19 With a Bullet (36 page)

My last thought was of Taina, who in her letter had told me that her father had sent her pet pig to a friend’s farm “where he would be more comfortable and would be used to breed”. I had raised pigs while at high school and had 22 pink pigs in neat stalls at the back of the plot. I had given her a squealing piglet, the size of a small puppy, for her birthday. Of course the pig grew huge and had the run of their five-acre plot, beating up the dogs for their food and shitting on the front lawn. I hoped that she had believed the breeding part because I knew the next time she would see Pig would be as the sausages her mother cooked for breakfast.

¹⁷
Afrikaans insult applied to those of South African/British dual nationality. Literally ‘salt dick’, it refers to having one foot in either country with your dick hanging in the ocean between

¹⁸
Plaaslike bevolking: local population (Afrikaans)

BUSH JUSTICE

In the air tonight—Phil Collins

For us, Operation
Ceiling
had come to an end. 32 Battalion were still busy in Angola with Operation
Carnation
, which had been run hand in hand with our seek-and-destroy operation,
Ceiling
, and would continue for weeks to come; they would still be going strong when the next big ops started, but for us, thankfully, it was over.

The other three D Company platoons all came into the rendezvous by midday the next day and we walked the last 20 or so clicks back across the border in a huge company V formation, swapping war stories with the guys from the other platoons and showing off booty that we had picked up.

Willy Bray told me how he had shat himself when they were mortared during the night and said that SWAPO troops were doing fire and movement into their TB. He felt bad but said that they had no choice but to run, and that they had sat tight through the night in small groups until they regrouped the following morning at their emergency RV on a
chana
many kilometres south. (There was always an emergency rendezvous given before we bedded down so that we could reunite later if the shit hit the fan during the night.)

I told him how we had hit FAPLA—the Angolan army—by mistake, how we’d had to run from the tank or BTR in the middle of the night and how we had hardly any ammo left.

We also heard how
Valk
1 had had a desperate, almost hand-to-hand contact in some thick shrub that lasted a few minutes, how Swanepoel had been seriously wounded through the groin and how the university lieutenant leading that platoon had been shot in the hand. Both had been casevaced out and more than half a dozen terrs had been killed.

Our part in the operation had been successful—all in all D Company had got over 60 kills and not lost a man. Commandant Lindsay would surely be proud of his boys.

The next morning we stepped over the remnants of a rusty barbed wire fence that was the border and crossed into South West Africa. I was still dressed in my blue sneakers and my assortment of SWAPO and FAPLA clothes and got Doogy to snap a photograph of me standing on the broken-down fence that symbolized the border. I flashed a grin and a peace sign. I took a photo of him as he scowled at me with one foot in Angola and the other in South West Africa. Inside South West Africa I changed out of my terrorist outfit and donned the hated army boots again.

We dropped the V formation and walked the last ten clicks in a loose company group, not at all concerned about running into any SWAPOs who happened to be south of the border.

D Company had proved itself in battle, in a four-week cross-border operation with hardly any support and only in platoon strengths. We were warriors at last. We had faced the enemy in their own country, kicked their ass and had bragging rights to almost 80 kills, if you included the contacts on the previous bush trip. Our senior company, I had heard, had finished up with 130 kills, which I had thought very high, but we were well on our way to beating them. Those 12 months of hard training were now bearing fruit and we were getting all the action we could handle. We did not know that in a few weeks we would be part of the biggest conventional cross-border operation into Angola that South Africa had yet to launch.

We crashed through the bush like happy school kids going home after a football game, joking and shooting the shit.

“Why can’t they send some Buffels to pick us up at the border, instead of walking all the way back to base?” John Delaney was walking happily along with a bounce in his step, flitting from group to group, chatting and swapping stories.

“Can’t wait to have an icecold Coke and a honey sandwich and get these fucking boots off.” No one had taken off their boots for three weeks, but I’d had it easier with my sneakers.

“All I want to do is sleep on an army foam mattress and shave. I feel like I’m back on Recce course,” John went off on a tirade, telling everyone in earshot how this four weeks in the bush was nothing compared to the seven weeks of hell that he and I had spent on the Recce selection course where we had walked close to 700 kilometres.

“Think
this
is bad? Try seven weeks.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that bad if you two almost made it to the end— you both look like hell now.”

I looked at Dan Pienaar who had a pair of brand-new SWAPO boots dangling around his neck. “Better than you’ll look hanging from a tree by those fucking SWAPO boots.”

We soon sighted the white sand walls of Ombalantu base camp and walked through the small gates which were guarded by two serious-looking infantrymen who gawked at us as if a company of SWAPO was walking into camp. We looked at them with the thousand-yard stare we had picked up from weeks of constantly peering through the bush. We walked with the long stride of men who have walked far and fast for a long time. We walked past the little white-brick HQ building and the six-metre-wide baobab tree and flopped our kit down in a heap around the small tin canteen in the centre of the tent square. I felt tired and bone weary from our four weeks in the bush ... but I felt good.

We had seen real action at last.

Most of the guys immediately took off their boots for the first time in four weeks and wiggled their toes into the sand. Cigarettes were lit amidst loud calls for the canteen to open. I had been sitting on my kit for about ten minutes, enjoying my third Camel and grinning at the schoolboy-like activity around me when my ears picked up a hauntingly soulful drumbeat and horn coming from the tin camo-painted canteen some metres away. The solid, moving drumbeat and mournful horn compelled me to find out who and what the heck this song was. I got up and walked to the door of the canteen, still in my filthy, torn uniform, pushed my way through a few 3 SAI troops who quickly gave way, and watched Phil Collins on a music video for the first time, breaking into “I can feel it coming in the air tonight”. He crashed into the chorus as he changed tempo halfway through the song. I stood and watched the whole video, mesmerized, and afterwards walked back to my kit with the drumbeat still thumping through my head, thinking it was probably the best song I had ever heard. I still, to this day, think it is one of the best songs ever recorded—the haunting beat still grabs me by the throat whenever I hear it and I am still compelled to turn the volume up high wherever I might be.

3 SAI had occupied the base in our absence. SAI troops with short, regulation haircuts were walking around in twos and threes in squeaky-clean browns and PT shorts. They seemed awed by this company of unshaven paratroopers dressed in bits and pieces of SWAPO uniform and quickly disappeared from view into the tents, gawking from the shadows of the tent flaps.

“These fucking infantry look like they’re about to shit themselves,” Stan snarled, giving them a hard bush-killer stare as they scurried by, looking straight ahead.

“What are these pussies doing in our base anyway? I’ll be fucked if I’m not sleeping on a mattress tonight! Those are our beds they’re sleeping on!”

“Take it easy, they’re on your side.” I sat on my kit savouring the sweet burn of an icecold Coke and a chocolate bar that tasted like heaven.

“Fucking morons,” Stan was pushing the mad bush fighter thing and motioned with his chin in a ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ to a cleancut infantryman who was hastily walking past. The junior soldier braved a look but quickly turned and looked straight ahead. The company sat around the canteen, laughing.

We had come a long way together since we’d stood under the paradeground lights at 05:00 twelve long months ago, the survivors of the 700 who had tried to take the PT course to become paratroopers. Now we had been tempered in the heat of battle, the very reason we had all joined this outfit. We had become like one another, knew each other’s strengths, weakness and character flaws and now babbled together like a big family, sipping cold drinks and eating chocolate bars, shouting for the bar to be opened. Most had taken off their torn shirts and filthy boots, skinny torsos shining white in the sun in contrast to the crusty Black is Beautiful camo-smeared faces and arms, joyfully wriggling their blistered feet and toes in the hot, fine, white sand.

I looked across at our old tents and saw a group of short-haired, worried faces peering out through the tent flaps.

“Looks like these boys are dug in permanently in our tents—we might not get a foam mattress tonight!” I said, now also appreciating the seriousness of the new sleeping arrangements.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”

Corporal Pretorius came strolling out of the HQ and addressed us. “Pack your kit neatly down at the bottom there by the chopper pads. We’re not going to be staying here and will be moving out in the morning back to Ondangwa. We’ll spend the night outside the walls, next to the pad.”

He spoke gingerly, as a new pecking order had been established in the last four weeks of combat and patrolling in Angola and he wasn’t at the top of it any more. He had sat on his ass, not wanting to continue, just before the FAPLA contact. Not that I blamed him—I had wanted to turn around too. He smiled awkwardly as he was met with jeers and shouts of anger at the thought of sleeping another night in the dirt while the 3 SAI troops snored in our beds.

To me it wasn’t a big deal. I stood up with John Fox and slowly walked across the tent square to the chopper pad and dumped my kit against the outside of the sand wall.

John Delaney, always the first to pick up any news, came and dropped his kit heavily next to mine, spraying a cloud of dust into my face. His eyes were wide. “I hear there’s a big op going down ... just heard it from an infantry guard. It’s supposed to be a big one. He says they might be going all the way up to Luanda, like in ’75. Maybe take the whole of Angola!”

“Bullshit.”

“Serious. Ask Lieutenant Doep. And we’ll probably be involved.”

“You mean we’re going to hit FAPLA?”

“FAPLA and SWAPO and the Cubans and anyone else in the way from what it sounds like. I told you we started a fucking war, didn’t I?”

I tilted my head back, swallowing the last of my second cold Coke.

“When’s it going to happen?”

“I don’t know but it sounds like soon. All the infantry guys are talking about it.”

I wiped some sweat off my brow and for the first time thought of a shower. Funny, you would have thought a shower would have been the first thing on our minds but after four weeks you get to feel quite at home in filth. I had always wondered how those bums on the street could stand walking around black with grime. Now I knew. After a while you don’t even smell yourself or feel the grime.

John stood up and pointed back into Angola. “I know what’s going on. FAPLA is getting too buddy-buddy with SWAPO and even training them. That’s why we hit FAPLA by mistake … that ambush we did wasn’t far from their main base.”

We looked at him sceptically.

“Doep told me. Ask any of these infantry cunts—they all know about it.” I always doubted John with first-hand news, not because he was untruthful but because I knew he could not resist adding a tale or two.

I looked across the chopper pad trying to decide if I should lift my ass and go and shower, even though I felt quite comfortable sitting filthy in the sun. I saw Kurt coming across the chopper pad, lugging his kit over his back with one hand and with a big cheese, onion and tomato sandwich clutched in the other. His cheeks were bulging and he smiled as he put down his kit.

I caught a whiff of onion and my saliva glands reacted instantly. “Where did you score the sandwich?”

“At the kitchen. The cook.”

“Oh, I forgot you’re in with the cooks, being an alumnus and all.”

“Nah, he’ll give you one ... ask him.”

He took another huge bite of the sandwich, speaking around the mouthful. “Hey Gungie, the cook says that the sergeant-major here killed those two little cats we had.”

“Whaaaat?”

“The cook says he was feeding them, like we asked him to, but one day this sergeant-major stomped on the one cat in the mess while they were eating and broke its neck and the next day picked the ginger one up by the back legs and slammed it against the wall, killing it. He says the cat lay there crying for 20 minutes before it died.”

“Who the
fuck
is this cunt?” I said, sitting up, stunned at the news.

“Cook says he’s a mean fucker. All the troops are shit scared of him and he runs this camp like he’s God, ex-boxer and all.”

I stood up and felt a rage flood through me as I looked around towards the kitchen. Kurt, who had stood beside me in a few fist fights, knew that look and smiled slowly.

“Kill our fucking cats … where’s this cook of yours?”

“Easy, Gungie. He’s the fucking RSM and sergeant-major of this camp, man. Cool it!”

The cook was chopping a side of beef with a huge knife, stained up to his elbows in watery blood. “Yeah, he stood on the little grey one right here in the mess while we were having supper—didn’t even say anything—then left it lying there while the troops ate.