19 With a Bullet (19 page)

Kevin’s eyes were clenched with pain; he was holding his hand that was bleeding profusely as Kurt, who also happened to be the platoon medic, tried to apply pressure and put on a field dressing. Kurt was an enormous excompany cook who had grown tired of cooking and, after a couple of failed attempts at the PT course, had finally pulled through, got his wings and had recently been assigned to our platoon. He was a big lumbering fellow with fists like hams and ice-blue eyes.

Kevin, a feisty little guy from the south of Johannesburg, who had chipped teeth and was one of the company’s handful of amateur boxers, was squeezing his eyes, telling Kurt that he was going to fuck him up. Kurt, who was three times Kevin’s size, grunted and told him to put a sock in it as he turned and fumbled in his medic bag for the morphine. But he, and most of us standing around, suddenly all seemed to realize at the same moment that he was not going to find any morphine. The reason being that recently, at a small but wild ‘invite only’ party in Ondangwa, just before we had left on the vehicle patrol, the regulation two shots of morphine per medic bag had been liberated and used as the highlight of the party.

“Give him some Sosagon!” Lieutenant Doep barked as we all watched Kevin closing his eyes, grimacing in agony. Kurt’s voice was barely audible as he said he couldn’t seem to find any.

We all looked at each other sheepishly and Kevin, who was the last to remember the party, let out a loud groan of pain and anger when he realized there would be no quick relief. Doep began grilling Kurt on the missing Sosagon. Kurt in his low innocent voice was acting dumb and saying he was sure the vials had been there when he did his full check on the medical supplies at the beginning of the patrol, but which had probably fallen out of his medic bag somewhere in the bush.

We moved the Buffels back to a more open
chana
and secured the area. If there had been any ambushers, they were long gone now after this shot-in-the-hand episode. The medevac helicopter that Doep had radioed for took about 30 minutes to arrive. In the stillness of the bush we heard his blades chopping the air for fully five minutes before he spotted our third orange smoke grenade and the little civilian-looking chopper zoomed over us at treetop level.

I could see the burly pilot clearly as he hovered and expertly brought his little craft down in the small LZ we had quickly cleared, his rotors clipping small branches on the way down with loud cracks that sounded like gunshots. I was impressed with how they could find us so quickly in this vast and featureless bush. It gave me a feeling of confidence knowing that in no time at all we could be located and medevaced. It had always been boasted to us in training that if you were seriously wounded out in the middle of the Angolan bush, and if need be, they could have you back in Pretoria, thousands of miles away, in a state-of-the-art military hospital inside six hours. That made us feel good, and this quick response time for Kevin seemed to back the claim.

We went back to the chase.

The medevac pilot had told Doep that we were only 20 clicks from the Angolan border so it seemed we had lost the race, especially after the unfortunate delay. We threw caution to the wind and everyone rode on the Buffels, driving fast on the now-thinning spoor, sometimes losing it in our haste. By late afternoon we came to a small village of about eight grass huts. The old black headman told us that about 30 SWAPO had been there about two hours before and had commandeered the village’s horses and bicycles. We followed the horse spoor for a while but they soon bombshelled again into different but largely northerly directions. These fucking terrs were good; they had given us the slip for close to 40 clicks and had bombshelled into nothing. We hung on for dear life as our Buffels bounced around, evading the scrubby trees, staying on the spoor of a small group of about ten boot tracks and a couple of bicycles that had stayed together. The boot prints were far apart with the front toe print deep and broken. The tracker said that they were running fast. The terrain had changed a lot too and we were now in tall dark trees that looked almost like a forest, unusual for the countryside.

“That’s the border, right there.”

I stared at the couple of strands of rusty wire hanging loosely from old crooked wooden posts that stretched through the trees. We came to a stop at the broken-down border line and all stared at the thick foliage on the other side. It seemed that almost right at the border there was a drastic change in the type of bush. This was a phenomenon that I would come to notice many more times; there seemed no real explanation for it because both sides of the border here were uninhabited and wild.

“So what’s the stop? Let’s carry on after them! I bet they’re going to slow down pretty soon after crossing; they think they’re home dry. We might even catch them sleeping!”

I was caught up in the chase. I agreed with the sentiment and was also pushing the issue. I sensed I was right and that if we stayed hard on them we would catch them regrouping or taking it easy just across the border.

Stan, for once, agreed with me. “Ja … we got to keep on. We’ve come this far and they’re probably only half an hour in front of us, if that.”

“That’s Angola across there; we could meet more than SWAPO in there, my man. What if we run into a company of FAPLA with a couple of BTR armoured cars, or a couple of T-55 tanks. Then what you going to do?”

“Aah, bullshit ... what’s wrong, scared of a few Soviet tanks?”

Fox and Stander were at each other again. I sat quiet now, staring over the border into the trees. They might even be looking at us right now, wanting us to follow them over. There was an even bigger chance of an ambush when they were in their own backyard and felt safe.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea.

Lieutenant Doep was deep in thought, barely listening to Stan mouthing off about FAPLA who had shot the hell out of A Company a few months before. A troop tied a stone to the long antenna wire and tossed it high in a tree and the radio crackled and hissed to life as we lit up cigarettes. After 15 minutes of going back and forth, Doep put the receiver down, shook his head and said we had been denied permission to cross the border in hot pursuit. There was a chorus of disappointed jeers and cusses. Doep said that the infantry commandant in charge of this section had said
no way
were we to cross over. Once again the infantry had screwed us over. If it had been our Commandant Lindsay, he would surely have given the go-ahead. It was clear that infantry and paratroopers did not share the same philosophy. Thinking back, I never could figure out why we hadn’t had some sort of support to help make contact with this big group of SWAPO. It would surely have been a worthwhile effort as there were so many of them. At least get some choppers to leapfrog ahead to cut them off?

We moved back a few clicks and cooked up a lunch from our dwindling supply of rat packs, then started the slow trek back to Ondangwa. We had spent three weeks doing vehicle patrol, winding through the vast bush. We were tired.

We could have kept going for another year and still only have covered a very small portion of the endless terrain, but at least we had made contact three times and brought in 16 kills without any of us getting a scratch (except Kevin’s unfortunate shot-in-the-hand incident), so it was not too bad. It was time to head back to Ondangwa, which suddenly seemed like a welldeserved rest.

We were all getting a bit too used to sitting shoulder to shoulder bouncing through the Owambo bush. We looked and smelled like terrorists ourselves with our three weeks’ growth and dirty, torn-up bush browns.

32 BATTALION

Too much time on my hands—Styx

In response to allegations of atrocities, South Africa has furnished information about a battalion made up mainly of foreigners that it has been using for raids into Angola against the guerrillas of the South West Africa People’s Organization. The battalion, made up of black refugees from Angola and a few Europeans who would normally be described as mercenaries, is a unit of the South African Army
. New York Times, 27 May 1981

“You men are off to a good start—you made your mark on SWAPO and the news will spread that there’s a new bunch of paratroopers up here. You’re going to be just like old D Company!”

Commandant Lindsay stood near the fire that crackled in the long chipped concrete fire-pit. He stood in his usual confident stance—legs wide apart, which exaggerated his shortness—beaming like an extremely happy, hairy gnome. His teeth flashed red from the firelight. He was holding a plate and biting into a huge army pork chop, laughing as he listened to the different versions of the contacts from various troops who, after a couple of beers and some fresh meat, had plucked up the courage to take mild liberties with the commandant.

He smiled broadly, but even the dancing firelight could not hide his eyes, eyes as black as coal pits. He knotted his forehead when someone brought up the pursuit that had been stopped at the border and nodded his head but smiled again as he shook his pork chop in a defiant gesture.

“You’ll get your turn; don’t worry. Soon enough we will go looking for Boy in his own backyard and show him just what it’s like making war with the
Boere
!”
¹⁰

There was a chorus of whoops from around the fire. We knew that if Lindsay said we were going in after them, then that’s what was going to happen.

He was a born warrior and had been up here making war since Operation
Savannah
in 1975 when the South Africans almost reached Luanda. The story was that Lindsay only went back to South Africa for two months each year and had been doing so for the last five or six years. After a shit, shave and shampoo we chatted like happy school kids and wolfed down the huge chops with thickly buttered bread, followed by cans of icecold Castle lager and slabs of refrigerated Cadbury’s chocolate. It felt great to look like a white man again after washing off weeks of dry layers of Black is Beautiful camo grease.

Later that night, after a foray to the air force bar for additional supplies, we partied late into the night without any sign of the leadership element who, by the sound of it, seemed to be having a party of their own. The next morning we were told that
Valk
2, while we had been partying the night away, had made contact while doing foot patrols near Beacon 10, about 80 clicks east of where we had been, and had got four kills in a night ambush at a waterhole.

Apparently the SWAPO had been on a long-range patrol, heavily laden with landmines, heading deep across the border for the mining town of Tsumeb, a few hundred kilometres south of Beacon 10. It seemed that SWAPO was doing a big push which was apparently normal in the rainy season.

We settled into Fireforce, which was a pleasure. A short parade at 07:00, followed by morning situation reports and a few menial chores like cleaning ablutions and storerooms, then lying around the pool the rest of the day writing long-overdue letters and just generally bullshitting.

Luck was with us; RSM Louw, for some reason, had been shipped back to South Africa and life on the border was like it was supposed to be—no bullshit and let’s concentrate on killing terrs, not pulling up fucking weeds. It wasn’t so blazing hot these days and I began going for a run in the afternoons. I felt weak after almost a month in the bush, living on rat packs and cigarettes, and started slowly at first, but I was soon running halfway around the big air force base, a distance of 13 kilometres. I would then go to the small homemade weight gym next to the hangar, which consisted of a pull-up bar and a few paint cans filled with cement with poles in them that served as barbells. I even began shadow-boxing when I was alone, working my right cross and left hook but it felt useless—boxing seemed so far away and irrelevant to where I was in the middle of Owamboland.

I also got to see how the PF, the Permanent Force, lived. Their accommodation, surprisingly, was just as sparse as ours, except for their wellstocked bar, snack canteen and new swimming pool—it was strange to see Commandant Lindsay and company relaxing at the pool, because somehow I could never picture him relaxing anywhere.

It was here that I first saw a group of about nine American dogs of war who had sauntered into the HQ to report their arrival. Their spokesman was a tall captain, with dark aviator sunglasses, who wore a maroon airborne beret at a rakish angle on his clean-shaven head. They wore South African browns. A couple of them were shaved bald with eagles and parachutes tattooed on their forearms. They had R4s slung over their shoulders but a few had old, well-used M16s hanging on their shoulders and pistols at their sides. They were part of 44 Brigade, a newly formed outfit that had moved into some tents next to us behind the kitchens. They seemed to be mostly made up of ex-Rhodesian soldiers who had come over to South Africa. Now that their war in Rhodesia had been lost for them by the politicians, they had come to join our little war in Angola.

The Rhodesians looked like a tough bunch, having fought a long brutal bush war for the last however many years. Their kill rate against ZANLA and ZIPRA
¹¹
was sometimes a thousand to one. I had read somewhere that their paratroops would often do three combat jumps in a day. I had read that between 1950 and 1952 the French Colonial paras had boasted of 50-odd combat jumps, while in Vietnam the French had made 100 major jumps and the Americans only one. These Rhodesian troopies beat them all with hundreds and hundreds of jumps. Most of them had probably grown up in the bush and had been exposed to their bush war from a young age. Some of them looked not much older than us, but had years of bush-fighting behind them in the hot Rhodesian sticks.

After the Yanks left the HQ, I overheard Commandant Lindsay and his staff laughingly saying that the Americans were a bunch of cowboys and boozers who thought they were in the movies. His words would later prove true when one of them was killed by SWAPO in a contact while he performed moves that belonged in Hollywood and not in the Angolan bush war. When Stan mentioned that the Yanks’ airborne tattoos looked cool, I told him I could easily do a tattoo of an eagle and a parachute on his shoulder. He hesitated at first, but was soon enthusiastic about it and wanted me to start right away.