The Saharan Climate
I was deployed to Mali three times throughout my 5-year career in the Legion. I spend well over a year there and the surrounding countries fighting against terrorism and religious extremists. Sometimes however, the terrorists were not the biggest threat. The environment could kill you just as easily.
The Sahara Desert is vast. Spanning 4,800Km from east to west, from Egypt to the Ivory Coast, it measures around 8,600,000 square kilometres. Northern Mali, where I was based for most of the time, is practically a wilderness. Out there, there is no law. There is no concrete political structure nor a policing system. From my perspective as a Westerner, ‘life’ out there seemed more akin to survival. And that is never truer than when you are a long way from any kind of settlement.
When we were sent out into the depths of the desert on our pick-up trucks we had to be autonomous and brought with us everything we’d need to last a handful of days. This included ammunition, tools, equipment, rations and perhaps most importantly of all, water. We got through so much of that. From dawn till dusk your body is shedding water through sweat and out there, there is no air conditioning to offer you any respite. The hottest times of the day are hellish and the idea of having to run around with all my kit during a firefight at 14:00 makes me feel sick.
I used to leave the FOB with around nine litres of water on my person which would take me 24 hours to get through during a relatively inactive day. If you’re running around, you might use twice that. It weighed us down greatly and was never pleasant to drink for as the bottles cooked under the sun, the water would become as hot as tea and burn your throat as you glugged it thirstily down. It didn’t matter, either you drank or you died.
When we worked with the Tuareg tribes it was interesting to see how the men of the desert had adapted to the conditions. All the people that lived out in the most northern parts of the country were small and skinny. Like camels, they could go long periods of time without much liquid and their bodies seemed to economise it better than ours. They sweated less it seemed to me, or maybe they had simply learned to move less and therefore keep their bodies cooler by minimising their movement. In any case, lack of water was surely one of the fastest ways to die in the desert.
With the temperature being in the high forties (degrees Celsius) it takes several weeks to adapt to the climate. The highest I’ve ever seen a thermometer is 56 degrees! An oppressive heat if there ever was one. Bear in mind that a sauna is 60 degrees. Now imagine being locked into a sauna with boots, long sleeved combat gear, body armour, a helmet, a bag and a rifle. Stay in there for a day, then you’ll have some idea of what it was like to live out there.
Heat stroke was a serious issue for the French troops. I have personally seen a number of occasions where a soldier had to be airlifted back to the FOB because their bodies shut down due to the extreme temperature. A headache can lead to dizziness and then to cramps in the extremities and a feeling of nausea. In extreme cases, the victim could also have a seizure and kidney failure. The dogs get it worse than us however. Sometimes, the French army will employ dogs, usually Belgian shepherds, to sniff out explosives. The poor things usually have a thick coat and of course can’t sweat resulting in a 1-hour window of work from when they jump out of the helicopters.
Illness is not the only complication caused by the heat. I have worked extensively with helicopters in the past. We were trained to co-ordinate with them and used them for transport; they would set us down in the desert to attack an enemy position. There were times however, when it was too hot for them to fly.
If you imagine, the blades of a helicopter spin round and push the air downwards. If they spin fast enough and push enough air, they will take off. But when the sun is so hot it heats the particles in the air and causes them to vibrate more, therefore becoming more spread out. Essentially the air has been thinned and the blades have to work much harder to allow the helicopter to push itself into the air. It was not uncommon for a message to come through the radio that there would be no air support for a time because the air was too hot.
In addition to the heat, we had the rain to contend with too. Yes rain! I was deployed to Mali during the rainy season which spans roughly from July to September. In the pictures included you can see how torrential downpours can make life on the FOB a struggle.
But more importantly than being on the FOB, when we were out on patrol, the sand would soak up all the water and there were places that our heavy vehicles became bogged down and get stuck regularly. I have spent many hours labouring away at digging out one vehicle or other, shedding half my weight in sweat as we went. There were times when the progress of our convoys slowed to a kilometre an hour because of this.
The storms too were fearsome. The first storms of the season were always the most spectacular. The sand which had not yet soaked up all the rain to come was bone dry. High winds whipped it up into the air and created a wall of sand that surrounded the eye of the storm. It would stretch from one end of the horizon to the other; a several hundred feet tall leviathan approaching slowly, until the last several kilometres when it seemed to accelerate and was upon you before you could escape. The sand shoots at you like a million tiny bullets and tears at your skin. Blind and disoriented, it’s easy to see how people can lose their way back to camp in such an event and ultimately perish. On such occasions, you could expect anything not tied down to be gone by the morning.
If all that wasn’t enough, I’ll tell you about the bugs. Let’s begin with the mosquitos. Now, we all had to have malaria jabs before we went out. It’s compulsory, no jab, no deployment. Fair enough. But having a jab didn’t mean you were immune to malaria. In addition to that, we all had to have 2 malaria pills a day to combat the disease. Even then, you weren’t safe. There had been cases of malaria in the camp in Gao despite the soldiers having both jab and medicine.
Those little bloodsuckers are more persistent that you’d think. Perhaps because warm, succulent mammals were hard to come by in the Sahara, the mosquitoes would try twice as hard to get you. I remember once that we were patrolling a quagmire in the middle of the night after recent rainfall. It was teeming with the little bastards. Eventually, we had to stop to wait for the helicopters to pick us up. I sat back-to-back on the sandy ground with my partner, David, who had had the foresight to bring a large mosquito net that would cover the pair of us.
We draped the thing over us so it was resting on our helmets and over our knees and stayed that way or an hour or two. By the time we got back to the FOB and undressed, I was shocked to see that the spot where the net had been resting over my knees was covered in bites. In an area a little smaller than the palm of your hand I counted over 100 bites. On each knee!
Other critters include the camel spiders, ugly things that tunnel out from under the sand once the sun falls from the sky. When you shine your light on them, instead of running away from the danger, they scuttle towards you with their pincers outstretched! I was woken up by one once. It had tunnelled under our ned and onto my cot, crawled up my half-naked body and onto my face! I flicked it off in panic and didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. They aren’t venomous but I’m certain being bitten by one would not be fun.
Something that is venomous however, are the scorpions. We saw plenty of them too. Once, David took off his helmet after a long mission only to find a tiny scorpion nestled into the padding a centimetre from his scalp! That could have gone much worse for him. I don’t know of anyone who was stung by one whilst I was there, however I do know that the infirmary in Gao stocks an impressive collection of antidotes for many different kinds of venoms. A good thing too because as I’m sure you are aware; venom can be as deadly as a gunshot if not properly treated.
Africa has plenty more bugs to boot; those I listed were just the surface. Another soldier I know was stung by some kind of giant hornet and his face swelled up to twice its normal size. He too had to be airlifted back to base. It makes me feel lucky to live in the UK where the cooler climate dissuades breeding of those kinds of insects.
In conclusion, the Sahara is hot and hostile. Would I recommend it? Yes, absolutely, it was an amazing experience. But then, I’d probably recommend plenty of things most people never would. If you do have the inclination to go one day to see what’s there (not very much) then be sure to be prepared. You don’t want malaria. Or to die from heat exhaustion. Or to be stung or bitten, or to be killed by a violent storm, or to lose your way and stumble around in the sand until you collapse from thirst. Anyway, fantastic place!
