Thermobaric Weapons: The Horrific Way Russia Could ‘Melt’ An Army In A War

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the MOAB a thermobaric bomb too?

Short of Tactical Nuclear Weapons, one of the most effective warfare conventional weapons. I saw it in action.

I was an “almost too close to the explosion eye witness” to the Rhodesian use of a thermobaric bomb… nicknamed the “Golf Bomb.” I don’t know where that nickname came from.

12 of us were surrounded by terrorists and Frelimo in Southern Mozambique in July 1978 after laying land mines and a bungled case of trying to capture a terrorist alive for Rhodie Intelligence to interrogate. We were later told that there were some 1300 of them on the other side of the Limpopo River but that didn’t come from the terrorist we were focused on… he’s no longer walking the planet. That makes the world a better place that scum like him are no longer with us.

After a day of an odd interlude… them trying to figure out what happened to their pal we’d put down… and us trying to tell if they knew we were there, and where… it got hot as they took the benefit of the doubt in the form of firing air burst RPGS our direction… good God, I thought they’d never run out of projectiles. Then a blanket mortar bomb drop blindly everywhere on our side of the river.

We gave up on trying to bluff them or hide from these guys. The terrorists were a chicken shit opponent… but the Frelimo were battle hardened and a formidable foe. The whole jungle on the other side of the river like came to life from weapons fire as the Alouette III helicopters came in to get us. Frelimo. Helicopters got so much ground fire they turned back into Rhodesia leaving us on our own. We returned their 82mm mortar fire with the 12, 60mm bombs we carried and a Chinese mortar tube with no bipod or base.

Code named ‘Spider,’ the pilots kept radioing me that they had about 15 minutes fuel left as I had the VHF radio. A couple of Hunter Hawker jets had been hovering for some time next door over Rhodesia waiting for clearance to come help us… which caused an International incident each time and took time to get. Prime Minister Ian Smith had to approve it. Finally cleared to strike I talked them to their targets during this.

One Hunter Hawker appeared out of nowhere and took out a partially concealed Russian ZPU-4 14.7 MM anti-aircraft gun with his cannon. Quite the sight… the cannon rounds exploding as they made their path to the gun. The gun crew running in all directions and then the whole gun disintegrated.

Then the pilot basically asked me what my position was and where we were getting bombarded from. I told him we were on the north side of the river and to take his pick of anything between the AA gun he’d taken out to the river, and the whole of Mozambique on the south bank of the Limpopo River to Kruger National Park on the South African border about 2 miles away.

He told me something to the effect of “Stay tuned in… Cover your ears and watch this Mate!” I yelled out for the rest of our guys… “He said to cover our ears!” He then disappeared and returned in a sharp dive and leisurely pulled out of it. I saw the bomb as he dropped it… a Golf Bomb on the terrorist side of the Limpopo.

Suddenly a parachute deployed from the bomb and I could clearly see a long lanyard hanging from the bomb. As it slowly settled down, I watched this entire explosion as the lanyard stopped and triggered the explosion some twenty or thirty meters above the ground.

I have never witnessed an explosion like that… actually two of them. I was up the side of a hill on the north bank of the river probably some 100 foot higher and about 700 or 800 yards from where the bomb detonated. The “Krumpf” of the first explosion was small and you could see it was spraying aerosol fuel everywhere above the palm trees.

Then the real explosion took place… I’ll never forget the light of the explosion and the shock wave, that you could clearly see coming towards us because of the humidity. It shook the holy hell out of the trees and us and was deafening. I cannot imagine what it must have been like in close proximity… it must have killed hundreds of them. The over pressure of this weapon was designed to collapse lungs.

I looked up with the binoculars towards the AA gun area again and saw the most curious sight. Two safari trucks full of blonde-haired tourists were parked up on the hill above the blown-up AA gun on the South African side of the border fence. They were standing in the back of the trucks watching the strafing and the Golf bomb drop with binoculars. They looked like a bunch of Scandinavians on part of the Kruger National Park wildlife tour… it was probably the best tour they’d ever been on.

I got great camera shots of all this… but we all threw our packs and Willy Pete burned them. We had to run. We then shot our way through their sweep line that had started down the banks of the Limpopo, but these guys were numb from the golf bomb explosion and didn’t put up much of a fight. We climbed up a ravine out of the river valley. The Frelimo had no helicopters but had a truck mounted mortar unit called Mobile 9 that pursued us. The Rhodies had broken their encoding and the Portuguese speaking guys in our unit would interpret their play by play move on our PRC 73.

They followed us for miles, periodically dropping mortar bombs, but they were way off our trail as they couldn’t track like we could. We ran out of water. The mesa of Mozambique will suck a quart of water from the human body in an hour just lying under a tree. We drank our saline drips, which made it worse, but we finally got to the electronic mine field that covered the entire eastern border of Rhodesia. The engineers shut it off and led us through it. Dead elephants and bloated terrorists everywhere. There was beer by the truckload waiting for us… and water. We’d gotten out.

Somewhere in the bowels of a Western intelligence agency is a recording of this. Their spook came to our favorite bar, the Long Branch, when we got out of the bush and enquired of me. He was an American in Rhodesian Intelligence and told me he heard my American accent of the radio transmissions. I asked him what he was doing in Rhodesia… which he turned his answer into a statement of… “What are you doing here!?” He bought me a drink, gave me his name as ‘George Martin’ and his phone number in ‘Atlanta’ and told me to call him when I got tired of the Rhodesian army.

An African stole my zippered address book with his number, thinking something valuable was in it. White, the African’s name, did me a favor… because if he hadn’t, my bones would probably be bleaching in the African sun.

You’ve never seen an explosion, until you’ve seen a Thermobaric Weapon detonate.

Yeah, I know Johnny Paratrooper… I’m writing my autobiography again…

Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain.” – Rutger Hauer in his “Time to die” scene from the movie “Blade Runner”
In my memories are the above in a figurative sense… the below in the literal reality of my past…
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. The darkness of Zambia I’ve parachuted into at two o’clock in the morning with 60 pounds of explosives in my drop pack. I’ve watched a frightened, but still majestic and graceful family of giraffes gallop the African bush as I hung out the door of a helicopter flying by them at treetop level, almost close enough to touch them. Battled it out with terrorists mano a mano while neck deep in crocodile infested idle waters on the banks and sandbars of the Honde and Limpopo Rivers in Mozambique”- From Jack Lawson… an American in 1RLI Support Commando and attached to Rhodesian “C Squadron” SAS Africa 1977-79