DT: (Overlap) No, I personally did not see Cubans, no. At the time of the last... There was no confrontation - this is the strange thing. We're talking about only a matter of a few short weeks. Our CO, Callan, for whatever reason, decided to separate the first group, which... there were several strong characters in that group with a lot of military experience - one being Peter McAleese. I think he saw them as a threat to his position. He sent about six of those down to San Antonio do Zaire, which is near the coast, to protect that area - I mean, what half a dozen guys can do, I've no idea - with a few FNLA guys that were apparently there. So our numbers, which at that time were 21, were now denuded by another six or seven, so there was no threat to Callan in terms of military proficiency, if you like. And we carried on like that for... it was going on day by day. We were then told, that tanks had arrived in Damba, which was the nearest, town, I suppose one could call it, from us, which was some way away. And we organized ourselves to go and repel these tanks - I mean, this is the laughable aspect of it, I suppose - with our meager equipment. We cobbled together vehicles, robbing Peter to pay Paul, s-spares-wise, and.. set off for Damba. We had a base at a town called Maquela, where later the massacres took place. And the action - if there was any - was on that road, but it was very limited.

(Coughing in b/g. A bit of non-i/v discussion.)

DT: Total poxy - I mean, there was no action. If any action... no organized action. I mean, whilst Callan - God bless his cotton socks - had all the right intentions and the motives were there, the opportunity didn't present itself like "The enemy's five miles away - let's send out a patrol." They were 100-plus miles away, over very bad terrain, that took days to get 50 miles. Most of the time, the conditions... the weather at that time was... you would fry in the heat up to lunchtime; from lunchtime till tea-time, it would tip with rain; and then at night you'd be freezing cold, and you slept where you were. We had no blankets, no sleeping bags, no food. We did get some legionnaire's rat packs, but I didn't see a decent meal in the weeks that I was there. We had no such thing as a cup. If you were trying to make a coffee or a drink from the legionnaire's ration packs, you would brew it from the tin of fish that you'd just eaten, and it would be floating around with oil, and you drunk out of that. There was no such thing as knives and forks - we didn't have any. We had, at that time, obviously commandeered bootlaces for our boots, swapped our string for belts, so somebody else had our string. Yes, we were very badly equipped. Getting back to your question again - sorry, what was it?

DT: Oh, the action on the road. As I say, from my own perso... There were really only two main incidents that mattered in the weeks we were there. One, which was in San Antonio do Zaire, which I was not part of, which was literally a defensive action while the chaps escaped, which... Brummie Barker, one of our guys was called, and that was a brief five minutes of shooting whilst they tried to get to a boat. Callan... when we were based at Damba, he had the intentions of destroying the tanks at Damba, which were based at Damba, the next town, which was some... I guess 60 miles - I would hazard a guess - over dusty roads. So we theoretically, I suppose, carved that... put a line across the middle of that and said, "Right, that's enemy territory; this is ours." They had sent aircraft out - I mean, spotter planes - looking for the FNLA army that had arrived from England. Of course, we didn't really exist. They couldn't find us because we were so few. They saw our patrols, the odd Land Rover bonking along; and we understood later - or I understood later - that they thought we were very clever in hiding ourselves, and they literally ceased their forward movement at that time until they could establish how many of us there were and what our tactical situation was. And they had assumed - and I got it from very good authority on their side - that a battalion of guys was sitting in wait for their move forward, so they did nothing; we did nothing, apart from probe their area. There was a particular moment in time when Callan decided to... well, he had instructions by telegram, sent by a hand messenger... to stop the tanks at Damba. But they had stopped themselves anyway. And he organized an attack on Damba, with all 13 of us, I think, (Laughs) plus a few of our own FNLA blacks. And we set out for it one day, but we never made it. We did query the tactical situation, and he said, "We drive straight through the town. You shoot everything in sight, except the women and children, and we make for the airport and destroy the tanks." And when we asked how many troops there were there, he said, "Oh, there's only several... a few thousand," which would give you an indication of his mentality, or lack of tactical ability, because I don't think we numbered 50 even with our drivers, and they were black, and I must... no disrespect to their color... they were not particularly good at anything.

DT: (Overlap) It was very difficult to understand hour by hour what one was supposed to be doing. We lacked any of the normal military standard routines of the day, like a briefing, being told, "Right, you go out and you do this. Here's a map." We had no maps, we had no compasses. I mean, you went to war on a road. If you got off of thatroad, it was anybody's guess where you were. There was nothing, we literally had nothing. He might have had a map, but it was probably an old road map issued by Esso - there was nothing else. We were the most poorly equipped army you could... "army" ia joke, really... that you could possibly imagine, without any real aim. I mean, his aim was to win the war, and he would have killed everybody in Africa to achieve that, without the ability to do it. I mean, we had absolutely no chance whatsoever.

DT: We had several... they eventually got real-time intelligence that we were just but a handful, (Clears throat) or a few handfuls, and they started to make their advance from Damba, because at this particular stage I think even Callan's courage and common sense had told him that 50 people can't attack a town and come out the other side. So we waited for them. We.. started mining the areas that... we decided we'd lay ambushes for them - I mean, and they had to come down this particular road. They were clearing mines with the aid of a bulldozer with an extended blade on, by skimming the top of the road if ever they found any. My task was to get rid of the bulldozer, but eventually that didn't happen either. I mean, we went through the motions, but that bulldozer didn't arrive at my charges. And we spent our days with all the very best intentions of doing something if the opposition did this, which they never did anyway. And so basically, the two sides never actually met in any confrontational situation, apart from the last,... and perhaps... well, the only major incident at that particular time was when Callan took a raiding party, when the tank column and the infantry, the FAPLA columns were closing on what we could consider our territory, albeit that that was some 50 miles - we'd split it up, theoretically. And he decided to stop the convoy, and took an ambush party and did just that,... and he literally attacked a column of thousands head-on. He had guys inside the ambush put a rocket into ... it was at dusk when the ambush was sprung... into what he assumed was a tank, but it was a truck carrying munitions, which killed most of our guys when it went off, and God knows how many of the enemy, decapitated most of the ambush party, blew legs off, and it was a complete disaster. Some survived it. Callan was eventually captured after that incident, because he was also injured in it. And... there lays the tale of how not to do it.

DT: Well, that was obviously political...

(Interruption - noise. Cut.) 

DT: Right. It's been put to us that it was a dirty war. And, yes, it was a dirty war. Certainly, our small part of it made it even dirtier. I mean, all war is dirty, but in our particular context of the FNLA in northern Angola, with Europeans or British soldiers working under Callan, it was particularly dirty, in so much as we - and I use the word "we" collectively - committed what would be crimes, and in that respect the Angolan Government got the wording right: "war crimes". We did kill when we had no particular reason to. We tortured to achieve information that they probably didn't have, and this was not captured enemy soldiers: these were probably just local civilians. And that atmosphere permeated its way through the whole unit, where there was an air of lawlessness there. We had some Portuguese mercenaries, if you like, and we collectively recognized that there was no real command structure, that we were just a loose band of bandits with a very dangerous leader and a few associates, and we just went along for the ride and hoped it would improve, which of course it didn't.

DT: Yes. It seemed to suit certain parties there to question people with very brutal violence - I mean, and these would be ... somebody would maybe inform that somebody who is a local character is a spy. He would be arrested, for want of a better word, and he'd probably be the local greengrocer who knew absolutely nothing, and would be questioned as to his links with the MPLA, was he a radio operator? All nonsense questions. They were trying to achieve something, but really weren't going to do any good. The guy, probably as innocent as the day he was born, would answer in the negative, that he knew nothing. Questioning would then become more brutal, with physical beatings, escalating into use of knives or whatever it took to extract... until it was quite obvious that he knew nothing, and he would then be executed.

DT: By whoever happened to be on duty at the time. They were taken to Kiendi Bridge and shot in the head and dumped - if, of course, Callan hadn't, or one of the others hadn't beaten them to death at that particular moment in time.