19 With a Bullet (54 page)

A product of the mind or genuine Divine intervention? I did not know which but quickly the strange fear
did
subside. I felt the cold, slippery eel leave me. I was able to hold my mind steady and stay focused on the yellow and green trees in front of me, waiting for a figure to come crashing through the bush towards me. The gunships’ cannons sounded closer. I pushed up my jump helmet and pulled my rifle hard into my shoulder.

“Any time now … any time now ... take in easy ...”

I heard the bush crashing somewhere in front of me but saw nothing. Then I thought I saw some yellow bush move about 30 metres ahead but saw no targets. They’re right here. I can hear them! Seconds later
Valk
3, which had formed up a few hundred metres to our right, hidden in the bush, opened up with their 5.56 rounds sounding like firecrackers popping as they sprung their trap on the fleeing SWAPOs running slap-bang into them. The whole thing didn’t take long.

Within 45 minutes we were carefully walking back to the original killing zone.

I felt ashamed that I had felt so afraid. Where had it come from and how had it managed to sneak through all my intricate defences and ambush me so intensely and suddenly? Was it because I only had about three weeks left in the army before I was back in Civvy Street and my mind had loosened up too much? Was it the Bushman family we had slaughtered and that still lay here in front of me?

I pushed the thought from my mind. “You think too much, Korff.”

We gathered up the AK-47s and some satchels of equipment and trudged half a click to a
chana
where four Pumas had landed. We left the grisly scene behind us. The only survivors we left were the ten or so children and a woman who had crept out of the bush. They stood in a couple of small groups and watched us silently, like mutes, as we walked out of the thicket and down the hill, leaving them to wander among and identify the over 40 corpses sprawled grotesquely among the trees.

I knew that this contact—the one where we and the gunships with their 20-millimetre cannons had wiped out a family of women, grandmas, children, babies and their menfolk in SWAPO uniform, leaving a surviving woman and a handfuul of wide-eyed children there in that carnage—would haunt me forever.

It does.

We met up with
Valk
3 at the choppers. They said they had shot quite a few terrs who had run into them. I heard that one guy had mistakenly—or perhaps not mistakenly—shot two kids. I also heard that one terr had come forward with his hands held up in surrender and that another guy had shot him in the stomach. I did not dig for details or try to separate fact from fiction.

We flew back low over the trees in the classic Vietnam War formation— four big Pumas, a Cessna Bosbok spotter plane and two Alouette gunships, all flying side by side in a V formation barely metres above the treetops, all set against an angry red African sun that was minutes from setting.

I thought of the movie
Apocalypse Now
. We flew in this formation till we reached the airstrip at Ionde, then broke off. I sat cross-legged by the chopper door and saw all the troops looking up with contorted faces, admiring our fly-by.

Operation
Daisy
was over. It had been a fuck-up from start to finish, as far as I could tell. From what I heard, the whole huge mechanized fighting group of many hundreds of troops brought in 70 or so SWAPO kills in a period of about two weeks. I never did find out our losses but I’m sure it was a worse ratio than the our ten to their 1,000 kills of Operation
Protea
.

Valks
4 and 3 and the gunships between them had brought in 29 of those kills (not counting the families of the 29) in the last days of the doomed op. I heard that we had the largest single kill in the whole operation. Trust D Company to save the day. It was another feather in our cap. No one spoke about the Bushman clan we had wiped out—they only bragged about the 29 AK-47s we had brought back. The families were merely casualties of war, or as the Americans would say today—collateral damage—incidental.

A few days later we arrived at the white sands of Ondangs after the long bumpy ride through the Angolan bush. Back at Ondangwa there was a festive atmosphere. We had less than three weeks left in the army and should be flying back to South Africa any day to get ready to
klaar
out and hand back all kit, uniforms and equipment.

“Oh, yeah … Civvy Street, here I come! Gonna be walking down that main road. Wake up when I want. Gonna be dancing and
jolling
all night.” Delaney was on top form.

“What are you going to do? Become a bum?”

“For a while, yeah ... just going to
jol
... do what I want.” John was sipping a Coke, smiling from ear to ear. “What are you going to do, Gungie?”

“I don’t know ... my old man says I should look into being a plumber … I don’t know if it’s what I want to do. Bit of an anticlimax, hey?”

“Ja … that’s for sure. Maybe we should sign up for short term, try for the Recces again … carry on with the war. It’s still going to get hotter, I can tell you that.”

I sat silently and brooded. Naawwww … fuck the army. I’d had enough of this bullshit. I had seen enough to discourage me from signing on for any extra years.

It was strange, though … no one even mentioned the Bushman family. I tried to just push it out of my mind. When I think of it now, there was no way that old lady could have survived with a wound like that and the choppers wouldn’t have even attempted to take her to a hospital. What was I thinking? Maybe I just thought too much to be a good soldier.

Troops were openly drinking and horsing around in the small swimming pool, somersaulting and hurling each other in, splashing up waves that sloshed over the side of the pool. We had done our duty and given two years for the country. We had come together from rookie juniors just out of high school to become one of the two senior operational paratroop companies in the border war. We had done well. We had made a small dent in the communist threat that was infiltrating our borders and we had seen more combat than any other paratroop company before us. We had been key troops in three big cross-border operations and had, all in all, spent about three months of our operational time deep inside Angola, seeking and destroying the often elusive Boy. Our two paratroop companies, Delta and Hotel, had made a tangible difference in the outcome of this bush war we were fighting.

Just then the rowdy swimming pool group walked into our tent. They were still drunk but were in the tent grouped together with purpose.

“Hey, have you seen Baba anywhere?”

“No. Why? What’s up?”

“Well, we can’t find him anywhere ... he just disappeared ...”

“When did you last see him?” I asked, still leaning back in my chair.

“Naw … dunno ... we were all swimming here half an hour ago. His stuff is still at the pool.”

Kurt looked up from his card hand and we exchanged looks.

“Have you checked the pool?” I said, stating the obvious.

They shook their heads. “Ja … no, we thought of that ... but no … we haven’t.”

Kurt and I stood up at the same time and hurried towards the pool just metres away. Kurt and I were drunk but a lot less so than the pool crowd, who followed us. Kurt quickly took up the long pool brush and started to sweep the bottom of the pool. We all watched quietly. Kurt’s big frame was a dark shadow in the moonlight as he pushed the brush back and forth into the black water that still lapped the sides after the horseplay of 20 minutes before.

Suddenly he turned and looked at us, speaking in his low monotone voice. “He’s here. He’s right here, Gungie ... I’ve got the broom on him, right here.”

We all looked at him for a second as he gave a few small shoves on the long broom. I was the first to react, leaping into the warm water, landing right on top of Baba. It was a sick feeling to feel him under my feet. I ducked down to grab him but could not. He was under the plastic liner of the pool. I spluttered up to the surface.

“Get me a knife, quickly ... get a knife!”

Kurt reacted quickly; it seemed like mere seconds before he returned from the tent and tossed me his bush knife. I snatched it out of the air and in one move dived down, cut the plastic liner and heaved Baba from underneath it. I pulled him up and carried his limp body to the edge of the pool where many hands reached out to grab him. I jumped out of the pool and pushed the crowd away.

“Turn him around!”

I knew little about life-saving but I did know to get the water out of him. I put him on his back and pumped his knees into his chest like a water pump. With every push gushes of water and puke shot out of his mouth like a hose. I lifted him up around his hips and held him upside down as the water streamed out of his lungs. I started to perform what little I knew of CPR. All I did was to blow as much air into his lungs as I could while Kurt Barnes pumped his chest. The air came back out at me like air escaping from a balloon and flapped through his lips. I blew and blew until my mouth was covered in his puke.

I finally stood up when a Jeep came crashing through the small pool barricade and two medics jumped out. They took over and loaded him into the back of the Jeep. I knew it was too late. I walked away across the empty tent square. Most of the tents were in blackness, their occupants asleep or passed out for the night.

I sat on a sandbag bunker outside a tent and smoked. How stupid could they have fucking been! The old swimming pool in the middle of our square of tents was just a big hole in the ground with a thick plastic liner. The liner of the pool was old and ripped. They had been playing a deadly game of crawling under the ripped plastic liner, crawling with the weight of the water on top of them and coming out the other end of the pool through another torn section.

I looked at the big three-quarter moon that hung in the late night sky, casting a milky-white sheen across the vast African horizon. The moon mesmerized me like it had done a thousand times before. I thought of Julius Caesar looking at it and pondering. I thought of Jesus Christ … he must have looked at this same moon. I thought of every living soul over the ages who had stood and looked at this same timeless moon and asked questions of it and wondered. I shook my fist and cursed God aloud. I damned Him for letting this happen two weeks before the end. Having got through all this shit, to have Baba drown in such a cruel way, trapped under the plastic liner of the pool at the party celebrating the end of two years’ national service ... coming out of it in one piece just a couple of weeks before we all went back to our families and loved ones. Emotional and drunk, I sat on the sandbags and wept tears of frustration and stared at the moon. I thought of Baba, who was the smallest guy in the company and looked as if he was a kid of fifteen.

I suddenly couldn’t wait to get out.

EPILOGUE

March 2008

I never returned to live in my beautiful South Africa. The lure of a new country and life in the big bad city was hard to resist and my six-month stay in America turned into many years of ups and downs, struggles and victories.

I boxed for a couple of years and quit when I realized that I had lost the focus and dedication that was needed in the professional ring. I would take a fight because I needed the measly paycheck, doing most of my training at the ‘Cat and Whistle’.

When I quit boxing, a surprise was waiting for me. As my channel and outlet for tension was now gone, I was ambushed by the past. Ambushed by dead ‘freedom fighters’ with their brains blown out, ambushed by the spirits of dead men, old women and children and their spilled blood on the white sands of Angola and South West Africa.

I found it hard to handle any authority and to keep a steady job at the bottom of the ladder in my new country and many a loudmouthed boss was put up against the wall. The spirits of spilled blood manifested themselves in the strangest and most perverse ways, robbing me once again of my most precious memories and happiest moments.

It would always take me by surprise. Making love to my wife I would see her as a terrorist we had left dead in the sand. In a moment of tender thought of a loved one or family member, I would see that loved one in my mind’s eye shattered, broken, shot to pieces like the men we had killed. Any good and precious memory would be ambushed and drowned in the blood of headless men and mothers cut in half, still holding their dead children. These flashbacks came from nowhere. To mentally see my loved ones like this was so traumatizing that I would lose my breath and have to pull the car over to the side of the road in the busy Los Angeles traffic.

I was quiet but became quieter. The quieter I became the stronger the anger grew—many’s the owner of a disrespectful or sloppy Los Angeles attitude who was given an instant re-education with cruel boots and a fast, heavy fist.

For many years I couldn’t handle or even watch Hollywood make-believe movies with senseless violence. I would invariably get up and leave the theatre in the middle of the film.

I was ashamed, and didn’t dare tell anyone. I couldn’t bring myself to even utter the words, repeat or admit the horrifying visions that took my breath away.

South Africa became a faraway place as the years went by. I had not spoken to a Parachute Battalion buddy since I had left the army in 1981. I started to doubt the stories that I told of my war in Angola. I stopped talking about it and closed the doors to it until, after many years, it felt like a dream and perhaps it hadn’t even happened that way at all—maybe I’m mixed up, maybe a tank didn’t come out the bush at us? Was that SWAPO ambush in the chilly dawn real or was I imagining it? All my army friends—John Delaney, Doogy, John the Fox, Kurt, Stan the Man and others who, at one time had been as close as brothers, felt like long-dead ghosts in another, faraway land.

I read about the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola as a security guard one night, sitting next to an Ethiopian who claimed that he was a communist. He was the nicest person you could ever meet.