the time I flew with him it was a bounty of a million US dollars, though there was a little muted discussion in Freetown’s watering holes as to whether that meant dead or alive. Several reports subsequently claimed that the reward was actually double that. Travelling about with this war dog each day, to and from work and back home from the pubs and sometimes Hassan’s place, quite often very late at night was probably a bit of a risk, but the truth is, nobody ever gave us more than a passing glance.
During the course of dozens of operational flights we saw a good share of action, with Nellis and the boys doing the necessary each time we encountered rebels. Through it all, we were lucky. Our worst afflictions during this period were mild bouts of malaria.
In retrospect, the Sierra Leone experience was neither as odious nor as repulsive as I might have expected, even though, on a day-to-day, sortie-by-sortie basis, we were able to account for sizable numbers of the enemy. It is also true that none of us felt anything for those who came into our sights, if only because Nellis was eliminating the same bloody cretins who were systematically mutilating children. In this regard, it was telling that when we’d return to Freetown after a flight and the people asked us whether we’d been successful, they would embrace us no matter how we answered. Each one of them was aware of the dreadful stories that emerged each day from the jungle that encroached to the edges of this huge suppurating conurbation.
It was that kind of war. And for two years, Nellis’ lone helicopter gunship was about all the majority of the population had on which to precariously pin their hopes.
By the time that I became involved, the ground war had been going on for several years. Casualties had been heavy on both sides, sometimes with a Nigerian Army-backed “peacekeeping mission” (ECOMOG) providing support, sometimes not. We had little doubt about the nature of the enemy. As one UN observer succinctly explained in an off-the-record briefing, “The majority of the rebels are mindless cretins who make a fetish of cutting off the limbs of children.” He went on to declare the rebels “simple-minded bastards,” some of whom, he explained, believed that such actions were appropriate when they needed to amuse themselves during a slow day in the jungle.
Flying with Nellis could be a taxing experience, with some sorties that left us drained after only a couple of hours in the air. We had our moments, obviously, especially when we hovered over enemy positions or occupied towns after being told by British military intelligence (under whose auspices Nellis operated) that the rebels had deployed SAMs. Conventional anti-aircraft weapons, I was soon to discover, was the norm, but since recent events in Chechnya had demonstrated that this hardware was a match for anything more conventional forces could field, such occasions would marvelously exercise the imagination.
Occasionally we would return to base with a hole or two in our fuselage, though at least once the damage was self-inflicted. During an attack on one of the more active rebel towns to the east of Freetown, Hassan, our starboard side-gunner, swung his machine gun in too wide an arc and stitched a set of holes into the starboard drop tank. Fortunately it was empty. Had it not been—with us using tracers—the upshot of that little episode over enemy territory might have been different. Nor was it a lone occurrence. The pair of Mi-24 helicopters operated by Nellis and his pals for the Sierra Leone Air Wing was probably more often patched than any comparable choppers then operational in Asia, Africa or Latin America.
While the Air Wing’s day-to-day regimen was dictated largely by events in the field—much of it coupled to intercepts of enemy radio messages, which came into the special ops room around the clock—there was always something new happening at Cockerill Barracks. The headquarters of the Sierra Leone military was a large, futuristic-looking structure at the far end of a festering lagoon that fringed one of Freetown’s outlying suburbs. From there, the country’s only operational pilot flew from a single, heavily defended helipad on the grounds of this expansive military establishment that dated from World War II.
Most of the sorties launched during my own sojourn in Sierra Leone were routine, quick in-and-out strikes on specific targets. Still, things could get hectic. There were days when the crew went up three times in quick succession, occasionally timing the last mission to return just as the sun dipped below the horizon beyond Cape Sierra Leone on which much of this city lies.
On one of my early flights, we’d been ordered to scramble on short notice. Since I was the newcomer, Nellis relegated me to the back of the chopper with the side-gunners. I’d barely had time to shower and change, but I went aloft anyway in a T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of flip-flops. It was a bad decision. I spent much of that flight dodging chunks of sizzling hot metal as brass shell casings clattered onto my exposed feet from two very active general purpose machine guns (or in official British Army terminology, GPMGs). I should have known better because I’d been in a similar situation in Angola a few years before while covering that conflict with Executive Outcomes, a mercenary firm based out of Pretoria, South Africa. At the time we were in an Angolan Air Force Mi-17.
The bloodiest chapter of Sierra Leone’s brief post-independent history is now on record, but the war could easily have gone the other way. Because the government had been unprepared for any kind of conflict, hostilities from the outset tended to favor the rebels. It remained that way until a lightning deployment codenamed “Operation Palliser,” involving Britain’s Quick Reaction Force (QRF) pushed a powerful body of rebels into West Africa. Tony Blair’s government was serious about countering a military insurrection in what until the 1960s had been one of the jewels in the British Imperial crown.
The British strike force was initially composed of eight hundred men of the 1st Parachute Battalion Parachute Regiment, which was later replaced by a Royal Marine detachment. Additional support came from a variety of Royal Air Force and Royal Naval elements, including the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious as well as the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean. C-130 Hercules transport planes from RAF Lyneham, and RAF Tristars from 216 Squadron operating out of Brize Norton, were tasked to shift most of the combatants and lighter hardware, with much of it arriving by sea a month later.
With only a few hours’ advance notice, four RAF HC Mk2 Chinooks were flown in pairs more than 3,000 miles to Dakar, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. The epic deployment had set out from RAF Odiham, home of the British Chinook force. The crews of each of these giant helicopters were ordered to fly twenty-three hours within a thirty-six hour window of opportunity. In order to make this possible, the Chinooks were equipped with two 800-gallon Robinson internal extended-range tanks. Each aircraft had replacement crewmen from all three squadrons, each of whom assisted in some important way on what is now recognized as the longest self-deployment in the history of the RAF helicopter force.
From the beginning, just about everybody involved militarily in Sierra Leone knew they were up against an extremely aggressive insurgent group accustomed to meeting little if any resistance from government forces. However, when the war flared up again in late 1998 (there had been several earlier conflicts, one of which involved Executive Outcomes and South African mercenaries) the RUF quickly demonstrated that it was better trained and equipped than it had been in the past. Because of earlier results, Sankoh’s rebel army was motivated to achieve its single objective: the control by force of the entire country. The rebels’ combat ability was evident: they succeeded virtually every time they set out to capture a position held by Sierra Leone security forces. Within a month of initiating hostilities in 1998, Sankoh’s revolutionaries could go just about anywhere they wanted except the capital of Freetown.
Foday Sankoh’s twisted path to power as the head of the Revolutionary United Front meandered through several countries and spanned decades. The radicalized 1970s student leader served for a time as a corporal in the army and later as a television cameraman. His anti-establishment criminal behavior, however, landed him in jail. When he was freed, Sankoh fled with fellow Sierra Leonean exiles to Libya in the 1980s, where President Muammar Gadhaffi was busy spreading revolutionary instability by stirring up West African dissidents like Sankoh. Seething with anger against those with more wealth and anxious to lead his own rebellion, Sankoh crafted an alliance with Liberia’s Charles Taylor, who was planning his own internal coup. Taylor’s horrific eight-year uprising seized the presidency in neighboring Monrovia in 1998.
With the support of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s rogue president, Foday Sankoh had used the two years following a ceasefire—which the mercenary group Executive Outcomes had brought into effect—to totally revamp his revolutionary forces. During this impasse, President Gadhaffi provided generous material and financial support, and he obviously had reasons of his own for doing so. Other countries linked to the rebels were Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and, to a lesser extent, the Sudan. It was then too that al-Qaeda emerged as a factor in the war, using diamonds mined by Sierra Leone’s large Lebanese community to finance Osama bin Laden’s aspirations. This could very well have a bearing on why Britain took such drastic steps to defeat the rebels, though you won’t get anybody in London to acknowledge it.
We now know that the RUF employed Russian, Ukrainian, South African and other African mercenaries. Deployed operationally, many of these people were responsible for combat command and control as well as logistics and communications. For their part, the South Africans concentrated their efforts on imparting many of the principles they had used to good effect in their own wars in Namibia and Angola, which was one of the reasons why the rebels initially gained as much ground as they did.
The “hired guns” were not working their trade for free. Virtually every mercenary wielding a rifle or piloting a craft was also into diamonds, which was what the fighting was about. President Taylor’s cut was about one-half of the gemstones carried, flown or shipped across the border. His take was so large it explains why, within the comparatively short time of three or four years, Liberia emerged in London, Johannesburg, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv as a diamond exporting country of some significance.
And the war dragged on. On two occasions the rebels fought their way to within spitting distance of the gates of Freetown. Both times RUF forces were beaten back by a single helicopter gunship flown by Nellis, the government’s lone South African mercenary pilot. Far from their own supply lines running out of Liberia—but protected by enough heavy weapons to start another war—the rebels did not have the proper weaponry to counter Nellis’ airborne firepower. Our gun-ship had a 57mm rocket pod under each of its winglets together with a four-barreled 12.7mm Gatling Gun System mounted in the nose. The latter could fire nearly four thousand rounds a minute. It was impressive to behold such a weapon from a distance, as we sometimes did when we’d touch down in a town and Nellis would have us stay on the ground while he “cleaned up” outside. His favorite tactic was to fire the quad in half-second bursts. That alone was enough to tear-up everything in its path and a good reason why the Gatling was always the most feared weapon dominating Sierra Leone’s skies.
Beyond the perimeters of the grotesque Hell that some of us got to know as Freetown—a dirty, dusty, overcrowded conurbation with two million-plus refugees, all of them perched precariously atop rows of hills overlooking the sea—Foday Sankoh for a long while was little more than a rebel-in-waiting. In this regard he was identical to a dozen or so other militants who threatened governments up and down an unstable and debilitated Africa. There was, however, one striking difference between this aspiring oligarch and the rest. Sankoh craved legality. As some of his lieutenants were to report after the war, he dreamt of acceptance by the world at large. With it, he knew, came a seat at the United Nations and many of its ancillary bodies. Further, he would have had his own people ensconced in the Sierra Leone embassies in London, Washington and elsewhere. Foday Sankoh held throughout that the only way he could achieve his goal was to “own” his own capital, and that was Freetown. Fortunately, the squalid city on the northeast tip of a small peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean remained just beyond his reach—and much of that was Nellis’ doing.
Still, it was a near-run thing. Had Sankoh got what he wanted, it’s more likely than not that he and his cohorts might today be dealing cards with representatives not only of the British Crown, but with the rest of the world. Sankoh’s representative would have had a vote on par with that of the United States in the United Nations General Assembly. It was Nellis and his Hind in the end that preserved the status quo.
Operating as a scribe out of Cockerill Barracks in Freetown presented me with few problems. It soon became clear that my presence at the heli-base was an unusual departure for the Sierra Leone command, if only because I was the first journalist to become part of a combat team. But then, as Nellis himself pointed out to his commanders, I was his friend. Moreover, he stressed, the war was going badly for the government and Freetown needed to counter an effective public relations campaign launched by the rebels—again with Gadhaffi’s cash. Nellis had twice saved the struggling nation from being overrun by those same rebels, so when the South African pilot elaborated on such things, hardly anybody complained, at least overtly.
The Jane’s cachet, too, helped my cause. Once my articles began to appear abroad, British advisors operating out of Cockerill—including a sprinkling of SAS operators (specially-trained British commandos) and military intelligence boffins—tacitly accepted my presence. The result was that thereafter nobody, apart from some flying officers off the carriers lying at anchor with eight or nine other Royal Navy ships in Freetown Bay, gave me or my graying beard a second glance as we went about our work.
Ours was a tight, almost intimate little clique. The group included former SAS sergeant Fred Marafano. Decorated for his role in freeing hostages trapped in the Iranian Embassy in London some years before, Marafano had seen and done it all on four continents. There was also Hassan the side gunner, who had inadvertently poked a few holes in our own bird. Hassan, a native of Lebanon, was a proud Muslim and what made him even more unusual was that he firmly believed that Hezbollah, the terrorist group operating with Iranian financial support back home, would ultimately save the world. Given the circumstances under which we operated, we couldn’t disabuse him of his notion. He was, after all, covering our backs. He was also one of the most competent gunners I’d met in any war.
Another member of the team was a mysterious young thirty-something Frenchman known only as “Christophe.” He would come and go from Paris as it pleased him, there one month, gone the next. We eventually concluded that if nothing else, he was a likely candidate to have been working for France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, though to be fair, that was little more than speculation. When the numbers tally, however, you reach your own conclusions.
No one in Freetown examined “Christophe’s” credentials too closely. Nor, for that matter, did they run a check on mine, though Whitehall would have definitely have taken the trouble to check us all out at some stage or another. Our team included several Sierra Leonian side-gunners, all of them tough, committed fighting men who had seen both sides of the ongoing conflict.
Though subject to the kind of military discipline that one would expect in any fighting force, there were a lot of surprises. For instance, I was nonplused the first time I was taken into Cockerill Barracks by Nellis’ driver: we didn’t even rate a second glance from the guards. I wasn’t armed and I wasn’t wearing a uniform. I was actually wearing shorts. In fact, I didn’t even own a flying suit. Yet none of the black troops who were manning the gates so much as blinked when we drove through without stopping—even though they had never seen me before. It was peculiar to be so casually accepted as one of the gang in one of the most sensitive military establishments on Africa’s West Coast.
As I discovered, the only “authority” needed was a white skin, which in a black African country gripped by conflict was hardly another first. European mercenaries involved in African struggles tend to generate respect among the locals, especially when they were all that stood between a populace sleeping in their own beds at night and the kind of lunacy that RUF rebels were capable of generating.
My biggest personal concern that first day was how to strap my six-foot-two-inch frame into the gunner’s seat of the M-24, or in NATO-speak, the Hind. It was clearly built for smaller, more compact folk. The routine was fixed: slip the left foot into the appropriate groove on the fuselage and then a hard twist to the right, toward another indentation just inside the cockpit. That done, I would end up with one leg on either side of the joystick. For somebody who doesn’t even like to travel on the London Underground when it’s crowded, it took fortitude.
The view from up front was daunting. Until then I’d been relegated to the back with the side-gunners, where I had less of an observer’s perspective of the war than from where I was now perched. The small fan blowing into my face didn’t help dissipate the fog of humidity that enveloped us as we waited for Nellis to “wind her up.”
Naturally my curiosity got the best of me, especially since this was my first time up front. The array of dials and switches on all sides was rather intimidating, especially since they were all labeled in Cyrillic script. In my immediate line of sight was a gyroscopic device, digitalage complicated. More dials cluttered several rows of panels to my right and left. The black-painted optics of the helicopter’s computerized gun sights hovered at two o’clock. Though I flew often, I never understood any of it
Most obtrusive was the joystick. As Nellis had shown me earlier, this device was decorated with toggles in several colors, like the handles on some of those machines in any amusement arcade. The one that activated the Gatling, he specified, was bright red. “You touch it and it’s going to fire. So you don’t because that’s my job.” That was fine with me, I replied. The quiet-spoken pilot could be emphatic when it suited him. Earlier, he’d explained which buttons fired the helicopter’s rockets and that, too, was taboo for this passenger.
Moments later we were under orders. If I had doubts about what I was doing, it was too late. I’d be letting everyone down if I pulled out now. In any event, Nellis had stipulated that if I didn’t like it I should tell him beforehand so he could put somebody else in my place. Whoever flew under the front bubble had several in-flight roles, every one of them critical.
From the moment Nellis’ threw the first switch it took only minutes to become airborne. The ground crew checked out everything and then stood clear. While Western helicopters have set procedures to prepare for take-off—with things invariably arranged in an ergonomically friendly order—it is very much otherwise with Russian choppers. The first two circuit breakers Nellis activated were on either side of and behind his seat. The next, in sequence, was on his left, followed by another in the center, then to the right again, and so on.
He never complained about the Russian whirlybird, but I knew that this was one of the reasons why he was keen to get his hands on a surplus Aerospatiale Puma to do some of the transport work into the interior of this heavily forested country. Also, he told me, you could see the ground a lot better from the French chopper than the Russian, which was especially helpful when flying into some of the more difficult LZs, where we’d approach through disproportionately tiny spaces flanked by some of the tallest trees in Africa.
On the Mi-24, meanwhile, I had to attend to my own set of chores. My first job after lift-off was to push down hard on a small circuit breaker at my left elbow to arm our weapons’ systems. I would only do that after we entered Injun country, roughly six or eight minutes out of base.
Most pre-flight briefings in the Operations Center at Cockerill—unless there was a specific task that involved other aircraft or possibly liaison with ground forces—were brief. Never one for formality, Nellis had developed a sharp eye and a gambler’s instinct for risk, all of it rather resourcefully disguised by an urbane, insouciant style. He would sit at his desk and poke fingers at us.
As the pilot, he would first discuss fuel with his Russian-trained Ethiopian ground crew. One by one they’d go through some of the technical issues encountered after each flight, such as a problem they’d encountered the day before that involved a smoking exhaust. That seemed to indicate oil in a part of the engine where it shouldn’t have been.
Nellis turned to me. “You got water?” he asked while his eyes scanned a map on his desk. He did not see me nodding in reply.
“Something to eat?”
“We going out that long?” I asked.
“No, but you’ll need food in case we go down.”
“All I have is a can of bully beef.”
He didn’t answer.
The regular gang traveled light. Most times they didn’t take much of anything other than a single bottle of water, which was enough for a couple hours of flying. Somehow they just knew that they were going to get back, but then so does every aircrew in just about every war.
I was fractionally more skeptical. From day one, I never went up without a handful of water purifying tablets and my precious Shell Petroleum road map of Sierra Leone which, word had it, the rebels also used for navigation. If it came to that, at least I’d know how to get to Guinea.
“Side arms?” Nellis quizzed the others with a studied air of disregard. Each member of the crew had an AK-47 as standard issue. For “luck,” one of the gunners cradled a compact little Czech 9mm sub-machine gun. When dismantled, it could be hidden inside a car’s glove compartment.
The evening before, Hassan had given me the rundown of what to expect should there be problems. Whatever happened, he thought, we’d have enough firepower to fight our way out of almost any mess. The problem was that the GPMGs we carried onboard, stacked under the seats of the main compartment behind the cockpit when not in use, were comparatively heavy as these things go. Their ammunition cases were in obtuse, sharp-edged wooden cases, which would have made for awkward lugging in difficult terrain if we had to extricate ourselves from a dangerous situation on the ground in a hurry.
“If anything happens, you’ve got to help fight,” the Lebanese gunner told me with a wry smile. There were no ifs or buts about it, he suggested almost as an afterthought. One time he joked that since I was a journalist, I needn’t worry: “Just show them your Press Card,” he chuckled before turning to other matters. Hassan had never been one for the media, which he had grown to distrust from his experiences in Lebanon, but going down in the jungle, even he admitted, was a very serious matter. Which was why he took time out to explain what would be required of me if something happened. He had seen firsthand what the rebels did to people they considered their enemy. Anybody who emerged from a downed helicopter, as he chirped, “would be fair game.”
Not yet thirty, Hassan Ahmed Hussein had a sometimes sanguine view of the world, especially since he came from a society dominated as much by the chador as by the mullahs. Looking like a Corsican bandit, Hassan could charm a bird out of a tree. He was also a good man to have at your side in a tight spot. What became evident once I began mixing socially within this community was that Hassan’s reputation preceded him wherever we went. The last time the rebels had raided the town, Hassan had almost single-handedly evacuated hundreds of expatriate families from under the noses of the enemy. It was no accident that he was held in such high regard by everybody with whom he came into contact in Freetown.
Hassan had arrived in Sierra Leone by accident, having left Monrovia a short while before the Sierra Leone conflict got serious. Involved in undercover work for the Nigerians in the uprising that eventually brought Charles Taylor to power, a crooked Nigerian commander who owed Hassan money shopped him to Taylor’s people and he had to leave Liberia in a hurry. Tipped off that the president’s honchos were coming after him, Hassan slipped out of a window at the back of his villa just as they broke down the front door. Like Nellis and the rest of the boys, Hassan knew little else but war.
Once the Hind had lifted-off and headed out over the bay, there was none of the inertia of protracted custom. Nellis flew over several hardscrabble hotspots held by Sankoh’s people and peppered those we’d been told were hot, first with rockets and then with bursts from the Gatling. That went fine until the 12.7mm jammed. It was my job to “unjam” it, but nothing I had been told to do worked. Nellis reverted to projectiles again, and when they were gone, we headed back to base.
The gods smiled that musty tropical morning in West Africa and all went as planned. The crew got its share of kills.
Going to battle in the nose of a Hind, with my feet almost nudging the Gatling breech, must rank right up there as one of the ultimate combat experiences. It was certainly very different from flying in the rear with the side-gunners where our vision was largely restricted to the Hip’s half dozen portholes on each side of the fuselage. In contrast, my view of the war during those few dozen sorties when I was seated up front was superb, if only because I had the proverbial gunner’s-eye view of the war, like the pilot observing just about everything ahead of us and almost as much below.
To qualify to sit just ahead of Nellis in the nose, I was briefed that my first job was to spot enemy fire and movement. Everything else was secondary, Nellis said, accentuating the need for vigilance. Flying in single-ship operations meant that we had to be extra alert because, as he stated blandly, “We’re completely on our own.”
The helicopter’s Gatling gun got us out of most of the hotspots we ran into, poking as it did out of the fuselage immediately ahead of my seat. Dating from the Soviet era, this was the deadliest weapon in the Sierra Leonian armory. I’d been warned that it made a lot of noise, and for me this was somewhat worrying. Already half-deaf from a lifetime of covering conflicts, I feared what its blast would do to my ears. The two side-gunners at the rear with their GPMGs, in contrast, were relatively distant from the quad up front, and from where they stood behind the pilot, the Gatling roared rather than barked.
Being virtually on top of the weapon, however, was something else. I’d considered stuffing my ears to deaden the blast, but once in the air I had other important tasks to perform. The instructions arrived in a string of commands on the intercom. Nellis’ last words to all of us before lift-off were almost always the same: “Just be sharp and we’ll be OK.” He wasn’t one for throwing platitudes about.
That afternoon we went out again. A four-second run down Cockerill’s concrete runway and we were in the air, banking sharply to the right over the huge putrid mangrove swamp that separated the barracks from Lumley Beach. Once we’d topped the bridge at Cockle Bay—the one that links Aberdeen to Freetown—we were over open water and one of the largest natural harbors in the world. This was the same bay that had sheltered Allied convoys during two world wars and, more recently, a Royal Navy task force headed for the Falklands in the early 1980s.
The city’s low hills began to emerge out of the haze to our right, cluttered with more tin shacks than you are likely to find in many cities in Africa, Lagos and Johannesburg combined. A lazy smoky haze covered parts of the city. Our destination was Lungi, Sierra Leone’s only international airport. Along the way we skimmed a sea as flat as Antibes in August, broken intermittently by a couple of deep-sea trawlers at anchor, as well as dug-outs fishing for grouper and ‘cuda. There was also a flotilla of larger “Pam Pam” motorized boats that ply this coast all the way up to Dakar and beyond.
The gunship was a familiar sight over these waters and as we passed, the natives raised their oars in salute and yelled lustily in Krio. Because of the roar of our rotors we would never hear the natives as we zipped past, but others told us their cries were always the same: “Nellis, you de man!”
How they loved him. There were quite a few others in that part of the globe who called this former South African Air Force pilot “Peacemaker.”
After refueling at Lungi we headed for the interior, going in low and passing within hailing distance of one of the partially sunk car ferries the rebels had destroyed the last time they had come to town. For the rest, a primeval world whizzed by beneath us. It was simultaneously beautiful and captivating. An immediate impression, flying low, about thirty feet above the topmost layer of greenery to avoid enemy missiles, was that very little of it had had changed since time began. Now and again a cluster of forest giants would force us higher and a couple of times Nellis would almost clip the tops of palms. There were moments when we were so close to the triple-canopied forest that I might have stuck out my hand and touched it.
From our vantage point, as we headed into enemy country and the interior, there was little discernible movement in the bush below and, rather astonishingly, few signs of any kind of life. There were no people, no huts, and no animals that we could spot from the air. For much of the time we were aloft, we seemed to be caught in an ambiance that was both fascinating and mysterious. It was also forbidding—shaped, as some of the old codgers would say, by the Hand of God.
The coastal plain that we straddled was mostly flat, punctuated here and there by a thousand streams that would begin and end in the kind of putrefying swampland that I’d previously only seen in films about Vietnam or Cambodia. I imagined what it would be like to be forced down in that totally alien environment. I was certain that even if we survived the impact, never mind the crocs, it would have been difficult to reach dry ground.
Gradually the countryside sloped upward. Below were serried rows of ordered wilderness that stretched away as far as vision would allow. Ahead lay the Wara Wara Mountains, which escalated into Guinea. In contrast to the coast, the carpet of jungle in the north was almost unbroken, dotted here and there by granite outcrops that seemed to punctuate the furry carpet of green, very much like the gomos the Rhodesian Army had used for observation sites during their insurgent war. The rest of the country, laced with rivers, was simply beautiful. What a pity man had desecrated it with war.
Apart from flying and navigating across some of the most rugged tropical terrain anywhere (all very orthodox and military with grid map references and zero times), Nellis liked to handle the larger weapons himself. Usually he used manual sights because so few of our attacks were pre-planned.
Once we entered the “operational area” my role was threefold. First, as noted earlier, I had to throw the switch that armed our weapons systems. Second, I would activate our anti-missile jamming equipment, in a flash if needs be. Third, in the event of a stoppage, the Gatling had to be re-cocked. There were three booster cartridges coupled to three settings installed by its original Soviet manufacturers. And when the time came to push buttons, Nellis could be pretty direct over the mike about what needed to be done. And fast.
While the sortie earlier in the day had produced nothing of substance, our afternoon mission was based on a call for backup from a Sierra Leone Army unit deployed near Port Loko. A small, strategically situated town on the “horseshoe” road that links the capital with Lungi Airport, Port Loko had consistently come under fire from the rebels in recent months. Early word from the base to which we were headed indicated that a squad of government troops had been ambushed and its commander had reported the attack. That was why we were scrambled.
Though the history books had not yet recorded any of it, the region we were then traversing had seen more than its share of drama. Weeks before, four of my colleagues had been ambushed at a road junction a couple of hours’ drive north of Freetown. Two of them, Kurt Schork, an American with Reuters, and AP cameraman Miguel Gilmoreno, a Spanish national, were killed in the attack. The incident accentuated the army’s tenuous hold on the region as the balance of power continued to seesaw. Once the newspapers got wind of the story, Sierra Leone’s media did its best to shape public opinion. If government forces scored a hit, all of Freetown would rejoice. Were it a rebel success that might result in their close approach to the capital, the townspeople would stop buying non-essentials and instead go for that extra bag of rice to hide under the bed. Whenever bad news hit, a gloom of war so palpable you could almost sense despair settled on this mountainside African city.
As we headed toward our target more reports filtered in. This was no enemy feint. By all accounts we were heading towards a large force of rebels backed by vehicles that had Dshka heavy machine guns mounted on their cabs. Most were 12.7mm caliber, like our own, but single-barreled and unmistakable with their long muzzle-breaks up front. The radio reported some 23mm AAA.
Since headquarters had patched into the action by radio, I listened while an army captain with the nom de guerre “Scorpion” kept us briefed. His voice, high-pitched at times as he gave his version of events, verged on hysteria. We’d been given some idea of what was happening earlier, while still on the ground. Colonel Tom Carew, the Sierra Leone Army Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), had visited Nellis’ office shortly before we left and told him that one of the units patrolling towards the town of Mange had come under fire. The rebels were following up in large numbers, Nellis learned.
From the maps that covered the walls of Nellis’ ops center, it was clear that the target was a good deal closer to Guinea than Freetown. By vehicle, with roadblocks in place—even if the army had the fire-power to back it up, which it didn’t—it would have taken some solid fighting and perhaps a full day to cover the distance. The Hind took twenty minutes.
We were still on the approaches to Port Loko, which was little more than a collection of mud huts with thatched roofs along the main road leading into the interior, when Nellis fired his first salvo. I couldn’t immediately see what he was aiming at, but eight 57mm projectiles—four from each pod—roared in toward a clump of palms. A moment later we banked sharply to the right and then left again as Nellis took evasive action. He followed up with one or two brief bursts from the Gatling.
Interestingly, the “chin gun” didn’t sound at all like an automatic weapon. Rather, when fired, it uttered a low-pitched roar almost like an unmuffled heavy-duty truck going down a hill. You could feel the effects of the blast from its four barrels each time Nellis pulled the trigger, almost as if he had eased back on the throttle. The racket wasn’t as harsh as I’d been expecting, and I reckoned I could live with it.
As we continued circling the jungle below the reason for the scrap became clear. Government forces were indeed being attacked, but the situation wasn’t as bad as Scorpion had made out. From what we had been able to follow through our headsets, Scorpion’s men were being spearheaded by an unconventional and well-motivated group of tribal fighters known colloquially as Kamajors, which literally translated means “hunters.” Before the war, these tough, seasoned warriors roamed the forests of West Africa, keeping themselves and their families alive with what they were able to bag in the bush. They were originally armed with shotguns, a few single-action rifles of World War I vintage, and now and again a two hundred-year-old blunderbuss. These days, however, they matched the firepower of the enemy and cradled Kalashnikovs.
While we were heading in their direction, Nellis learned that the Kamajors had been attacked from a rebel emplacement on the road northwest of the place. It was perhaps a dozen clicks (about seven miles) or so from Rogberi Junction where Schock and Gilmoreno had been killed. Indeed, Nellis later told me, it wasn’t impossible that the same bunch of killers were responsible.
Moments after we arrived over the area Hassan spotted a white truck. It had probably been taken from the UN a few weeks before, only this one was heading down the road toward the Kamajors—fast! Mounted on its cab was a heavy Dshka machine-gun, the classic Russian anti-aircraft weapon. As Hassan later recalled, even from where we were hovering, he couldn’t miss the gun’s distinctive ribbing that ran down almost the full length of the barrel.
Nellis gained height, banked and leveled off, all the while keeping the vehicle in sight. He followed that maneuver with another salvo. Moments later he swung low over the target to find that the vehicle had swerved into a palm as it skidded off the road. It was now little more than a charred statistic. A few yards away lay a bloodied body, spread-eagled on the road. There were more rebel dead nearby in an open patch surrounded by tall clumps of elephant grass.
I thought I spotted green tracer fire coming up at us from a heavily foliated area, but Nellis wasn’t sure. Clearly the enemy was still active, but by then the pilot’s attention was focused elsewhere. He was looking at another target and we braced hard as he threw the machine into a tight two-G turn, almost clipping the tops of a stand of mahogany trees. Hassan and his Sierra Leonian counterpart, Lieutenant Schenks, had to hold on tight in the back because, unlike in Western attack helicopters, they weren’t strapped in. When the crew wasn’t doing what was required of them when flying from one point of the compass to another, they’d use beer crates for seats.
In his debrief Nellis explained the action: “I had a good idea where all this was happening. Headquarters had indicated that it was somewhere along the road to Mange.” Mange was not a big place, but it had long been an important staging area for the rebels in the north. The notorious Rogberi Junction was perhaps twelve miles away in the opposite direction. The truck, he explained, stood out sharply against the red gravel road, throwing up dust as it raced down. “You couldn’t miss it.”
Apart from two or three people sitting in the vehicle’s cab with the driver, another rebel with an AK was balanced perilously on the hood, right up front. There were half a dozen or more of them clustered around the anti-aircraft gun in the back.
“That promised trouble,” said Nellis. “I had to get us in and out again quickly. Fortunately I saw them before they spotted us.”
The gunship fired first. Nellis could see that the driver—suddenly aware of our approach—reacted smartly by slamming on his brakes. Unexpectedly, it had the effect of hurling the man on the hood head-long into the road ahead. Then, in what must have been a blind moment of panic, the driver put his foot down hard and drove over the prostrate figure. Nellis recalled seeing the truck lurch twice as two sets of wheels went over his body. By now both our side-gunners were firing independently.
The enemy—“gooks,” as the guys referred to them—kept emerging from the bush below, desperate on escape. I could hear Hassan curse each time he needed to change ammo belts, which was often. Spent 7.62mm brass casings started to pile up at his feet. Contrary to some reports, the British automatic weapons used by Hassan and Schenks were good, even though their barrels smoked like cigars after prolonged bursts of fire. Though they were in play just about every day of the war while I was about, we never had a jam.
For more than an hour we were in the air exchanging fire. Nellis would often carve a wide arc with the Hind, gaining a bit of height to better observe the terrain before taking us in again, low and fast. Depending on priorities, he would turn, level out and send in a line of rockets or perhaps use the heavy machine gun. The boys at the back would follow up with their GPMGs each time we banked and the routine would be repeated two, three or more times depending on circumstances. A lot hinged on whether there was enemy hardware or vehicles about, and Nellis would hammer away until he was satisfied that whatever he was targeting was destroyed.
As with most things in Sierra Leone’s war, flak jackets onboard were optional. Only side-gunner Schenks wore body armor, but then he was regarded as something of a pessimist within our ranks. I should have worn something, but in the clinging heat and hundred percent West African humidity, that sort of protection was more than just constrictive. Because the Hind was air-conditioned, however, it wasn’t nearly as stifling as I’d imagined it would be once we were airborne.1
With both sides exchanging blows, enemy fire slackened markedly once we’d arrived, the crew soon settled into something of a routine. Either Nellis would spot for targets, or Hassan or Schenks would report something suspicious below. From their positions at the back they had a more lateral view of the battle, while the two of us under our bubbles could only cover our forward envelope. Our flying helmets made it impossible to look behind.
Following a tradition that has become standard in many Third World wars, this South African pilot rarely moved about the operational area at anything but treetop height. Traveling just above the foliage at about a hundred-and-sixty knots (184 mph) was routine, though he would often raise the nose of the machine slightly once the scrap was on. This tactic could be hairy. A British Special Forces observer based at Cockerill’s operations center went up several times in the Hind and he surmised that going into action with Nellis was a bit like flying into Germany with the Dambusters during World War II. The same officer returned to base after one particularly hectic foray over Makeni to inform us that the altimeter had almost constantly registered zero.
Officially, taking British military personnel out in the Hind was forbidden: Whitehall strictly prohibited any of its soldiers flying with mercenaries. Nevertheless, conditions in combat are changeable and there was nothing that offered better reconnaissance opportunities than Nellis’ craft. So the British used Nellis when they could. In any event, operating as we were on the edge of the beyond, who in London would ever know?
Fighting over an under-populated and heavily foliated region has its advantages. In places the bush was so thick that it created huge natural arcs over smaller, open patches of ground. In that sort of country it was difficult to deploy heavy weapons. Of course, we knew that these were around, but usually the men manning the heavier weapons couldn’t see what they were firing at until it was too late.
This was also true with anti-aircraft missiles or Manpads—especially the former Soviet Strela-2 (SA-7 “Grail”). Because of the leadtime needed to activate their intricate electronics systems, these anti-aircraft weapons were all but useless in the jungle. According to British intelligence, some of the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) had been flown into Liberia from Libya and the Ukraine, though most had come by land from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, in numbers deliberately fudged.
Something similar had happened in the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa’s border wars along the Angolan frontier. There, Soviet-backed insurgent armies had for decades tried to bring down a South African Air Force helicopter using ground-to-air missiles. There were many close calls and, while a few choppers and other aircraft were lost by conventional ground fire, the Angolans fired an arsenal of Russian SAMs over the years and not one was successful. Sierra Leone, in contrast, offered a different set of permutations, especially when Nellis covered open ground or struck at some of the towns in rebel hands.
Gradually, as the months passed and hostilities intensified, Nellis’ Hind became the Freetown government’s most potent weapon. It was the first time in modern warfare that a lone pilot at the controls of a helicopter had actually turned a war on its head—though Nellis will concede today that there were times when he thought he was done for.
In an earlier sortie around Newton, about a month before I arrived—the town lies just beyond a line of hills surrounding the capital—he and the crew were ambushed one early morning. Because Nellis was the one obstacle that stood in Sankoh’s way in his bid to take Freetown, the rebels went to considerable lengths to try and shoot him down. On this particular morning they set up a Dshka, together with a double-barreled 14.5mm anti-aircraft gun, near a tall building in the middle of town. The idea was to effectively cover both arcs of the Mi-24s approach. They were aware, too, that Nellis followed the same flight path when “going to work” each day. He did so purposely. As he explained, his “predictable” flight path was designed to draw enemy fire in the hope they would use their heavier weapons.
“Then, I can see what I’m aiming at…and I can take them out.”
And that’s what eventually happened. For once, as Nellis remembers it, the rebels were prepared to fight. Normally they ran for cover whenever his helicopter appeared. According to Hassan, the first thing the crew saw was a string of tracers coming at them the moment Newton came into view. “You couldn’t miss the telltale, red tracers of the 14.5s,” he explained, adding that it made for an impressive display in the early morning sky. “The moment the firing started we knew that it was serious,” he declared.
Nellis reacted by throwing the chopper into an arc. “What was really bad,” continued Hassan, “was that the tracers just kept on coming; there seemed to be no end to them.” He vividly recalled how they all believed, at least for a time, that some of the projectiles were going through their tail rotors (though this was not the case). Since a 14.5mm shell will penetrate the steel of any armored vehicle, it would certainly demolish a helicopter—especially if a rotor, the tail boom or the hydraulics take a hit.
It was over almost as soon as it had started. The Hind soon crossed a nearby row of hills and was out of range. “What happened next,” explained Hassan, “was like something out of a film.” Nellis turned the helicopter around again and standing off almost a mile from the small community, he launched two salvoes of rockets, first at one side of the building adjacent to the heavy stuff, and then at the other.
“After that we went in fast,” Hassan explained, “firing the Gatling. Then we let them have it with a beautiful bunch of rockets.”
And so it went for the rest of the time that we worked the area around Port Loko that afternoon. Nellis would bank hard as soon as something came into view. If he didn’t use the Gatling, more rockets would follow. With thirty-two projectiles in each pod, the Hind was capable of firing eight salvos of eight each time he took her out, but on this occasion, he would rarely fire clutches of more than four at a time, most times in pairs to conserve firepower. Gradually, after an hour in the air, the pace slackened. Nellis would ease down low and for a while we’d nudge the jungle before he’d look for something else to hit. It was almost as if he was getting his second wind.
Weaving around enough to make me squeamish, Nellis waited until we could see a small force of government troops approaching along the road where we’d hit the truck. It was their job to secure the vehicle and the heavier stuff. After dealing with them by radio, Nellis headed north again, this time making for the riverside town of Mange; it was from there that the rebels had initially launched their raid.
This compact little settlement emerged from the jungle only a few minutes later. In the soft light of dusk, the setting was delightful, with the last rays of the sun reflecting off images below as the thick undergrowth and what had once been a palm plantation filtered them. It was the sort of place, I couldn’t help thinking as we hovered, that I’d have liked to visit before the war. More of a village than a town and dominated by a disproportionately large, whitewashed three-story mosque, Mange was quaint compared to the rest. It was a pity, I reflected at the time, that the rebels had a hold on it.
In his approach, Nellis fired a couple of rockets at a position on the outskirts and seconds later looped around to come in again. I didn’t see any retaliatory fire, but Nellis assured me there was. His objective had been a small stand of buildings protected by sandbags at the southern end of a large bridge that had earlier been identified by Cockerill as having been used by the rebels as a vehicle checkpoint. Banking once more Nellis swooped in for a final pasting and in the process hit several more buildings.
Ten minutes later we were on the approaches to Lungi to refuel. We had just about used up the last of our ammunition. By the time we got back to the base at Cockerill the Hind had been out for just under two hours. Throughout the sortie I hadn’t once been able to stretch my legs. And being very long, they did need intermittent stretching.
A report was later brought to the ops room indicating that the day’s kills (confirmed body counts) totaled fourteen, though there were almost certainly more. Ground forces would also have accounted for their share. More of the dead would be found days later when, following their noses, troops would be led to half-devoured, decomposing corpses strewn about in the undergrowth. Their buddies would have crudely hidden them in the dense growth before pulling out, though in the tropics it is impossible to hide the stench.
While there might have been more fatalities, there was no way then of knowing for certain. In any event, not many of the wounded were likely to have survived the night. Without treatment, septicemia would set in from any significant wound to the torso and, in that climate, would kill a man in six hours, sometimes sooner. Add to that the everyday reality that the conflict in Sierra Leone—irrational and uncompromising as it was—was not one that favored prisoners of war. Very few captives survived for long. Some were eaten; “fresh chop” they call it in West Africa.
What was clear to anyone who stayed in Sierra Leone for any length of time was that this was an extraordinarily difficult country in which to fight. On my previous visit with the mercenary group Executive Outcomes in 1995, Fred Marafano warned that West Africa’s jungles were “the absolute worst imaginable.” He spoke from hard experience, for he’d spent more than twenty years in the British Army and had seen combat in some of the world’s harshest conditions.
While in uniform Marafano, a Fijian-born national, had been posted just about everywhere. He’d soldiered in the rain forests of South and Central America as well as Borneo, the Gulf, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. West Africa, he said, was very different. He was adamant that the jungle that started on the outskirts of Freetown and went on in an unbroken line all the way to the frontiers of Guinea and Liberia, was the most inhospitable place on the planet. In contrast with the Amazon and Southeast Asia’s rain forests, he declared, Sierra Leone’s jungles “with their spikes that clawed” were totally unforgiving.
“The jungle here is impossible for us and equally daunting for them,” he told me. The only way to really get about was on properly made roads or tracks through the thick bush, many of them created by generations of everyday usage. Stop using them, he explained, “and the jungle will reclaim a road in three months.”
Approaching sixty, the man everybody in Sierra Leone knew simply as Fred had a coolness in his dark eyes that was belied by a fixed smile. Marafano had always been one for accepting the most difficult option, if only, as he put it, “because it’s usually the quickest route to success.” That, he stated, was even more pertinent when there was a war on the go.
Marfano had been fighting rebels in Sierra Leone the first time I met him six years before. And he was still at it this second time around. Meantime, he’d made a life for himself in Freetown with his young wife and a new baby. When his missus started worrying about her parents who lived up-country in a town that was periodically over-run by the RUF, Marfano single handedly led a combat team composed of about a hundred of his Kamajor followers halfway across the country to liberate the place.
“I kicked them out of the area to ease her mind,” he nonchalantly explained.