#executiveoutcomes

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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The Mexican Chronicles – NineAfter chow we got on the vehicles on top of all the kit. The driver and his mate were armed with AKs. We went sightseeing, saw a sign that said Restaurante and decided to go get something to drink. The restaurant was closed. It was a small building with quite a few bullet holes in the walls. Some of the windows were boarded up. Glass windows were rare in Angola. Their vegetation was sparse consisted mostly of the thick-leafed type of plant you find along wind-swept coasts. Just past the building was a huge sandstone cliff with the ocean crashing down below. It was like a scene from a movie. We had no time to get down to the beach. On the way back we saw some small informal markets; at that time there were none of these back in South Africa. They looked precisely the same as the ones you now find in the New South Africa: terrible. Sticks held together with string or strips of plastic, and roofs made of rusty pieces of tin. Raw chunks of meat hung from wire attached to the roof, alongside dried salted fish. I had never seen dried fish of this size before, only the tiny kapenta fish in Zimbabwe, but the smell and the flies made the idea of eating any of this lot somewhat repulsive. The fish had been cleaned next to the stall and a few months’ worth of innards just lay there rotting in the sun. This was our first glimpse of how unhygienic this country was. Our delicate city noses could not take much of this and we did not linger very long. We had been told a vehicle would take us to the training camp later in the afternoon, so we headed back to the airbase. It turned out that it was the same vehicle we were on and the kit underneath us was actually for us.Rate this:

The Mexican Chronicles – EightWe had instructions not to drink the water out of the taps; after my stint in the SADF I could not believe how dirty the showers and toilets were, and would not have wanted to drink from those taps anyway. Having been a civilian for the past 10 years had made me squeamish. I would soon be cured! We found a storeroom ourselves, with 5-litre bottles of water with Portuguese labels. As I have mentioned, no-one went out of their way to be helpful. The military being what it is, everyone has to have an image; perhaps this is to fool oneself about how dangerous the situation really is. We got a decent chow and a few beers at about 3 o’clock. Up till then it was warm bottled water. We were lent plates and pikstels but the kak-sleg store-man wanted them back.Later when I went on my first Pass, flew out of Caba Ledo, and it then looked like an old SADF camp. Clean!

Pikstel is a set , knife, fork , spoon. Kak-sleg is Shit- bad.

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The New Mexican Chronicles – One

Bilbo Baggins said something along the lines of: ‘One ought to be very careful when one steps out of one’s door, as one never knows where one may end up.’I stepped out of the proverbial door with the intention of getting horribly drunk at the local pub, which was conveniently within walking distance. I was doing just this when someone I’d had a nodding acquaintance with ten years back in the army, walked into the pub.

We were both not working me by choice because I had just sold my house and inherited a nice sum of money, Trevor because he couldn’t find work at that time. Anyway, Trevor had heard that, somewhere in Pretoria, a company was looking for men with operational experience to train troops in some African country, and they were paying very well – in Dollars! He had a contact name: Sergeant Pelsur, a company name: Executive Something, and a telephone number he was too bloody scared to act on. Well, I’m not known to be a man who sits on his hands, so after a good few drinks, off we went to my girlfriend’s house to make the call. All went well and an appointment was set up for the following day.

This, by the way, was Monday. I gave Trevor some money for petrol and booze and we both tried to find our old army records. My girlfriend Charmaine came home and I told her the news. She took it quite well but her 17-year-old daughter, Samantha, was none too happy. And that is another tale with a Devil’s Tail attached. The next morning, after my customary breakfast of a six-pack and a few shots of vodka……. to be continued

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The Mexican Horse Thief

Section Eight Solutions

THE FERDIVERSE!

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