My first posting was to Mt elgon national park way back in 1992. Elephants and all other wildlife associated with a big forest were found in this park , but it had something else unusual ; tribal clashes. The communities around the park were ripping each others throats and the authorities did not seem to mind it at all. But i had to secure the park from the marauding gangs who had to go right through the park to steal from each other. The Sabaot tribe stole from the Bukusu who were a sub clan of the greater Luhya tribe, and the Wagisu monsters came out of Uganda to help their cousins the Bukusu. The Bukusu did not have guns, but the other two were citizens of both Kenya and Uganda and they had access to guns and dual citizenship , and they were fearless and merciless . They could kill without blinking.
The forests of Mt Elgon was very thick and hid very many evils , and we needed to get in to the forest to solve some riddles and in the process crush some beliefs , such as trying to prove that the Wagisu were cannibals. The police department believed in such myths and they refused to take part in any operation planned or even thought off anywhere inside or around the forest. We walked into enemy ambushes plenty of times and we lost personnel, and many people were injured and almost all were direct hits on the buttocks. Don't ask me how that was possible but if you ever get the chance to hike in those forests then maybe you will know why. we took it positively and talked about it jokingly, and made fun of the guys who got hit , and we never ran away from the forest, in fact we could not work anywhere else in a better way. we learned to work in small groups of four men each, and we were very effective , and deadly. In the park we had hundreds of refugees driven away from their farms , and they were killed like chicken by the bandits, and we had a duty to protect them. This outfit was first identified as * FERA * and they were fighting the Ugandan government, but their accomplice in Kenya latter became the famous Sabaot land defense force, ( SLDF ).
It was not normal for a day to pass without hearing gun fire those days, either friendly or enemy, and there was one particular time that we failed to hear gun shots for a week and we were all uneasy, and i had to call all the teams together and one officer was asked to shoot in to the air and we cheered and this settled our sugar levels to minimum. Cattle rustling was a daily activity then, where the agriculture development cooperation ( ADC ) grade cows were stolen and later sold like hot buns in neighboring Uganda . The park was used as a conduit for years and we tried to stop it by ambushing all known routes in the forest but the area was too big and the plant called stinging nettles got into our nerves. We eventually took our patrols to the moorland and waited for the cattle that high up and this paid dividends. We completely crashed the rustling rackets and the ADC managers of Transzoia will attest to this, and my men were sold livestock products from these farms at half price for our efforts.
I was born to a nomadic tribe in the northern frontier thus rustling was a normal way of life to us. I lost many family members to cattle rustlers to the extent that death did not scare me any more. Guns were common to my people and this helped me greatly when i was trying to bond with the teams in Mt Elgon. I fused in very fast with them, and I was grateful , for though it was baptism by fire, it helped prepare me for the rest of my tour as a security warden.
In the beginning i didn't know enough to be scared. The thing about a bullet is , you cant see them. All you can do is hear them. And until you connect the sound of a bullet with someone dying , you don't have enough sense to duck. That is exactly what kills most people in the early stages of combat. They hear a shot , they stick their head up , and they get killed. until you have actually shot someone or been shot at yourself , it doesn't really sink in. It really sunk into me in Mt elgon. I knew those bullets could kill me , so i kept my head down. and i said *oh my God* . This is real , and i survived.
No comments:
Post a Comment