In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Sa vim bi (149]
"Things did not look good. They would catch us before darkness
came. And the river would not help because I did not know how to
swim. We knew about Portuguese prisons if they caught us. I was
not afraid to die, but I wanted to live, to free my people.
"I was worried about Mama Tshela, but later I learned that she
pretended to be dead when they threw a grenade."
(The next day Savimbi introduced me to Mama Tshela, and deferred
to her as a revolutionary matriarch; her face was disfigured
with jagged scars.)
"We had tried to ambush a train, but the Portuguese had spies in
UNIT A, and they set a trap. And our dynamite didn't work right.
My twelve men had not yet come back from North Korea.
"The plane dived at us when we got close to the river. I shot at
it, but you never seem to hurt those planes with a rifle.
"Nzau Puna fell down. He seemed to be finished, but I carried him
to the river. I did not want them to find our bodies to drag them in
the streets of Silva Porto.
"We threw our weapons into the water and jumped after them.
The water carried us away and Ilunga pulled me across. Our luck
saved us from the Portuguese and from the crocodiles, and Nzau
Puna got well.
"Another time we went back and blew up the railroad."
The story was full of associations for me; I had spent part of my
childhood hiking and hunting on similar hills, near the same river,
the Kasai we spelled it, four hundred kilometers north in the Belgian
Congo.
In Chicala, a small town on the railroad, we stopped before a
simple brick house on the only street in town. A number of somber
people were gathered in front, two were wearing blood-spattered
white smocks. In the anteroom were four soldiers, three seated on
a bench and the other lying on a mat on the floor. All were patched
with soggy bandages. The smell of rotting blood was strong and flies
were everywhere. Savimbi spoke to them briefly and I followed him
into the next room. A young man was stretched out on a table, his
chest heaving, drawing air through a huge, gaping, bloody hole,
where an hour before he had had a nose and mouth and jaw.
As we left Savimbi said matter-of-factly, "He will die. There is
nothing we can do."
There was now only one doctor in all of central and eastern