Death of a captain (III)
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
Lunch is over, the veterans are smoking outside in the restaurant porch, drinking a brandy. The war dead demand that someone tell their story, how they left this world, what they were called, where they rest. The living grant them their wish. Aurélio:
“Another important date was the 3rd of July 1972. There was an Indian sergeant, Divate, in the company. That was his surname. Don’t ask me what his first name was, I don’t know. He did the sergeant’s course with me and slept in the bed beside mine in Necoleze. We were good friends. Another sergeant wasn’t right in the head, half mad, he couldn’t go out into the bush. So Divate, who had just arrived after a five-day operation, had to go out again.”
Sergeant Jorge Fagundes takes advantage of the pause to pick up the thread of the story.
“I remember that very well. I’d gone to Nova Freixo to get the wages. I arrived in the afternoon and was going to hand over the money to the sergeant who acted as treasurer and go through the payroll with him. I’d only just got out of the Berliet when the captain appeared and told me: ‘A mine’s exploded on the trail, Divate and a private have died, you have to go out with a platoon and help the others.’
“The Berliets took the troops to a certain point on that trail, then you had to continue on foot. Divate’s platoon was moving forward in single file when a soldier stepped on an antipersonnel mine. The mine blew up and dismembered him. He looked like a doll, with no arms or legs, just the body with the head still attached. Divate was walking in front of him, he’d walked by without stepping on the mine, but was caught by the blast of the explosion.”
Aurélio completes his explanation:
“The body wasn’t torn apart, it just had a cut at the bottom of the back. But the splinter must have pierced the vital organs above and he died immediately. Seven or eight of the men were wounded as well.”
Jorge takes up the narrative:
“The wounded were evacuated by helicopter, but they wouldn’t take their weapons or rucksacks in an evacuation. The ones who remained on the trail couldn’t carry all of that, along with the two dead men, which is why we had to go and help them.
“When we left Necoleze to meet up with them, it was already late, around four o’clock; we were still on the trail when night fell. We had to camp there. No one slept. I did my stint on sentry duty, but no one slept. Close to dawn, we heard footsteps on the trail. Some of our men had not yet loaded their weapons but they soon loaded them. Whoever was approaching heard the noise, and made off like a bat out of hell. They weren’t FRELIMO troops, they were the militia of the chief of the Necoleze post who were trying to catch the guys who had planted the mine. As they knew the area like the back of their hand, they would stop in the villages and each one carried a bunch of bananas on their shoulder to eat. They threw away all the food as they fled. We began to walk along the trail and all we could see were bunches of bananas that had landed all over the place.
“It took us some time to reach the other platoon, because we had to test the ground for more mines. Then we came back with them, each with two rucksacks or two G-3s on their shoulder, and the dead men wrapped in canvas. Divate was kept in a lead coffin in the barracks, placed in a shed, beside the armoury, for almost two months, waiting for his father to come for the funeral. He’s buried in Necoleze, at the end of the airstrip.”
Jorge calmly exhales the cigarette smoke and finishes the story.
“When they counted the G-3s, one was missing. Battalion headquarters ordered us to find the weapon. They didn’t want to leave weapons lying around. I had to go back to where the explosion had taken place. When we got there, a fortnight had elapsed, you couldn’t be around the stink of rotting flesh. The explosion splattered the flesh of the soldier who had been dismembered in the branches of the surrounding trees, it was hanging there, rotting in the sun. We covered up our noses with handkerchiefs in order to endure the stench and kept searching in the bush. We couldn’t go back to barracks empty-handed. We found the remains of the G-3 barrel with a piece of the breech attached to it. We took it back to the barracks and informed headquarters that no weapons were missing.”
No weapons were missing, but a man was. Two, in this case. What upset me most, when I consulted the history of my father’s battalion in the Military Historical Archive, were the detailed tables at the end of each trimester, compiling all the possible and imaginary data about the casualties inflicted and material seized from the enemy. A war of numbers, ridiculous and sinister, in which the death of a Portuguese soldier is described in three brief lines full of lies (a suicide converted into an “accident with a firearm”, for example), in contrast to the wealth of details concerning miscellaneous items seized from the enemy. In a “sudden attack”, in November 1968, they captured “1 satchel, 1 backpack, 3 canteens, 1 pair of boots (made in Cuba) and 1 pot without a lid”. As well as “1 M, 8 W and 8 C”. That is, one man, eight women and eight children. The space that each item takes up on a page says everything about the priorities of whoever is writing a document, whoever is conducting a war. Perhaps it isn’t possible to conduct a war if a man occupies a significantly bigger space than a pair of Cuban boots.
The veterans say goodbye, get into their cars, they leave. I follow Aurélio to his car. I still don’t know how the first captain of the company died. Now that we are alone, he can tell me the details.
“It was another date in my tour of duty that has remained engraved on my memory, the 16th of September 1972, in Necoleze. It was 5.00 in the afternoon, at 4.30 we’d already gone off duty for that day. The captain liked to take photos, he’d walk about the barracks with his camera. He often did this at the end of the afternoon.
“A Black soldier, Florêncio, was drunk. He’d already caused problems at lunch with the duty officer, in the soldiers’ canteen. We realised there was an altercation, more noise than usual. The guy wanted more wine than was served at the table, the officer wouldn’t allow it. But he had wine in his dormitory or he went to get some from the village and he got drunk all the same. There had never been problems like that, there had never been anything. There had never been an argument between soldiers and sergeants, between sergeants and second lieutenants, between second lieutenants and captain, there had never been any trouble at all. It was one of those things that happen because they just have to happen. The captain passed by the place where I was sitting with the other sergeants, in front of our mess hall. We began to hear a commotion in the soldiers’ dormitory. Some soldiers came to warn us that Florêncio was armed. The captain saw him beside the place where the Berliets were parked, he had a G-3 in his hand and was shouting. He really looked like a bloke who was drunk. But he didn’t fire a shot, he began to walk towards the gate to the barracks, shouting all the while. The captain moved towards him and called:
“‘Florêncio! Hey Florêncio! Where are you off to? Florêncio!’
“But the other didn’t turn round, he paid no attention to him. The captain said something imperceptible. I don’t know if the soldier could make it out, mind you. I think that it must have been something along the lines of: ‘Fuck you, then. This will be sorted out one way or the other.’ Then he turned his back to leave, and at that moment, Florêncio turned round as well and fired a shot with the G-3. He got the captain right in the back, killed him there and then. You know how it is in those cowboy films, when the guys are shot, they stand still for a second or two and then they measure their length on the ground? That’s just how the captain fell. I have never forgotten. I’ve dreamed about it a lot. I haven’t dreamt for some years now, but for a long time I had nightmares.
“No one could go to the captain’s rescue. I think he died immediately, anyway. As soon as I saw that, I took flight. Because the guy fired the shot that killed the captain then carried on firing the G-3. It has a magazine with twenty-five or thirty bullets. I ran towards the back of the dormitory, got into a big hole there in the ground. We waited until he’d done all the shooting he wanted. When he emptied the magazine, he ran out of the barracks. We understood he’d fled to the village. We organised a hunt for the man. He who kills once can kill a second time.
“We got ready as if it were an operation in the bush. We loaded our G-3s, divided ourselves into platoons, surrounded the village. Florêncio ended up surrendering. He realised he didn’t stand a chance and came out of the Black woman’s hut he’d gone into. We improvised a lock-up in the barracks, he spent the night in prison, we stood guard. On the following day, the helicopter came for him, they took him to Nampula. I have no idea what happened to him. We never saw him again.”
For more than an hour, standing beside the car, while night descends, Aurélio Lobo describes in detail the manoeuvres of the military hierarchy to pass the buck and hold him responsible for what had happened, him and the other three sergeants in the company who had been drafted into the army, and how, through an implausible turn of events, with the help of his father, a policeman with the most basic education, he and the others managed to get themselves off the hook. But that’s another story, an adventure played out in life, not a tale of death, and so we stop here.
January 2024