James Rawles - Liberators

This cordon sanitaire, also known as une zone totalement dépeuplée —was a ten-kilometer-wide strip that would be 100 percent depopulated. In this border zone UNPROFOR border guards could fire at will at anyone attempting to cross. The free-fire-zone policy was not publicly acknowledged at first, but warning signs were posted along its length, and eventually parts of it were planted with land mines, which killed deer with alarming regularity.

Phil Adams was not surprised to learn that a detachment from the Cinquième Régiment d’Hélicoptères de Combat (part of the Fourth Brigade Aéromobile, or Fourth BAM) had established a helibase at the Williams Lake airport. They had brought in two types of helicopters, Pumas and Gazelles, both manufactured by Aérospatiale.

The larger SA 330 Pumas could carry up to sixteen troops, while the SA 342 Gazelles could carry only three. Phil considered these helicopters a key threat to the resistance, one that needed to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Lazy at heart, the UNPROFOR’s local command foolishly set up its three roadblocks just five kilometers out of Williams Lake and didn’t have any others until just outside Bella Coola to the west, Prince George to the north, and Kamloops to the southeast.

Driving his Ford F-250 pickup with a camper shell, Alan McGregor was able to drop off the three-man team just two miles before the roadblock. He then continued into town to buy supplies, as he did once every two months.

Canada’s infrastructure had fared better than that in the United States, in part because the power grid was predominantly powered by hydroelectric power. There was still grid power up in much of Canada. Some stores were still open, but it was a scramble to find anything to buy. Alan and Claire were often disappointed on these trips. It wasn’t until they learned to bring butchered sides of beef with them in their pickup that they got fully in tune with the barter networks in Bella Coola and Williams Lake.

The three raiders—Phil, Ray, and Stan—had opted to travel lightly armed, for the sake of speed on their planned exfiltration. Phil carried his M4gery with four extra magazines; Ray had his Inglis Hi-Power pistol with stock/holster and five extra magazines. Stan had a Ruger Mini-14 with four magazines. Stan and Phil also both carried .22 pistols in their packs. All three of their backpacks were bulging with glass cider jugs filled with napalm and padded with quilted poncho liners and their Nemesis suits. Each pack weighed nearly sixty pounds.

Although thermite would have been more compact and more effective, they opted for the expedience of simple Molotov cocktails, using gasoline. The gasoline was thickened with Styrofoam to the consistency of heavy syrup. Since they had used green Styrofoam pellets, the finished product had a light green tint.

Since there hadn’t been resistance activity west of Edmonton other than the sinking of the RO-RO ships (an act blamed on “American commandos”), UNPROFOR’s helibase at the Williams Lake Airport was lightly guarded and only three kilometers northeast of the town. From a timbered hill to the east, the raiders watched the routine for two days and nights, using binoculars and Phil’s PVS-14 night vision monocular. A variety of tents and vehicle shelters housed the pilots, ground crew, and cooks. Their ALAT’s light discipline was atrocious, with light blasting out each time a shelter door or a tent flap was opened. Their eight helicopters were parked in rows at eighty-meter intervals. Behind them was the unmistakable squat shape of a brown rubber fuel bladder—almost universally called a blivet. This one had a sixteen-kiloliter capacity. Next to it was a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums, standing upright.

During the first day that they watched, French soldiers used a commandeered bulldozer to methodically scrape the ground over a wide distance on three sides to create a protective embankment around the fuel storage point. They were obviously getting ready for a prolonged occupation. Taking his turn with the binoculars and watching the bulldozer’s work, Phil whispered, “What do you want to bet that the next thing they’ll do is bring in something like Hesco bastions and make revetments for the helicopters?”

Even at 450 yards, Phil recognized the distinctive outline of the FAMAS “bugle” 5.56mm bullpup carbines being carried by the French troops. By 2015, most of the French army had transitioned to the FÉLIN (Integrated Infantryman Equipment and Communications)—the French infantry combat system of the 2000s. It combined a modified FAMAS rifle with a variety of electronics, body armor, and pouches. The suite had an integral SPECTRA helmet fitted with real-time positioning and information system, and with starlight light-amplification technology. The power source was two rechargeable Li-ion batteries. The SPECTRA helmet was used by both French and Canadian military units. In France, it was also known as the CGF Gallet Combat Helmet.

The chronic supply shortages and breakdown of sophisticated electronics repair facilities during the Crunch meant that the high-tech portion of the FÉLIN gear was rendered useless. Without the communications, positioning, and night vision gear, all that they were left with was traditional “dumb” helmets, body armor, and nonelectronic optical sights and “iron” sights for their FAMAS carbines.

It soon became clear that there was only one pair of ALAT enlisted sentries posted each night in six-hour shifts, and that they walked the perimeter in alternating half-hour rounds. Part of their patrols brought the two sentries together at the far side of the airfield at regular intervals. There, they would often take breaks to smoke cigarettes.

At just after 1:30 A.M., Phil and Stan waited until they saw the flare of cigarette lighters, which spoiled the sentries’ natural night vision. The two sentries, both armed with FAMAS carbines, were sitting side-by-side, sharing one pair of earbuds from a digital music player. They were singing along to a French hip-hop song by Tiers Monde. Instinctively, the sentries faced toward the airport’s perimeter fence.

Wearing the masks from their Nemesis suits to conceal their faces from any security cameras, Phil and Stan quietly padded up behind the ALAT sentries and by prearrangement, shot them each ten times with .22 LR Ruger pistols loaded with target-grade standard velocity (subsonic) ammunition. The pistols had been fitted with empty two-liter soda-pop bottles duct-taped onto their muzzles, serving as ersatz suppressors. Each report was not much louder than a hardback book being slapped shut.

They continued just as they had rehearsed: They reloaded and flipped up the safety buttons on the pistols. Then they removed and stowed the pop-bottle silencers. It took a couple of minutes to clumsily pull off the FAMAS magazine pouches and detach the sling buckles from the lifeless bodies of the sentries. Slinging these extra guns and web gear made their heavy loads even heavier, but they weren’t going to walk away from useful weapons.

They moved in, advancing on the rows of helicopters. There were three Pumas and five Gazelles. First they opened the fuel cells on each helicopter and opened their doors, which surprisingly were not locked. (They had brought a large hammer and a cold chisel in case they were.) Each of the raiders carried four one-gallon cider jugs.