Elizabeth Carponti

Posted 17 Years Ago

Elisabeth, you are so sweet! Thank you so much for the review on WATCHES....you are benevolent with your words and I need them.
love, lara

Posted 17 Years Ago

Dear Elisabeth, thank you so much for reviewing my BETWEEN YOUR EARTH AND YOUR SKY ...you are so wonderful benevolent, I think it's to long. Those cosmic poems are to long, but I can't change it. I will read and review you, too.
hugs,
lara

Posted 17 Years Ago

Wow I love your work!! Thanks for sharing it with us!!~Bee

Posted 17 Years Ago

Wow I love your work!! Thanks for sharing it with us!!~Bee

Posted 18 Years Ago

Posted 18 Years Ago

thank you so much for your kind words..

hope your day is as awesome as you are!

Posted 18 Years Ago

When is your next instalment of the German ghost story due?
I wait for it with bated breath. Stay beatiful, Tam Anderson

Posted 18 Years Ago

Hi DeDe Thanks for all the advice re; typos etc. I've been working on it all pm after I got my car back from the garage. I remembered some other stuff that was going on at that time and I've added them in. Hope you like it. Tam XXX
Bullet proof??
16/12/2006 00:12:40
The story of a successful attack on N�mwengo airstrip, in the Congo
The background; In 1980 a group of 24 American students were taken hostage by communist guerrillas in the Congo. They were being held at a large fortified building near N�mwengo airstrip, 65 Km Southwest of Kinshasa.
The government there had asked the British government for help as they were out of their depth, never having had such a large scale kidnapping before. The Head Shed tasked us to go and �spring� them, as we were on exercise in a neighbouring country.

October 25, 1980:

300-200-100, �Oooooffff...... bollocks! That f*****g hurt!� Hitting the ground with 100 pounds of extra s**t strapped on to you from 300 ft in the air with barely enough time for your parachute to open, never mind to catch the air and slow you down, isn�t very nice. I released it, scrambled for my bergen, and made sure all of my equipment was still attached and working, I field pack my parachute, pick it and my bergen up and scramble over to the regroup area. Bullets were flying, people screaming and the sound of the Anti-Aircraft guns still firing at the C-130 Hercules that had just dropped us onto the airstrip, It was not the way I had envisioned going to work that morning.
I dumped my parachute with the rest and made my was over to where the Troop were regrouping, we took a quick head count to ensure all 36 personnel were present and accounted for and then quickly took up our positions around the airfield to start the initial phase of Operation �Urgent Rescue� I and the lads had the task of securing the airstrip first and foremost, then planning, and then executing the plan for the rescue of the student hostages at the N�mwengo airstrip terrorist stronghold. This was going to be a helluva long day.

The day turned into twilight, and the whole time we were receiving small arms and sniper fire from various locations around the far side of the airstrip. The big guns on the end of the strip, that were initially causing us so much s**t concerning the jump, had been silenced, thanks to the C130 �Spectre� gunships that had pummelled the area with heavy fire, for about an hour straight, earlier that day.
(Equivalent to the DC4 �Puff the magic dragon� in Vietnam days.)

My Army mate and good friend for the last 12 yrs Ken, was getting nasty. Well when you�re pulling fire in and there is not much fire going back at them, it's not much fun. "So" he says, "This is s**t! We're getting sniped at and can�t do owt about it". I replied "Hey, mate, at least we aren�t getting bombarded!" Well, Ken never was one to sit around while everyone else had fun; soooo..."Wait here", he says, "I'll be right back"; �Ahh s**t, here we go� I thought. I knew he had some kind of fucked up plan to go and slot some terrorists.

"Hey c'mon lets go" Ken whispers, I didn't even hear him coming back to our position. I guess that's a good thing, meaning no one else did either. "What the f**k are you playing at, Ken?" I asked. "Just c'mon, shoot oop and I'll tell you when we get thore". Ken was from Manchester. Well, I guess the party is about to start, and the terrorists don't realize they are the guests of honour. I thought.

Keith had gone back to the Squadron area, a couple hundred meters to our rear, and grabbed another one of our friends, Cpl. Mooney who just happened to be the assistant armourer, the person who was 2 i/c of all the Sqn. weapons and spook stuff, dragged him to the make-shift Arms area, just a cordoned off area, and talked him into giving us a Laser Range Finder/target designator and some passive night vision goggles,.
Now remember, night time, snipers, Keith is bored, PNVGs, Laser Range Finder...Have you worked it out yet?

We find a spot that has really good cover and concealment right outside the blacktop of the airstrip. We hunker down, and Ken pulls out the Mk3 Laser Range Finder, pops off a couple of shots in the direction of where we thought the snipers were firing from and sits and waits...Now, we also have PNVG-4 night vision goggles and image intensifier �night sights� on our weapons. Ken at that time had just come back from Sniper training himself, and was carrying a modified M-14, especially equipped for snipers. He hands me the LRF and says, "Keep your eyes open, and watch that mound out to our front, its approx 200-300 metres away.� Well, a couple of minutes go by and Pop! Pop! I look through the LRF and see what I'm looking for, as does Ken through his PNVS-4's, I tell him "Adjust left, Target 375 meters". I hear the round leave the barrel, and I see, an instant later, a body drop to the ground. Well, one down, too many more to go.

This continues on throughout the night, and, as the sun is starting to rise, we make one more attempt. Ken for just a brief moment sits up on his knees to adjust his ammo pouches and I hear a POP! and I feel the wet warmth of what I know can be nothing but.....He slumps down next to me, into my arms, and I just lose the plot altogether! Not externally, but internally.
I grabbed both of our first aid packs tore them open and applied pressure to his chest wound, I grabbed the morphine styrette, from his ammo pouch, but before I can use it, I remember that you cant give morphine to a chest injury, as it is a respiratory depressant, and then he stopped breathing.

The b*****d stopped breathing!!!

I spent the next 20 min or so trying everything I had been taught to try to revive him, all along knowing that f****r that shot him was just waiting for me to adjust my ammo pouches.

It took me the better part of 3-4 hours to drag him, in a seal-crawl across 300 meters of really rough terrain before a couple of my guys from the other troop saw us and ran out to help.
The reason it was so important, that I brought him back was simple.
One of the unprinted rules of the SAS clearly states;
�Surrender is not an SAS word, and I will never leave a fallen mate to fall into the hands of the enemy.�
We bring our dead home to be buried in the SAS plot at the head shed at Hereford.

I washed his face and chest and put him in one of the body bags which we had brought along for this eventuality, kissed his forehead and zipped him up in it. Then I went for revenge!
The Troop Officer, a Captain Blashford-Snell. Took me to one side and said, �I know you�ve just lost your best mate, but revenge is a dish best served cold.� I though about what he had just said and thanked him for his advice.
We then had a quick but thorough briefing what we were to do that night, when we were to put in an attack. �H� hour came along.
We had been cleaning our weapons and I had my trusty M16/203 oiled and ready for action.
Then I went to �kick some a*s� as the rangers say! We moved out under the cover of darkness that night and slowly crept towards the guerrilla positions.
The African nights are pitch black to the extreme, and that suited me just fine. I was No 2 in my patrol and the �point� was creeping along in scan mode, his head slowly sweeping the ground ahead as night vision works better when the target is moving, and if you cant move the target, then you move your head.

They had left some guards out to keep a watch but they were o high on the local �Fruit punch� distilled from the juice of roots and leaves, and were soon disposed of. I�d heard it was pretty potent.
We heard singing as we neared the enemy camp and it seemed that no-one had expected us to attack at night, so they were having a bit of a party with their �camp followers� young girls, the eldest of which seemed only about 10 or 11.
One was naked, and on her hands and knees while behind her knelt a boy who was crashing into her. She just took it with her eyes closed.
Behind him stood a line of young men with their manhood�s dangling in front of them. The next in line was playing with himself to ensure he was hard enough when the boy in front of him had finished.

We got into position along the bank of the river and stood by for the signal to fire.
The Captain blew his whistle and the whole camp seemed to freeze. I aimed at the guy who was still deep inside the young girl and blew him away with a single head shot. I then took aim on the next in line, and so on until after several seconds, they suddenly unfroze and started looking for their weapons. I think I slotted three or four before they came to their senses and started to return fire. They hadn�t been trained in the use of weapons by a professional soldier, and most of them jammed, due to not being cleaned regularly, or at all, for that matter.

In the meantime, the rest of the troop had opened fire too and slotted a good few of them before they composed themselves enough to return fire, which was inaccurate to say the most. We gradually moved in and threw in a few thunderflashes to disorientate them and entered the building, firing as we went. We eventually found the hostages huddling in a basement room, where they were being kept. We got them moving by shouting at them to �get on your feet and move!�. We then hustled them outside, where the rest of the lads were keeping the enemy busy, along back to the river where we then called in for the Chinook, which had been standing by, to pick us up.

On the way there I passed the young girl who had been in the process of being gangbanged and she had looked up from where she had still been left, on her hands and knees, and said �Thank you, sir.� Now that�s what I call manners!

The Chinook soon arrived and we embarked onto it and took off sharpish, as we could hear that the enemy were massing for an attack.

All in all, we accounted for 46 dead bad guys that night, and early morning. Not too shabby for 36 guys that were bored and looking for something to do in spite of being in the middle of a war zone.

When we got back to Hereford, eventually, we had a �piss up� in honour of the guys who hadn�t made it back, and auctioned off their gear, to raise funds for their next of kin, as is traditional in �The Regiment�. Bill, the SSM (Squadron Sergeant Major (WO2)) copped paying over one hundred pounds for a thirty quid walkman, whose batteries had long festered and leaked into its innards! The rest of us paid well over the odds for gear that we would jettison into a wheelie bin on the way home!

The Regimental Chaplain had broken the news to Lesley prior to our return, but I still found it necessary to go and see her myself, and explain exactly how he had died.
�P� Company had been a piece of piss compared to that, and I never want have to go though anything like that again. We wept in each others arms for what seemed like hours, with Sue crying also and hanging on to us both.

We returned from N�mwengo, with 5 less than we started with. One of those 5 was not only a friend but a brother in arms and a person whom I truly loved and cared for. He actually was the one who gave me the name I ended up giving to my first son, Duncan, who was the King in �Hamlet� We had rescued the students, but at a heavy cost in mates and friends. I suppose none of them would have wanted to go out any other way, but their memory still lives on in my mind as though they were still here.

�Bullet-proof?� I suppose I don't have to explain any further as to why I decided it was best to give us that nickname.
As we grow older, hopefully we grow wiser.
With that wisdom should also comes the realization that some things are just better left alone, because the truth of it all, is simple...
None of us are "THAT" Bullet-proof. Not even the "SAS"

Glossary;

M16/203; An Armalite type weapon with a 40mm grenade launcher slung underneath it.
Chinook; A large, twin rotored helicopter used for inserting troops into a battle zone and as a workhorse to lift heavy payloads.
Thunderflash; Blast grenade used to disorientate the enemy by a loud noise and white light. Thunder �Flash� Get it?? Got it?? Good!!




Authors note;
Once again I find it difficult to sleep, when there are these images going through my mind. Every night. Night after night. It is endless�.
I hope you all enjoy reading this,
Tam Anderson

Posted 18 Years Ago

Hi seia, (DeDe) I've read all your work and I found the German Folklore ghost stories particularly interesting. I lived in Germany for 6 years when I was in the Army, and I can totally relate to it.
Tam Anderson,
Newbattle Aabbey,
Midlothian,
Scotland.

Posted 18 Years Ago

I keep going back to your two German ghost stories theyre brilliant!!! When is the next episode due??? Tam Anderson