19 With a Bullet (31 page)

The sun blazed as it reached its zenith. We sat relaxed, the platoon spread out among some long dry grass under some crooked thorn trees that gave us just enough shade. We were pretty far into Angola, probably about 60 clicks, and for some reason our platoon was too far ahead of the others. We were told to sit tight for a day or two till the other platoons caught up.

We were all feeling confident after the textbook ambush two days ago. I had let bygones be bygones with Stan. He had been quiet for the last two days. I felt bad for him, knowing that he had wanted to come with us on the ambush; he seemed quiet and disappointed not to have taken part. But today he bounced back and chatted on about how 12 months of hard training had turned us into machines and how we would be able to handle a SWAPO force three times our size because of the quality of soldier that we were.

“Well, I wouldn’t be too sure. Look what happened to
Valk
3 … they were hit good, mortars landing in their TB … if SWAPO had a stopper group waiting for them when they ran, we would all be singing a different tune now. Even
Valk
1 had a fight that could have turned out different.”

John Delaney, who was in one of his morose moods, lay against his kit chewing a long piece of dry grass. He wasn’t his usual cocky self. He and Stan were still at it.

“You think these guys haven’t been trained? Some of these guys have been trained in Russia and China! We’re just lucky we got them in an ambush. Wait till we hit a base that they can defend! Plus, they think they’re winning this war!” John Delaney said, referring to the propaganda leaflets we had found that told of countless South African soldiers walking the steeets of Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town legless and armless as a result of encounters with SWAPO mines. They also said that the morale of our troops was so low that we just smoked dagga, marijuana, all day to escape the hopelessness of the situation and the harsh treatment we received from our rank.

We lazed in the shade, chatting and joking, feeling totally at home in the bush. John the Fox was going on about life on his dad’s huge tea plantation in the beautifully lush area of Tzaneen and how they would ride dirt-bikes around the plantation, when I noticed an old black man casually walking along the small footpath that ran about 20 metres past us.

“Hey, look here!”

I pointed to the old man who appeared to have seen us but walked on, seemingly unconcerned. John Delaney and I jumped up and waved to him to come to us and he casually complied, approaching us with a little smile on his aged face, toying with a long blade of grass in his fingers. He was a short, grey-haired, pleasant-looking fellow who appeared to be a local. But I quickly noticed that he was wearing the same pale olive green zip-up sweatshirt that I was wearing, the one I had got from the ambush. This did not strike me as too odd, because I figured it was probably easy for locals to buy and trade from troops around the area.

We asked the old man if he knew where SWAPO was. He did not understand what we were saying but obviously understood the word ‘SWAPO’. After eyeballing us for a minute he casually signalled with the bit of grass in his hand that SWAPO was not far away, in fact just ahead of us. We thought he had misunderstood us and asked him again.

This time he smiled, pointed more emphatically ahead and repeated as he pointed. “SWAPO … SWAPO!”

John and I excitedly led him to Lieutenant Doep, who was now in charge again since both the university lieutenants had been flown back to South Africa (one with half his hand). Doep was resting on the other side of our TB. He stood up under his tree, eyed the old man suspiciously and then called the 101 Battalion tracker to interpret. We stood by as they spoke; it quickly emerged that there was a SWAPO group or base just ahead of us but the old boy didn’t know how many there were. He didn’t think too many.

“Ask him if they have trenches dug into the ground,” Lieutenant Doep instructed the interpreter, making a digging motion with his hands.

“He says no, he has not seen these.”

“Does he know if they have many weapons with them?” Doep indicated his R4 rifle as he spoke. The old man just smiled sincerely and did not answer but when questioned again the interpreter replied: “He says he thinks they do.”

The interpreter and the old man jabbered back and forth while John and I stood around, not wanting to be left out, feeling protective towards our captive. The receiver crackled as the lieutenant sat on his haunches and tried to get comms with Commandant Lindsay back in base camp, but he had been having trouble with the radio the last couple of days and was unable to get through.

“Tango Lima, do you read me, over? Tango Lima, do you read, over?”

The radio crackled and squelched for 15 minutes with no response. Finally, a decision had to be made. We could not let this old man go, because he would almost certainly compromise our position to the SWAPO whom he said were so close by. We had no comms and did not know what we’d be walking into by just taking this smiling old man’s word. It did not feel right and I was not for it. It did not make sense; even if there weren’t many of them, if one of us got hit we could not get casevaced
¹⁵
out because there were no communications. Who knew what this old fucker meant by “did not think there were too many”?

I voiced my opinion. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go into something where we don’t know how many there are, without gunship support or comms. It’s not good planning.”

There was muttered agreement from some of the other troops who had joined the small conference under the tree. Stan, however, seeing a chance to make up for missing the ambush, egged Lieutenant Doep on, saying that we wouldn’t need gunships if we caught them by surprise like at the ambush. This was not a game of cowboys and fucking Indians, I countered. Some of us might get killed because of a wrong decision. Even our two-line corporal didn’t want to go without at least comms with the operations room for backup.

Finally Lieutenant Doep, like a schoolteacher in a class debate, listening to both sides, said we should have a vote. There were more ayes than nays, so the decision was made to immediately follow the old man. We kitted up and checked our weapons. I had used almost two 35-round magazines in the ambush three days before but had five more that were full. I filled up the two mags that I had taped together with medical tape for a quick change. This time I put my knife back on my belt, took the SWAPO cap off my head and changed back into my dirty, torn brown skin. If I died, I didn’t want to go in a SWAPO uniform with their cap and badge on my head.

At about 15:00, with the sun halfway down the western sky, we moved out in a V formation, with the old man leading the way up the small footpath. We walked for about 30 minutes and the bush thinned out. We came upon what seemed like the beginnings of a populated area, with our path leading into a bigger, well-used track that had smaller paths breaking off in a crisscross spiderweb leading to a few scattered kraals. A handful of locals in threadbare clothes came out and stared at us with curious and not-so-friendly faces.

I felt in my gut that this was not good, but the little excursion seemed to have taken a life of its own and could not be stopped now. I had a horrible feeling we were walking into something deadly. Pretty soon there were a few distinctive chevron-shaped SWAPO boot spoor clearly imprinted on the sandy path, which were soon joined by many more with different spoors. Suddenly, up ahead, we came to a group of small, well-kept white brick buildings with tin roofs. We were entering a small town. A few locals standing in the shade of the
stoeps
, the verandahs, looked at us in amazement as we strode through their little town with false bravado, still in our formation which was gradually becoming more and more ragged.

We rounded some tall old trees and to our surprise in front of us stood a huge old white Portuguese church, the size of a small cathedral. Its square steeple, extending 20 metres or more and its high-pitched roof covered in old, cracked orange tiles seemed bizarrely out of place. We stopped outside the church. The doors were open. We cautiously walked in. It seemed that it was still in use, with pews and an old metre-high carving of Christ on the cross next to the the pulpit. I thought how out of place it all looked, then it slowly dawned on me that, to us, Angola might be one big war zone, but to these people it was their home. There were some remarks of astonishment at our find; someone said the big carved figure of Christ would make fine war booty but there were bigger concerns and we quickly moved out. (I understand that later some South African troops did in fact take this fine piece as plunder but that it was later returned in a small ceremony at the end of the war.)

It seemed that the old man had, wisely, gapped it while we were in the church and we were now on our own. Just past the church were more small brick buildings and a low cement reservoir where a group of young women were scrubbing heaps of brightly coloured clothes. They stopped to stare at us in astonishment as we approached. None of us waited for the interpreter. “Where’s SWAPO? SWAPO! SWAPO!”

I confronted a pretty young African girl with her hair teased up into a small untidy afro, and shouted at her in English. “Where’s SWAPO?”

She stared at me, silent, her eyes burning with something that seemed to be both shock and anger. She had probably, her whole life, heard about the racist South African
boere
and how they would eat her—and now here she stood, face to face with the white devils. They all stood dumbly staring at us, not hiding their contempt.

“Don’t waste time ... we’re already in it.” My mind was racing ahead.

We briskly moved on, leaving the little town behind us and I sensed that this was it, that we were now truly walking into the shit. The track quickly became a white sand road. There were now all sorts of boot tracks, with large vehicle tracks turning onto the road.

Our platoon was falling apart. Half the guys were languishing some 40 metres behind. I turned and frantically waved them on, mouthing a silent “Come on! Come on.” I looked at Doogy, walking long metres back, carrying the MAG.

He silently shook his head at me in a unmistakable message: “This is not good!”

I was shocked to turn again and see that some of the guys had stopped altogether and were mumbling among themselves. To my amazement our corporal, who had been with us since basic training and who had chased us unmercifully, saying that we had to be tough to be a paratrooper, was sitting on his haunches, muttering in Afrikaans, “This is
kak
. This is shit! I’m not going any further.”

I looked at him in disbelief and felt something rise in me. “We’re in it! It’s too late, we’re in it! Let’s go,” I mimed to no one in particular and turned again to wave on the rest of the platoon, still dragging far behind on the sand road. Once again I was filled with the numb feeling of ‘let’s get this over with’, knowing it was already too late to turn back and that our best bet was to go forward—hard! I was right, because seconds later the shit hit the fan.

Shots rang out from the tree line in front of us. Isolated at first, but then furiously, kicking up sand around us and whip-cracking overhead.

I bolted across ten metres of open ground, with spurts of AK bullets kicking at my heels, to a two-metre-high anthill and found cover with three others as sand and dust flew up around us. It was a pretty open area with only scattered bushes alongside the road. The platoon had scattered and taken cover where they could, but most lay flat ... out in the open.

No one was returning fire! I could not see exactly where the firing was coming from and did not particularly want to put my head around the antheap, as rounds were cracking all around us. We sat huddled in cover for half a minute or so, before there came a lull in the firing. I took the chance to peep around, as did the other three. Puffs of drifting white smoke hung in the tree line 30 or 40 metres to our front left. A tall figure made a mad dash, with elbows pumping, across some open ground into bushy cover.

“There!” I shouted, and fired off six or seven quick shots at the bush where the figure had just disappeared.

Now we began to pour fire at the tree line. I heard Doogy’s MAG open up with a welcome sound, in one long salvo of about 30 rounds. We were all up now, moving forward and shouting encouragement to each other. Back in training I had not realized how important battletalk was … now we were all shouting to each other to “C’mon, let’s go, c’mon, c’mon!” as we ran spread out across the open
chana
towards what seemed to be a retreating enemy, firing at fleeting glimpses of running figures in the trees. Suddenly an RPD machine gun opened up from the other side, to the right of the
chana
. We all dived into the dirt in the open. He was shooting high but corrected himself as sand spurted yards in front of us, spraying us. By now we had the hang of it and all opened fire at the tree line and the tell-tale smoke. The RPD stopped.

Away to our left somewhere a heavy fire fight broke out at the far end of our broken sweep line, I could see four or five of our guys lying on their bellies in the
chana
, blasting away into the tree line. I recognized Lukie Nel who was calmly kneeling and slowly being enveloped in a cloud of white smoke as he laid down a barrage of fire. Still on the ground after the RPD fire, I turned to see if I should shoot across the sweep line to help, but decided against it because I couldn’t see the target and from my angle it was too close to our guys. I looked for Johnny Fox and my surrounding troops who all had their heads turned, momentarily caught up in the fire fight that was building to a fever-pitch, but they held their fire and it seemed that they too had decided that the angle was not good, with no visual targets.

Just then, literally out of the clear blue sky, and with the timing of a Hollywood movie and unbelievable navigation, two South African Air Force Alouette gunships came swooping over our heads like the fucking cavalry. With blades hammering, they turned in a tight orbit above the fleeing terrs 60 or so metres ahead of us. Doep must have got through on the radio, the very obvious thought struck me.