19 With a Bullet (48 page)

“Shit Horn, not bloody bad … those vehicles were lucky not to come our way last night.”

Horn grinned as the whole platoon ooohed and aaahed.

The fight seemed to be over and the rest of the day was spent in much the same way as the previous afternoon—moving from bunker to trench, but now there was no firing at all except from our own troops as they fired deep into bunkers, moving around at will. New ammunition caches started cooking off again, sounding like fireworks.

We found one of the ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns that had been shooting so well at our Mirages the day before and had scared the shit out of us. The two barrels still pointed skyward. The area around it was littered with big empty shells.

I was amazed to see a thousand-pound bomb crater that was the size of a small house and three metres deep, with burned white sand clods the size of TV sets scattered for 30 metres around it. The bombs had not come too close to the AA gun positions and we didn’t find any bodies at the guns. I heard the infantry found a gunner who had died at his gun while shooting at ground level; a Ratel took him and his position out with 20-millimetre fire. We also came upon the kitchen stores, which was a row of brick rooms filled to the roof with cans of pilchards and ham. In one room there was a mountain of canned chocolate milk. We found cartons of cigarettes, beer, porn magazines from Europe and even a handful of marijuana which we tried to smoke but after a couple of hits tossed the shit away.

We found and captured a skinny man with desperate, burning eyes who was lying flat in an open field next to the buildings. He was dressed in civvies and said that he was trying to get home but when we searched him we found a camouflage epaulette with two black stars in his pants pocket. We trussed him up with parachute cord and put him up on a Ratel where he sat looking quite relieved. At midday we made a loose laager with the Ratels and Elands and sat down under some trees to feast on fish and chocolate milk. There were at least three of our platoons and thirty other personel walking around laughing and chatting in the lightness of the moment. Half an hour later we all jumped as gunfire erupted in the middle of the laager. I looked up to see John Glover standing, legs wide apart, shooting into a deep narrow hole about the size an antbear hole. After seven or eight shots he emerged from the wreaths of gunsmoke and spoke loudly to the hundred surprised faces looking at him.

“There’s a terr right here in the fucking hole! I’m sitting brewing some tea and I hear this rustling in the hole. I look down and see a pair of fucking eyes looking up at me. He must have been sitting in there for two days!”

I didn’t even go over to look. I sat with my back against the tree, enjoyed my pilchards and washed them down with warm chocolate milk. I had another five cans in my kit.

Soon the whole area was teeming with Engineers and all sorts of other troops, loading up mountains of ammunition crates, equipment, generators, tools and office equipment. Abandoned FAPLA T-55 tanks roared into life, billowing black smoke as SADF drivers drove them out of their underground ramps and parked them in the open. Dozens of anti-aircraft guns were being towed away or loaded onto rows of captured Soviet-built GAZ-66 and Ural-375 trucks. The SADF booty from the operation was enormous. I later saw photographs in a magazine of the equipment and vehicles captured—just the crates of ammunition alone would fill a football field, never mind the more than 200 trucks, 16 tanks and more than 50 artillery and anti-aircraft pieces.

It had taken two days to overcome the big FAPLA base at Ongiva but we had done it. Apparently the operation was a huge success.

The armoured Buffels that had brought us to Ongiva had been brought forward. As we walked warily in a long broken line through a thicket of trees towards them, I carried my kit over my shoulder with one hand and my rifle at the trail in the other. Botha, who was a few metres in front of us, suddenly stopped and started firing into the bush next to him. I dropped my kit and John and I ran forward. A FAPLA soldier, already mortally wounded by Mark’s fire, lay huddled under a thick bush. I aimed and put two shots into him. He jerked but was still moving. Botha and I shot again. Half his head was gone but he still writhed and kicked and his chest heaved as he took big gulps of air. I felt very distressed by it all as we all dumbly watched him thrashing. All I wanted was to put the poor bugger out of his misery but he would not die. John the Fox hopped over the little ditch, leaned over into the bush and held his rifle in one hand like a pistol, placing the muzzle point-blank on the poor soldier’s heart and pulled the trigger. It seemed to do the job as finally he lay still. It was very messy. I walked away trying to push it out of my mind. Why couldn’t we have taken the poor man prisoner? I didn’t see an AK lying anywhere near him. As we were walking away Botha, who was a part-time company clerk and a slight, anaemic-looking fellow with yellow-blond hair and glasses, boasted that he had got 14 kills in the last couple of days. One of the other troops in his platoon backed up his claim when we told him he was talking shit. Botha, the company clerk, with 14 kills?

That night we slept in a big laager of Ratels and listened to the howitzers shelling who-knows-what many miles away. The only excitement came when a machine gun from a Ratel opened up just above my head at a sound in the bush around us. I had heard it too. It must have been a donkey or something. I dozed off into the first sleep in days, safely under the wheels of a big armoured Ratel.

The following day we drove through the ghost town of Ongiva. It was a surprisingly built-up little town, with a town centre that consisted of a couple of main roads with street lights and several three-storey, modern-looking buildings. The orange tile roofs of several of the buildings were caved in from mortar hits and thick black smoke from a building that had been smouldering for two days still rose in a pall on the outskirts of town. About a kilometre from the town centre were the suburbs—long rows of a few hundred deserted, small brick houses, their contents spilled out into the streets. Paper, furniture, money and everything imaginable littered the roadways and sidewalks, and before long we all had thick wads of useless Angolan money. It looked as if the infantry had done a thorough job of going through the town with nothing left unturned. There were still large groups of infantry or intelligence troops going through the buildings with fine-tooth combs and examining every document.

During the day some civilians emerged from somewhere and gawked at us warily. The kids were not as suspicious and laughed as we threw them sweets from our rat packs. I finally gave my wad of money to a skinny woman in tattered clothes with three kids running around her. It was useless to me. I couldn’t see myself ever coming back to Angola on a shopping spree. I even saw an old white man who sat on a chair and quietly watched us. He was probably a Portuguese leftover from the colonial days, one of the few who did not leave with the others when the communist-backed MPLA took power.

We spent the day moving around and riding shotgun while an army of troops drove out, loading up everything of value from the big base and the town. We swept the surrounding bush on a few false alarms, until it was finally announced that we were moving onto Xangongo.

Xangongo was another FAPLA base almost as big as Ongiva, about 80 clicks away to the east. Xangongo had been hit by our sister H Company, infantry and another mechanized fighting group a few days before we hit Ongiva, but a battalion of FAPLA tanks had apparently reoccupied the base and had sent a message that they were waiting for us. Or that was the story that was being passed on through the troops.

The entire kilometres-long Mechanized Fighting Group 20 took off slowly along the tar road to Xangongo. On the way out of Ongiva I saw a black civilian I remembered having seen sitting under a tree with his bicycle when we had started the attack three days before. I recognized him by his bright red pants, I was amazed that he hadn’t moved from under that tree in three days. He sat casually and smiled and waved as we passed him in the Buffels. I think he was glad to see us go. Presently I saw an old donkey, also a casualty of war, and quite a sight crossing a big
chana
all alone, dragging his shattered back leg behind him away from Ongiva.

It was a painfully slow journey, because long sections of the road were lined with trenches and bunkers containing more ammunition and supplies. Some trenches were old and collapsed, while others looked well kept. We stopped while each one was searched and the contents loaded up. Some suspicious bunkers were blown up which erupted in huge explosions that set off thousands of rounds popping in the inferno. We crawled along at a snail’s pace, spending the night in a big armoured laager. The following morning we finally crossed a small bridge and came to Xangongo, halting in sight of the base. It was deserted. There were no tanks to meet us. We spent a couple of days moving around Xangongo which looked similar to Ongiva with a maze of trenches and thick World War Two-like cement pillboxes with machine guns at intervals along the trenches. Some of the trenches had cement-plastered walls.

After about two weeks of chasing phantoms in the bush and with Eastern-Bloc canned fish and chocolate milk coming out of our ears, Operation
Protea
finally came to a end. We headed south, out of Angola, on a tar road in a slow 16-kilometre-long column of Buffels, Ratels, bellowing T-55 tanks and an almost endless column of hundreds of captured Soviet trucks.

The operation had been a great success. On the radio (every troop now had a transistor radio because there had been one or two in just about each bunker or trench that we entered) we heard a slow-talking, reassuring newscaster’s voice assuring everyone in South Africa that all the SADF troops had been safely pulled back out of Angola days ago (we were still some distance inside Angola at the time). The radio said that 1,000 FAPLA and SWAPO troops had been killed in the operation. Among them, apparently, was the SWAPO deputy commander-in-chief and the deputy for political affairs. The SWAPO artillery commander had also been captured.

The SADF had lost only ten men, most of them when a Ratel troop-carrier fully occupied with infantry was taken out by anti-aircraft guns shooting at ground level, just as in Operation
Smokeshell
.

The long slow convoy drove back to the staging area in the Etosha game reserve where we had trained for the op. We spent two depressing days sitting around in the red sand and getting drunk at night, celebrating our success. Everybody seemed to be sick of this bush crap. D Company (with the exception of me who had spent three weeks sleeping in a bed waiting for my court martial) had been roughing it in the bush and sleeping in holes in the ground since the start of Operation
Ceiling
more than two months ago.

“I can’t wait to walk into a Black Angus steakhouse, sit down and order a juicy steak with pepper sauce. Then two slices of cheesecake and an icecold beer. Stroll down to the beach and check out the dolls. Lie on the beach and sniff that good old Cape Town salt water.” Even hardnose Stander was getting homesick.

“Cheesecake and beer? Makes sense … you’ll probably be in your browns … you know it’s pretty hard to walk on the beach with jumper boots. Also, it’s not allowed, you know ... the MPs tend to frown on it.”

“Fuck the MPs ... if I want to walk in my browns on the beach, I will. I don’t give a shit about the MPs. If I want to eat cheesecake and drink beer, I will. We’ve just come from the front line of one of the biggest operations the SADF has ever done. Fuck the MPs. There were over a thousand kills in this operation. No other operation has come close ... and we were front line!”

We were sitting around the same ashy fire-pit where I had got wasted and passed out the night before the op and hallucinated. I sipped my warm beer.

“That’s bullshit. Where do you get a thousand kills?”

“That’s what it is ... there were a thousand kills in the whole operation … that includes Xangongo and the small bases that were hit around the area too.”

“Well, I still say it’s bullshit. I didn’t see a thousand dead bodies lying around ... did you?”

“It was the whole fucking area, man! You know how many of our troops were in on this op? Probably well over three thousand, what with all the stopper groups.”

“Well, then, they must have had all the kills because I was there on the front line attacking the biggest base of the operation and I didn’t see anywhere near a thousand kills.”

Stan and I were at it again. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and I told him that my eyes didn’t lie and that I hadn’t seen many rotting corpses at Xangongo either. He shook his head in disgust.

“Hey, cool it, you two. Let’s go back to where you were sniffing the salty sea air, but I’m telling you I’d rather be sniffing some good salty Cape Town babes.”

We all cracked up as the conversation changed to girls.

A chaplain stood on a Ratel, read from the Bible and gave a long prayer of thanks to God for watching over us. I couldn’t hear a word he said. A thousand troops from different units assembled in the fine red sand and were given sky-blue Tshirts with ‘Operation Protea’ on them in tiny letters to show that the wearer had been there. Mine was too small and I was never able to wear it. We were told what a good job we had all done and what a setback for SWAPO this operation had been. A brigadier or a general, who had a bigger voice that the chaplain, told us we had set back SWAPO’s activities in southern Angola for many years to come and that South African presence would be maintained in Ongiva and Xangongo, forcing SWAPO to pull its bases and training camps much farther back into Angola. We had taught the Angolan army a huge lesson about aiding and abetting SWAPO and allowing them to set up bases under their protective wing. FAPLA forces had also been driven back and South Africa would henceforth basically control southern Angola. We were then all dismissed from Fighting Group 20 to return to our different units.

The Parabats drove back down the long tar road to good old Ondangwa in a long, weary column, arriving late that night. There was no chow for us and we had to sleep on the dirt around the swimming pool as the juniors still occupied the tents. Still, it was home. We laughed and joked as we jockeyed for places to sleep on the soft, well-churned-up sand. It was good to be back again, in one piece.