The Mexican Chronicles – Fourteen

In another sloppy tent I could see what our magazine. Two tiffie types were half-heartedly cleaning a well-used machine gun. In the tent was precious little, certainly not the 50 assault rifles one would have expected. We were divided up into our specialties; to get to Longa one had to have had a special training, or have told some convincing lies at The House. So I met my fellow mortarists, and in typical army fashion they were all pretty mellow guys. One was a divorced, unsuccessful lawyer. He got his 15 minutes of glory a couple of years later on Special Assignment, even though he was one of the first to resign when we went operational. The mortar crew had also only been there for a couple of weeks.The time had come to meet the troops we were hired to train. As we walked up to the training area I got a better idea of my surroundings. Our base was spread, about 500 m or more, along a huge river which looked deceptively slow-moving. This was Rio Longa; it still had 6 km to run to the sea. Along the bank were lush green reeds and huge mango trees. On one memorable occasion a couple of hippo came through those reeds to inspect our camp. It was in the middle of the night and they crashed through a few tents before returning to the river, never to be seen again. Not that I blame them; the Executive Outcome chaps, on the whole, were quite ugly and they had screamed awfully loudly! The other animals that came to visit us were some monkeys. They were black but had a heart-shaped white ring around their faces. The reason they came was to eat mangos; there were a lot of mango trees near the river. One bright spark decided to throw a mango at them; big mistake. They returned fire, their inaccuracy compensated for by sheer volume and the speed at which they threw green mangos back.The Angola colobus (Colobus angolensis), Angolan black-and-white colobus, or Angolan colobus is a primate species of Old World monkey belonging to the genus Colobus.

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