"We Are from These People"

An antiguerrilla patrol--afirefight, death and fleas

The U.S. policy of aiding the Salvadoran armed forces in their drive against the country's leftist guerrillas continued to provoke resistance last week. In San Salvador unidentified gunmen sprayed the U.S. embassy with automatic rifle fire. In San Jose, Costa Rica, a bomb damaged a van carrying U.S. Marine guards to the embassy, wounding three Marines and two civilians. A leftist group claimed credit for the bombing and called for a "halt to the Yankee intervention in El Salvador. "In the Salvadoran countryside, meanwhile, government forces continued their counterinsurgency operations on several fronts. Last week TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich joined one such search-and-destroy mission near the town of Suchitoto, 20 miles northeast of the capital. His report:

The sun was already high when Black Troop, a unit of Salvadoran cavalry, moved out of Palo Grande, a tiny hamlet near the Guazapa volcano. The troop, comprising three squads of 25 men each, was commanded by Captain Juan Vicente, 29, a tall, taciturn veteran. The soldiers left their three small French Pan-hard armored cars parked beside the village church and began climbing slowly toward a suspected guerrilla base on a distant hillside.

The cavalry, along with National Guard troops and a unit of the army's First Infantry brigade, has been operating in this area for nearly three weeks. The units usually spend eight days in the field before being relieved, each time leaving their steel helmets, which are in short sup ply, for their replacements. Most units operate as single patrols. Explains Captain Juan Vicente: "This is no combined operation. We don't have the men for that."

It is indeed ideal guerrilla country: dense scrub and jungle interspersed with small farms, low stone walls everywhere. The coffee trees are in bloom, but most of the farms are deserted. The soldiers had prepared for combat that morning by cleaning all their weapons. The officers, who have few privileges, saw to their own. Most carried the West German-made G3 automatic rifle. Young Lieut. Eliu knelt down with his squad and uttered his own simple prebattle invocation: "God, look after us and make us act with justice and rectitude and not be driven by our emotions."

Captain Juan Vicente communicated with his three squad leaders by radio, because it was impossible to see more than a few feet through the jungle and coffee trees. The patrol moved on, clambering up a soft cliff face in the clammy heat.

At the top of the hill in a cornfield, we ran into a full-scale firefight. The guerrillas opened up with a .30-cal. machine gun from a clump of trees on a neighboring hilltop. Captain Juan Vicente radioed to Red Troop, an infantry unit operating near by. "Chele, Chele [Blondie], this is Grapefruit," he barked. "We have contact with their machine gun." He ordered Red Troop to move up and try to cut off the rebels. Turning to his own men, he muttered, "They're firing away like madmen. Let's hope they'll use up all their ammunition." Lieut. Jorge, a squad commander, struggled to set up a 60-mm mortar while his men fired M79 grenade launchers at the enemy gunners. When the first mortar shell overshot its target, a taunting cry echoed from the guerrillas' hilltop position: "Come and get us, you queer cowards!"

Jorge then ordered up fire support from the armored cars' 90-mm guns back in Palo Grande. Captain Juan Vicente warned him to make sure of the coordinates or the guns would "blow us to hell too." The salvos were on target; after two rounds the machine gun fell silent. There was no way to tell whether the shells had hit it or whether the guerrillas had decided to retreat.

The soldiers fanned out along a deadend track leading to Cerro los Ganchos, a favorite guerrilla observation post. Along the way, they stopped to search deserted farms, with their seed bins full of grain and with little family shrines with holy pictures on their plain walls.

The Giron ranch, in Cerro los Ganchos, was searched more thoroughly than the others. While a sniper with bad aim kept M16 bullets zinging through the banana leaves, soldiers discovered a hidden gun position, two first-aid backpacks, a homemade grenade, a Claymore mine and a 100-year-old muzzle-loading rifle.

From the ranch, with its commanding view of the surrounding country and the Guazapa volcano, sharp-eyed soldiers picked out two figures armed with rifles moving down the mountainside. "When they are in range, tell them to halt with hands up," the captain ordered. The call echoed over the valley, but the two figures chose to run. The soldiers bowled them over with their G3s. One fell on his back; a red stain appeared on his shirt. Two other guerrillas were also killed that afternoon from the Giron veranda.

By evening Black Troop had used stones to set up a defensive position in the yard. They expected a counterattack. In the cookhouse, meanwhile, soldiers started to prepare tortillas. Then came an order: "Chicken to the pot." Laughing and tripping over one another, the soldiers finally managed to catch 20 or so chickens around the farmhouse. As night fell, Red Troop arrived; a group of women and children also came to seek protection. A nightlong thunderstorm kept the guerrillas away, but it also obliged the troops not on guard duty, officers and men alike, to sleep on the veranda, with its large population of aggressive fleas.

In the morning Captain Juan Vicente radioed the Palo Grande headquarters and proposed that his men hold the ranch as an advance post to continue the search for the guerrillas' base and hidden weapons. To everyone's surprise the answer was "negative." Black Troop was to return to base. On the way down the hill the soldiers encountered no resistance. But close to Palo Grande, a squad ran into a group of 25 guerrillas. One soldier was wounded in the head. He was Black Troop's only casualty; a Red Troop lieutenant had been killed in the previous day's firefight.

Overall, Black Troop approached the guerrilla war as professional soldiers. They were not consumed by hate, but they had strong opinions about the war's causes and its victims. "We are from these people," Lieut. Eliu once said pensively, pointing to a small farmhouse. "We know how life treats them."

Both officers and men seemed pleased with the demise of the rich landlords, and there were lots of digs at the "14 families," the oligarchy that had dominated El Salvador for more than a century. They were also wary of politicians, especially the professional soldiers who had gone into politics and become, they said, as corrupt as the politicians. For the moment, though, Black Troop's job was to help the politicians win a war that could, in the words of Captain Juan Vicente, "go on for a long time, perhaps for years.'' qed

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