A desperate prayer in the shadow of death

Colonel William Dixon stood on the stoep and prayed.

"I said: 'Lord, if we're not going to make it, please let it be quick,'" he recalls.

The day before, on March 23 2013, his combat force of 200 crack troops had fought more than 7000 Seleka rebels, killing about 1200. That night his paratroop company had been ambushed while returning to base, and 25 were missing.

Despite a ceasefire negotiated the night before, the base was under fire, with rebels shooting through the porous perimeter, or lobbing mortars and firing rockets over the walls. Some rebels hopped over the wall to loot the South African stores. Others sat in their "technicals" at the gate, training their weapons at the SA soldiers.

Dixon put a white flag on the gate, giving his troops strict orders not to return fire.

"If they had attacked us in force, we wouldn't have made it," he says.

A Seleka officer announced that "the general is here".

Dixon, Major Michel Silva and two other officers met the general with their hands raised, but rifles slung across their chests. Silva considered it the most anxious moment of the battle.

"It was a 40m walk of death. If they'd opened fire we would have shot back, but they would have massacred us," he says.

The Seleka leader, General Hakouma Arda, waited at the gate with two generals and three colonels.

With Arda was a rebel commander who had been wounded in the ambush at a Y-junction near the city.

"You slaughtered my men," said the wounded commander belligerently. Dixon thrust a can of Coke at him and called for a South African medic, Captain Mmakoena Rose Mahlo, to treat the injured commander. She gave him morphine and attended to his wound.

"As a woman my biggest fear was that I would be raped. When you think you're going to die, you act quickly.

"I took off my earrings and put on my helmet," she recalls.

After being treated by Mahlo, the rebel was clutching Mahlo's copy of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and waving peace signs at his enemies. South African medics treated several rebels, which reduced the tension.

Dixon spent hours negotiating the safe return of his men, or their bodies, often having to hand over vehicles or cash in return. Lieutenant-Colonel William Bucibe, who commanded the medics, accompanied Arda to retrieve the South African dead.

"Arda would point to our bodies. We picked up 11 at the Y-junction," says Bucibe.

Meanwhile, wounded South African soldiers emerged from hiding to be taken to the base.

By that afternoon, only two men - Rifleman Given Mulaudzi and Lance-Corporal Daniel Makwenkwe Tats - were still missing.

Mulaudzi and Tats had sought safety on a hill behind the Y-junction where their convoy was ambushed. The pair were separated in the bush. The next morning, Mulaudzi called his captain at the base and was told there was a ceasefire.

"He told me we are packing and going back to Mzansi," says Mulaudzi.

He walked down the road and waved to some rebels with his hands up. They took his rifle and body armour, beat him , threw him on the back of a Land Cruiser occupied by 10 rebels and drove off in the direction of Damara. He was about to undergo a terrible ordeal.

On the way the rebels continued to beat him, forcing him to drink beer, smoke dagga and fire celebratory rounds into the air with his rifle. Once or twice they stopped to loot.

When they reached the battle site, Mulaudzi was forced to pick up body parts.

"I had to put them on top of the food - our ration packs."

At the rebel base in Damara he was forced to off-load the body parts, and they continued to beat him with rifle butts.

"I was dizzy and sick. The smell was terrible. I thought: 'Why don't these guys just stop torturing me and kill me?'"

Then he was taken to a clearing, which he realised was an execution ground. A rebel commander handed a rifle to his officer, ordering him to shoot Mulaudzi. Instead, the officer gave it to a child soldier, who dropped it and was executed.

At that moment, another Seleka general arrived and came to blows with the man who wanted to execute Mulaudzi. The South African was taken back to the base, shaken but alive.

Three days later, Tats was still missing. He had been wandering around the hills above the city. Then he ran into a local who spoke broken English. The man lent him a cellphone that he used to call his base in Bloemfontein, and French special forces were sent to rescue him.

By then the South African soldiers were at the French military base at Bangui airport. That afternoon the head of the infantry, Major-General Lindile Yam, addressed the South African soldiers. Tats was brought in midway through Yam's address, causing pandemonium and cheering. Everyone was finally accounted for.