Michael's Dispatches

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Published: Monday, 10 December 2012 14:44

Butterflies on suspected elephant dung: many signs are obvious.

10 December 2012

The British learned that employing local trackers can be disastrous.  Indigenous folks can be immensely talented at local tracking because they are tuned intimately to their biowebs.  Problems start from there.

“Jungle Man” might be able to trail a butterfly—especially so if he can sell it—but he cannot read a map.  He does not get lost because he knows his home range and how to navigate there.

Hilltribe jungle boys in Thailand.

Biowebs and tracking can change dramatically from one terrain to another, in the space not measured in miles, but feet.  In Brunei, jungle gave way within just a few steps to desert-like terrain that resembled Afghanistan. When the trees were cut the soil washed away, leaving a Martian landscape similar to parts on the Big Island of Hawaii.

In fact, the Big Island has most of the ecosystems found worldwide, ranging from alpine tundra to forests, jungles, prairies, and desert-like areas, down to tropical beaches and coconuts.

Jungle Man could track around his village, but when loaded onto a helicopter and flown onto a cold, dry and treeless mountain only minutes away, he might fail.  On the Big Island, alpine tundra is a nine-minute Blackhawk flight to tropical beaches.  Similar dramatic changes are common globally.

The British learned that even superb local trackers cannot make up for absent military expertise.  They cannot be transported to work reliably in other conditions.

Hilltribe village in northern Thailand. The villagers keep three elephants.

According to Dean Williams, a retired British Royal Marine and combat tracker instructor, “The key factor is the ability to make logical deductions and assumptions via an understanding of military tactics and SOP's…”  Local trackers typically cannot do this.

Numerous combat trackers read this draft.  Two cautioned that local trackers are at times hired to potent use.  One veteran officer mentioned the Koevoet unit in Namibia.

The book Shadows in the Sand reveals a series of combat tracking stories, as told by a native tracker enlisted in the Koevoet.

The local trackers were not just village boys plucked away from lives of finding wayward cattle.  They received combat training, and then piled tracking atop their new combat skills.

Strapping the enemy to the mud guards. I highly recommend the book Shadows in the Sand

The Koevoet had a reputation for hard tracking, hard killing, and hard drinking, often returning to camp with mangled enemies strapped around the vehicles. They stacked the bodies high.  They also were paid for kills, a practice that some Americans might not support, and which was controversial locally.

There were complaints about strapping the bodies to vehicles, but the insides of the vehicles were cramped, and nobody wanted gore on the floor. They began covering the bodies.

The Koevoet faced threats that we faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mines, roadside bombs, RPGs and small arms. Koevoet used armored vehicles and helicopters to track, push, and cut ahead of enemy.

Many of those tracked down were expert trackers themselves, and would use anti-tracking techniques which often worked.

If our folks in Afghanistan could track like the Koevoet, the Taliban would be an endangered species.

Judging by descriptions in Shadows in the Sand, our men are far better fighters than the Koevoet.  But the Namibians were good fighters, courageous, and could track.  It matters less that you are a great fighter when the enemy can find you easier than you can find him.  This is part of combat.

Despite Koevoet unit and other successes, it remains inadvisable to hire trackers from villages thinking their skills are universally applicable.

The Rhodesians melded tracking more to our way of combat and were extremely successful.

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