19 With a Bullet (49 page)

We were just getting comfortable when Lieutenant Doep appeared through the darkness and told us what we really didn’t want to hear. “Hey, listen up, D Company. Don’t unpack your kit and don’t hand in your ammunition. We’re going back to Ongiva first thing in the morning. There’s a garrison of 200 FAPLA who’ve reoccupied the town and we have to go and sort them out. Good night.”

I thought my ears were playing tricks on me after the long drive in the noisy Buffel, but John the Fox confirmed the information.

“I’ll bet we’re the only ones going back ... wait and see. I’m telling you!”

I had recently come to understand more clearly how the South African army worked. The Afrikaner did not overreact as some other nations would. I had seen this on TV when they would send eight policemen with dogs and shotguns to handle hundreds of rioting blacks. They would think nothing of sending 40 men to take on 300 enemy (as they did in Operation
Super
in March 1982 when 45 troops from 32 Battalion attacked a base and killed 201 SWAPO terrorists). They definitely did not believe in the old rule about outnumbering the enemy three to one.

That night I had the first episode of a nightmare that would recur for many years: Our platoon was walking on patrol, deep in Angola. We walked through a dark, petrified forest-like area that seemed to have been burned and then we found ourselves walking into the middle of a small town with rows of small brightly painted houses like those in Ongiva. The dirt streets had big potholes and rubbish lay strewn everywhere. The little town was alive with activity; the black Angolans stood calmly on their
stoeps
chatting with each other and jeered at us, unafraid. Kids ran around us, laughing as we walked through in formation. Something was obviously wrong; we should not have been there but we kept formation and walked through the uneven, littered streets. Then a local came up to us, grinning, and casually told us in some language we could more or less understand that we had better watch out because someone had gone to call the government troops and they would be here any minute to kill us.

But we kept on with our patrol.

Early the next morning D Company—and D Company alone—took off back into Angola, above the old potted tar road that crossed the border and linked the two countries, as well as leading straight into Ongiva. It was the old road that had been used in the days of the Portuguese to cross to and fro over the border to South West Africa. The tar was cracked and the edges of the road had long since crumbled away. We passed the last dribs and drabs of South African troops driving back to South West Africa in Soviet GAZ-66 trucks, loaded high with Eastern-Bloc ammo and towing AA guns or civilian cars. We were the only idiots going the wrong way. Our three-month bush trip was soon to be over; we were scheduled to return to South Africa in a couple of days (most outfits did a six-month stint but one of the perks of the paras was that we only did three, the logic being that we would see more action than the rest), so no one particularly felt like heading in the direction we were.

“This is crap. We should be suntanning and getting ready to go home. Send someone else back! Send the juniors in ... they need the experience. We’ve spent almost the whole bush trip in the fucking bush. I cant remember what a bed feels like,” Roberts sulked.

“That’s why they call it a bush trip, dumbo.”

We soon came to the town of Ongiva but this time there were no bombs and anti-aircraft fire. It stood like a ghost town. We came in from a different direction this time and didn’t see a soul. Even the few locals who had come out of hiding after the op seemed to have disappeared .

We stopped on the outskirts of town and got out of the Buffels. The company spread out in a long sweep line and slowly advanced into the town, with the Buffels following behind. It was a very different feeling to what it had been before, when we’d had hundreds of troops, artillery, fighter planes and armour behind us. This time it was one company of paratroopers, with a Buffel-mounted 82-millimetre mortar.

Fuck the army!

Not a word was said as we got into town and walked cautiously through the deserted streets like a gang of bad guys in a spaghetti western as all the townsfolk hid away. Only this time there were no townsfolk. We walked down the main road and through the old town square that was still cordoned off with rusted chains draped from cement bollards left over from the times when there was grass and flowers in the little square. We walked cautiously through the rows of pink and blue houses and finally to the other side of town where the trenches of the military base began. This was a few kilometres from the airfield where we had fought a week earlier. The trenches and bunkers were deserted. We did not run into a garrison of 200 FAPLA or even two dozen FAPLA. All we found was an eerie ghost town and a FAPLA army base. Ongiva was certainly aptly called the ‘Town of Death’

We dug in on the outskirts of town, close to the main tar road (the same road FAPLA had used to make their midnight escape with their ill-fated convoy of vehicles) and soon found that we were not alone. In the distance we could hear the occasional sounds of vehicles or gunshots.

One morning a shout went up as a white Jeep came racing along the tar road 300 metres away. Kleingeld dived for his mortar tube and popped off some 60-millimetre mortar bombs that landed pretty close to the speeding vehicle, but which didn’t stop it. The Jeep made the gauntlet but returned half an hour later with a white flag flying out of the window on a long stick.

“Get in position! Spread out! Spread out!” Doep shouted excitedly as the Jeep drove slowly over the
chana
towards us with his white flag flapping. I dived into my little hole and trained my rifle on the approaching vehicle. It pulled up to our position and, to our surprise, a short Portuguese priest, complete with dog-collar and all the rest of it, hopped out of the driver’s seat and immediately began berating Lieutenant Doep, wagging his finger in Doep’s face and rattling away in broken English. I couldn’t hear everything that he was saying but he was unafraid and shook his fist in rage, pointing to us lying in the dirt. He pointed to the town behind him and shook his arms in the air as he stamped his foot in the sand. Doep listened sheepishly and was also waving his hands trying to calm the padre but to no avail. With a last wag of his finger he turned without looking back, jumped into the Jeep and drove off over the
chana
, his white flag still flying.

Doep was smiling as he sat down, leaning his rifle against a tree. “He said that the United Nations is going to fix us, that we will have to answer to them and to God for what we have done by attacking the innocent people of Angola.”

“Hey Kleingeld …
gooi morters
, fire mortars; it’s your second chance,” one of the troops joked as we watched the padre’s white Jeep disappear.

At night I did not sleep well. My old fear of being shot sleeping in my foxhole was alive and well, and justified. I couldn’t understand the army at all. It takes a whole fucking mechanized fighting group eight kilometres long and with 20 fighter planes to take the base and then they send in one company of paratroopers to try and prevent it from being reoccupied. They either thought very highly of our fighting abilities or they were stupid. I opted for the latter. The troops were grumbling. The due date for our return to South Africa had come and gone days ago. Everyone was up to their necks with Angola and the bush. We spent the days sitting in our foxholes eating rat packs and talking about Civvy Street. Doep said we might spend another month on the border because of the shit that had gone down. It was bad news.

We weren’t doing any
kak soek
patrols, just monitoring the tar road and watching the area with binoculars. The only real excitement and scare came when, just before dusk one night, Doep shouted that a recce group farther up the tar road had said that a convoy of BTR armoured troop-carriers and a couple of old T-55 tanks were on their way up the road to our position. We flew out, hanging onto the sides of the Buffel and set up a hasty ambush by the side of the tar road. All we had was a couple of RPG-7s and a 60-millimetre mortar. I lay with my puny 5.56 rifle tucked into my shoulder and thought how the 14.5-millimetre guns on the BTRs would turn our little ambush into mincemeat. Then the tanks would ride over us just to finish the job and we’d all die just because they couldn’t spare a couple of armoured vehicles to accompany us. Darkness thankfully enveloped us and no tanks arrived but we did hear vehicles far away in the distance. At about 21:00 we broke the ambush.

At dawn one morning, after eight or nine days of sitting at our little observation post, Lieutenant Doep came with very good news indeed. There was a Flossy (Hercules C-130) sitting on the runway in South West Africa at the paratrooper base at Ondangwa right now as he spoke and it was waiting for us. Replacements were on their way in choppers that would take us from Angola to Ondangwa. Then straight onto the C-130 and home to South Africa. Within two hours we would board the Flossy, fly 1,600 kilometres and be back in Bloemfontein, South Africa ... today.

It was fantastic news. We chatted and laughed like school kids as we kitted up and walked the few clicks to the deserted airfield we had attacked two weeks ago, to lay an area defence for the choppers. True enough, 40 minutes later, eight big Pumas came hammering in low over the trees and landed on the deserted FAPLA airstrip, unloading a company of wide-eyed black South West African troops from 101 Battalion to replace us.

D Company had the distinction of being the first of many thousands of troops to monitor and occupy the Angolan town of Ongiva, as from then on the South Africans pretty much controlled of the whole of southern Angola and Ongiva for the next eight years. I walked with John Delaney down the runway to the choppers. Kurt snapped a photo of us just before we jumped in. I scratched my two weeks’ beard and watched the ghost town of Ongiva with its rows of bombed-out houses and its miles of trenches and bunkers disappear below the horizon. We flew at treetop level which was standard procedure in the operational area. I lay on my kit, relaxed and enjoyed the long chopper ride back as I watched Angola flash beneath me like a wide green sea. At least we did not have to drive the long bumpy journey out of Angola.

As we disembarked at Ondangwa we saw the C-130 sitting fat and squat on the tarmac and we chatted and laughed with the realization that we were truly flying out that day. There was our plane, right in front of our eyes. I was ready just to walk straight from the chopper to the Flossy but we headed instead to the paratrooper tents close to the chopper pads, where we found that all our kit we had left at the training area almost a month ago had been piled into one tent (the one I had stayed in on my threeweek court-martial vacation). There was a quick hot meal of army slop in the tin-roofed kitchen and even time to catch a shave and shower to wash off the now-hardened Angolan grime before we shouldered our heavy
balsaks
and tramped across the hot tarmac to the big camo C-130 that sat eager to return to South Africa. I slept cold and cramped in the netting seats, not having had the time or the forethought to dig out a bush jacket for the long, high-altitude flight home. But it didn’t matter.

Landing at Bloemfontein we were told to our surprise that there was a big welcome-home parade going on in downtown Bloemfontein for us and the other units that had participated in Operation
Protea
. We were immediately loaded into big Samil trucks and taken from the airport straight into downtown Bloemfontein where, to our amazement, there was a full-scale military parade outside the city hall on the main drag. All the streets had been closed off for kilometres around with thousands of civilians and families cramming the pavements as we drove in. Battalion after battalion of infantry, paratrooper, services and panzer troops lined the road, neatly in closed-order formation with patriotic orange, white and blue banners hanging from lamp post to lamp post over the wide main street.

“What the hell’s going on here? Is somebody dead?”

“Yeah, there are a thousand FAPLA and SWAPO dead. This is for us. We’re the fucking heroes!”

When our small convoy of trucks drove up the wrong street, people at the roadside thought that the parade had begun and waved and smiled. We waved back sheepishly. Finally the drivers were directed to the right spot at a parking lot near the centre of town and we hopped off and dubiously eyed the scene in front of us. A few hundred panzer troops who had taken part in the operation were lined up in the parking lot as well. They had some Eland armoured cars with them that they lounged against. It looked as if they had been waiting for a while.

It was unbelievable that the army could have put together such a well-timed manoeuvre. Whoever had planned on having the Parabats present at this parade had done so with precision planning, flying us from deep in Indian country in Angola, then immediately onto a C-130 at Ondangwa to South Africa. Three countries in one day. Perhaps it was just luck, perhaps they would have continued with the parade without us, as they did with our sister H Company which was nowhere to be seen.

We looked a ragged bunch, still dressed in our torn bush browns, faded to light khaki with pockets ripped off. My clean shirt that I had hastily pulled from my
balsak
in Ondangwa was stiff with white sweat rings and black with dirt on the collar and sleeves. Our boots were scuffed white from more than two months of kicking sand in back-to-back operations. I still had my two quick-change magazines taped together with dirty white medical tape in my rifle. Our hair hung two or three inches over our collars. We looked like veteran bush fighters with our maroon berets on our heads. We were the heroes, welcomed home and cheered. Warriors at last, who had defended the country and fought for the security of all. We formed up into a company in the parking lot and, with a military band leading the way, began marching down the main road.

Civilians packed the pavements and kids waved from their fathers’ shoulders. After months in the bush my eyes were like a hawk and I quickly picked out the beautiful, and not-so-beautiful, girls in the crowd that lined the road waving. In truth, they all looked beautiful, all of them waving their hands and smiling. Lipstick and pretty dresses and soft brushed hair. I stared at them out of the corner of my eye as we marched down the thronged main street with the casual cocky attitude of proud combat paratroopers.