19 With a Bullet (5 page)

Before leaving home, I had bought and carefully kept a jar of skin-coloured theatrical make-up to cover up the butterfly I had tattooed on my shoulder in my early schooldays. As they began interviewing the guys I dashed off to the bungalow on some flimsy excuse, pulled out my special make-up and applied it liberally to my left shoulder and the back of my neck, already pretty badly sunburned after my new no. 4 haircut. I did a good job and dashed back again, full of cream. When my turn came I stripped down to my underwear and walked into the office.

The redhaired Parabat lieutenant was sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. A second lieutenant leaned against the desk, his arms spread wide, supporting him. He was a blond-haired, raw-boned man with thick black eyebrows that met between his eyes.

“Hold your hands straight out in front of you,” he barked after glaring at me for a minute. “Now turn around.”

I turned around 180 degrees, slowly.

“What’s all that shit on your neck and arms?” the fierce blond-haired lieutenant asked in brisk Afrikaans.

“It’s for my sunburn on my neck, lieutenant,” I answered quickly and confidently.

He stared at me for a moment with fiery green eyes. “Why do you want to join the Parachute Battalion, and why should we let you try?” he demanded, still leaning against the wooden desk.

“I want to see action, lieutenant. I also want to learn how to jump from a plane,” I replied quickly.

He stared at me for a long second, as if trying to look into my mind, then bent and mumbled something into the ear of the redhaired lieutenant sitting next to him. It seemed that he was in charge, even though he was the lowerranking lieutenant of the two. It was cold as I stood in my underwear and bare feet on the cold tile floor. As he broke his stare I looked quickly at his name patch. Lieutenant Taylor wrote something brief on a notepad in front of him and dismissed me.

About 40 of us waited outside the offices while everybody was interviewed. We were told that the Parabats would only take nine volunteers out of the 40 so of us from the Engineers’ camp. The make-up covering my tattoo was beginning to melt in the midday sun, and I was thinking about making an excuse to go back to the bungalow and get some more when the two paratrooper lieutenants came out the office, brought us to attention and quickly started to read out a list of names.

I got a cold feeling in my gut when, by the time he got to the sixth or seventh name, mine still hadn’t been called. Then, on the ninth and last name, he paused for a second, unable to pronounce the next name. With the usual difficulty he coughed out my name: “Korff.” I quickly went to stand with the other—chosen—eight. They were only taking nine of us from the whole camp, and technically I shouldn’t have been there. I smiled. I smiled, but I didn’t feel bad; I knew I was supposed to be there. By hook or by crook or good luck.

Two of the guys they had chosen were from my bungalow. Hans Kunz was a tall, strong, good-looking German Afrikaner with intense blue eyes and a strong square jaw, and looked like a fine example of the ‘master race’. The other guy was Anders, who was one of the toughest-looking blokes I had ever seen. He was short, with curly black hair, olive-brown skin and eyes with an almost unreal white and blue brightness to them, like a Husky dog. He had veins that bulged on the front of his short, thick forearms, and I don’t think he had trained with a weight in his life.

We were to
klaar
out immediately and start handing some of our kit back to the stores. I had to take my routing form to my platoon lieutenant to be signed and released. He looked at me with his pock-scarred face and the same look of bored hatred, and gave absolutely no indication or acknowledgment of the incident on the parade ground when he had shoved me in among the chosen, with a passing time. He signed my papers and thrust them at me as though I was a piece of shit.

‘Signing out’ took the rest of the day, running around the camp—but it was a great feeling. I was getting out of this dump and going to a real fighting unit.

The truck took us to Bethlehem station, where we were met by the redhaired lieutenant. He turned out to be a pleasant fellow and he told us what to expect when we reached 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein, a few hundred kilometres away. There we—together with hundreds of troops selected from dozens of other units—would undergo basic training. Only after basic training would we move on to the notorious PT-based paratrooper selection course, designed to “fuck you up”, as he put it, and to weed out most of the original 700 candidates and leave about 200 troops for paratroop training. The troops who didn’t make it would be RTU’d—the dreaded ‘returned to unit’.

I had already fucked up once. By luck or fate I had got this far, and vowed to myself right there and then that I would not be among those returned to unit.

The Bedford truck lurched as it drove over the speed bump at the big wroughtiron gates of 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein. Smartly dressed guards with maroon berets and full webbing stood solemnly on each side of the big black gates. Behind them stood the yellow-brick guardhouse with old ivy covering the walls, while on the other side was a busy-looking duty office with sliding glass doors. As we drove up to the parade ground, a huge brown and white fish eagle in a ten-metre-high dome cage whooped loudly at the passing trucks.

“This looks like the real thing,” said Hans Kunz in his thick Afrikaans accent with a touch of German. “This is where we belong … this is good.”

He was even more excited to be there than I was.

“Yeah, this is it … Airborne … Parabats. Let’s go,” I answered with a bravado I didn’t altogether feel at that moment. Hans spoke of the nine of us as a team; we had already established a kinship, coming from the same shithole Engineers’ camp. James Anders had said perhaps ten words in the last two days; he just surveyed the scene quietly as we pulled onto the parade ground, his hands gripping his kit tightly. The camp lay along the side of a long hill. A couple of tar roads led up the hill between rows of long white bungalows with red tin roofs. At the top of the hill was a huge, three-storey parachute hangar. From behind it poked out tall aircraft ‘mockups’ and the ‘ape cage’, from which we were told we would jump if we passed the dreaded twoweek PT course.

1 PARACHUTE BATTALION

Welcome, my son. Welcome to the machine—Pink Floyd

There was a huge modern mess hall and recreational area, not like those at the corrugated tin dump we had just come from. There were small flowerbeds around the long, low-roofed administration buildings and all the tarred streets were named after legendary paratrooper battles in Angola, such as ‘Vietnam’, Moscow’ and ‘Cassinga’, where the Bats had done a dawn drop, landed right next to the SWAPO base and fought a hard battle, successfully taking the base by midday. The whole camp radiated a feeling of energy and professionalism and a sense that one was lucky just to be allowed through the gates. Wherever I looked troops were being led, drilled or chased at doublequick time by gimlet-eyed instructors wearing maroon berets and sporting huge handlebar moustaches.

Any illusions of glamour soon disappeared, however, and we realized that we were in hell. We were sorted into platoons and chased mercilessly from 04:30 till 17:00. Everywhere we went, we had to run. Pulling equipment from stores on the run. To the chow hall on the run. To the shitter on the run. And, of course, around the infamous
pakhuis
—the parachute hangar— where all the parachutes were prepared, packed and stored. It was a high building set back from the barracks next to the jump-training hangar, about a 400-metre sprint up the tar road, along a dusty, rocky, well-trodden path, around the huge hangar and back to the front steps outside the bungalow. It had to be done in 70 seconds by the whole platoon or company, or we had to do it again. We ran it hundreds of times, as did every paratrooper who passed through 1 Parachute Battalion. And we hadn’t even started the basic training yet.

Basic training—no sleep, inspections, running 35 kilometres to the shooting range, and sleeping overnight with icecold winter winds blowing down the huge, flat, stony shooting range. We were instructed on rifles, LMGs (light machine guns), radio procedure, patrol formation and—of course— drill. We drilled for a couple of hours daily, until we moved like a well-oiled machine—fast, tight and moving as one. I sat on the bungalow steps at night and smoked a cigarette with Hans. My feet were starting to give me trouble and were getting rubbed raw.

The feet were the worst. For the first time in my life, I felt the cold breath of mortality. I had always thought that nothing could hurt me; the invincibility of youth—that I was untouchable, that my body was like a machine that I could push on and on. I had always felt like Superman, with unlimited youthful energy and strength. For the first time I began to understand how easily a body can just stop working; how something can go wrong and that you could get sick and maybe die.

“You should tell the lieutenant that you want to change your boots,” Hans said, checking out the blisters on my feet.

“Yeah—the staff sergeant said they only do exchanges on Thursdays. That’s five days away. By that time I’ll have no toenails left!” I answered, still picking moodily at my wounds.

“I heard that the PT course is going to be extra tough for us, because they got to many troops,” said Hans, blowing a cloud of smoke into the night. “They’ve got to lose more troops than usual. There’s almost 700 here. They only need two companies. Most of these guys are going to be RTU’d back where they came from. You’ll never make the course if your feet are in bad shape. Boom! — RTU!”

“Bullshit. I’ll make it,” I said quickly. I felt a surge of anger through me. I was angry at always having to be controlled by others. I was angry with the stupid fucking army for only doing boot exchange on Thursdays, probably costing me the chance to get into the Bats.

“Bureaucratic bullshit,” I mumbled.

The notorious paratrooper PT course started under bright floodlights early one dark, cold Monday morning on the frozen-hard parade ground. It consisted of two weeks of nonstop PT, all day long, from 05:30 till 17:00. The day was broken up into hour-long PT classes with a few minutes in between for a break, and was designed to “fuck you up” and to send 70 percent of us back to where we came from. Each instructor took pride in the number of troops who would quit his class and drop off the course to be RTU’d.

One class was to run carrying your buddy across the parade ground without him touching the ground. It was impossible after the tenth time. In another class we would have to carry a 30-kilogram concrete block, called a ‘marble’, for an hour. We would have to run around the damn
pakhuis,
which was a 400-metre run, carrying this wretched marble, and do various horrible exercises with it, never letting it touch the ground. Another fun class involved an hour on the obstacle course, telephone-pole PT, or knocking each other’s lights out wearing boxing gloves.

Getting up in the mornings was the worst, and the time most troops thought of quitting. Should I get up for a day of pure hell, or just lie here in bed and legally quit? It wasn’t that the PT in itself was so hard, but day after day of it with no let-up made the body weak and limp and you moved forward on pure willpower, with zero energy. Each day would end with a nine-to-15-kilometre run in boots, webbing and rifle with an ambulance driving slowly behind to pick up that day’s crop of new RTUs who’d cracked and sat down on the side of the road, beaten.

My feet were killing me. Every step I took I could feel new skin being torn from my feet. I had tried to exchange my boots, but the hairy-faced son-of-a-bitch staff sergeant at the stores told me with a smirk that I had already made an exchange, and that we were only allowed one swop. I was too green to make a fuss and thought that I would just make do with the second pair of boots, which weren’t quite as bad as the first. I had made this mistake before. My feet had always been flat, like a SWAPO, and an odd, non-standard size between 12 and 13. Whenever I bought shoes I made the mistake of taking the smaller size 12 because they felt snug and okay. The same with the boots, which seemed to fit for the first couple of days. But after the first 15-kilometre run I started having problems again.

By the end of the first week, my feet were one open wound. I had lost all the skin on my toes right down to the flesh. I pulled a couple of my toenails out like old rotten teeth, showing them to the guys in the bungalow and tossing them in the trash. I rose half an hour earlier than everybody else, when it was still pitch dark, and dressed my feet, wrapping each toe in gauze and Band-Aids, with a thin bandage around my heel. I smeared thick Vaseline on the inside of my hard boots, all the way down to the toe. After that it would take five minutes to push each foot into the cold, hard boot. By the time I’d done that, it was time, and I would shuffle to the bungalow door and down the tar road to the parade ground looking as if I was skiing down a black tar slope. I found that by sliding my feet and not lifting them I could get through the first hour of PT, until the intense pain was replaced by a comfortably numb, deep ache.

I was determined to carry on. I had screwed up once at the preliminary tests at Engineers, and if it wasn’t for the Engineers’ lieutenant who had plucked me from failure and pushed me into line I would not be here. I wasn’t going screw up again. I was going to get my wings if I had to lose all my fucking toes for them. I gritted my teeth and pressed on.

“C’mon ... do it! This is what it takes ... don’t stop now!” I found that one of the tricks to ease the pain was to keep moving. I wouldn’t stop moving during the short smoke breaks between PT classes, and would shuffle around or walk on the spot as if doing a rain-dance while I quickly smoked a cigarette. Every day the instructors would encourage us to report sick or sit out for a while if we couldn’t carry on, and then laugh as they wrote those who did so off the course. I knew that if I made one word of complaint about my feet I would be off the course and RTU’d