Original subtitles

The rebels are going on the rampage.

We could hear what sounded like thousands of people trying to shoot at

What are they going to do? Are they going to skin me?

Are they going to flame me?

Are they going to cut me open and rip my still beating heart out? Or what are

they going to do?

Oh my god.

Oh. My. God.

I like doing something that involves a bit of risk.

Running up hills and jumping off cliffs.

I'd be trained in the jungle.

I've been to the desert with Royal Marines.

And I found myself at the age of 29 being promoted to major, which meant I

the youngest major in Britain at the time.

But the downside of being promoted early is that sometimes you get promoted out

of the jobs that involve running around.

And I was promoted into a desk job working in London.

I found myself using the office photocopier and moving blocks of paper.

I think, well, hang on a minute.

So when the opportunity came up to go and spend six months working with the

United Nations in West Africa, this seemed like too good an opportunity to

down, and I jumped at the chance.

Sierra Leone was beautiful, but it was ridiculously hot.

It's just like somebody's holding a hairdryer in your face.

The local RUF representative was a character called Colonel Sharif.

He's well -educated, he spoke good English, and we got on quite well.

Sharif told me about some of the strange local beliefs that some of the rebels

had, and there was a lot of black magic going on.

They say if you eat the heart of a brave man, you'll be brave yourself.

He asked me slightly pointedly.

Are you a brave man, mate?

Absolutely not. No, no, that's not me at all.

I just had to ask him.

You ever eaten anyone?

Yes.

Okay. Is it... True what they say.

Does it taste like pork?

I don't know.

I'm moving.

That's not what I was expecting. That's not what they teach you in the

recruiting brochures about what the bad guys are going to be doing.

We drove about 150 miles into the middle of Sierra Leone to a town called

McKinney.

There were approximately 10 ,000 armed combatants in McKinney. The kids whose

average age was about 12 years old.

The militias would recruit child soldiers by killing their families, so

family that the child soldiers had left were the militias.

I saw two five -year -olds who both carried AK -47 rifles, which were longer

than they were tall.

These kids would do anything that they were told.

They'd clearly been looting and pillaging women's wigs, and they'd be

around wearing these crazy hair designers.

What's your name? I look him in the eye.

I am Dead Body.

Pleased to meet you, Mr. Body.

I am Stuff, Captain Dead Body.

It's just a bit mad.

Pleased to meet you, Stuff, Captain.

I can see he's got his hand on his rifle, he's got his finger on his

just want to calm things down.

How old are you?

Fifteen. And how long have you been a rebel?

Seventeen years.

And he then smiled despite himself. He couldn't help but smile.

That's very impressive, Captain.

End of April, it's four months into my six -month posting.

We finally established all the disarmament centres, but it was a bit

because nobody was coming.

Basically, we were a bit bored.

We were unarmed, but there were armed Kenyan soldiers who'd be manning the

and just providing an armed presence.

We see a pick -up truck coming along the road. A load of guys shouting and

jeering on the back of the truck, brandishing their weapons.

And I see that it's Colonel Bow, the local RUF hardliner who's driving.

And he said, my men are angry with the fact that you are here. You are here to

disarm us. We don't want to disarm.

It's late morning, but he looks like he's been drinking.

You can smell it on his breath.

That's unfortunate, Colonel, because we have a job to do.

He wasn't here to make small talk.

And then he launches into a tirade of his own. When the hungry lion roars...

the blood flows into the river, the world will remember Bao.

He reminded me, like, of, you know, a bad -tempered dog, like some American

bull terrier who was after a fight.

Power to the people!

and I'm sitting there all the time thinking, shut up, you idiot.

So what would happen, Colonel, if I did decide to disarm some of your men?

If you do bark, then you'll be lucky to leave.

He was almost like a James Bond baddie, the way he sort of laughed.

I'm thinking this guy's bark is worse than his bite, but I was wrong.

So, 29th of April.

I won't forget the date because it was my 30th birthday.

The temperature was somewhere in the mid -90s.

Imagine the scene. It's refugees coming along from the road. That's what they

were trying to look like.

They were very, very cagey. They were a bit scared.

It transpired that they were rebels.

They said they wanted to hand their rifles in.

Another guy has got a handcart full of

mangoes with a rifle hidden underneath it.

All right.

Come inside. Bring him in.

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's go. Move. Get him inside.

They were very wary because they hadn't been told by the rebel hierarchy that it

was OK to disarm.

From Bauer's perspective, the weapons were RUF weapons, so we'd stolen them

him.

I told the United Nations headquarters, there is a serious risk that we will

provoke a violent reaction.

We got the response that we should go ahead and destroy the weapons the next

day.

I then got on the phone and phoned one of the senior British officers within

United Nations headquarters to say, listen, sir, do you know what's going

And when his considered reply was, look, there's a risk involved, but do it

anyway, then for me that was enough, and I trusted my bosses, and we knew we had

to get on with the job in hand.

Yes, sir, thank you, sir.

Out.

Every one of those weapons that was handed in to us, we'd physically

We'd take out a hammer and smash the trigger mechanism, whatever it took to

that weapon out of action.

As I'm driving the three miles back towards McKinney, I see Bao coming the

way with a pickup truck.

He looks angry, but he always looks angry.

There's a group of armed men with him, but he often had a group of armed men

with him.

Sometimes survival

comes down to judgment and skill, but for me, it was just the fact that one o

'clock was lunchtime.

that saved my life.

I'm sitting there eating my lunch. Far in the background, we hear some rifle

shot.

Then we hear from the Kenyans on their radio net that there's been some sort of

attack at the disarmament centre.

Oh God.

I'd seen Bao going in. I didn't know what the hell had happened.

My heart's starting to beat faster.

Something's going wrong. We're losing control here.

We can hear gunfire in the distance. We can hear gunfire on the radio.

And then we hear the final message.

We're about to be overrun.

Then nothing more on the radio.

I'm on the satellite phone saying, listen, this has happened. What do you

about this?

Get straight on to the rebel headquarters and tell them there's been

You started attacking the United Nations.

Get them to stop.

We were told that we should send down a team of negotiators and find out what

the hell was going on.

All right, we're heading over there now.

I jumped into the UN jeep, along with the Gambian officer, and as we were

to drive out through the gate to the compound, somebody shouted that I was

wanted on the satellite phone in the operations room.

So I jumped out of the jeep, and my place was taken by a Norwegian officer.

They didn't come back.

The Norwegian chap.

Press transmit on the UN radio that he had.

So we heard these guys were jostled, were shouted at,

beaten, stripped of their uniforms, tied up,

and then the radio transmission ended with a single gunshot.

If it's happening to them, it's probably going to happen to us.

We're stuck.

We're unarmed. We're surrounded.

The roads have been closed. There's no getting out of there. More and more

people are gathering outside our house.

A rebel truck drives along the main road, firing shots towards our house.

Chanting, people shouting, looting.

The rebels are going on the rampage.

It's like...

A group of caged animals who've been caged for too long and now the gates

been opened and they're out on the warpath.

And I'm now feeling horribly aware of the colour of my skin, the fact that I

the disarmament officer and the fact that Bao in particular didn't like me.

Not a good feeling at all.

A small amount of relief, a small amount of hope, when I'm visited by a more

moderate RUF contact, Colonel Sharif.

I'm saying, well, you know, what's going to happen here?

Should we just try and drive out? And he's saying, no, no, no, stay where you

are, stay where you are.

Don't let Bao get you.

And he's saying, Bao, it's a special plan for you.

I'm thinking, well, what does that mean? He says, well, he's going to eat you if

he gets you.

I'm just thinking, oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I reasoned it would be a matter of time before Bao would come to get us.

We should get into the compound where the Kenyans are about 800 metres down

road.

The Kenyans are the United Nations armed soldiers.

By this time it's broad daylight and there's people everywhere, but I thought

might be able to trick our way out.

And I remembered a story that actually a Canadian park ranger had told me about

what to do if you're attacked by a grizzly bear.

You simply lay your rucksack on the ground in front of you and the bear will

more interested in eating the contents of your rucksack than he will be in

eating you.

So what we did was to put the TV, the video, the fridge near the front door.

And then once their attention was, what's happening at the front door?

That's when we went for it.

You'd never seen a group of people run as fast as we ran, about 800 metres to

the Kenyan compound.

Come on!

You can almost become hysterical with excitement because you think you're

to be OK.

And then just as you think you're going to be OK... ..the reality sinks in.

It wasn't a fortified position.

in which we could fight compound itself had a five foot high mud brick

wall surrounding it i think it was an old catholic mission compound it had a

series of burnt out buildings we

got

out just in time

Bo was now... He knew where we were.

Check the building in the back.

I now found myself in the same situation as two other Brits and a New Zealand

officer. The New Zealander Dave looked suspiciously like a Brit, as far as the

rebels were concerned.

Paul, naval officer, intelligent, brave, but what he wasn't was a soldier.

He was a submariner.

The best -trained guy out of the others was a young army officer called Andy.

He'd just been released from hospital, suffering quite badly from typhoid.

We didn't have very much water, we didn't even know each other particularly

well, and suddenly we were thrown together.

And we very quickly agreed that we'd stick together whatever happened.

I went towards the wall to have a look out.

The rebels were in a state of anarchy.

They were running around the town.

taking pot shots, disorganised attacks on our position.

And I thought, well, while the rebels are running wild downtown, I can lead a

group of men out of here, you know, we'll get out of here, no problem.

So I got on the satellite phone and I asked the United Nations and I asked the

Brits in the United Nations, I said, look, would you back me if I attempted

lead a breakout from here?

I think our opportunity to escape is now, and I think we have a good chance

success if we go now.

I was told no.

Stand and fight! Stand and fight!

But I'm going, but sir, we have no weapons.

And he simply said, stand and fight anyway!

Right.

I did what I was told.

As darkness fell, the rebels encircled our position.

They then began rhythmic drumming and chanting.

They get everybody

in the trenches.

We know that the attack's about to happen.

This isn't a military thing that they're doing. It's some primeval spirit

worshipping, psyching themselves up.

We could hear what sounded like thousands of people trying to shoot at

And when you hear a bullet going overhead, you hear it crack.

The bullets are travelling so fast, they're actually travelling faster than

speed of sound. And you can also feel the air pressure changing as these

go nearby.

So not only can you hear it in your ears, but you can almost feel the air

pressure changing around you as these bullets go.

There'd be lulls.

All the Kenyans are in their trenches with their weapons in their shoulders,

their fingers on the trigger, ready, holding their nerve.

There's no point shooting into the darkness. We don't have enough

that. The guys who did have ammunition only had 100 bullets each.

And we waited until the first rebels started to try and climb over the walls.

And when they did, that's when we shot back.

There.

Bang! Bang!

Bang!

Gone.

As we started hitting them and their bodies started falling back onto the

outside of the wall, then the other rebels wanted to back off. They didn't

to share the fate of their companions who'd tried climbing in first.

For 20 minutes there'd be sporadic gunfire, then for 20 minutes nothing.

And I was crawling around there wondering what was going on, and I heard

thud.

And my immediate thought was that maybe someone had thrown a hand grenade in.

So I ducked down and counted to ten, and when whatever it was hadn't gone bang,

I knew it wasn't a hand grenade, so I crawled over to investigate.

And I felt around in the bushes and felt this object.

I picked it up and there was the sudden realisation that I'd just picked up a

severed human hand.

The intensity of the attacks in the morning was dying down.

It was so hot that it was just like being in an oven the whole time.

Not only are you losing energy through sweating, but every time you hear a

gunshot, it was like a jolt, and then you can't relax, you

can't sleep.

And then in the end, almost like a medieval siege, they knew that our food

water would run out, and then they'd win.

On the third day of the siege, the rebels tightened their cordon.

We were effectively trapped.

We received news on the satellite phone that diplomacy had failed.

The United Nations headquarters, their advice was that we should attempt to

escape.

The implication, if...

We stayed where we were.

We were going to be slaughtered.

For God's sake, when I said I wanted to escape, then you told me no.

Now when the situation is much harder to escape, you're telling me that we've

got to go for it.

We realised that we were going to have to do something to rescue ourselves.

The outside world was not going to be able to help.

The thing perhaps that made my mind up for us was when...

Between that fourth day of the siege, under the banner of a white flag, we saw

group of rebels coming into the compound.

And they had a simple message which said, Brother Africans, we have no fight

with you.

Hand over the white men and you can go free.

Refuse and we'll kill you all.

And to prove how serious they were, they skinned a prisoner alive.

i sat down with my three british colleagues and we said whatever else

we were going to attempt to escape that night or die trying we'd be aiming for

mile 91 which was a small united nations held town about 50 miles to the

southwest of mckinney we'd move only at night laying low during the daytime we

then took out our knives and cut off the united nations badges on our uniform we

were no longer United Nations observers, as far as I was concerned, we were once

again combatants. We were soldiers.

I made one final phone call.

I phoned my father.

And it was the only time during the whole horrible situation, during

the whole siege, that emotionally I lost him.

I found myself just being a child who couldn't stop crying.

My dad was just telling me to be strong and to keep it together and to do my job

properly.

He

knew

that this was potentially goodbye.

Our plan was simple.

We'd attempt to jump over the wall and run through the rebel cordon at about 3

'clock in the morning when we knew that the rebels were likely to be at their

lowest ebb.

We walked in single file towards the northwest corner of the compound.

I was in the lead.

I went to the Kenyan corporal who was in charge of his section.

and said, I'm a British soldier.

I have been ordered by my government to escape.

Will you help us?

I felt strangely calm.

My senses seemed hyper, hypersensitive. I felt that I could see in the dark. I

could hear a pin drop a mile away. And if anybody had tried to have stopped me,

I'd have been able to take their weapon off them and rip their head off even if

they'd shot me first. I really did feel so alive.

I knew it was now or never. This was our chance.

I knew I had to keep low. The guy's close behind me.

Come round the side of the house.

I felt the barbed wire coming into my face and it cut my lip. I tasted

blood in my mouth.

And there in the darkness I saw somebody moving.

And I just made out his eyes.

I thought, well, this is it. What happens here?

And then just for a split second, I thought, you know what? The best thing

is don't rush them. Just rush past him.

In that moment of the rebels not knowing what was going on, we were past him.

Every step was a step away from danger.

This was really working.

There was just this sort of feeling of exhilaration. Yeah, we're riding out our

luck here. This is good.

I don't remember for a moment for those first few hours feeling tired or

anything like that.

Yeah, we're getting there. We're getting there. Come on, keep going, guys. Come

on, let's do it. Let's do it.

I saw that Andy was having a hard time. And I could almost... There were almost

demons in my mind telling me, you know, you'd be better off alone.

Push on on your own. You'll be quicker than these guys.

Come on!

Come on, you bastards. You've not done your share of the hard work.

I heard somebody fall behind me.

Come on. Get up. Get up, mate. Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

We're really tired. We've not slept for five days.

We've been drinking almost nothing.

OK, we did it. We did it for today.

Just before first light, in case somebody was tracking us, we crawled

what seemed like a fantastic hiding place.

As we lay there,

we heard some voices nearby.

We could actually hear people using buckets to get water.

And it turns out that the fantastic hiding place that we'd identified in the

darkness was all of 20 or 30 yards from the edge of a village.

And that close to McKinney, we had no doubt that there would be rebels in that

village.

We were on our sixth day by this stage with no sleep, but because of the

proximity of the rebels and the villagers, we couldn't sleep.

We lay there for hour after hour, just being eaten alive.

My throat is swollen from the lack of water and I could feel the back of my

throat was cracking.

I heard some stones coming through the air. Well, what the hell's going on

There were some kids who were throwing stones at a nearby mango tree, trying to

knock down fruit.

I was just wondering what the hell I was going to do if one of these kids, while

trying to pick up fruit, suddenly saw us.

I was going to have to silence an innocent kid in order to stop our

from being given away.

By the end of the day, we knew that our main enemy was our thirst.

If we didn't find water, we were going to die.

There was a possible source of water, a dotted blue line on the map, meaning a

seasonal river about five miles to our west.

I whispered to the others that I thought we should drink the rest of our water

to give us enough strength to be able to keep going for a few more hours.

I remember taking the last few gulps.

I moved it around in my throat to try and keep my tongue and my tonsils as wet

as possible.

The next few hours, they just go a bit hazy. We were all in and out of

consciousness, stumbling.

When you get badly dehydrated, you stop sweating, and when that happens, your

body temperature goes up, and very quickly you can pass out, and it leads

your death.

We stopped, then we...

We were going to die. We had to keep going.

This was our sixth night with no sleep.

In the staff officer's handbook, they tell you that after 96 hours without

sleep, a soldier is effectively useless.

We'd gone almost double that period.

There was this.

big african lady in a white shawl who was along by our side and i had no idea

what she was doing there and i knew it was a hallucination but it didn't make

go away

eventually

we saw what looked like the trees that would be next to a river bank.

And then we could make out the river bank itself.

Came over the bank.

There was no running water.

I thought maybe there'd be some small puddles. So I went down on my knees,

feeling around me as best I could, feeling for small patches of moisture.

Still nothing.

There was no water.

And I just remember falling back against the bank and looking up at the sky and

wondering what was going to happen next.

We were in a tropical jungle, and yet I was about to die of thirst.

I was too...

Tired and thirsty to be scared. I was too tired and thirsty to be in any sort

pain. I was thinking I'm about to die here. I've done everything I can. I've

tried. I've failed. This is it.

And then as we were lying there keeping still, we heard the noise.

Frogs croaking in the darkness.

And it struck me that where there were frogs croaking, surely there had to be

some water.

It was just the act of being silent that had given us that one opportunity we

needed.

We found some small muddy pools.

There was leaf mould, there were dead insects in the water, there was all

of scum.

But it was just the best water we'd ever seen.

We took our water purification tablets out and using five times the normal

doses, we started drinking.

Looking at the map, I considered that we were probably now far enough that I

could call for a British military helicopter to come and rescue us.

I pulled the satellite phone out, pressed the on -off switch.

Nothing happened.

Whether moisture had got into the battery, whether I'd banged the

phone against a tree the night before, I don't know.

but it wasn't working there was

nothing more we could do

When I woke up after maybe 20 minutes, just a little bit of sleep, I felt just

little bit more rational again.

Let's go.

I thought we should just keep going as we are. As a commando, you learn that

of the basic rules is that you move only at night. You hide during the daytime

when people can see you.

But I think it was Paul who said, Phil, we're going to have to change our

tactics here. We're moving too slowly.

Moving at night is not working.

I'd become fixated on my plan, and maybe my plan was not the right one.

It had taken us two nights of effort to go less than a quarter of the distance

we needed to go to get to safety.

We'll find a guide.

Find a guide.

We have to take a chance.

We have to kill someone.

If we were going to find somebody to act as our guide, though we were going to

have to trust our lives to someone who we didn't know.

In the morning, what we did was to crawl forward to where the forest met some

agricultural land.

200 yards from the edge of the forest, we could see a small farm.

Four mud brick buildings with thatched roofs on the top.

There were no animals. I guess the rebels had taken the animals away, but

people were still trying to farm. And that was the first good indication.

And then we saw an old man.

A man, maybe in his early 40s, but by Sierra Leonean standards, he was quite

old guy.

While this guy looked like a civilian, his sympathies could be with the rebels.

Though we were terrified, maybe somebody would appear with a gun.

It may sound like a small thing, a stupid thing, but I knew the rebels, and

last thing they did was do an honest day's work. So when I saw this guy

working hard in the field, I thought, this looks like a normal human being.

This was going to be a gamble.

Suddenly I'm in the middle of an open area and there was nothing I could do to

hide myself.

But at the same time, there was almost a sense of relief for the first time in

several days.

I wasn't...

acting like a fugitive. I was walking tall, I was proud.

I remember the wind blowing around and the sun was in my hair and I just felt

like a real human being again.

As we approached, I just initially saw in his eyes that he was starting to

and then when the beginning of a smile became a big, broad smile, I just knew

that it was the beginning of the way to safety.

From that point on, friendly locals were going to hand us from village to

village, from guide to guide, to enable us to get back to our UN safe haven.

We were safe for now.

But although I didn't know it at the time, for me, the biggest challenge was

to come.

I'm sitting there on a wet and windy... Thursday, staring at the computer

screen, I suddenly felt my left leg going to sleep.

So I stood up and I walked round the office, shook out my leg a bit and sat

down.

Then my right leg started to go to sleep.

And then as I sat there, I felt a creeping numbness coming up my body.

And by the time I was rushed into hospital that night, I was effectively

paralysed from just beneath my ribs.

Turns out that I'd brought home a virus that was causing inflammation in my

spinal cord.

Whether it was something I ate, something I drank, an

insect that bit me, guess I'll never know.

The 50 feet that I had to walk on my own to get to the hospital toilet

before I was allowed to leave hospital was in some respects harder than the 50

miles I had to walk through the jungle.

The wheels of justice finally turned, and Bao finally got arrested.

Mr. Bao sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 25 years.

Then hopefully, Bao will spend the rest of his life in prison.

The bad guys don't always win. The good guys sometimes win too.