cut
03-05-2004, 01:16 PM
Anyone read this? or thinking pf getting it?
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/images/184413394X.jpg
CAPTURE
Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the US Army
It was 25 August 2000. A two-hundred-strong contingent of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, had been in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone for four weeks. Stationed within the Sierra Leone Army’s Benguema Camp, the British soldiers were split into two units: a larger training force and a smaller defence force. They had been sent to Sierra Leone as part of a British-led effort to train the chaotic Sierra Leone Army to wage war on that country’s notorious jungle-based rebels and bring peace to the country. The Royal Irish Rangers Training Force had the daunting task of drilling some basic military discipline into the shambolic Sierra Leone Army (SLA) and teaching them the basics of British Army combat tactics. By contrast, Defence Force faced what should have been the far easier task of maintaining security in and around the Benguema Camp.
The headquarters of the Royal Irish forces in Sierra Leone was based in a crumbling but comfortable diamond smugglers’ house in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. But the bulk of the men were based out at Benguema Camp, some ten miles to the south-east of Freetown, at an old colonial plantation recently transformed into a functioning military base. Surrounded by ramshackle bamboo fences and rolls of barbed wire, the Royal Irish soldiers were billeted in a tented area at the rear of the Benguema Camp, which itself perches on the shores of the West African ocean. Inland towards the east were the vast swamps, jungles and heavily forested hills of the nation’s interior.
But to the north and the west lay the Atlantic shoreline, a series of picture-postcard white sandy beaches fringed with palm trees, from where the crystal blue waters of the tropical seas rolled on uninterrupted until South America. It could almost have been a paradise posting for the British soldiers, were it not for several factors all but unique to Sierra Leone: fabulously rich diamond fields, a bloody civil war, battle-hardened rebel guerrilla forces, rampant corruption, regular armed mutinies and widespread rape, looting, mutilations and murder – and all of it fuelled by a surfeit of modern weapons.
For over a decade, a civil war had been raging in Sierra Leone – a war unrivalled in all of Africa in terms of its senseless horror and brutality. The country had been all but overrun by the crazed rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a group of terrorist bandits and murderers. Bereft of political aims or objectives and with no popular support, they were driven by the lust for power and control over the country’s diamond mines. They revelled in meaningless savagery and horror – calling their rebel units names like Burn House Squad or Cut Hands Commando. Kill Man No Blood Unit’s speciality was beating people to death without a drop of blood being spilt.
The RUF was no tinpot outfit. They had serious money with which to buy serious weaponry, earning some $100 million a year from the illicit trade in diamonds. And for years, they had preyed on the people of Sierra Leone like an evil plague of locusts, turning their unspeakable practices into so-called ‘games’. The rebels’ version of Russian roulette was designed to extract maximum ‘entertainment’ from terrorising groups of captured villagers. They would scribble grotesque ‘punishments’ on scraps of paper – ‘cut off hands’, ‘cut off genitals’, ‘slice off lips’ and the like – which were then screwed up and thrown into a heap on the ground. Each of the captured villagers was then forced to choose one of the pieces of paper, and whatever horrific mutilation was written thereon was exactly what the rebels would proceed to do to them.
If possible, the ‘sex the child’ game was even worse. Captured women would first be gang-raped. Presuming they survived that ordeal, the rebels would then gather around any of the women who were heavily pregnant. A ringmaster would take bets from his fellow rebels on the *** of the child the woman was carrying. Once all the wagers were in, whoever had bet the highest price got to slice open the belly of the pregnant women with a machete and haul out the child, hence revealing its ***.
The RUF had committed mass rapes and ****** mutilations designed to destroy the very essence of their victim’s humanity. Fathers were forced to watch their own daughters being gang-raped, their sons being buggered. Boys of just eight or nine years old were forced to kill their own parents, and then join the so-called rebels. The rebels achieved real infamy when they had launched an indiscriminate campaign to hack off of the limbs of men, women, children and even babies. These, then, were the rebel forces that the Royal Irish Rangers were up against in Sierra Leone; this, then, the insanity of evil that they had come to Sierra Leone to help put an end to, once and for all.
It was the RUF’s sick campaign to turn Sierra Leone into a nation of amputees that had finally brought their activities to the attention of a horrified wider world: TV and newspaper pictures of four-month-old babies with both arms amputated at the elbows could not be ignored. While most British, European and US citizens knew little about this country or its war, they knew that depraved rebels were perpetrating acts of terrible brutality such as chopping off babies’ limbs. Something had to be done.
In April 2000, with a massive UN peacekeeping force in total disarray and the Sierra Leone Army in retreat, the RUF were poised to capture the nation’s capital city. The last time this had happened, some five thousand people were tortured and murdered in the capital city alone. With the RUF and their allies now poised to carry out a repeat performance, a powerful force of British troops, spearheaded by the Parachute Regiment, were drafted into Freetown, under a mission codenamed Operation Palliser. In theory, the Paras were there to carry out an entitled persons (EP) evacuation – to airlift all British and allied nationals to safety. But within days of their deployment, the Paras had moved up-country and engaged the RUF rebels, killing several and stopping their advance in its tracks.
As the immediate rebel threat receded, the British commanders turned their attentions to the bigger picture. An International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) was put together, under which the Sierra Leone Army was to be given basic combat training by Her Majesty’s Armed Forces (assisted by a small number of their American and Canadian allies). The British made no bones about the ultimate goal of this training: it was to enable the SLA to crush the RUF and allied rebel groups, and to restore order and sanity to the devastated country.
Fast-track three months, and the Royal Irish Regiment had arrived in Sierra Leone to take over the IMATT lead role. The Royal Irish Regiment capture had been formed from a recent amalgamation of the Royal Irish Rangers and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), its combined troops being known simply as the ‘Rangers’. The new regiment brought with it a long tradition of highly trained and aggressive airmobile soldiering. In a sense, the Rangers were Northern Ireland’s answer to the Paras, although less highly jump-trained and more accustomed to heli-borne assaults. Of particular relevance to the IMATT mission was the Rangers’ experience fighting the terrorist war in Northern Ireland. Within their ranks there were decades of combat experience gained in one of the harshest theatres of urban and anti-terrorist warfare in the world. The Rangers would be more than a match for Sierra Leone’s rebels.
The men of the Rangers’ Defence Force were rotated through stag duty (sentry watch) and security patrols, which made their work a little more varied and interesting than that of the larger Training Force. Many of the Rangers drafted to Sierra Leone had already seen action overseas, most recently in Bosnia and Kosovo, and so they were well placed to defend their IMATT mission. But as had been the case with those conflicts, the Rangers now found themselves parachuted into the midst of a long-running, brutal civil war, one beset by insecurity. The hostile forces of the RUF were massed to their north and east, and several other unpredictable and heavily armed rebel groups roamed the surrounding jungles. It was clearly no place for complacency.
Shortly after first light on that 25 August morning, Defence Force headed out on foot patrol to recce the terrain inland of the Royal Irish base. Their route led into the densely forested, rolling hills stretching from their Benguema Camp eastwards into the remote jungles of the country’s interior. The patrol was following narrow bush paths that snaked through the jungle, massive tree trunks towering on either side of the men, reaching a hundred feet or more into the jungle canopy overhead. As the men set out into the forest it was deathly quiet, apart from the tramp of boots on the bare, sandy soil of the forest floor. Dawn mists still clung to the treetops high above them, and so little light penetrated through the jungle canopy that it took several minutes for the men’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, so they could see to find their footholds properly.
The patrol’s mission was to search for observation points (OPs), from where they could keep an eye on any rebel movements in their area. Ideally, they were looking for a large granite outcrop breaking through the forest canopy, offering a vantage point. As the African sun rose above the forest, the jungle animal and bird life woke with it, the dank air split by the barking of troops of monkeys and the Caw! Caw! of parrots and hornbills. The path climbed over tangled labyrinths of tree roots, dived down slopes into sunlit streams, and skirted around the eerie, man-size mushroom-shaped termite mounds that grew out of the forest floor. But by mid-morning, all the patrol had discovered were several clearings for hashish plantations – a scattering of bright green cannabis plants with spiky leaves, and shacks for drying them. The jungle had proven far too dense to offer the British soldiers any OPs with useful views over the surrounding terrain.
By lunchtime the men were back at Benguema. Word had gone out that the Officer Commanding (OC) at Benguema Camp, Major Alex Martial, was preparing a vehicle reconnaissance patrol into the Occra Hills. The Occra Hills lay some thirty-five miles to the north-east of Benguema, a considerable distance into bandit country. None of the Royal Irish had ventured that far inland before. Everyone in Defence Force wanted to be on that patrol, especially as Major Martial would be leading it. Major Martial was in his early thirties, and one of the youngest majors in the British Army. The word among the men was that he was ex-14th Intelligence Brigade (known as ‘the Det’, short for the Detachment) – the elite, covert British Army unit deployed in Northern Ireland against the IRA.
Like many of those who had served with the Det, Major Martial was a ‘grey man’, the sort of person who would be unnoticed in a crowd. He had few distinguishing features as such, and it would be hard to describe his physical appearance. Being able to keep such a low profile was of crucial value in the war against terrorism that had been fought for the past three decades in Northern Ireland. This ability to go unnoticed, this practical invisibility, was the key quality of the men of the Det. Few of the soldiers of Defence Force felt they knew Major Martial very well, but he was considered a high-flyer and was well respected. So far, most of the men had found much of the Sierra Leone posting pretty dull – too much time spent guarding the camp perimeter on stag duty in the pouring rain. The offer of a vehicle patrol was a rare chance to get out and about and see some new terrain.
Major Martial chose Captain Ed Flaherty as his second in command (2iC). Flaherty was in his late twenties and a Belfast man. He was around five foot seven, stocky, and wore his blond hair an inch or so longer than most of the junior ranks (an officer’s prerogative). Like the Major, he was seen as being an army career man through and through. As the Regimental Signals Officer (RSO), Flaherty would be capture in charge of comms on the patrol. Sergeant Michael ‘Mickey’ Smith, another veteran of Northern Ireland, and another Belfast man, was also chosen to go. Smith was a lanky whippet of a soldier and a typical sergeant – good at keeping things running in the background. Then there were the three corporals – Alistair ‘Ally’ Mackenzie, Reginald ‘Reggie’ Ryan and Jason ‘Sam’ Sampson.
Sam, a tough and uncompromising non-commissioned officer (NCO), was all right once you got to know him, the men would say, but that could take some time. The Major asked Corporal Sampson to select four Rangers as security for the patrol from his own Rifle Platoon. Corporal Sampson chose men that he knew well, with significant combat experience: Rangers Gavin ‘Gav’ Rowell, Jim ‘Sandy’ (on account of his bright blond hair) Gaunt, Kieran ‘Mac’ MacGuire and Marcus ‘Marky’ McVeigh. At twenty-one, Ranger MacGuire was the oldest of the four. A quiet, popular soldier, Mac had mousy brown hair and was of average build. He was the only patrol member who hailed from Southern Ireland, but that wasn’t really an issue; there were lots of Southern Irish in the Rangers and no one felt any animosity towards them.
Rangers Gaunt and Rowell were twenty-year-old neighbours from east Belfast; they’d grown up together on those tough streets and were best mates. Ranger Gaunt was five foot eight and wiry going on thin. With his bleached blond hair and freckled face, he could still have been mistaken for a schoolkid. In fact, he often was when trying to order a few pints of Guinness in the bars of Belfast. Ranger Gaunt was trusting almost to the level of naivety; trusting of his superior officers, the camaraderie of his mates and in the military in general. When he spoke he did so quietly, almost under his breath, with his sentences peppered with ‘sort ofs’ and ‘youse know what I means’, as if seeking reassurance all the time. He did his best to disguise this lack of confidence with an off-the-wall sense of humour.
By contrast, Ranger Rowell was over six foot, thickset with closecropped dark hair and said to look a lot older than his twenty years. A confident individual and a natural soldier, women found the Ranger handsome in that rugged, soldierly way. He had an air about him of being a man who knew he could get the job done, one not ****e to fear or self-doubt. When he spoke, he did so confidently, and with an air of knowing what he wanted to say.
Ranger McVeigh, the youngest at nineteen, was another east Belfast lad. He had joined the Rangers at the same time as Ranger Gaunt, so they were the most junior in terms of time served, but even so, Ranger McVeigh was already convinced that a career in the British Army was the only life for him. Despite their obvious youth, all four Rangers had combat experience, both from Northern Ireland and recent tours in the Balkans. Ranger Rowell, the most experienced of the four, had also served for seven months in Macedonia, so he had spent nearly a year on combat duty before being posted to Sierra Leone. For most of these young men, joining the British Army was a welcome ticket out of Belfast, and one of the few ways to escape from the Troubles that had blighted so much of life in Northern Ireland.
Settling down in the shade of a tree that overhung the base perimeter for a chow down of spam (again), Ranger Gaunt glanced around the base. To his right, there was the coiled razor-wire camp perimeter, with the dirt track on the far side. To his left, there were a series of khaki tents in which the Rangers slept, with the old colonial-style red-brick plantation house in the background, where the officers were billeted. As he looked around, the Ranger spotted a group of his mates preparing some Sierra Leone Army (SLA) soldiers for ambush training. God, what a shower the SLA looked, slouching about in their ragtag uniforms, the Ranger thought to himself. At least with Defence Force it felt like they were doing some real soldiering. According to his mates, the SLA recruits were usually half pissed on some locally brewed hooch. Which meant that it was all but impossible to get them up and out for PT early in the morning. The SLA had a long way to go before they’d be ready to patrol the jungles of Sierra Leone, he thought to himself, let alone the streets of Northern Ireland.
As he began cleaning his SA80 assault rifle in preparation for the patrol, the Ranger thanked his lucky stars that he’d been put on Defence Force. He was getting out and about that afternoon, not overseeing some gang **** of an SLA training exercise. It was no wonder the SLA had proven so incapable of defeating the rebels, he reminded himself, slamming the breech back into his SA80. He began preparing the rest of his kit for the patrol, checking on his grenades, flak jacket and spare magazines. Now, where was his flaming jungle hat? Oh, there it was. He’d been sitting on it while cleaning his weapon. The five-thousand-strong Sierra Leone Army might outnumber the rebels some three to one, but they remained a bunch of complete incompetents, that was for sure.
There were only one or two exceptions that Ranger Gaunt had come across during his time in Sierra Leone. One of them was the SLA’s capture Corporal Mousa Bangura, a damn fine soldier if ever there was one. Formerly a militia member, ‘Corporal Mousa’, as he was known to the British soldiers, had gone on to join the Sierra Leone Army, and had then been one of the first to benefit from the British-led IMATT training. In November 1999, he’d been seconded to a platoon-sized unit of British Special Forces, based at a small military camp at Hastings, on the outskirts of Freetown. They were running recce and combat missions up-country, the forty-odd men being taken in via chopper and dropped on to target, and then extracted by chopper once the mission was complete. Though Corporal Mousa was never actually allowed to go on one of these missions, he had earned an awful lot from the three months he had spent working with the British soldiers.
Ranger Gaunt was relieved to discover that Corporal Mousa would be accompanying them on the patrol. He was a tough soldier and a smart one too. He knew how the rebels and the militia and the British forces tended to think and operate, often from first-hand experience. While Corporal Mousa had felt very much like a boy who’d suddenly met the real men when liaising with the British Special Forces troops, he felt more the Rangers’ equal, which was a good feeling. His role on the patrol would be to act as a guide, translator and adviser to Major Martial.
Corporal Mousa’s opposite number in Benguema was Captain Flaherty, and he had given the Sierra Leonean liaison officer prior warning of the patrol’s intentions. Two days earlier, Captain Flaherty had approached Corporal Mousa to discuss the intended route of the patrol. The destination was Masiaka, extending the normal range of the Rangers’ previous patrols. To date, these had only reached as far as Mabontoso, a village on the outskirts of Freetown. Beyond Mabontoso was bandit country – a large swathe of terrain controlled by a notorious rebel group called the West Side Boys. As Corporal Mousa had already passed along the road to Masiaka with other British army units, he wasn’t overly concerned. The rebels were unlikely to cause any trouble as long as the British patrol stuck to the main road passing through their territory.
All in, it was a twelve-man patrol then, made up of the eleven British soldiers and the one Sierra Leonean. But with two officers and five NCOs, it was very top heavy. The British members were armed with the British Army standard-issue SA80 assault rifle. As usual, Corporal Mousa chose to take with him the far more reliable and larger calibre AK47 assault rifle. The patrol would be using three vehicles, all in drab military olive green: a WMIK, an open-backed Land-Rover fitted with a weapons mount installation kit, including a chunky 50-calibre machine gun and a 7.62mm general purpose machine gun (GPMG), a standard Land-Rover and a signals Land-Rover, bristling with radio antennae. Ranger McVeigh had been chosen for the patrol in part because he was one of the few men who knew how to operate the 50-cal: it was an older design of gun which had to be manually calibrated in order to fire on automatic.
After they’d finished their lunch of spam sandwiches, the Major outlined the mission to the assembled men. ‘OK. Listen up, lads. We’ll be heading up towards the front line, passing through the Occra Hills, to pay a liaison visit to the UN base at JordBat2 – Masiaka. There’s little likelihood of any trouble, but stay alert. If there is a contact, you are to follow standard drill: return fire and drive out of the contact if at all possible. If we cannot get the vehicles out and need to go out on foot, form a base fire line and fire and manoeuvre out of the situation in the normal way. I want to stress that we are to avoid contact if at all possible. That’s all, men.’
JordBat2 was the neighbouring UN peacekeeping base at the town of Masiaka, where a Jordanian battalion held nominal control over a large swathe of territory. The Jordanians were part of the 13,000-strong United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), a multinational peacekeeping force that had been made to look hopelessly foolish and incompetent by the rebel forces in recent months. Over a thousand UN troops had been taken hostage en masse and had scores of their vehicles stolen, while the rebels had wrought havoc across the country. Four British UN officers had been captured along with the hundreds of other UN forces, but they had managed to make their own getaway.
Masiaka is situated on the most crucial road in the country’s transport system – the main route heading north and east into the country’s interior. The British patrol’s route to Masiaka lay along this tarmac road, which snaked through the rolling jungle. The drive was expected to take around an hour, and en route the patrol would have to pass through a series of UN checkpoints, and two roadblocks manned by the West Side Boys. The rebels called themselves the West Side Boys to signify that they held the territory to the west of Freetown, as opposed to the Sierra Leone Government territory to the east. They had taken the inspiration for their name from a rap song by the US gangster rapper Tupac Shakur. They were renowned for looting and pillaging the civilian cars and buses and aid vehicles that passed through their territory.
The Jordanian UN contingent were widely suspected of having done a deal with the West Side Boys – whereby they would not interfere with the rebel’s road piracy activities, if the rebels didn’t threaten their men. This went totally against the Jordanians’ UN peacekeeping mandate, one of keeping the peace and ensuring safe passage of people and vehicles up and down the highway to Freetown. Many Sierra Leoneans suspected the Jordanian peacekeepers of having an even more dubious pact with the West Side Boys. They accused them of buying up the loot that the rebels seized on the highway, and doing deals with the rebels to purchase any diamonds that fell into their hands. Whatever the exact nature of the shady Jordanian–West Side Boys relationship, it would end up costing the Royal Irish Rangers dear.
The thousand-strong West Side Boys – who styled themselves the ‘West Side Niggas’ – espoused no coherent political ideology. They had fought alongside the larger RUF rebel group during past battles, seizing power and presiding over months of anarchy and murder in the country. Their men and boy soldiers were renowned for dressing up in women’s wigs before combat, and being permanently drunk and high on drugs. Supposedly allied to the Sierra Leonean government, the Boys had recently fought a series of battles against the forces of the UN and the SLA. The only thing you could be certain about with the West Side Boys was that you could never be certain whose side they were really on. In short, they were famously violent, unpredictable and trigger-happy.
Ten miles north-west of the Royal Irish base at Benguema was the Freetown Amputee Camp, housing several hundred victims of the violence in Sierra Leone. The camp ‘chairman’, Lamin Jarka, was a former bank employee and one of the victims of the West Side Boys. One afternoon in January 1989, the Boys had come for his daughter Hannah, who was just fourteen. Lamin Jarka had fought them off while she escaped through a back window. When he was finally overpowered, he was ordered to go and stand outside in a line with other captives. At the front was a teenage rebel with the name ‘Commander Cut Hands’. Cut Hands stood beside the stump of a tree and proceeded to chop off the hands of each man in turn with an axe. Those who resisted were shot. It was three days before Lamin Jarka received any medical treatment. But his daughter had been saved from the rebels. This horrific story was far from unusual. A couple of days after the Rangers’ arrival in Sierra Leone, an escaped West Side Boys prisoner had been brought to their Benguema base. Under questioning by the British troops, it turned out that he was an SLA soldier who had been captured in one of their roadblocks. He had been dragged from his vehicle and taken to a nearby hut, then stripped naked and buggered. Just at that moment, another vehicle had appeared out on the road, and the West Side Boys had rushed off to loot it. The SLA soldier had grabbed his chance and escaped through the thatched roof of the hut. If he hadn’t done so, he was certain the rebels would have killed him.
But despite such reports, Major Martial’s heavily armed patrol didn’t think they had too much to fear from the West Side Boys. Several times in recent months the British military had shown its teeth against the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone, and each time the RUF had come off very badly. Hopefully, word had got around by now that British forces were not to be messed with. In any case, in all of the Royal Irish Rangers’ intelligence briefings to date, the West Side Boys had been identified as ‘friendlies’. Presumably, intelligence knew what they were talking about, and so the West Side Boys must have somehow allied themselves to the British forces in Sierra Leone. It was a strange alliance, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the shifting miasma of allegiances in Sierra Leone’s civil war. So, Major Martial’s patrol would head up for a lunchtime chat with the Jordanians, check that everything was all right, and then return. Simple.
- extract from uncorrected proof copy
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/images/184413394X.jpg
CAPTURE
Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the US Army
It was 25 August 2000. A two-hundred-strong contingent of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, had been in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone for four weeks. Stationed within the Sierra Leone Army’s Benguema Camp, the British soldiers were split into two units: a larger training force and a smaller defence force. They had been sent to Sierra Leone as part of a British-led effort to train the chaotic Sierra Leone Army to wage war on that country’s notorious jungle-based rebels and bring peace to the country. The Royal Irish Rangers Training Force had the daunting task of drilling some basic military discipline into the shambolic Sierra Leone Army (SLA) and teaching them the basics of British Army combat tactics. By contrast, Defence Force faced what should have been the far easier task of maintaining security in and around the Benguema Camp.
The headquarters of the Royal Irish forces in Sierra Leone was based in a crumbling but comfortable diamond smugglers’ house in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. But the bulk of the men were based out at Benguema Camp, some ten miles to the south-east of Freetown, at an old colonial plantation recently transformed into a functioning military base. Surrounded by ramshackle bamboo fences and rolls of barbed wire, the Royal Irish soldiers were billeted in a tented area at the rear of the Benguema Camp, which itself perches on the shores of the West African ocean. Inland towards the east were the vast swamps, jungles and heavily forested hills of the nation’s interior.
But to the north and the west lay the Atlantic shoreline, a series of picture-postcard white sandy beaches fringed with palm trees, from where the crystal blue waters of the tropical seas rolled on uninterrupted until South America. It could almost have been a paradise posting for the British soldiers, were it not for several factors all but unique to Sierra Leone: fabulously rich diamond fields, a bloody civil war, battle-hardened rebel guerrilla forces, rampant corruption, regular armed mutinies and widespread rape, looting, mutilations and murder – and all of it fuelled by a surfeit of modern weapons.
For over a decade, a civil war had been raging in Sierra Leone – a war unrivalled in all of Africa in terms of its senseless horror and brutality. The country had been all but overrun by the crazed rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a group of terrorist bandits and murderers. Bereft of political aims or objectives and with no popular support, they were driven by the lust for power and control over the country’s diamond mines. They revelled in meaningless savagery and horror – calling their rebel units names like Burn House Squad or Cut Hands Commando. Kill Man No Blood Unit’s speciality was beating people to death without a drop of blood being spilt.
The RUF was no tinpot outfit. They had serious money with which to buy serious weaponry, earning some $100 million a year from the illicit trade in diamonds. And for years, they had preyed on the people of Sierra Leone like an evil plague of locusts, turning their unspeakable practices into so-called ‘games’. The rebels’ version of Russian roulette was designed to extract maximum ‘entertainment’ from terrorising groups of captured villagers. They would scribble grotesque ‘punishments’ on scraps of paper – ‘cut off hands’, ‘cut off genitals’, ‘slice off lips’ and the like – which were then screwed up and thrown into a heap on the ground. Each of the captured villagers was then forced to choose one of the pieces of paper, and whatever horrific mutilation was written thereon was exactly what the rebels would proceed to do to them.
If possible, the ‘sex the child’ game was even worse. Captured women would first be gang-raped. Presuming they survived that ordeal, the rebels would then gather around any of the women who were heavily pregnant. A ringmaster would take bets from his fellow rebels on the *** of the child the woman was carrying. Once all the wagers were in, whoever had bet the highest price got to slice open the belly of the pregnant women with a machete and haul out the child, hence revealing its ***.
The RUF had committed mass rapes and ****** mutilations designed to destroy the very essence of their victim’s humanity. Fathers were forced to watch their own daughters being gang-raped, their sons being buggered. Boys of just eight or nine years old were forced to kill their own parents, and then join the so-called rebels. The rebels achieved real infamy when they had launched an indiscriminate campaign to hack off of the limbs of men, women, children and even babies. These, then, were the rebel forces that the Royal Irish Rangers were up against in Sierra Leone; this, then, the insanity of evil that they had come to Sierra Leone to help put an end to, once and for all.
It was the RUF’s sick campaign to turn Sierra Leone into a nation of amputees that had finally brought their activities to the attention of a horrified wider world: TV and newspaper pictures of four-month-old babies with both arms amputated at the elbows could not be ignored. While most British, European and US citizens knew little about this country or its war, they knew that depraved rebels were perpetrating acts of terrible brutality such as chopping off babies’ limbs. Something had to be done.
In April 2000, with a massive UN peacekeeping force in total disarray and the Sierra Leone Army in retreat, the RUF were poised to capture the nation’s capital city. The last time this had happened, some five thousand people were tortured and murdered in the capital city alone. With the RUF and their allies now poised to carry out a repeat performance, a powerful force of British troops, spearheaded by the Parachute Regiment, were drafted into Freetown, under a mission codenamed Operation Palliser. In theory, the Paras were there to carry out an entitled persons (EP) evacuation – to airlift all British and allied nationals to safety. But within days of their deployment, the Paras had moved up-country and engaged the RUF rebels, killing several and stopping their advance in its tracks.
As the immediate rebel threat receded, the British commanders turned their attentions to the bigger picture. An International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) was put together, under which the Sierra Leone Army was to be given basic combat training by Her Majesty’s Armed Forces (assisted by a small number of their American and Canadian allies). The British made no bones about the ultimate goal of this training: it was to enable the SLA to crush the RUF and allied rebel groups, and to restore order and sanity to the devastated country.
Fast-track three months, and the Royal Irish Regiment had arrived in Sierra Leone to take over the IMATT lead role. The Royal Irish Regiment capture had been formed from a recent amalgamation of the Royal Irish Rangers and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), its combined troops being known simply as the ‘Rangers’. The new regiment brought with it a long tradition of highly trained and aggressive airmobile soldiering. In a sense, the Rangers were Northern Ireland’s answer to the Paras, although less highly jump-trained and more accustomed to heli-borne assaults. Of particular relevance to the IMATT mission was the Rangers’ experience fighting the terrorist war in Northern Ireland. Within their ranks there were decades of combat experience gained in one of the harshest theatres of urban and anti-terrorist warfare in the world. The Rangers would be more than a match for Sierra Leone’s rebels.
The men of the Rangers’ Defence Force were rotated through stag duty (sentry watch) and security patrols, which made their work a little more varied and interesting than that of the larger Training Force. Many of the Rangers drafted to Sierra Leone had already seen action overseas, most recently in Bosnia and Kosovo, and so they were well placed to defend their IMATT mission. But as had been the case with those conflicts, the Rangers now found themselves parachuted into the midst of a long-running, brutal civil war, one beset by insecurity. The hostile forces of the RUF were massed to their north and east, and several other unpredictable and heavily armed rebel groups roamed the surrounding jungles. It was clearly no place for complacency.
Shortly after first light on that 25 August morning, Defence Force headed out on foot patrol to recce the terrain inland of the Royal Irish base. Their route led into the densely forested, rolling hills stretching from their Benguema Camp eastwards into the remote jungles of the country’s interior. The patrol was following narrow bush paths that snaked through the jungle, massive tree trunks towering on either side of the men, reaching a hundred feet or more into the jungle canopy overhead. As the men set out into the forest it was deathly quiet, apart from the tramp of boots on the bare, sandy soil of the forest floor. Dawn mists still clung to the treetops high above them, and so little light penetrated through the jungle canopy that it took several minutes for the men’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, so they could see to find their footholds properly.
The patrol’s mission was to search for observation points (OPs), from where they could keep an eye on any rebel movements in their area. Ideally, they were looking for a large granite outcrop breaking through the forest canopy, offering a vantage point. As the African sun rose above the forest, the jungle animal and bird life woke with it, the dank air split by the barking of troops of monkeys and the Caw! Caw! of parrots and hornbills. The path climbed over tangled labyrinths of tree roots, dived down slopes into sunlit streams, and skirted around the eerie, man-size mushroom-shaped termite mounds that grew out of the forest floor. But by mid-morning, all the patrol had discovered were several clearings for hashish plantations – a scattering of bright green cannabis plants with spiky leaves, and shacks for drying them. The jungle had proven far too dense to offer the British soldiers any OPs with useful views over the surrounding terrain.
By lunchtime the men were back at Benguema. Word had gone out that the Officer Commanding (OC) at Benguema Camp, Major Alex Martial, was preparing a vehicle reconnaissance patrol into the Occra Hills. The Occra Hills lay some thirty-five miles to the north-east of Benguema, a considerable distance into bandit country. None of the Royal Irish had ventured that far inland before. Everyone in Defence Force wanted to be on that patrol, especially as Major Martial would be leading it. Major Martial was in his early thirties, and one of the youngest majors in the British Army. The word among the men was that he was ex-14th Intelligence Brigade (known as ‘the Det’, short for the Detachment) – the elite, covert British Army unit deployed in Northern Ireland against the IRA.
Like many of those who had served with the Det, Major Martial was a ‘grey man’, the sort of person who would be unnoticed in a crowd. He had few distinguishing features as such, and it would be hard to describe his physical appearance. Being able to keep such a low profile was of crucial value in the war against terrorism that had been fought for the past three decades in Northern Ireland. This ability to go unnoticed, this practical invisibility, was the key quality of the men of the Det. Few of the soldiers of Defence Force felt they knew Major Martial very well, but he was considered a high-flyer and was well respected. So far, most of the men had found much of the Sierra Leone posting pretty dull – too much time spent guarding the camp perimeter on stag duty in the pouring rain. The offer of a vehicle patrol was a rare chance to get out and about and see some new terrain.
Major Martial chose Captain Ed Flaherty as his second in command (2iC). Flaherty was in his late twenties and a Belfast man. He was around five foot seven, stocky, and wore his blond hair an inch or so longer than most of the junior ranks (an officer’s prerogative). Like the Major, he was seen as being an army career man through and through. As the Regimental Signals Officer (RSO), Flaherty would be capture in charge of comms on the patrol. Sergeant Michael ‘Mickey’ Smith, another veteran of Northern Ireland, and another Belfast man, was also chosen to go. Smith was a lanky whippet of a soldier and a typical sergeant – good at keeping things running in the background. Then there were the three corporals – Alistair ‘Ally’ Mackenzie, Reginald ‘Reggie’ Ryan and Jason ‘Sam’ Sampson.
Sam, a tough and uncompromising non-commissioned officer (NCO), was all right once you got to know him, the men would say, but that could take some time. The Major asked Corporal Sampson to select four Rangers as security for the patrol from his own Rifle Platoon. Corporal Sampson chose men that he knew well, with significant combat experience: Rangers Gavin ‘Gav’ Rowell, Jim ‘Sandy’ (on account of his bright blond hair) Gaunt, Kieran ‘Mac’ MacGuire and Marcus ‘Marky’ McVeigh. At twenty-one, Ranger MacGuire was the oldest of the four. A quiet, popular soldier, Mac had mousy brown hair and was of average build. He was the only patrol member who hailed from Southern Ireland, but that wasn’t really an issue; there were lots of Southern Irish in the Rangers and no one felt any animosity towards them.
Rangers Gaunt and Rowell were twenty-year-old neighbours from east Belfast; they’d grown up together on those tough streets and were best mates. Ranger Gaunt was five foot eight and wiry going on thin. With his bleached blond hair and freckled face, he could still have been mistaken for a schoolkid. In fact, he often was when trying to order a few pints of Guinness in the bars of Belfast. Ranger Gaunt was trusting almost to the level of naivety; trusting of his superior officers, the camaraderie of his mates and in the military in general. When he spoke he did so quietly, almost under his breath, with his sentences peppered with ‘sort ofs’ and ‘youse know what I means’, as if seeking reassurance all the time. He did his best to disguise this lack of confidence with an off-the-wall sense of humour.
By contrast, Ranger Rowell was over six foot, thickset with closecropped dark hair and said to look a lot older than his twenty years. A confident individual and a natural soldier, women found the Ranger handsome in that rugged, soldierly way. He had an air about him of being a man who knew he could get the job done, one not ****e to fear or self-doubt. When he spoke, he did so confidently, and with an air of knowing what he wanted to say.
Ranger McVeigh, the youngest at nineteen, was another east Belfast lad. He had joined the Rangers at the same time as Ranger Gaunt, so they were the most junior in terms of time served, but even so, Ranger McVeigh was already convinced that a career in the British Army was the only life for him. Despite their obvious youth, all four Rangers had combat experience, both from Northern Ireland and recent tours in the Balkans. Ranger Rowell, the most experienced of the four, had also served for seven months in Macedonia, so he had spent nearly a year on combat duty before being posted to Sierra Leone. For most of these young men, joining the British Army was a welcome ticket out of Belfast, and one of the few ways to escape from the Troubles that had blighted so much of life in Northern Ireland.
Settling down in the shade of a tree that overhung the base perimeter for a chow down of spam (again), Ranger Gaunt glanced around the base. To his right, there was the coiled razor-wire camp perimeter, with the dirt track on the far side. To his left, there were a series of khaki tents in which the Rangers slept, with the old colonial-style red-brick plantation house in the background, where the officers were billeted. As he looked around, the Ranger spotted a group of his mates preparing some Sierra Leone Army (SLA) soldiers for ambush training. God, what a shower the SLA looked, slouching about in their ragtag uniforms, the Ranger thought to himself. At least with Defence Force it felt like they were doing some real soldiering. According to his mates, the SLA recruits were usually half pissed on some locally brewed hooch. Which meant that it was all but impossible to get them up and out for PT early in the morning. The SLA had a long way to go before they’d be ready to patrol the jungles of Sierra Leone, he thought to himself, let alone the streets of Northern Ireland.
As he began cleaning his SA80 assault rifle in preparation for the patrol, the Ranger thanked his lucky stars that he’d been put on Defence Force. He was getting out and about that afternoon, not overseeing some gang **** of an SLA training exercise. It was no wonder the SLA had proven so incapable of defeating the rebels, he reminded himself, slamming the breech back into his SA80. He began preparing the rest of his kit for the patrol, checking on his grenades, flak jacket and spare magazines. Now, where was his flaming jungle hat? Oh, there it was. He’d been sitting on it while cleaning his weapon. The five-thousand-strong Sierra Leone Army might outnumber the rebels some three to one, but they remained a bunch of complete incompetents, that was for sure.
There were only one or two exceptions that Ranger Gaunt had come across during his time in Sierra Leone. One of them was the SLA’s capture Corporal Mousa Bangura, a damn fine soldier if ever there was one. Formerly a militia member, ‘Corporal Mousa’, as he was known to the British soldiers, had gone on to join the Sierra Leone Army, and had then been one of the first to benefit from the British-led IMATT training. In November 1999, he’d been seconded to a platoon-sized unit of British Special Forces, based at a small military camp at Hastings, on the outskirts of Freetown. They were running recce and combat missions up-country, the forty-odd men being taken in via chopper and dropped on to target, and then extracted by chopper once the mission was complete. Though Corporal Mousa was never actually allowed to go on one of these missions, he had earned an awful lot from the three months he had spent working with the British soldiers.
Ranger Gaunt was relieved to discover that Corporal Mousa would be accompanying them on the patrol. He was a tough soldier and a smart one too. He knew how the rebels and the militia and the British forces tended to think and operate, often from first-hand experience. While Corporal Mousa had felt very much like a boy who’d suddenly met the real men when liaising with the British Special Forces troops, he felt more the Rangers’ equal, which was a good feeling. His role on the patrol would be to act as a guide, translator and adviser to Major Martial.
Corporal Mousa’s opposite number in Benguema was Captain Flaherty, and he had given the Sierra Leonean liaison officer prior warning of the patrol’s intentions. Two days earlier, Captain Flaherty had approached Corporal Mousa to discuss the intended route of the patrol. The destination was Masiaka, extending the normal range of the Rangers’ previous patrols. To date, these had only reached as far as Mabontoso, a village on the outskirts of Freetown. Beyond Mabontoso was bandit country – a large swathe of terrain controlled by a notorious rebel group called the West Side Boys. As Corporal Mousa had already passed along the road to Masiaka with other British army units, he wasn’t overly concerned. The rebels were unlikely to cause any trouble as long as the British patrol stuck to the main road passing through their territory.
All in, it was a twelve-man patrol then, made up of the eleven British soldiers and the one Sierra Leonean. But with two officers and five NCOs, it was very top heavy. The British members were armed with the British Army standard-issue SA80 assault rifle. As usual, Corporal Mousa chose to take with him the far more reliable and larger calibre AK47 assault rifle. The patrol would be using three vehicles, all in drab military olive green: a WMIK, an open-backed Land-Rover fitted with a weapons mount installation kit, including a chunky 50-calibre machine gun and a 7.62mm general purpose machine gun (GPMG), a standard Land-Rover and a signals Land-Rover, bristling with radio antennae. Ranger McVeigh had been chosen for the patrol in part because he was one of the few men who knew how to operate the 50-cal: it was an older design of gun which had to be manually calibrated in order to fire on automatic.
After they’d finished their lunch of spam sandwiches, the Major outlined the mission to the assembled men. ‘OK. Listen up, lads. We’ll be heading up towards the front line, passing through the Occra Hills, to pay a liaison visit to the UN base at JordBat2 – Masiaka. There’s little likelihood of any trouble, but stay alert. If there is a contact, you are to follow standard drill: return fire and drive out of the contact if at all possible. If we cannot get the vehicles out and need to go out on foot, form a base fire line and fire and manoeuvre out of the situation in the normal way. I want to stress that we are to avoid contact if at all possible. That’s all, men.’
JordBat2 was the neighbouring UN peacekeeping base at the town of Masiaka, where a Jordanian battalion held nominal control over a large swathe of territory. The Jordanians were part of the 13,000-strong United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), a multinational peacekeeping force that had been made to look hopelessly foolish and incompetent by the rebel forces in recent months. Over a thousand UN troops had been taken hostage en masse and had scores of their vehicles stolen, while the rebels had wrought havoc across the country. Four British UN officers had been captured along with the hundreds of other UN forces, but they had managed to make their own getaway.
Masiaka is situated on the most crucial road in the country’s transport system – the main route heading north and east into the country’s interior. The British patrol’s route to Masiaka lay along this tarmac road, which snaked through the rolling jungle. The drive was expected to take around an hour, and en route the patrol would have to pass through a series of UN checkpoints, and two roadblocks manned by the West Side Boys. The rebels called themselves the West Side Boys to signify that they held the territory to the west of Freetown, as opposed to the Sierra Leone Government territory to the east. They had taken the inspiration for their name from a rap song by the US gangster rapper Tupac Shakur. They were renowned for looting and pillaging the civilian cars and buses and aid vehicles that passed through their territory.
The Jordanian UN contingent were widely suspected of having done a deal with the West Side Boys – whereby they would not interfere with the rebel’s road piracy activities, if the rebels didn’t threaten their men. This went totally against the Jordanians’ UN peacekeeping mandate, one of keeping the peace and ensuring safe passage of people and vehicles up and down the highway to Freetown. Many Sierra Leoneans suspected the Jordanian peacekeepers of having an even more dubious pact with the West Side Boys. They accused them of buying up the loot that the rebels seized on the highway, and doing deals with the rebels to purchase any diamonds that fell into their hands. Whatever the exact nature of the shady Jordanian–West Side Boys relationship, it would end up costing the Royal Irish Rangers dear.
The thousand-strong West Side Boys – who styled themselves the ‘West Side Niggas’ – espoused no coherent political ideology. They had fought alongside the larger RUF rebel group during past battles, seizing power and presiding over months of anarchy and murder in the country. Their men and boy soldiers were renowned for dressing up in women’s wigs before combat, and being permanently drunk and high on drugs. Supposedly allied to the Sierra Leonean government, the Boys had recently fought a series of battles against the forces of the UN and the SLA. The only thing you could be certain about with the West Side Boys was that you could never be certain whose side they were really on. In short, they were famously violent, unpredictable and trigger-happy.
Ten miles north-west of the Royal Irish base at Benguema was the Freetown Amputee Camp, housing several hundred victims of the violence in Sierra Leone. The camp ‘chairman’, Lamin Jarka, was a former bank employee and one of the victims of the West Side Boys. One afternoon in January 1989, the Boys had come for his daughter Hannah, who was just fourteen. Lamin Jarka had fought them off while she escaped through a back window. When he was finally overpowered, he was ordered to go and stand outside in a line with other captives. At the front was a teenage rebel with the name ‘Commander Cut Hands’. Cut Hands stood beside the stump of a tree and proceeded to chop off the hands of each man in turn with an axe. Those who resisted were shot. It was three days before Lamin Jarka received any medical treatment. But his daughter had been saved from the rebels. This horrific story was far from unusual. A couple of days after the Rangers’ arrival in Sierra Leone, an escaped West Side Boys prisoner had been brought to their Benguema base. Under questioning by the British troops, it turned out that he was an SLA soldier who had been captured in one of their roadblocks. He had been dragged from his vehicle and taken to a nearby hut, then stripped naked and buggered. Just at that moment, another vehicle had appeared out on the road, and the West Side Boys had rushed off to loot it. The SLA soldier had grabbed his chance and escaped through the thatched roof of the hut. If he hadn’t done so, he was certain the rebels would have killed him.
But despite such reports, Major Martial’s heavily armed patrol didn’t think they had too much to fear from the West Side Boys. Several times in recent months the British military had shown its teeth against the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone, and each time the RUF had come off very badly. Hopefully, word had got around by now that British forces were not to be messed with. In any case, in all of the Royal Irish Rangers’ intelligence briefings to date, the West Side Boys had been identified as ‘friendlies’. Presumably, intelligence knew what they were talking about, and so the West Side Boys must have somehow allied themselves to the British forces in Sierra Leone. It was a strange alliance, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the shifting miasma of allegiances in Sierra Leone’s civil war. So, Major Martial’s patrol would head up for a lunchtime chat with the Jordanians, check that everything was all right, and then return. Simple.
- extract from uncorrected proof copy