The Last King of Scotland (1998) Page 30

  Messages from the dead, I thought, as the steel glinted again. I watched the black smoke balloon up above the town. Then my mind returned to Gugu. How could he have become such a creature? From son of a distinguished cartographer to bloodthirsty kidogo in just a few years. Was this what Amin had done to Uganda? Or was it my fault – should I have looked after Gugu, should I have stayed there and been a father to him? Or killed Amin when I had the opportunity? By that stage, I reflected, it wouldn’t have done any good.

  The sharp rattle of machine-gun fire jerked me back to the present. As I turned round, I saw a Tanzanian soldier drop to the ground. The sergeant-major shouted. There was blood on the dead man’s face.

  The troops fanned out on either side of the road, running and then crouching behind the stumpy trees and tall sharp grass. They held their automatic rifles out in front of them, occasionally letting forth a jerking volley of fire.

  Up ahead, flitting among the trees, were the indistinct shapes of Amin’s fleeing soldiers. Beyond them, high up, a battery of artillery started a fusillade. I could see the yellow and red flashes illuminating the brow of a hill. The bullets whistled by, and shells began to fall round and about, many to the rear. When the high-pitched whine of a shell came in the air, the Tanzanians threw themselves down and curled up in tight balls. Once it had exploded, they got up again and continued their darting runs forward.

  The APC – in which, probably foolishly, I felt quite safe – began to move forward slowly. We passed a detachment of gunners setting up mortar base-plates down on my right in the soft earth. I watched them attach the three slanting tubes on to the plates, feed in the bulbous charges and turn away their heads in anticipation of the noise: thud! thudl thud! and then the awful wait before the explosion proper. I felt my eardrums press in, and the noise and brightness of it made me want to close my eyes.

  When I opened them, clouds of blue smoke were drifting over the battlefield. The Tanzanian infantry moved ahead, with the APC and other vehicles trundling after them. In front of me I could see the bodies of those I assumed to be Ugandan soldiers sprawled in the tall grass – both armies were wearing exactly the same camouflage fatigues – while behind the mortars continued to send their deadly charges in high loops over my head.

  As well as the bodies, there were bits of equipment (rifles and ammunition pouches, knapsacks and canteens, crumpled items of clothing) sprinkled over the rough yellow vegetation. The road itself was also scattered with the debris of war – brass shell cases, the guide wires from rockets and other assorted bits of metal – all of which the caterpillar tracks of the APC crushed as it went over them.

  The bombardment and mopping-up operation continued all afternoon. We passed through the deserted towns and villages that lined the road: Sanga, Lyantonde, Katovu, Kyazanga, Mbi-rizi. In every one, the shops were shut up, in every one there was not a soul to be seen – the inhabitants had all fled into the bush – not a soul to be seen, until the whip of a sniper’s bullet was heard and we would stop and flush him out.

  The Tanzanians slowly moved forward, with the Amin soldiers somewhere in front. The Tanzanians were much more disciplined, if the bunch nearest to the APC were anything to go by. Three of them manned a heavy machine-gun, which they mounted on its tripod for each engagement. One man lay on the ground pulling the trigger, his legs apart, while another fed the belt of bullets into the breech. The third man lay next to them, his rifle at the ready, to provide cover for the others. I watched transfixed, heedless of any danger to myself. There was something hypnotic about the way the spent cases sprung out, each tumbling along the ground beneath the tripod in response to the orange flames that came out of the muzzle with every burst.

  In between, while they changed belts, the man with the rifle would discharge a few rounds himself. He didn’t seem to be shooting at anything in particular. His own spent cartridges flew over his shoulder and he, in turn, would snap in a new magazine as his two companions set themselves once more to their stammering, deadly work.

  As they did so, patches of oily smoke emerged from the breech. Perhaps because of the oil in them, these patches held their shape. Dark and mysterious phantoms they seemed like, as they drifted slowly across the tops of the tall grass on either side of the road or threaded themselves through the parched branches of the acacia trees. Then the APC moved on again. For a few minutes a pack of wild dogs appeared out of the trees and trotted along beside us, the females carrying their young in their mouths.

  The closer we got to Masaka, the more vague and fleeting my impressions of the fighting became. This was as much a consequence of the increasing noise (which reached a crescendo as the APC crept up towards the vanguard) as it was of the fall of darkness. Only it wasn’t darkness, but a general, low-level blaze of munitions, light enough to illuminate the shapes of men and vehicles. The glow was of an uncertain colour – yellow, red, purple, gold – and the whole of it was intermittently crossed by thick clouds of dark smoke. But all this, both the clouds and the dull glow, gave way to the screaming phosphoric trails of the rockets which the Tanzanians began to pour into the town as we came within range. The tracers passed high over my head, their luminous track staying in the sky long after their passing – and staying in my head, too, when I shut my eyes: imprinted on the retina like a photographic negative. I thought of Amin’s eye again, looking at it through the opthalmoscope, and wondered where he was, what he was looking at.

  Every now and then there would be a still more blinding flash of light as one of the rockets hit an arms dump or the fuel tank of a vehicle: this would illuminate the outline of the town – an outline that changed with each illumination, as the bombardment took its toll. It wasn’t just rockets. That evening the howitzers sent nearly three thousand shells into Masaka.

  By the end of the barrage, the opposition had dribbled away to nothing. But they were weary Tanzanian soldiers who entered the destroyed town that night. Weary of marching, as much as anything. Only Major Mabuse had put up a fight, apparently, but that was all over by the time the APC reached the bombed-out church.

  I did see Mabuse’s body, though, recognizing those peculiar raised scars on his cheeks. I might as easily have not recognized him: the bottom half of his body was nothing but an anonymous tangle of flesh, draped over the twisted wreck of a mounted machine-gun. The Tanzanians said that he had fought to the last minute. I thought of him in that bar in Mbarara, his grim face staring into the bottom of his beer glass as if he were conjuring up demons from the flecks of foam.

  The whole place smelt of burned flesh, and the whole place was smashed. Rubble and broken glass littered the pavements, and the tiled roofs of buildings – caved in and hanging at precarious angles – were curved into strangely beautiful, fragmented shapes. Below, among the piled bodies, dogs and chickens sniffed and scratched. I looked out for the Tropic-o’-Paradise, but could hardly distinguish one shelled building from another, still less spy out the pirate sign.

  I slept in the APC that night, and so did Colonel Kuchasa, who climbed back in late and smelling of beer. I was lying on a blanket on the floor in the back, the driver was stretched out on the front seat. The Colonel took up a position at the far end. I could see his cheroot glowing in the dark.

  “It has been a very good action,” he said, to no one in particular. “Not only have we won, we have also collected much valuable equipment. Recoilless rifles, six tanks, Pye 47 radios, plastic explosive, medicine, boots and tunics, even a bazooka – Idi Amin has been the best quartermaster we have ever had.”

  “Mmmh?” I said.

  He rambled on. I fell asleep that night with the smell of cordite in my nostrils – it was like fireworks on Bonfire Night, but much stronger – and the sound of the Colonel’s voice in my artillery-battered ears.

  “I like this war,” he was saying. “I was trained in classic infantry techniques by the British at Sandhurst and in guerrilla tactics by the Chinese. This war has both. It’s wonderful.”

  Beyon
d his words persisted, real or in my head I no longer knew, the howl, hiss and chatter of exploding ordnance…And the sound of helicopters, too, came to me with the mind’s night creatures, the glittering eyes of Major Weir chopping and changing with those of the Colonel in the vertiginous blur of the rotors.

  36

  I felt a little stronger the following morning and with Colonel Kuchasa’s permission was able to help out in the ambulance wagons. The Tanzanian medics accepted me with brusque professionalism. This was war seen from a totally different point of view: not military capability, but the simple algebraic fact of KE = ½MV² and its attempted reversal. That is, once again, the laceration or crushing caused by the passage of a bullet or the more general tissue necrosis following the shock wave of an explosion (shrapnel, blast wounds). Cavitation ensues as the tissue is flung forward and outwards. Pathogens take hold at the entrance and exit wounds as they are sucked in by the negative pressure in the cavity.

  So much for the theory. The man I was working on as I thought about all this had a small dark entrance hole next to his groin and (we discovered on turning him over) a bigger exit wound on the buttock, out of which trailed a skein of bloody tissue. His skin was covered with blood. I swabbed the wound and then went in, cutting away at the deep fascia. I trimmed the ends of two tendons and lightly tacked together the strands of a severed nerve.

  The stretchers kept coming in, bearing men with various injuries: part of the shoulder taken off, or legs full of shrapnel, a bullet through the ear, a severed spine, or shell splinters in the abdomen. In each case: nitro under the tongue, a morphine plug in the hand, an IV needle and line into the forearm (the saline solution as a temporary replacement for lost blood). Then exploration of the wound.

  It is first sluiced with an antiseptic solution. Then debridement (surgical toilet) takes place: the removal of bullets, indriven bits of clothing, loose bits of bone and obviously unviable tissue. The wound is incised generously and widely; the neurovascular bundles are identified; dead tissue is excised – tissue that does not bleed, tissue that does not contract freely when cut, tissue that looks green, yellow or blue in colour, signalling sepsis and fulminating putrefaction – and the wound, after further antiseptic irrigation, is left open or covered with a gauze light enough to allow easy drainage. Suture may be attempted four to six days later if the wound is free from infection.

  If there is a good blood supply and healthy tissue, no haematoma or tension in the tissue planes and, most important of all (and most difficult to achieve in a field hospital), freedom from pathogenic bacteria, healing can occur quite quickly. If, on the other hand, blood supply is poor or obstructed, tissue dead, damaged or infected, healing may take many weeks. It may be necessary to sprinkle antibiotic powder (ampicillin, cloxacillin) on the wound if the injury involves contaminated bone. The latter should in any case be cleaned with a curette, and on no account removed from the wound as this may result in limb shrinkage or non-union.

  And then the next case. In quieter moments came the simpler needs of an infantry regiment on the march: Vaseline for the callus that forms where boots rub the back of the calf, medicated talc for scrofula, ointment for septic toes – as well as more generalized cases of tick fever, hookworm, jiggers, tropical eating sores and the like.

  By the end of the morning (the first influx of major casualties having been dealt with), I returned to the APC. I had to walk back down the line to get to it and, as my bad luck would have it, I chose to do so at the moment of a counter-attack by Amin’s forces.

  I was walking along against the flow of troops – I could hear the swish of their knapsacks jogging against their backs as they walked, and smell the graphite oil from their guns – when there was a series of sharp cracks. A soldier near to me muttered an indecipherable exclamation and promptly fell on to his back. The column dived for cover and so did I. The bullets began to whip over us, lashing the air and tearing through the grass. For a few moments we were pinned down.

  I realized that the man who had been shot was lying beside me.

  Blood was dribbling from his open mouth. I leaned over him and gently lifted his hand away from where it was pressed against his chest. I saw that the bullet had passed through his ribcage and – the blood from the mouth suggested – pierced a lung. He would almost certainly die. I took off his hat and cradled his face in my hands. He was moaning slightly, and beneath his half-closed lids the whites of his eyes were fluttering up and down.

  Using the hat, I tried to staunch the flow from his chest but it was useless. And then I realized that all of his lower body had also been sieved by bullets. I was lucky to have escaped unscathed. I blew the whistle that was hanging round his neck, and stayed with him until the stretcher-bearers got to us, the pair of them looking like an insect with their low, crouching run and the poles between them. More daring than I, they took him off. One twitching leg hung from the stretcher as they ran, the boot full of blood.

  The encounter raged for the next hour or so, the bullets piping directly above me and grenades exploding with dark red flashes to my right and left. Every now and then it would all die down and you would think it was over, and in these moments I would scuttle farther back towards the APC. And then the fusillade would begin again.

  When I finally reached the APC, I had another close shave as I clambered in. A bullet passed so close that I felt the wind of it on my face. Once inside, the cabin resounded with loud metallic pings as bullets and pieces of shrapnel bounced off the armour.

  Eventually the din ceased and we began to move forward. I looked out of the turret again. We soon came into a more fertile and – so it initially seemed – peaceful area of countryside. It appeared vaguely familiar. There was millet there, and a maize plot. I realized that we were about to cross the equator. I saw the concrete rings and looked out for Angol-Steve’s odd little homestead, on the left-hand side. I was shocked to see that it was totally burned out.

  There was also something else, a few hundred yards farther along. Hanging – by a rope, from a baobab at the side of the road – was Angol-Steve’s body, swinging slightly in the wind. There was blood and brains on his shirt. His shins, I noticed, were ragged. Wild animals had obviously gnawed at them. Hyenas, I thought, sickened. The APC speeded up. I felt an overwhelming sadness. I had liked him – he had certainly been harmless, and in his eccentric way he was a shaft of light.

  Angol-Steve was not the only one. All along the way after that, at various points next to shell holes and tanks that had slewed off the road, were strewn the mutilated bodies of Ugandan peasants. It was senseless slaughter – the retreating army had no quarrel with these helpless people, except in so far as they might not have given them maize or matooke when they demanded it – slaughter born of fear and the knowledge that one period of brutal domination was coming to an end. Unable to look any longer, I climbed back down into the ringing steel shell of the APC.

  About half an hour later Kuchasa’s genial face popped over the circular hatch of the turret. “We got the devils who did all that,” he said, seeing my downcast expression. “Come and have something to eat. We want to take Kampala on a full stomach.”

  I climbed out and joined the officers where they were standing around a fire. Two large black pots were hung above the flames and inside them, ugali (maize-meal porridge) and a stew of stringy meat. I dipped handfuls of the white goo into the gravy. It burned my hand and wasn’t really very nice, I suppose, but I suddenly realized that I was very hungry. I listened to the officers talk in a mixture of Swahili and English as I ate. They planned, the Colonel said, to be in the capital by the following night. He sent a runner to tell the other troops. “Sika Kampala,” the whisper went round the cooking pots. “Take Kampala.”

  And so we did. But it wasn’t plain sailing. The next engagement was at a village called Lukaya, somewhere between Masaka and Kampala. There was a papyrus swamp there and when we reached it, water – two or three feet deep – covered the road. The APC sloshed
through it like a prehistoric monster, sending columns of brown liquid shooting up on either side. As we went through, a couple of dark shapes leapt off through the papyrus: sitatunga, the aquatic antelopes whose splayed hooves enable them to walk through swamps and over floating carpets of vegetation.

  More significantly, there were a thousand Libyan and Palestinian soldiers on the other side of the swamp. The Libyans had apparently been flown in from Tripoli by Colonel Gaddafi, who had issued a warning to Tanzania that he would come in on Amin’s side.

  It turned out that these Libyans were armed with Katyusha rocket-launchers and soon the rockets, with their blood-red tails, were flying the other way. The Tanzanian ranks were thinned in this encounter – I saw three go down myself, falling together like ballet dancers – and the invading army had to pull back until air support could be brought up. Once the Tanzanian MiGs had strafed the Libyan position, streaking so low above us that they almost touched the trees, the infantry were able to move through the swamp towards the Libyan positions.

  They did not take many prisoners from among the Libyans, and what few they did take seemed among the sorriest creatures I had ever seen. (Kuchasa said some didn’t even know in which country they were fighting.) They trailed behind the APC during the final stages of the assault on Kampala.

  The contingent of Tanzanians I was with was not the only one. Various other regiments had been securing strategic locations all through south-western Uganda, from Mutukula to Murongo (where Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda intersect), and then converging eastwards on the capital. The regular Tanzanian troops were aided by rag-tag bands of anti-Amin guerrillas. All in all there were 45,000 Tanzanian soldiers and about 2,000 guerrillas.

  Early that evening, as Kampala’s seven hills came into view, it began to rain. By the time the first buildings came into sight, the road had turned to flowing mud and the verges were full of the noise of boots tramping in the sodden grass. The mud clogged the tracks of the APC, making it creak and rumble all the louder.