19 With a Bullet (20 page)

I had done a couple of tattoos on my brother and a friend at home, so I found two needles and glued them together between two matchsticks like a small harpoon, broke open a pen for ink and we had an instant tattooparlour in our tent. Stan was cheerful once he had made his mind up and sat in the chair with a pillow under his arm and smoked as I drew the swooping fish eagle and parachute, our battalion emblem, on his shoulder.

“The fucking 101st Airborne was a crack outfit in Vietnam. Over there they were called the Screaming Eagles. They were the ones who fought that battle at Hamburger Hill. They got the shit shot out of them, but kept on going for two days until they took the hill. They also took that bridge, didn’t they?”

“You got your wars mixed up— that’s in the Second World War, and I think that was the British Airborne. Stop moving around! Keep still, for fuck’s sake!”

“Huh? … hey, that hurts!”

I had read a book about the 101st Airborne during basic training and was familiar with their actions in the Second World War. They had dropped into France on D-Day and had fought gallantly against the Germans but, as was usual with paratroopers, their drop zone had somehow been fucked up and they landed in separate pockets and fought for days in small groups with no communications with their HQ.

“They shaved their hair like Mohicans, with a strip down the middle and painted their faces like fucking Red Indians on D-Day.”

In the meantime the tattoo that I was needling on his shoulder was taking on a different dimension as I began to ink it in. By the end of the sitting the aggressive, fluid swooping eagle I had drawn with the pen had come out as a motionless lame chicken with its stiff wings in the air and its head bowed as if scratching in the dirt for worms.

I wiped the bird clean of the blood, hoping I was seeing it wrong but it jumped right out at me, plain to see. It was a fuck-up, plain and simple. Stan stared at it in the small hand-mirror and was quiet for a very long while as he contemplated his inflamed, smudged right shoulder.

“What’s wrong with the wings? ... They’re kind of … too high up ... and stiff.” He laughed a bit with everyone else but by the time he returned from looking at it in the bathroom mirrors he was fuming.

“It looks like a fucking kaffir chicken pecking mielies! You better fix it up, or take it off! I’m not going to walk around with this fuck-up on my arm!”

He was seriously upset and was threatening to burn it out with a hot knife. I told him that there wasn’t much that I could do to improve it, but consoled him by saying that he shouldn’t worry about it too much because it would probably look better when it healed and, if not, he could get a professional to go over it back in South Africa and he would never be able to see that it had even existed.

“But in the meanwhile I look like I belong to the Scratching fucking Chickens!” He was really upset and stormed out the tent and disappeared towards the cooks’ tents. He was fuming; if he could have decked me, I think he would have.

I decided it was also time to disappear and went visiting some other tents just to get out of his sight. I came back much later when the lights of the tent were out and everyone seemed asleep. Nevertheless, the story of the tattooing got around and soon I had customers lining up in my tent at night for tattoos. Needless to say I stayed away from the more difficult swooping fish eagle and stuck to a basic parachute and wings which I could do quite well. I had no more dissatisfied customers.

The stars twinkled like a thick milky blanket high in the clear black winter sky. A cold chill had settled over Owamboland. We were lying wrapped up and sound asleep in our tents when Lieutenant Doep hurriedly woke us at about two in the morning and told us to kit up, pull fragmentation grenades and some extra rations as quickly as we could and meet at the chopper pad in ten minutes. Half asleep, we lined up in the dark at the small armoury shed and stuffed grenades into our kit as the turbines of the three Pumas cranked up on the dark pad 50 metres away, identifiable only by their winking green and red lights.

All we were told was that 32 Battalion was in deep shit in Angola. It was pitch dark inside the chopper, except for the soft green glow of the instrument panel that illuminated the troops closest to the front in a soft green haze. The Pumas were flying faster than we had ever flown before. The side door was closed this time, and the fuselage shuddered as we reached almost full speed, hurtling north into the blackness of Angola.

I peered out of the window and was taken aback by the vast blackness of the Angolan bush below, with not a light to be seen as far as the eye could see and probably not for hundreds of kilometres farther. We were all fully awake now. No one said a word, but we all knew that if 32 Battalion was in the shit then we were going to be in the shit too. 32 Battalion were all battlehardened veterans of the Angolan civil war. They were called the ‘Terrible Ones’, and their war cry ‘Advance!’ was legendary on the border, as were their countless victories that spanned more than ten years of bush-fighting. Readying myself for the worst, I fidgeted with my rifle and tightened my bootlaces, expecting to be to be dropped right into a night-time fire fight.

We flew at breakneck speed for about half an hour and finally slowed down, circled and landed in a small clearing in the bush where there were a few huge rubber bladders of Aftur and Avgas for the choppers surrounded by light vehicles with groups of black troops hanging around. We disembarked in the dark and were told to sit and wait near the choppers. We lit cigarettes and sat with our teeth chattering in the early morning cold and checked the scene. In the black stillness we could hear the faint thump of mortar fire far off to the west.

I nudged John Fox. “Listen ... mortars.”

He said nothing and pulled deeply on his cigarette as Lieutenant Doep came over to tell us what was going on.

“Three Two is doing a night attack on a SWAPO base. Boy is dug in and Three Two are getting revved. We are going in as support from the north to flush Boy out. Put up your night sights and stand by!” That’s what I loved about the army—they didn’t bother us troops with boring details like what the enemy’s strength was or how they were dug in.

Usually we only wore our floppy bush hats on patrol, but this time we had our the new fibreglass jump helmets, with chinstraps, which we had used only once—on the operation that had turned out to be a lemon. After about 40 minutes the mortar fire seemed to quieten down; we sat in the stillness of the bush smoking and hugging our knees for warmth. We waited and waited and soon the soft, cold blue light of dawn started to line the horizon. Doep came and told us we were not going in, as 32 Battalion had broken through—most of the SWAPOs had fled into the bush and we would be joining a 32 stopper group to sweep for stragglers. We flew in at 06:00 and were dropped in the bush where we were met by a platoon of 32 boys.

It was the first time I had seen the ‘Terrible Ones’ face to face and they looked the part. They were all older black troops with hard, worn faces. They were heavily laden with kit and firepower, but they moved easily with an animal stealth that only came from spending many months at a time in the thick bush. Their leader was a young, tough-looking white sergeant with curly blond hair and angry blue eyes; he made no bones about showing his distaste for us being there. He snubbed Lieutenant Doep when Doep asked him what had happened the night before, only saying that SWAPO was dug in; he gave no further explanation.

“Well, we know that much—that’s why we were woken from a good night’s sleep to come and help you, you stupid cunt!” I muttered.

We walked silently the whole day, sweeping through the bush with no sign of SWAPO and spent a miserably cold night shivering in our light inner sleeping bags. We had been caught off guard by the cold weather and had not brought along our full sleeping bags. Early the next morning after a quick breakfast the 32 Battalion sergeant’s shit attitude boiled over; he snapped at Lieutenant Doep over something and there was a heated exchange of words. Doep came back, clearly mad as hell, and sat fidgeting with his chest webbing until he barked at us to kit up. The sergeant clearly had no respect for us and thought that we were not fit to even be walking with his fucking 32 Battalion. The ill-feeling quickly spread through both sets of troops and pretty soon there was a noticeable gap in the patrol formation as we walked slowly through the bush. Our attitude had become ‘Fuck 32 Battalion’. At midday we sat and had a cold lunch in a thicket of trees and swapped thoughts on the situation.

“Fuck them—let them fight their own battles. If they’re so good, why did they need any help? We could still be relaxing at Ondangs. They didn’t seem so sure of themselves the other night when they sent an SOS for help, did they?”

I sat chewing on a hard energy bar, keeping an eye on the 32 Battalion TB about 50 metres away. I had heard stories of these guys getting into shootouts among themselves over women and really petty arguments, so I was taking no chances. They spent their lives in the bush as a Lost Legion, refugees from the Angolan civil war who had been employed by the South African army, that didn’t want them either but had formed them into a battalion, keeping them on condition that they fought until they were too old or too wounded. They were a legion that lived and died by the sword and its rules.

Stan was getting into it as usual and was standing there glaring at them, saying that we should take them on and show them who was who. “If we make contact they might try to put a few bullets our way. I tell you … I’ll start shooting back if I even suspect it’s coming from them. I don’t give a shit!”

Lieutenant Doep told us to stop talking shit and concentrate on finding SWAPO, which we did for the whole day, finding a few cold, lone tracks that weren’t worth chasing.

My mind was drifting to the few short weeks that we still had on the border before we headed back to South Africa for a month back at home base in Bloemfontein. I had been missing Taina a lot lately and although I was enjoying it in the boonies I couldn’t wait to see her and to squeeze her as tight as I could and tell her about what we had been up to. She had been writing regularly and I had a pile of steamy ‘I miss you stacks’ letters describing what she was going to do with me when she saw me. Others were more mundane, telling me what she had been up to. There was even the occasional tear mark on the paper that was circled in pen, just in case I missed them.

I had the habit of carrying her latest letter in my top-left shirt pocket, so that she could be close to my heart ... and that if I caught a bullet she would be right there with me, and for the convenience of pulling it out in the bush and reading it for the tenth time, just to see her handwriting which, I felt sure, I would be able to recognize out of a pile of a 1,000 letters. We had been going together for five years now, since she was 14 and I 16 and she was more than a girlfriend—she was my best friend, too. I was missing the ordinary things that we would do together, like driving around or sitting at a roadhouse after a night out, chomping on cheese dogs and sipping Cokes. I had recently come to realize that I surely did love her, even though some times I didn’t appreciate quite what I had. But I did know that lately I had been longing to see her again.

After a third fruitless day of scouring the bush for SWAPO, Lieutenant Doep told us to get ready for the choppers that were coming in to take us back to Ondangwa. About fucking time. I was thankful; because of the tension with 32 it had not been an enjoyable patrol. They too seemed happy when the big Pumas landed on the small
chana
and we piled in to be lifted away.

“Fuck the Terrible Ones!” shouted Stan as we lifted off.

¹⁰
Afrikaners, der. farmers

¹¹
ZANLA: Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army; ZIPRA: Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

The author as a child, playing soldiers.

Soon to lose his ‘bonnie’. The author savours his long hair, the day before his enlistment.