19 With a Bullet (44 page)

“You must be fucking mad! What do you mean, deploy? Can’t you see we’re taking fire, you stupid fucking idiot?” my mind screamed. I grasped my R4 in a death grip, my knuckles standing out starkly white. I shifted my body and readied my feet to kick open the steel side panels of the Buffel.

Bullets cracked close over our heads, sounding like the target pits on the shooting range back in Bloemfontein. Now I thought I had some idea how those poor bastards must have felt landing on D-Day. Doep had the radio receiver to his ear, glaring fiercely as he tried to listen into the receiver.

“Deploy! Deploy! Deploy now!” he screamed in Afrikaans but no one moved. “Deploy! Deploy!” but still no one moved; we crouched low in the Buffel with our heads down.

“You fucking stupid person,” I thought. “Why do you want to go out there? Can’t you see we’ll all get killed?” I wanted to scream at him.

The troops at the side of the vehicle fumbled at the heavy pins to release the panel, as we all kicked it over with a loud clang. I leaped out and tumbled to the ground. I immediately got up, ran a couple of metres and hit the dirt. Everybody was hugging the dirt.

“Fire and movement ... go!” my mind shouted at me. I looked at Stan on my right and he nodded furiously. He leaped up and ran a couple of metres and dropped. I looked around and did the same. The tar road was 20 metres in front of us but we were in an open
chana
as flat as a bowling green with not a stick for cover. Bullets cracked and kicked up dirt around us in big squirts. Stan moved again but quickly dived for the deck. I, too, leaped up in sequence but dived for the sand almost at once. I leopard-crawled some metres to a shallow depression in the sand, quickly looked up and saw no targets in the bush line 50 to 70 metres away, but the sudden loud crack of a bullet very nearby made me shove my cheek into the sand.

“We’re taking too much fire, stupid motherfuckers ... we can’t move,” I swore at no one in particular. I looked at Stan who also had his head flat against the sand with his ear on the ground. I dared not get up. I dared not move a centimetre. Without moving my head I could see that the whole advance had stopped and was lying prone in a scraggly line. Some had not moved from where they had landed next to the Buffel, which was now very quickly backing away. We were pinned down; we could not move. We could not even look up, never mind shoot back. Sand kicked up around us in terrifying sprays.

I lay still and involuntarily tried to wriggle my body deeper into the soft sand. I could hear myself breathe. It was not even 07:00 and already the sweat was pouring into my eyes, stinging them. I was afraid to even move my hand to try and wipe them. I closed my eyes and lay still.

“Any time now I’m dead ... any time now.” I expected a bullet to blow the top of my head off. I would not even feel it. My brains would lie there steaming in the morning chill, just like the SWAPO’s at the ambush had done. These might be the final seconds of my life right now, right now as I lay thinking about it. Stupidly it crossed my mind that it would be sad and wasteful if I were to be killed here today.

“Fourie is down! Medics! Fourie’s hit!” the shout came down the line. I shouted the message on without turning my head. I could do nothing so I just lay still with my cheek in the sand. It was strangely relaxing; my mind was working in slow motion and I felt almost that I wasn’t really there at all but I was an outsider looking on. I took the chance to breathe deeply and get a grip.

For some reason I became fascinated with my rifle, centimetres from my face, as its image burned into my brain. I looked at the four notches scratched into the chipped green paint above the hand grip. Each symbolized a man killed with this rifle. Two were already scratched into the rifle when it had been issued to me. Suddenly I almost forgot where I was and felt an acceptance, a relaxing, cozy detachment from the present, as if I was lying in the sun in my backyard while bullets cracked head-high.

I inspected the granules of white sand that covered my sweaty forearm and noted how my arm hairs pushed out through the sand and glistened with sweat. I suddenly noticed a tiny, almost transparent green bug struggling across the wet sand granules on my forearm. He wasn’t much bigger than a grain of sand himself. His little antennae waved frantically and his green legs worked as he climbed over each grain one at a time. “Where the hell does this little bug think he’s going? Doesn’t he know what’s going on here?” I watched him with amazement. I had never seen a bug so small. He struggled on, slipping and falling back, but carried on, determined to get where he was going. “What’s his fucking objective? What’s this little thing’s purpose? For what possible reason on earth does a bug this small exist?” I questioned. Idiotically I noted too that if I had not been lying in this position, unable to move and with my face so close to my arm, I would never in my life have seen this wonderful, stupid, determined little bug.

“Kruger is hit ... Kruger’s hit!” the call came down the line. Numbly I shouted the message on. It was sinking in now. It was a fuck-up! We were pinned down in the open and we were all going to get shot to hell. Two guys are down and we haven’t moved ten fucking metres. And we only have another 13 kilometres of base to get through! We had been pinned down now for about ten or 15 minutes and nobody seemed to know what to do.

“Why don’t the fucking Ratels come forward? What are they here for?”

“Keep your heads down ... the Mirages are coming in for a run!”

I didn’t bother relaying the message. Everyone had heard it. I turned my face up to see if I could see the Mirage dropping out of the sky but saw nothing. Thirty seconds later I caught the flash of a plane darting in low above treetop level and a couple of huge explosions followed almost at once, 300 metres in front of us.

They were not as big as the thousand-pounders but big enough to shake the ground under me. A cheer went up and the shooting stopped. After 30 seconds I reckoned it was safe to get up on my haunches. The bomb smoke drifted lazily over the trees just ahead.

“
Vorentoe
! Forward!”

At the far end of the line one Buffel with a bit of cover had advanced about forty metres ahead of us, having taken advantage in the lull in the firing. Paratroops were even futher forward, running bent over and not even doing fire and movement. They were about 50 metres ahead of our side of the line. Suddenly, when I looked again, they had all turned and were sprinting back at full speed, breaking into different directions.

“What the fuck’s going on to make them run like that?”

Soon the shout came down the line. “Tanks! There’s a fucking tank coming!”

I stayed put and could now plainly hear the clank and squeak of something approaching on the far side from the trees.

“Tanks, tanks ... we got tanks coming out right on us!” Lieutenant Doep was close to me to my left and shouting as loud as he could into the receiver.

I sat watching with a numbness in my gut. The whole line had started to scatter wildly in all directions.

John Delaney was shouting as he ran doubled over towards me. “Tank, right here ... right here!”

I sat and watched, unable to pull away from the movie scene unfolding before my eyes. Sure enough, an old T-34 emerged from the tree line about 100 metres to our right and stopped, only partially exposed in the trees. I could see its long barrel sticking out confidently and could now hear its big motor roaring at high revs. Perhaps he was stuck in first gear or something. I turned and ran crouched a little farther to my left, away from the tank, then stopped and turned. There was nowhere to run to. We were on a bowling green of fucking sand! I flung myself flat on the sand.

Stan almost fell over me as he too ran doubled over past me. Minutes passed that seemed like hours, before I heard an engine gunning behind me. I turned to see one of our small, odd-looking Eland armoured ‘Noddy’ cars with its long 90-millimetre gun barrelling towards us at almost top speed from across the
chana
. He became airborne as he bounced over bumps and turned nimbly, kicking up a cloud of dust as he came directly through our scattered line and then turned again, this time towards the tank. The little armoured car came to a quick stop right in the middle of the open ground about 80 metres from the tank, waited a couple of seconds and then fired one shot from his 90-millimetre with a loud bang.

The shot was right on target. When the smoke drifted away the T-34’s turret was lying off to one side and the open body was burning, belching dense black smoke. I couldn’t believe it. My admiration went out to the panzer men in the Eland. The panzers had been our neighbours in Bloemfontein, the traditional arch-enemies of the paratroopers during training. We used to jump over the fence at night to kick their arses but I knew that from here on they would have my full respect. I quickly pulled out my camera and snapped a shot of the burning tank billowing black smoke.

“Forward!”

We weren’t out of the woods yet. Fourie had been shot in the leg and was hobbling away with a medic on either side of him. His trouser leg had already been cut off, with bright blood seeping from a hastily applied field dressing. Kruger had a hand wound and was walking doubled up behind the medics, clutching his hand with the other. We were still taking light fire but advanced with fire and movement over the tar road to the banana-shaped trenches, finding them to be old, broken down and abandoned.

The big Ratels had only now moved up among us after the tank scare. About time too. They slowly rolled forward with their huge wheels as we started forward with buddy-buddy fire and movement next to them. We went over the crumbled trenches and into some scattered trees, still with no visible targets. Stan, who was my partner on this operation, bolted four or five metres in front of me and dived into the dirt. I looked around and jumped up, flipping my rifle to ‘fire’ as I did so. I had taken two quick steps when the unmistakable
whoosh
of an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket went over my head, probably aimed at the big armoured Ratel that had come in directly next to me on my right. I collapsed instantly like a man shot through the head and fell hard to the ground with a loud grunt. It was not a controlled fall; my rifle ploughed into the sand with the fire-selector open and sand poured through the open slot into the working parts. The rocket had missed the Ratel, for no explosion came. I lay on my side and worked the bolt, ejecting a couple of rounds, hearing the sand grinding inside the rifle.

“Fuck it!” I looked towards Stan, who had found cover in a shallow depression and was beckoning me to come over. I leopard-crawled the 15 metres like a snake, just like in the training manual, and fell into the little hole. Thank heavens for basic training.

“I got sand in my rifle!”

“You better clean it! Do it now!”

I flipped onto my back and stripped the R4 in triple-quick time, working like a sea otter and putting the working parts on my chest like seashells as I pulled my bandana from around my neck. I worked fast and smoothly. In training I had always struggled with weapon stripping and assembling, never mind speed-stripping. Now my fingers worked like steel pins, easily forcing the parts together and snapping them in. Amazing how quickly and easily one can strip and clean a weapon and reassemble it under fire. Every part went back into place at the first atempt, with not the slightest hitch.

“Fuck ... RPG almost took my head off. Did you see that?”

“Ja, it came from those trees there.”

I crawled to the top of the depression, wiped my eyes with my bandana and adjusted the heavy jump helmet that kept falling over my eyes. We were about 50 metres into the base and were now among scattered trees. I was already drenched with sweat. I saw a sand wall up ahead with thick trees behind it.

“Where? Over there?”

“Next to that wall.”

I put my rifle over, aimed at the top of the wall and squeezed off four or five shots. Stan followed suit. They were the first shots I had fired. I still hadn’t seen a target but it felt good. I was just looking up to search the trees again when a huge
burp
filled our world as the anti-aircraft guns opened up ahead of us again.

“Jesus!” I dropped down.

“Hey Gungie, look!” Stan lay on his back and pointed to the sky where a small Bosbok (Bushbuck) spotter plane was in big trouble. The spotter plane had thought, as we all did, that the AA gunners had all deserted their guns after the thousand-pound bombs were dropped on them but there was one stubborn gunner who had stayed at his post and seemed determined to fight till the end. The small single-engined aircraft was so high he was just a speck in the blue sky but not too high for the sharp-eyed FAPLA gunner.

The Bosbok seemed unaware that he was being shot at and was putt-putting along slowly, but he must suddenly have realized that he was in the jaws of death. The spotter plane weaved and dived as white puffs of flak exploded around him. At one stage he was totally engulfed in a cluster of about 20 puffs but he emerged from them diving at a 45-degree angle and high-tailed it out of there like a bat out of hell. I’ve never seen a small plane move like that before. He made it out, full of holes, only because the anti-aircraft guns had stopped shooting for some reason.

“Jeez, I never knew a Bosbok could move that fast!” I was grinning and Stan was laughing.

“That’s one lucky damn spotter. Did you see him change down to first gear very quickly?”

“Ja, he turned into a Mirage pretty quick.”

Our chuckling was short lived. The brave FAPLA anti-aircraft gunner was back in the game. He had trained his barrels on us at ground level and sent a salvo of shots over our heads with a sound like doomsday that took the breath out of me. I had been on one knee after the spotter had high-tailed it out and was scanning the bush in front of me but dropped into the sand like a sack. It was the loudest and most frightening sound I had ever heard—ten or 20 anti-aircraft projectiles split the air just metres above our heads in less than a second! The gun, we discovered later, had four barrels.