#KILL # Short story #DYWT PULL THAT TRIGGER! I got down from the high cockpit of my armed helicopter. I was barely able to take my weight on my knees, which I noticed, were atremble. As I removed my chamois leather gloves, I saw that my hands were also following my limbs. Shaking. The firing had an effect on my nerves. I had fired a weapon a hundred times before and never felt this way. No no…..I just remembered…. As a child, I had fired my air gun at a sparrow and had managed to kill it. I had felt awful then; and it felt worse now. This time was different. It was not sparrows but real live people who were to be fired upon with an aim to kill. I was suffering from trauma of killing another human being for the first time in my life and the effect of the same had sunk in only after the engines of my helicopter went silent. I walked like a zombie to the crew room shaking from head to toe, my mind numb. Plonking myself on the sofa, I tried to come to grips with the situation. We were part of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force in the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC, where our duty entailed maintaining peace by the ‘use of force’. The action was taking place in Goma, where we lived on the eastern flank of the DRC. The weather was salubrious and the place so beautiful. But that was it. We operated amidst tension and strife in the politically weak and war-torn country where no one knew whose side the other was on. Ironically again, Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians-sworn enemies at home, worked shoulder to shoulder to maintain peace in this foreign land; a mission that hadn’t found success for many years. DRC, once upon a time, had been a rich country, and then, the Congolese currency was even stronger than the US dollar. It was still rich today, but riches were now being siphoned off by illegal exploitation with many a nation’s economy thriving on the spoils. Due to all this and more, life was not happy in this nation locked in the middle of Africa. The Congolese Army was made up of underpaid and undertrained militia who brandished their weapons to rape, loot and kill poor locals who could barely feed themselves. Not much could be done to stop this till we established some kind of stability in the region. Within this army, were dissident groups, who would often break away from the so called ‘regulars’ and the fighting for supremacy would begin. Often, we, the UN troops, would be caught in the melee and crossfire. UN peacekeepers had been killed too. This story is of 2006-07. We had heard of a big faction of the army led by one self-styled ‘General’, Laurent Nkunda commencing fighting near the town of ‘Sake’, located at the base of the hills and close to our town of Goma. As per intelligence inputs and our reading of the battle, we had visualized that the fighting would peter out near Sake and the militia disappear into hiding. But in life, and specially in war, things don’t generally happen as we think they will. One night, as we slept, we were woken up by gunfire. It appeared that the militia were, indeed, closing in to Goma. If they managed to take over the town, they would get us too, and destroy the entire establishment that had been painstakingly set up over time. We got information from the locals who told us that as many as 10,000 militia were advancing towards Goma. We realised that if the town was taken over, many civilians would die and Congo would lose an important town. The warring faction had to be stopped…. and stopped short of Goma….at whatever cost. Meetings and briefings started through the night as the fighting could be heard closer. We accelerated efforts to get the ‘go ahead’ to use our weapons in self defence. Our action to stop the ‘enemy’ had to be quick and swift; and it was planned that way. The army was requested to send out their four-Armed Personal Carriers (APCs) just outside the town so as to block the advance, should the militia manage to come this close. With the extended reach of our helicopters, we were to stop them much before they came within killing distance of these APCs. We were all set with the aircrafts loaded with rockets and guns, awaiting a go ahead from the UN HQs at New York. And when we got it soon enough, we realised that we had been drawn into a war in a foreign country, fighting against an enemy who actually wasn’t our enemy. The first mission planned was to Sake in the late evening hours. We were to fly towards the town and take stock of the situation from up above. Maybe, just seeing us flying around would force them to disengage. But that did not happen. Flying with me was a young pilot in the captain’s seat, and both of us were to soon see action. We reached the area and spotted a pick-up kind of jeep with about 8 to 10 militia armed with guns speeding away on the road towards the hills. While I focused my sights on to them, I transmitted to the commander on ground, ‘Request identity of people traveling in camouflage pick up jeep heading out of Sake towards the south…..’ Pat came the reply on radio. ‘Roger sir, stand by….. and after a few seconds his voice crackled again, ‘That is the local commander of the militia with his men, and he seems to be heading towards the hills to regroup!’ ‘Kill them sir!’ he pleaded after a pause. ‘Roger, Over and Out!’ As we went closer to the jeep which seemed to be traveling at breakneck speed billowing plumes of dust on the kutcha road, we were spotted. This forced the jeep and its occupants into hiding in the foliage. The cat and mouse game had begun. We orbited a distance away with my sight fixed on to the road where we had lost them. When they realised that we were out of sight, the jeep appeared into the open and onto the road. We tried to get a shot at them this time. As we neared for the kill, he repeated the procedure of disappearing into the thicket. These guys seemed to be good. The chase was getting exasperating and the tension building in the cockpit. We had about 10 to 15 minutes of fuel left to get them; if not, the mission would be a failure. With all the modern gadgetry on board, it was simple for us to keep track of the road as I did, peering through my periscope sight. But we needed to get physically close to them, stabilize our flight and put our ‘pipper’ on them to get them-and that required at least a couple of minutes of exposure time. We decided to go further away from the area and ducked down to very low heights over a grassy piece of land. I realised now, that if we allowed them to climb a small hillock just ahead of the point from where they had gone into the bush, we would have our job cut out. I briefed the crew of my plan and pumped them up. ‘Let us have some good shooting today! Recheck all switches on!’ It was the moment of reckoning for all of us in the cockpit. We had to deliver the weapons on target. The jeep came out of hiding and commenced its climb up the hillock. It would soon be traveling 90 degrees to us and could be clearly seen against the high ground. The helicopter zoomed up to 700 feet and we commenced a shallow dive towards the target. ‘Three kilometers……check rocket master on and switches selected to salvo’, I started the count down. ‘2.5…… confirm sight selections to automatic?’ ‘2 km.. steady steady… hold her steady!’ ‘1.5……. ready to fire….standby…. ‘1.4….1.3….’ 3-2-1 …..FIRE! I yelled, as if adding to the boost of the rockets… The aircraft seemed to stop in mid air as rocket after rocket left the pods whooshing away to their final journey in a stream of smoke. The target did not stand a chance with a volley of 16 projectiles. I looked for impact through my sight. Amidst a cloud of smoke and dust, the rockets seemed to have straddled the target. We heard the explosions one after the other and saw the bright flashes of light as they impacted around the vehicle. We then decided to do another run in to check if our aim was right. This time we had to be ready to fire another salvo if required. The smoke and dust of the impacting rockets had cleared as we came in for the second run. Through my sight, I saw that the jeep had been reduced to a mass of contorted steel. I could see that the driver was dead in his seat while the others had jumped off and died due to the flying shrapnel. There seemed to be no survivors. We flew back to base happy that we had got the target. It would soon be time for the next mission. We practically did not sleep over the next three days that the fighting continued and when it eventually stopped, we also were on the verge of collapse. It was black coffee and the josh of the men on the ground that made us go on, beating our stress. With the local militia leaders killed, the fight seemed to have lost its momentum and General Nkunda ordered his men back into the hills to regroup to fight another day. When the guns fell silent, bodies of the men killed in battle started arriving for burial at the graveyard located right next to our camp at Goma. We saw truckloads of them. Some of them, of course, had been killed by our action. It was a sad sight, and my stomach still churns when I remember the episode. While flying and firing from the air, it is easy to pull the trigger from a standoff distance. Just imagine- the soldier on ground has to fight and kill the enemy from close range and sometimes even in hand-to-hand combat. My admiration for my friends in greens went up a couple of notches as I realised this. The foot soldier requires much more guts and nerves of steel to kill.