19 With a Bullet (51 page)

Stan went off in a huff and hitchhiked the whole 1,000-kilometre, two-day journey to 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein only to be told on arriving that it was a false alarm. He turned around and hitchhiked back. Apparently only a handful of D Company had responded to the emergency call-back from our precious 21-day pass. Stan was pissed.

*****

“I’m afraid that’s the way it seems to be going, son. There’s talk that they might one day release Mandela and that the ANC could become a legal political party. I doubt that it’ll happen but either way I think there are going to be some big changes here. It can’t go on like this. These world sanctions are killing the country. The Americans won’t sell us a thing. Everything’s so expensive. Bombs going off somewhere almost daily. I’m afraid the day might come that life as we know it will change.”

“Fuck the Americans,” I thought. “They’re a bunch of do-gooders—a naïve, McDonalds-guzzling, fat-ass nation that thinks whatever they do, the world should do the same. Fuck the British ... and the whole world too.”

I held no hatred for black South Africans nor did most of the people I knew. We would go out of our way to help them. I had known since I was a kid, without being told, that apartheid was wrong and would end one day, that black people should get a better shake. But the ANC becoming a political party, with Mandela coming out to lead them after 22 years in jail? What horseshit was that? It sounded like a bad Hollywood screenplay. The ANC wass backed by the same commies I was shooting on the border. I smiled and shook my head and tried to let it go. I wasn’t going to let politics ruin my 21-day pass. When I thought about it I actually didn’t really give a shit because it would never happen. That would be the day, that South Africa would give in to world pressure and communism.

“Well, you’ve only got three months left in the army, son. Have you thought what you’re going to do when you get out?”

“No, I haven’t, pa…”

“You should think about what your friend Ricky Jones is doing ... plumbing. It’s a good trade … you’ll always find work, wherever you go.”

“Plumbing ... you’ve got to be kidding. The hell I’ll walk around in dirty clothes, swinging a monkey-wrench and fixing fucking pipes,” I thought to myself.

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” I said to my father.

OPERATION DAISY
October/November 1981

The song remains the same—Led Zeppelin

We were back up in the operational area on our third and final bush trip. Nothing had changed much at Ondangwa in our short absence. We sat packed and sweating in the hot, tin-roofed canteen next to the small pool and had a welcome-back briefing on what was happening in the area.

Over 2,000 insurgents had been killed since the beginning of the year, with 1,295 being confirmed. This was not including the external operations, where they claimed 300 had been killed by bombings alone and 1,000 in Operation
Protea
. The SADF had lost 49 troops which they claimed was less than the previous year. The local black population had suffered heavily, with 91 civilians murdered by the insurgents and another 62 who had died in landmine explosions. A further 103 had been abducted into Angola to forcibly join SWAPO. We were told that Operation
Protea
had dealt a devastating and humiliating blow to FAPLA and that cross-border insurgent raids into South West Africa were down in the last month, as SWAPO and FAPLA were still reeling from the enormous loss of men and equipment. We had shown FAPLA it was not wise to interfere with us while we were dealing with SWAPO. The good news of the briefing was that D Company was going to be on Fireforce again, which meant at least one platoon at a time would be on reaction force, lounging around the pool waiting for the siren to wail.

With no immediate action planned for us I started working out in the little gym and going on runs. I set up a punch-bag filled with towels and sand next to the laundry room and started to work the bag.

“I think I’m going to box when I get back to Civvy Street. Turn pro and get a title.”

Stan laughed. “Turn pro and get fucked up is what you mean! You can’t just decide to turn pro, china. You’ve got to come up through the ranks from a kid—fight your way up, get provincial colours, national colours. Its takes a mindset like one of these idiots—like that Ackerman. He’s been boxing since he was five years old. He’s like a machine.”

“Bullshit. I’ll take Ackerman out. He’s no machine. I’ll whip that boy before he can say ‘Stand in the door’.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Hell, yeah!”

I held Stan’s sneer.

Stan still had a thing about Ackerman, whose brief reign of power had fizzled over the last months of combat, of which he had missed a lot. Yet he still waddled around the company like a short, squat tank with eyes like a snake and a fist always ready to knock someone out. Just a few weeks ago in a disco in Bloemfontein we heard that he had knocked a civvy cold with one sucker-punch in the middle of the dance floor. Ackerman had always been wary of me because he couldn’t figure me out. I was not a loudmouth and didn’t swagger my stuff, like a good macho Afrikaner boy would. He and I had sparred with each other on PT course where I had caught him with a few educated punches. The incident of beating the acting company sergeant-major shitless at Ombalantu had caught even his reptilian attention. (He had not been around at the time it happened and had missed all the operations because he had been called back to South Africa to box for 1 Parachute Battalion in inter-unit tournaments but he had heard about it—as had almost every troop in the battalion.) He had always had a dislike for Stan, eyeing him coldly, waiting for an opportunity to arise. Stan knew it too and I think he had bad dreams about bumping into Ackerman late one night when no one was around.

I slammed the bag with a leftright-left hook combination, then sat down panting. “I think I can do it. I think I can be South African champ. Just got to get back into shape.”

Stan laughed.

After a few weeks doing short patrols and happily hanging around the pool on Fireforce, there came word of a night operation on a SWAPO base in Angola. It was apparently going to be the first night attack that South Africa had ever done in the Angolan conflict. It was to be a combined operation with 44 Brigade, which was disbanded a year or so later to be built into a para unit. At that time it was the small but notorious unit with all the crazy ex-Vietnam Yanks with parachute tattoos on their arms and ex-Rhodesians who had joined the SADF.

We drove out in trucks to meet them at a secluded spot to practise for the op. It was 100 or so kilometres back into the Etosha National Park, close to where we had trained for Operation
Protea
.

44 Brigade had three or four Q-Kars with them—army Jeeps with twin MAGs mounted on them. We spent cold and miserable nights doing fire and movement with live ammunition, once again going through the motions of clearing out trenches and bunkers with RPGs and grenades. The night lit up with red tracers bouncing off the ground as we dived into the dirt and opened fire.

“Bunker at 2 o’clock … RPG take it out! Forward! Keep the line straight … don’t bunch up!”

For three nights we practised till well after midnight. Then we would try fix a hot meal in the dark and catch some sleep, still full of sand from diving into the dirt. To help matters a bitter cold and windy spell had sprung up since our return to the border.

The target base was manned by 300 SWAPO terrs, very deep in Angola. Once again the leaders had in their wisdom decided to send just over 100 of us to do the job. Everyone seemed relieved when the day before we were supposed to go in, a cold windy morning, we were brought together and told that the president himself had called off the operation the night before, deeming it too dangerous. (I found out later that apparently every cross-border operation had to be approved by then President P. W. Botha.)

We returned to Ondangwa happy to resume Fireforce and our suntanning duty, but after a week of chilling out, a jubilant and smiling Commandant Lindsay hurriedly called us together next to the pool and announced that another very big operation was in the offing. The man loved war with a passion. He once again paced with enthusiasm in front of the company in his short pants, flashing his teeth. He told us that this was going to be as big as Operation
Protea
, but that this time we would be going even deeper into Angola to look for Boy who had retreated from the bases close to our border, but was still running the training camps hundreds of kilometres inside Angola— business as usual. Lindsay told us that all this new information had come to light from the enormous quantity of maps and intelligence we had gathered in Operation
Protea
. (I realized later that all this new info, without a doubt, had come from the mountain of maps and documents that
Valk
4 had discovered in the FAPLA ops room at Ongiva, where we had found Kruger’s bush hat in the desk drawer.)

It was going to be a full mechanized fighting group, just like Operation
Protea
, where the convoys of each group were perhaps eight or ten clicks long. The target was a cluster of SWAPO training bases hundreds of kilometres into Angola. This was going to be the deepest operation into Angola since
Savannah
in 1975. This time our sister H Company, with infantry, who were already in training at Etosha, was going to spearhead the attack on the bases at Bambi and Cheraquera farther north, while we would be on standby as reaction force at a FAPLA airstrip called Ionde, 120 kilometres into Angola. Ionde was still to be captured. Three C-130s would be dropping a few companies of paratrooper ‘campers’ (paratroopers who had completed their national service but who were doing their compulsory annual threeweek to three-month camp that was required of every army-going South African for 15 years after their initial spell of national service) who would be stopper groups waiting behind the target areas.

The long mechanized attack convoy took off pre-dawn one morning and we snaked our way slowly through the bush. The dawn light was still blue-pink. We had just crossed the border into Angola when we hit our first landmine. There was a muffled explosion up ahead and the column ground to a halt. The news filtered down from vehicle to vehicle that the lead Ratel had hit a landmine. We waited an hour, huddled shoulder to shoulder and shivering in the cold before we started moving again.

No one felt like doing this operation. We only had about seven weeks left in the army. Operation
Protea
had been a massive operation and enough excitement for anybody for a while, and that had only been some seven or eight weeks ago. The long 21-day pass had also softened us up and the talk was more about tits, ass and Civvy Street than about shooting Boy. We lacked the resigned gloom and morbid focus that had been present just before Op
Protea
. I guess being downgraded to standby Fireforce was also part-reason for the lack of commitment.

Late that afternoon the convoy stopped. We were probably some 50 or 60 kilometres into Angola. We heard shots popping from far up front. After half an hour we heard that three big knobs had been killed when they saw some black troops in the bush and, thinking them to be UNITA (Dr Jonas Savimbi’s boys, also fighting for democracy in Angola and therefore supported by South Africa), jumped off to speak to them and the rag-tag group gunned them down. It had been a group of SWAPO who then quickly disappeared into the bush. We never did get the details of what really happened.

“It’s a bit off a cock-up, ain’t it?” John Glover scoffed.

“Haven’t even got to the target yet and we’ve already lost three brass and hit a landmine. Sounds to me that someone knows we’re coming.”

“Ja. I thought they said SWAPO wasn’t even this close to the border after we fucked them up.”

It seemed to take forever, crawling stop-start through the bush but the next day we finally came upon the small FAPLA airstrip. All it consisted of was a handful of small brick buildings with a potholed runway situated between two big
chanas
. It was deserted. We drove in without a shot being fired. We were told to dig in for a couple of weeks among the scattered trees, 50 metres from the airstrip, where we would be on standby if the shit hit the fan with H Company. The main column of Ratels, water trucks and Buffels carried on northward to the targets at Bambi and Cheraquera 50 or 60 clicks away. In a relaxed picnic atmosphere we dug in under the trees. I built a bivvy from branches and managed to get my hands on some clear plastic body bags which I cut up and stretched over the frame to build a fine, sloped roof. There had been a slow on-off drizzle, brought in by the coming winter winds. I was pretty proud of my architecture and checked it against the others to compare. Mine was structurally sound and had no leaks. At least I would be dry.

Early the next morning before dawn I woke to the sound of heavy droning engines in the sky above and looked up to see the big shadows of three C-130s flying directly overhead in the moonlight and heading north. I could just make them out. It was our Parabat stopper groups who were being dropped behind the targets.

By midday we were all told to hand in our water bottles for the stopper group who for some reason or other had no water. Later it became widely known that there had been a major fuck-up in the drop zones and that the poor paratrooper campers had stood in the door with full kit, ready and hooked up for 45 minutes, while the C-130s flew up and down looking for the DZ. (As any paratrooper knows, once you have stood up and hooked up with full kit, there is no sitting down again.) Everyone was puking in the plane and, to add to it, when they finally did the bush jump, for some reason they were critically short of water.

We sat under our trees kicking back and smoking. An old DC-3 Dakota was parked on the runway. The wounded had begun to arrive. We watched from under the trees as they loaded a couple of badly wounded black soldiers onto the DC-3 to be flown back to South Africa.