19 With a Bullet (26 page)

Kruger (
seated left
), ‘The Fox’, Stan, Korff and mortar man Kleingeld taking a break in Angola.

The author sitting on a SAAF Impala jet that had made a successful emergency landing in an open
chana
close to Ondangwa air force base. The paras stood guard until the plane was retrieved.

Stan and who-knows-whose finger—probably Gungie’s.

H Company troops search the corpse of a SWAPO cadre. The paras had walked into an ambush but turned it around when they charged their assailants.

Final
klaar
out parade.

Korff with a deep cut. He fought on to lose on a points’ decision.

Granger Korff knocking an opponent out of the ring, raising his arm in victory. Note his opponent’s feet sticking up in the front row—coincidently where the judges are seated.

FREE NELSON MANDELA

Give me the night—George Benson

It was like a dream—sleeping in my own bed between crisp white sheets that smelled of sweet soap and waking to my mother’s cheerful voice. That evening the family, as always, sat at the long, polished, antique oak dinner table as my mother served up huge helpings of yellow pumpkin and my favorite stew, which I could not finish, having lived on a couple of small cans of corned beef and a few biscuits a day for the last few months. My father was as proud as punch and took me to his offices when I had to go into town to get a few things, telling his staff that I had just returned from a bush trip in Angola. I knew most of them and they pumped my arm vigorously, asking me if I had run into any SWAPO or FAPLA. I told them that we had, but that SWAPO was no match and usually ran away.

Taina had grown lovelier than ever and insisted that I pick her up from college in my uniform. At her request I wore my faded bush browns with my spit-and-polished jump boots and my maroon airborne beret at a rakish angle on my head. I prayed that no one from 1 Para would see me because, apart from being strictly forbidden to go out in browns, we would laugh and scoff at any troop who walked around in his jump boots to try and impress the civvies and yet, here I was, guilty of this mock-worthy sin. Anyway, it did feel great to walk down the street in my bush browns and jumpers with a gorgeous girl at my side. All her college mates’ heads turned; she got the effect she was looking for and almost crushed my hand as we crossed the busy campus to her car.

I told her what we had been doing up on the border, how it felt being deep in the bush with the enemy walking around the same area, and about the operation in Angola with the jets dropping bombs and us rushing in to find that it was a lemon. I told her about the contact that we’d had and how the SWAPO we had shot seemed so young.

“It will all be over before you know it, Gray, and you’ll be back, and we could maybe move somewhere on our own. You know, we’ve been going out for five years … we could even perhaps … you know … get married.”

I was quiet. Even though I knew that I loved her, marriage still seemed a thing that you did much later on—not at twenty-one.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said slowly.

“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” she said disappointedly.

“Well, it’s not that, Tains … let’s just wait and see when the time comes. Perhaps we could go off and do something exciting together.”

“You always want to go off chasing excitement.” She was sullen for a few minutes and stared up at the night sky, but soon bounced back to her usual bubbly self. “See those three stars in a row up there?”

“The three kings?”

“Yes. Whenever you look at those stars, think of me and I’ll think of you … that way we might be looking at them at the same time and be together.”

I laughed at her, and looked up at the stars. “Okay, Tains—those will be our stars forever.”

I saw on television how South Africa had become the whipping boy of the world and how tough new trade sanctions had been imposed by the USA. I felt angry whenever they showed groups of protesters outside the South African Consulate in Washington, with signs saying things like ‘Down with racist South Africa’ and ‘Bomb South Africa’. I wondered whether all Americans were that stupid, or whether it was only some. I shook my head. Stupid shits—didn’t they know that the ANC and Mandela had communist ties and that if the blacks took over they would welcome the Soviets into our backyard? I felt contempt for the US and their do-gooding naïveté, thinking that they could dictate what another country should and should not do. The chanting morons with the signs knew nothing about the 40,000 Cuban troops who were spread across our border, or that our country was surrounded by communist countries and that Mandela’s ANC ‘soldiers of liberation’ were being trained in Libya and the USSR.

Back at 1 Para base camp in Bloemfontein, life was a little easier. We swung a little more clout now and got a little more respect from the rank who roamed the base like walruses. When they did chase us, there was always a new lot of juniors for us to take it out on. The new juniors seemed petrified of us and came to attention whenever they ran past us, just as we used to do to our seniors. Some of the guys were hard on them, ragging them and having them drop for 50 push-ups, and then making them fetch photographs of their girlfriends for us to pervertedly drool over. I did not get into it because I knew how I had hated it when I was a junior and had got ragged on and humiliated, wanting nothing more than to slug an ugly fucking senior in the mouth.

Commandant Archie Moore, for some reason, was not his usual cheerful self. He proclaimed that the morale and attitude of the whole battalion stank, and that we were all to go on a 50-kilometre route march in boots, just to pull the battalion together and give us a quick, much-needed attitude adjustment. Everyone in the base was to march. Cooks, clerks, drivers and even fat storemen who hadn’t done PT for years turned up in browns and boots early one Saturday morning. We took off on the long dirt roads that crisscrossed the open farmlands behind the base. It took us the whole day; we came back into base around 15:00. At 19:00 the last small groups of clerks and stragglers were still coming in.

The following morning at parade Archie Moore told us that he wasn’t satisfied, that we would march again the following Saturday and that this time we would all stick together as a battalion. My feet, which had never really recovered from the obscene beating I had given them on PT course so many months before, had started to tear up again—so once again I was smiling, on light duty and in sandals, as I watched the whole battalion set off again on another 50-kilometre march.

BACK INTO ANGOLA
Operation Ceiling, June 1981

Moontan—Golden Earring

The month back in South Africa had flown by and before long the C-130 delivered us to the white sand and dusty bush of Owamboland once again. This time our sister company, H Company, would have the pleasure of being based at Ondangwa as Fireforce, while we were to be based at Ombalantu, an old
berede
base, mounted unit base, about 100 clicks from Ondangwa.