19 With a Bullet (12 page)

There had been a shooting at one of the kraals near the base. The black South West African troop who was guiding us took us quickly off the tar road and down a long narrow dusty road that wound about five clicks into the bush, ending at a small village. The village had about 30 well-kept square, little mud-brick houses with corrugated-tin roofs. The path leading to the huts was swept clean; I could smell the pigs that were squealing and snorting in an enclosure to one side of the huts. A strong-looking Owambo man, dressed smartly in his weekend best, came running to meet us and started telling us in a calm voice that “We have him, we have him,” pointing towards the pigsty. I followed his hand motion and saw a small black man lying on his side with his hands tied behind his back. He looked anguished and was crying, his face shoved into the dirt.

We walked into the kraal with our rifles held nervously at the ready, not really knowing what was going on. Stan and I came into the centre of the village. At my feet I saw the body of a big, strapping man lying dead, with his arms outstretched. As I looked I saw another man dead in the doorway of a hut and an old, lighter-skinned and wrinkled woman still sitting in her chair—dead—her chin resting on her chest, her arms hanging loosely at her side, with her legs pushed out in front of her. Her beer mug lay at her feet.

I walked into a house and saw three bodies, one lying across a small table that had been pushed on its side and two more—a man and a woman—lying on the floor, also dead. We walked around the little village and counted 15 dead civilians who had been shot by the man they had tied up at the pigsty. He was a member of the local ‘home guard’ unit, formed among the local population around the area close to the air force base of Ondangwa and Oshakati, a civilian town about 60 kilometres from Ondangwa on the main tar road.

We never discovered why, but the shooter had clearly lost his mind, taken his G3 military rifle and walked through the village calmly blasting everybody he saw. The scene looked prearranged, like a movie set, with bodies everywhere … propped up against walls, dead in chairs, sprawled in doorways. Some had tried to run and had been shot in the back; they lay face-down on the outskirts of the huts. I noticed that they were all clean and well; it seemed like a Saturday afternoon party that had gone horribly wrong. I also figured that this guy must have been quite a good shot because everyone he had shot was dead and looked as if they had died quickly, on the spot.

I saw no wounded; everybody had been hit in the body. His weapon, as all the home guard used, was a G3. The G3 fires a 7.62-millimetre NATO round—a big bullet, the same as the FN, with awesome killing power.

In the middle of the open area between the huts lay a pretty teenage girl in a clean white dress. The top half of her dress was completely soaked with blood from a shot through her chest. The black South West African troop who had guided us to the kraal suddenly broke down, sobbing and wailing, as he recognized that the girl was a relative of his. Lieutenant du Plessis led the begrimed man away towards the Buffels, trying to console him, but not very successfully. The black troop was howling.

It was beginning to get dark as a Jeep arrived with a trailer hitched to the back. We began loading the bodies into the trailer. It was a small trailer, the kind you would use behind a
bakkie
, a pick-up truck, if you were going camping for the weekend. Pretty soon the 15 bodies lay piled on top of each other, almost to the point of sliding over the edge. A black South West African troop produced some rope and began lashing the bodies down, as if he was tying down a heap of firewood. He pulled the rope through the tie-eyes on the side of the trailer and finally had the load secured to his liking.

“Fuck—why don’t they just send another trailer, or at least a truck to put them on?” asked Kevin McKee, a small and thuggish-looking ex-professional boxer with a thick scar that ran across his face, but a man with a heart of gold.

“They’re going to drive all the way to Oshakati on the main road with these people piled high like this? They hit one bump and they’ll all go flying off onto the road. They haven’t even got a canvas tarp to cover them with!”

We all stood around and inspected the gruesome pile of bodies and tugged on the ropes, testing the strength and tension.

“It’s getting dark anyway—who’s going to see them?” Stan said smugly, seeing an opportunity to antagonize McKee. Stan and McKee were both Capetonians who had known each other on the rougher side of the Cape Town streets and were always at each another. Anthony Stander, aka Stan, although he could hold his own, was not a rough and tough physical fighter. His main weapon was his mind and a cold, piercing stare that could bend spoons. He was slender, with curly blond hair and hard blue eyes which he would use to glare menacingly at whomever needed to be glared at. He fancied himself as a throwback to the tough German infantrymen of the Third Reich. Stan was a hard case who was emotionally as cold as ice. He had grown up in an orphanage in Cape Town and had reached 1 Parachute Battalion via a spell in a reformatory. Stan’s favorite trick was to find the chink in one’s armour and then exploit that chink retentlessly until the victim either exploded or imploded. This time the chosen prey was his old street buddy, Kevin McKee, from the mean, ultra-tough slum suburb of Woodstock in Cape Town. McKee was a fighter, no doubt about it, and had been a professional boxer at an early age—before he even joined the army— but he had a very soft heart and a long fuse. Stan knew just how far he could push his luck with Kevin McKee.

“It’s only 50 kilometres to Oshakati and the roads are pretty smooth,” Stan said. He smiled, lit another cigarette and glanced at me, urging me to join in the fun. Stan had got the reaction he wanted.

“Only 50 fucking clicks! Your
poes
!
⁷
How would you like to have
your
family piled like that and carried in a trailer for only 50 kilometres?”

McKee glared, dropped his neck instinctively into his chest and stood ready to deck Stan, who knew his limits and had taken a couple of steps back, but still smirking at McKee.

Lieutenant du Plessis broke up the tension and we got a couple of blankets from the village to cover the heap of bodies, securing them so that they would not blow off on the journey to Oshakati, 50 kilometres past our base at Ondangwa. Some MPs arrived and took the culprit away, who now looked composed and relaxed as he climbed into the Jeep. We rode back the short distance to Ondangs with the Buffels’ headlights piercing the moonless night and smoked more cigarettes. The Jeep with the trailer followed slowly behind. I couldn’t wait to get back to base and wash my hands.

I had never touched a dead person before and I could still feel the cold, stiff feeling on my hands where I had grabbed them by their ankles and heaved them onto the heap on the trailer. Especially, I could still feel the rough material of the pretty teenage girl’s clean, embroidered short white socks on my hands. Back at the base the other platoons had finished the
braai
and were in their tents playing darts. They were all loaded because it was the first time we had been allowed to drink beer. We were told that if we wanted to get some more pork chops from the kitchen we could start the fires up again to finish our
braai
. I had lost my appetite for greasy pork chops however, even though it was our first night back after patrol and four days’ eating rat packs.

I washed my hands thoroughly, grabbed a couple of beers and a pack of cigarettes, went to the tent and flipped on the tape recorder. Marianne Faithfull spat out ‘Broken English’ in her disturbed voice. It sounded like fitting music for the moment.

⁴
paratrooper platoon, lit. falcon (Afrikaans)

⁵
C rations

⁶
temporary base, a rest area or an overnight sleeping position while patrolling in the bush

⁷
cunt (Afrikaans)

INTO ANGOLA

The tide is high—Blondie

“We’re going to attack a base?”

“That’s what I hear—there’s a terr base in Angola and we’re going in to hit it!”

Danny, our section leader, was a sturdily built native South West African with a deceptive, sleepy way about him. He was gathering the company for orders in the middle of the tent square next to the pool. The whole company sat chatting excitedly when Commandant Lindsay came walking briskly onto the square, followed by the four lieutenants and our company commander, Captain Verwey

Lindsay was smiling happily (for him, anyway), and stood on the little sandy mound next to the pool. “Men,” he said in Afrikaans, and looked around with satisfaction. “Our reconnaissance planes have identified a SWAPO base about 100 clicks over the border into Angola.”

He paused, looking around smiling. I got the distinct feeling he had done this many times before. “They’ve seen a lot of activity around there lately. It’s probably a jump-off base for infiltrations into Owamboland and is responsible for the increased SWAPO movement and landmine incidents in this area lately.

“We’re going to go in tomorrow and will take these people out! D Company will fly in and be dropped by Pumas on a
chana
next to the terr base after the air force has bombed the target for ten minutes. H Company will be on standby from Ondangwa if there are any problems.”

He carried on talking and gave more details, saying that there were possibly 150 SWAPO in the base and that they were probably new recruits in training before their usual big push into Owamboland during the rainy season that would be coming up in a few months.

There were apparently five buildings: three of them were barracks for the troops, one was the officers’ quarters and the other some sort of ops room. Lindsay spoke easily, as if he was planning a picnic and then handed over to Captain Verwey and the platoon lieutenants.

“This is what it’s all about,” I thought and moved excitedly to the front of the company as we all crowded around to get a better look at the little model that Lieutenant du Plessis was drawing in the sand with the back of a pen. He drew the three buildings that were close to each other, then two larger ones that were about 50 metres from the main buildings and which were supposedly the troops’ barracks. Captain Verwey showed us on the model where the choppers would land and how we would advance from the
chana
into the small base.

Lieutenant Doep, as we’d taken to calling him, then took our platoon aside, as did the other lieutenants theirs, and told us that we would be dropped in the
chana
500 metres from the base, would spread out in a battle line and advance on the base until we started to draw fire, then we would do fire and movement into the base. Lieutenant Doep stared around at the platoon with a frown. It would be his first action too. He wore his feelings on his sleeve, unable to hide his nervousness. “
Valk
4 will be in the last two Pumas. We will exit last and be at the end of the battle line. There are some shallow trenches on the southern side of the base that we will have to deal with. When we take fire, we take cover and start our fire and movement into the base, just as though we were training this afternoon.”

“Will we have any armour support?” questioned Dan Pienaar, our newly appointed section leader, trying to sound important.

“Well, the last time we checked, a Ratel troop-carrier with a 90mm cannon didn’t fit into a Puma,” snapped Lieutenant Doep sarcastically.

Dan shuffled his boots in the sand in embarrassment as the platoon laughed at this slap-down. I felt it had been a good question and thought that you should usually have armour support when you hit a base. That afternoon we drew white phosphorus smoke grenades from the locked armour store. Each platoon went to the small shooting range at the side of the base to ‘sight in’ their rifles.

I had been carrying an LMG, a light machine gun, for a couple of months. It was a Belgian-made 7.62 MAG that was belt-fed. I had fancied myself standing up and mowing down sections of the enemy like corn as they advanced or retreated, but had found it more work than it was worth. It was a good machine gun, but you had to keep the damn thing scrupulously clean or it would jam on you. I, not being the tidiest or most conscientious troop around, had many jams and now didn’t trust the thing if I had to jump up suddenly and my life depended on the weapon. Although, it was a thing of pure beauty when it did fire without a jam as nothing could beat the feeling of blasting out a belt of 50 rounds in a rapid four or more bursts. It was a heavy gun but I had become used to it and for months I had been doing exercises with it—using the whole machine gun as a barbell to do curls and soldier presses until I was so used to the weight that it felt like an R4 rifle in my hands.

That afternoon, in an open field next to the chopper pads, we dressed in full fighting kit, with helmets, and huddled together as if we were flying in choppers. Then, on command, we ‘exited’ and formed a spread-out battle line, advancing as a company in a long line until Verwey shouted “Taking fire!” and we dived into the sand and began moving forward. Doing this fire and movement with the MAG and 500 rounds was tough.

Later we all sat under a small tree trying to avoid ‘Spikes’—the sun— relentlessly nailing everyone with its burning afternoon rays.

Captain Verwey spoke calmly to us in the relaxed way he had. “Be sharp, men, and only shoot when you see a target. Aim for the belt buckle and, if you hit Boy, make sure you put another shot in his head as you walk past, because you don’t want him getting up behind you and surprising you. That’s what happened to A Company and they lost a troop. If everybody is sharp, we’ll all get to go home together after this bush trip.”

He motioned casually toward the tents with his chin. “Now get some rest and get your kit ready, because
môre gaan die poppe dans.
” ( ... tomorrow the puppets are going to dance.)