19 With a Bullet (14 page)

“Check that one out!” barked Lieutenant du Plessis, pointing quickly at the hut that had been destroyed by the bombs. Kevin Green and I moved cautiously towards the destroyed hut.

The acrid stench of high explosive was still thick in the air as we walked across a green carpet of leaves and small branches that had been blown off by the powerful bomb blasts. Around the hut were a couple of bomb craters about five metres wide by a metre or so deep, with big clods of earth burned white and grey by the blast. The hut itself was a tangle of twisted and broken branches. It had not taken a direct hit but there was a crater about three metres from the hut and this had been enough to completely destroy it. Kevin Green and I moved through the mess and found nothing.

We discovered a couple of well-trodden paths leading from the hut into the bush behind. I made quick eye contact with Kevin and we gingerly started to walk around a small sprout of bush, our fingers on the triggers—ready. We crept on and came across a small clearing under some high trees that was untouched by the bombing. In the middle of the clearing stood a long, rough but sturdy four-legged table made of branches tied together and about five rows of benches behind each other, made in the same way. It seemed to be some kind of classroom. The ground around this ‘bush furniture’ was well used and even seemed to have been swept. On one side was a long rack that stood at an angle—what looked to be a weapons rack where SWAPO would lean their weapons while they learned new ways to ‘kill the racist
boere
’. By the looks of it, it seemed that the camp had probably been deserted for a couple of days.

By this time the company had gone through all of the five buildings—or what was left of them—and all found the same thing ... nothing. Not even a scrap of paper.

“The bastards are gone,” Lieutenant du Plessis observed with feeling.

We stood in the clearing. Doep spoke briefly into the radio that had quickly been set up. We got a minute to relax and get our breath. I leaned against the table and peered around into the bush, trying to will a terr to come walking out from behind a dusty bush. I examined the way the branches on the table had been tightly tied together with long strips of green bark.

“They were right here, sitting on these benches,” I thought. Standing in their classroom broke the spell and in a second I imagined the bush class of SWAPO sitting on the benches, dressed in tiger-stripe uniform and the little peaked caps. Their faces were coal black and their eyes were bloodshot red— they were sweating. Against the rack they had their AK-47s and RPGs lined up, ready for action. Funny … whenever I thought of SWAPO, I imagined them red-eyed and sweating.

“Back to the
chana
. Go to the same helicopter that dropped you!” came the urgent shout from one of the other
valk’
s lieutenant, Dudley Grant.

We hurriedly turned and moved out the deserted little base and made our way back to the
chana
. The Pumas were already coming in a long formation over the treetops and landing like ducks in a row down the length of the
chana
. Being ‘cherries’, the sound of the Pumas’ loud chopping turbines biting the air spurred us on and we double-timed it for a couple of hundred metres.

I was limping and having a hard time keeping up but finally we got to the last Puma at the end of the
chana
that should have been ours, but
Valk
2 was boarding it and the flight engineer pointed with a gloved finger to the next chopper. We all turned and rushed off through the dust storm to the next Puma but it too was full, and we were told to move on again. Heaving for breath we carried on running to the next chopper in line. Before we got there we could see it was full and bypassed it to the next.

We had been double-timing for about 500 metres from the deserted base all the way up the
chana
. My lungs felt like they were going to burst and my eyes were blinded by the dust. My legs felt like lead and my shoulders burned from the weight of the MAG and 500 rounds of ammo. I cursed as we ran. Lieutenant Doep turned to wave us on, his shirt filled like a balloon by the prop wash. He looked like a fat little man running on the spot and waving. I gritted my teeth and thought back to running the 3.4 kilometres with full kit on the PT course. It did not make it any easier.

We eventually ran the entire length of the
chana
, past seven Pumas and arrived at the last one that was empty. It turned out to be our Puma, which had moved to the top of the
chana
because there had been no space for him at the bottom where he had first dropped us.

“Idiot! Stupid idiot!”

I could hardly lift the MAG onto the chopper but somehow managed to heave it up with two hands. Stan grabbed my shirt collar and heaved me up into the chopper and then fell flat on his back, heaving for breath. I was still cursing and swore I would never again let the sound of a chopper or a frantic idiot flight engineer force me into unwarranted urgency. My lungs burned and my chest felt like bursting. I leaned my head on the LMG I was cradling in my lap as the Puma lifted off. I had thick phlegm in my throat; I felt like retching and had the same kind of breathlessness I had experienced when I did the first selection run for the Bats at the Engineers’, when I couldn’t carry on. I made a mental note to cut down on the cigarettes because I felt I was going to die. I would find out later that this was in fact an athletically-induced form of asthma that would, indeed, almost kill me.

BASE NIGHTS

All along the watchtower—Jimi Hendrix

I sat at the wobbly fold-out table in middle of the tent. It was midday and I was concentrating without success on getting the beads of sweat dropping from my forehead not to fall on the Red Cross writing paper. Even my writing hand left wet smudges on the small pad. I was telling my brother about the ops, but in a rough slang code to fool the army censors. I told him how we had flown into Angola to hit the base and that it had turned out to be a lemon with the terrs gone before we got there. But still, I told him, we had flown a cross-border operation which not everybody in the army got to do. I stopped and wondered just how they had known we would be coming, or whether it was pure luck that made them move on before we arrived.

Dan Pienaar, our section leader, sat in the tent doorway, leaning back on a plastic chair. He had the usual dreamy, half-asleep look on his face that was his claim to fame and the reason for his nickname
Vaak Seun
, literally ‘Dim Boy’. He was a rather philosophical SouthWester. I had grown to like him over the months; we had spent a couple of hours chatting about various things. He was a native South West African from a farm near Windhoek; all his family were in the military, so he too had earned his one stripe and was trying his best to be a good leader and work his way up.

I gave up writing, closed the pad and leaned back to adjust the small electric fan that we had scored from an air force ‘tiffy’, a mechanic. “Hey, Dan—how do you think those terrs knew that we were going to come, ’cause it sure looked like they cleaned up and cleared out just before we got there.”

“They probably picked it up on the bush telegraph … they’ve got their spies all around these parts. Some of them have probably even got family living around here and heard about the op before we did.”

“Nawww, c’mon … what spies?’’

Danny spoke in his slow South West African way. As he stared out of the tent with his droopy eyes he reminded me of a Red Indian in a Western movie who had insight and wisdom as he spoke a slow warning to the white man. “Half the SWAPO’ve probably got family in this area; you’d be surprised how fast word can spread here in the bush. They could even have someone in this base who saw us training.”

I paused and listened, even though I doubted there was a spy in Ondangwa. Ondangwa was a big 20-square-kilometre air force base. There were hardly any troops here except for the Airborne and 5 Recce sections down at the far end of the base that was shrouded in secrecy and barbed wire—the story was that they had live antipersonnel mines around their enclosure, even though it was inside Ondangwa air force base. Although there was also a black South West African infantry company, 101 Battalion, which had moved in two weeks ago and were staying in some tents behind the air force admin block.

Who knows; Dan might be right—one of these troops could spill the beans if they saw unusual activity. Local black Owambos were also employed at the base. Maybe Dan wasn’t full of shit after all and had a point. At 20 years of age, I didn’t know very much of the history of South West Africa. All I knew was that communist-trained forces were trying to take over South West Africa, and they were the vanguard for other communist countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany to move into the area and grab South West Africa’s vast mineral wealth, which included uranium, and then move on to South Africa. Or so I had always been led to believe, and never having heard an alternative point of view, I did believe it.

Dan spoke slowly and gave me a half-hour lesson on the history of South West Africa. He reckoned that 80 percent of the SWAPO troops were probably from Owamboland. I listened with interest when he told me that the fight for South West African independence had actually started in Cape Town in 1956 by one Herman Toivo, who was a World War II veteran and railway policeman. Dan even hinted that perhaps it was their land anyway. I found myself agreeing with him that it probably was the people’s land. It had been a German colony and was now run by South Africa. They wanted to break free from the chains just as South Africa had broken free from Britain and most African colonies from their respective European masters.

“The trouble is that they are backed by fucking communists who will want more than independence. They want the whole shooting match.”

“That’s a crock. Do you think that the Yanks and the West will sit back and allow Russia or China to just move in and take over South Africa if South West Africa got independence? No way; it’s not that simple. They’re feeding us bullshit again.”

“Bullshit? You think having 40,000 Cubans and a communist country as our new neighbours is bullshit!” I was getting a bit upset at Dan’s weird point of view.

“Zimbabwe’s so-called freedom fighters were communist-backed and they’ve just won their independence. They are just north of us. I don’t see them trying to take over South Africa or building freeways to Moscow.”

Our conversation was interrupted by a bellow from RSM Louw who had recently arrived on the border from 1 Parachute Battalion and thought that he was still in Bloemfontein. He was known as a first-class prick who seemed to have a genuine chip on his shoulder and a fierce hatred for us troops. Rumour had it that a troop had run off with his wife a couple of years ago, but of course we had no proof. We could hardly believe it when, for the second day in a row, he had us fetch rakes and shovels and walk around the tent square doing a chicken parade for butts and looking for weeds.

The terrain was all pure white sand. He was being fucking ridiculous because there was not one single weed in the camp! It crossed my mind to use my week-old twisted ankle as an excuse to get out of this futile exercise but decided against it, not wanting to take the chance of being left behind on light duty if the siren wailed and we had to fly out on Fireforce. I picked up a rake and joined the seek-and-destroy mission that ambled about in small groups, chuckling among themselves at the stupidity of the action.

“This is almost as futile as finding and shooting a real live SWAPO.”

“Yeah—we’re on the border fighting a war and he thinks we’re raw recruits in 1 Para!”

That night in the tent square we relaxed as the burning South West African sun sunk red behind the sand banks that surrounded us and threw a beautiful pink against the sky. As soon as it was dark Stan and I shuffled down, heads low, past the ops room and down through the air force tents to the prefab air force offices on the far side of the big brown hangars, where twenty Mirage fighters were kept. The place was crawling with blue; our brown army uniforms stood out like SWAPO tiger-stripe in the blue air force world that we were in.

We stood in the shadows like insurgents and listened to The Police’s ‘Walking on the Moon’ as it drifted softly from the cassette player in the bar. Stan and I peeked through the flap into the bar. There was a tall air force sergeant with a walrus moustache, talking loudly about all the bullshit he had to go through to get his mail and complaining that he’d had to personally go and check at the postal unit for his parcels.

We stood in the shadows a full half an hour before he finally left and Stan quickly slipped into the long bar and bought two bottles of good South African brandy. The barman was a happy, chubby lad who was also doing his two years’ national service. He sold us booze even though he knew he could lose his cushy job if he was caught.

“When are they going to allow you meat bombs to have a drink?” I heard him ask Stan mockingly.

“After the next contact, or when we get ten kills a week,” Stan answered, trying to sound like an old bush war veteran and glaring at the barman with his well-known ‘I’ll kill you’ Waffen SS stormtrooper look.

“You know, you guys must be the only unit in the whole damn South African Defence Force that’s not allowed to have a cold beer at night— why?”

“Because we’re always on standby looking after you guys’ arses. We’re like Squad Cars—on duty 24 out of 24, you know. We’ve got no time for daily drinking like the rest of you.”

“Probably won’t let you because you can’t handle your drink. Look at us ... easy, relaxed … making the best out of a bad thing. Here, I know nothing about it if you’re caught.”

Stan quickly passed me the bottles through the tent flap, walked calmly out the bar emptyhanded and slipped past two lieutenants who were just walking in and luckily seemed too deep in conversation to notice him.

The chubby air force barman was right. The Parabats were the only unit I knew of that was not allowed to drink. Nobody knew what the real reason was. Every other unit in the SADF was allowed two beers a night, starting from after basic training. The Bats weren’t allowed to drink at all; not throughout training back at Bloemfontein, or even up here on the border. It was a pretty low rule for a tough paratrooper outfit—not allowed to have a cold frosty after a long, hard day—but we had all sort of got used to it and just made the most of it when we got the chance. The result of this was that when we did get the chance to drink, we would all binge, go overboard and get fucked up. This binge-drinking would result in a sad loss to us later on. One of the stories as to why this rule was in place was that, years ago, some drunken paratroopers had walked into the officers’ mess in Bloemfontein, fucked everyone up and torn the place apart; hence no drinking for any paratrooper any more, except now and then at
braais
when we returned from patrol or ops. So far this had only happened twice.