19 With a Bullet (28 page)

“What the yellow rubbery fuck was that?’ I hissed to myself. It sounded like some lunatic preacher, or possibly some nut-job giving some sort of crazy suicidal orders to some equally crazy suicidal troops.

In the morning the security patrol rose cautiously and returned with a report that about a dozen, what looked like non-military spoor, were visible not 40 metres from our TB.

What was going on? Was it SWAPO playing games with us and trying to scare us, or was it a bunch of civilians who just happened to have a very special inspirational speaker at their midnight mass, considerately held just 40 metres from our TB?

We moved out ever so cautiously, deeper into Angola, our eyes scanning the bush constantly. The terrain had suddenly changed again, becoming even more dense. It was now impossible to move silently as we had to crash through brittle dry brush packed under the larger trees and which snapped with a loud crack if you pushed it aside too far or got hooked up on your webbing. The new lieutenant changed course; we turned and circled in a wide horseshoe to try and get out of the ‘petrified woods’ which seemed endless. Finally, after a few hours the terrain dissolved back into the more familiar solid bush and clearings.

We turned north again, walking alongside a long
chana
that gave us protection from one side. We stopped for lunch with a clear view over the
chana
.

“The kaffirs are all around us,” Stan sneered. “I can smell a kaffir and I tell you they’re watching us right now.”

I could not argue with this, lying propped up against a tree smoking after a cold lunch of bully and potatoes and a can of the peaches. I was deep in thought about the events. We had found spoor around our TB every morning and that crazy babbling had got us all a bit spooked. I thought of the movie
Apocalypse Now
and of the crazy scenario of us running into some strange, lost SWAPO outfit in Angola who were possessed with the wills of African madmen. I snapped back to reality.

“Maybe they don’t want to make contact and they’re just trying to fuck with us until they can get a stronger force together,” I said after a pause, with a lot more confidence than I felt. I was convinced we were going to be attacked at night in our TB. I nipped my cigarette and put the half-burn back into the box. It would still be a couple of days before the resupply chopper dropped us rations, water and cigarettes.

My feet were killing me again, so I asked Lieutenant Doep for permission to wear my blue sneakers which I had brought along just in case. My feet problems were legendary in the platoon; he quickly agreed after I showed him the bruised and blue tender scar-tissue that covered my toes, which for some reason refused to fully heal. Delaney and the others looked on in envy as I tucked my hard, sand-scuffed boots into my H-frame backpack and slipped on my comfortable old Adidas sneakers ... with a big grin. I walked around in a circle for a few paces to drive home the point and test the feel of them.

“What bullshit! If your feet are so fucked, you should be flying back for light duty with the resupply chopper,” John Delaney grumbled, genuinely put out by my little show.

I let his envious remark wash over me and smiled as I readjusted the laces to a snug fit. “Doep seems to think I’m okay as long as I’ve got the sneakers on why don’t you take it up with him?” I laughed.

We hugged a long winding
chana
, which gave us a sense of protection and a bit of time to relax. Later that afternoon, nestled in a wooded area of tall trees, we came upon the trenches and bunkers of the old SWAPO base, codenamed ‘Vietnam’, which had been one of the bases attacked by the Parabats in Operation
Reindeer
three years before. SWAPO had lost 859 troops in that operation. The Bats had jumped in after heavy bombing by the Mirages, and in the best airborne tradition the jump did not go as planned. Smoke from the burning camp and strong winds fouled up the DZ and gave SWAPO time to regroup and put up a fierce fight, but with armour support it was over by 14:00. The Bats lost four troops. Or at least, that’s what I heard.

We walked through the collapsed trenches and bunkers and kicked around in the sand awhile at bits of metal and old AK-47 shell cases. I stood and looked at what seemed to be a collapsed underground bunker. The halffilled trenches stretched into the tree line and seemed like a good defensive position. A hell of a fight had taken place here between SWAPO and the Parabats. I thought back to the chance meeting I’d had with the paratrooper walking down the street when I was in high school. He was the one who had first got me interested in becoming a paratrooper when he told me about the Bats jumping into a terrorist base and how he had taken out a terr with his knife. This could have been the operation that he was talking about, because as far as I knew the Bats hadn’t jumped into a base since then because that drop had been such a fuck-up.

The story was that SWAPO fought determinedly in the trenches till the end and that scores of them had died with their hands clasped with the thumb pushed through the two forefingers in the well-known ‘Fuck you’ gesture. A fuck-you sign on their chest as they died? I never did believe this story ... but would soon be able to check its authenticity first-hand.

We dug a TB in some thick trees about a mile from the old Vietnam base and bedded down for another long night. As the darkness closed in my imagination took off and I imagined the sounds of the battle that had taken place here in 1978 when some two thousand men faced off against each other early one morning. I could hear the big 450-kilogram bombs from the Mirage jets exploding, the
crump
of mortars and the clatter of AK-47s, overlaid with the loud crack of the paratroopers’ folding-stock 7.62-millimetre FNs. (The old Bats did not have the 5.56-calibre R4 that we now used.) I dozed off into a light sleep.

It was almost full moon when I was woken a few hours later for my watch. The moon bathed the bush in a ‘moon tan’ that was almost as clear as day. I tried sleepily to stay awake, peering into the bush over the white sand that shone like a beach. I was nodding off when I heard the faint
thump
,
thump
of what sounded like mortars in the distance. For a second or two thought I was still imagining the old sounds of the Vietnam battle but quickly realized that this was real, that there was a battle going on somewhere to the east of us. The radio in the centre of our TB crackled softly to life and was quickly turned down to a low, broken hiss. Quickly the word was whispered from hole to hole that
Valk
3 was getting the shit revved out of them five clicks to the east and that mortars were landing in their TB.

We lay silent as we listened to the continuous barrage that was muffled by distance, but clear in the still bush.

“This is it. I told you they would hit us at night. Ja, this is when the fucking fun starts.” I lay quiet, listening to the almost continuous boom of 82-millimetre bombs falling so fast that they sounded like a single, rolling barrage.

“Roll up your kit,” Lieutenant Doep hissed in the darkness.

Instantly my kit was rolled and I was ready to move.

I quickly got back in the hole while I waited for the rest of the platoon to kit up. The hole suddenly felt very shallow and small and I swore to myself that from now on I would take the time to dig a decent fucking hole!

The mortars had stopped for a while but were now starting up again. It seemed that the attack hadn’t been going for more than five minutes when the welcome sound of a fighter jet could be heard high in the night sky, coming from the south and tearing through the blackness towards us. It was hard to pinpoint exactly where the sound came from. It seemed to bounce around the sky, but within two minutes the horizon east of us lit up like a small sunrise as the jet dropped its bombs on the SWAPO mortar flashes. Instantly the mortar fire stopped.

We could hear the jet roaring high in the dark sky above us, patrolling like an avenging angel from the south. After ten minutes or so the roar disappeared into the distance, the jet heading back to Ondangwa, its mission accomplished and leaving us only with the night and its bush sounds. The mortars did not start up again but not a lot of sleeping got done for the rest of that night.

We did not move but stayed in the same TB. In the morning we heard that
Valk
3 had had no choice but to break ranks and run like hell in all directions when the mortars began landing right in the middle of their TB. Luckily SWAPO did not have any stopper groups set up waiting for them, with the result that only two troops had been slightly wounded. Later on I would speak to my buddy Willy Bray in
Valk
3, who explained that they had all shat themselves but sat tight in their holes, shooting back. He said that SWAPO had started to do a full-on attack into their TB, even doing fire and movement forward. When SWAPO’s mortars began landing accurately and heavily in among their holes they retreated, because there was nothing else they could do.

(This, much later on, led to a few punch-ups with the infantry who, on finding out what had happened, called the Bats, and
Valk
3 in particular, ‘chicken’ because they had run away.)

It was our fifth day in Angola. We had probably covered about 35 clicks so far and were advancing cautiously north, deeper into Indian country. Our eyes scanned the bush continually as we walked. Even while taking a dump or opening a can of bully, you scanned the bush.

As anyone who has gone on a seek-and-destroy mission into a foreign country on foot in only platoon strength would know, it has a distinctive, unusual and very dangerous feel to it. It felt clearly as though we should not be there. Like ‘trespassers will be shot’. It felt that if we were caught, ‘they’ had every right to kill us. Now I knew how a SWAPO patrol felt when they crossed the border into South West Africa. In the last few days my R4 rifle had started to feel very small and inconsequential in my hands.

Our first five-day resupply was scheduled for today. I still had some water and chow, but was out of smokes and had been bumming Camels off my partner, Johnny the Fox. While making our way through a dry, lightly bushed area next to a
chana
on our way to rendezvous with the resupply chopper, we crossed paths with a herd of goats. Before you could say “Tickle my balls with a feather”, the black trackers had grabbed a goat ... then another ... and another. One minute the goats were walking past us, eyeing us with suspicion; the next they’d had their throats cut, head in the fork of a tree and were gutted, partially skinned and missing all four legs up to the hip and shoulder joints. The deceased goats were later to be shared between those who had helped capture the unfortunate beasts. John and I were among them. Lieutenant Doep, who had been walking near the head of the formation, did not even know it had happened—and the only way he bust us was when he smelled the appetizing aroma of meat cooking as we sat down next to a small
chana
and waited for the resupply chopper. Our punishment was to give him a fair portion of goats’ meat.

“This is going to taste better than the steakhouse back home,” I said, eyeing the strips of goat meat that I held over the miniature fire. I licked my fingers, wet with fat, as I slowly turned the sizzling strips directly in the flame. I held the meat between two green sticks, like chopsticks. I had extra-green sticks to take over when the first ones got too burned. I had to pick the two shrinking pieces of meat out of the fire a couple of times, having a hard time flicking off the ash that had stuck to the meat. I finally figured out just to leave the ash and brush it off when the meat was cooked.

“See how fast they gutted that goat?” remarked Stan, who was also one of the chosen few and was cooking next to us. “That’s how fast one of these terrs can gut you if you give them the chance.”

He was frying his meat in his dixie can, sitting seriously as he watched it cook and stick to the bottom of the pan.

I sat equally seriously, watching my chopsticks burn and weighed his comment. Stan and I had recently been getting on each other’s nerves and I took his comment without much humour.

“Stan, do you really think I would allow myself to be cut up by SWAPO like a fucking goat? I’ve got a rifle with 35 rounds in the magazine and another 35 strapped to that one—no one’s going to cut me up like a fucking goat. If they do, I’ll be long dead and so will all of us because you guys will be there to help me, right?”

He was a bit taken aback by my uncalled-for response and so was I, but I was getting tired of his constant cynical remarks and bullshit comments. He smiled a big shit-eating grin but didn’t answer, sensing that we were getting near the end of our tethers with each other. And he knew that although he could out-mouth me any day, he would be no match if we came to blows.

“Hey, calm down, both of you,” said Kurt the ex-cook. I knew he didn’t really mean it, because he too was getting tired of Stan’s bullshit and I’m sure he was secretly hoping for a confrontation.

I finally took my blackened goat meat off the fire and ate it slowly with salt from my rat pack but had lost some of the joy of the meal. Then all at once the tension and silence of the Angolan bush was broken by the distant hammer of the resupply chopper’s rotor blades. Lieutenant Doep shouted for someone to get ready with an orange-smoke grenade. Someone popped one and tossed it into the
chana
. The orange smoke seemed to hug the
chana
floor, not wanting to rise above treetop level, but finally a breeze took it and it wafted high above the trees. The chopper landed close to the tree line, blowing up a storm of dust, as some of us ran to help unload a mountain of rat packs and jerry cans of water, taking it in turns by section to fill our seven water bottles and pull five days’ dry rations.

As we reached the chopper I had noticed a ragged, skinny African in SADF browns miles to big for him, jump out of the chopper. He was led over to Lieutenant Doep by our own Company Staff Sergeant Greyling who had flown along to personally deliver the resupply and was full of cheer and bullshit. Thinking that the black man was just another tracker joining us, I thought nothing further of him.