19 With a Bullet (6 page)

“Just think to the next second ... no further.”

Every morning at 05:00 roll call, under the big paradeground floodlights, there were always a couple of guys missing who just couldn’t get out of bed to carry on. Already our class had shrunk from 50-odd men to less than twenty. Every full day of PT ended with a 15-kilometre run and every night I pulled out another toenail and tossed it in the trash.

My feet had became a conversation piece in the bungalow at night, with guys crowding around to see the injury and wondering how much longer I could hack it.

“Your feet are pretty fucked up, mate,” said John Delaney, a cocky, John Travolta lookalike from the south of Jo’burg, who would later become a good friend.

“We’ve still got a week to go and they say that it’s going to be even tougher— you’d better get some painkillers or something, or you wont make it with those feet,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, if I sick-report for pain pills even once I’m off anyway, so I might as well carry on.”

John nodded in support.

“It’s only five more days. If I drop off I’ll regret it for years,” I said with false bravado.

“Well, I have to tell you …” said a blond-haired troop a couple of beds down from me, “when I see you get up early in the morning and bandage your feet it helps me go on, because if you can carry on with those feet, then I can also push on.”

Another troop laughed from across the bungalow and agreed with him.

One afternoon we were split into eight-man teams and each team was assigned one of the steel 200-kilogram vehicle parachute pallets that stood in a pile next to the hangar. We were told to carry it for 21 kilometres without the big pallet touching the ground. We thought they must surely be joking, because we could barely pick the thing up and carry it past the camp gates without wincing in pain, never mind carry it for 21 kilometres. It wasn’t a joke. The pallets were not only very heavy— so much so, in fact, that six men could just about shuffle with one on their shoulders—but they weren’t designed to be carried and had sharp edges that cut into your shoulder, no matter how you tried to carry them, making the whole business almost unbearable after just a few minutes .

Six guys would be carrying the pallet while the other two took a ‘sanitykeeping break’ of about a minute. We alternated almost continually, with the front guys eventually ending up at the back resting for a minute before they started at the front again. If you were the two guys at the back who were next in line for a break, your mind would almost be at breaking point from having carried the thing for something like five minutes and having moved from the front to the middle, and then to the back position. The men who were resting had to keep running to stay up with the team. Nevertheless, we got it past the gate and ran like this for 21 blood-and-sweat-soaked, nonstop kilometres across long open fields and endless dusty sand roads, with our instructor behind us, carrying a long switch. One of the guys on our team, a ‘Dutchman’, an Afrikaner, nicknamed Cheese, lost his mind at some point. He screamed and sobbed and had to be slapped repeatedly across the face to get him to get a grip on himself, because if one man cracked and gave up the team was sunk.

JUMP COURSE

Comfortably numb—Roger Waters

Cheese thanked us afterwards for the face-slappings and said that was what snapped him out of the hell. By this time my feet were numb, but I knew the damage that was being done with each step. So we bit the proverbial bullet and somehow our class came in first. It was the first and last time that they used the steel pallets. When the top brass heard about it they banned the pallets from being used on future PT courses because they were too gruelling for the troops. Some guys really broke down after that run. They went back to using telephone poles and tyres.

Suddenly, one afternoon at 16:00, it was all over. Two hundred of us stood on the parade ground; all that was left from the 700 hopefuls. Two companies of paratroopers. We had made it through the PT course. Two weeks of nonstop PT. I smiled stupidly, shook my head and swore with sheer relief.

After a week’s break to recover, the next step for everybody was the threeweek jump course. For me, it was hobbling straight to the hospital in sandals, where a horrified doctor looked at me strangely after checking my feet and immediately gave me enough antibiotics to kill a horse and three weeks’ light duty, also in sandals. I had lost all my toenails. He could not believe that I had gone for two weeks with feet in that condition. He shook his head as if disgusted with the army and muttered something in Afrikaans. I said nothing. I spent that day—and the next few weeks— once again comfortably numb from double doses of the strong painkillers he had given me.

My feet would take years to fully recover and were to give me trouble throughout my whole military service. The rest of the guys from the newly formed D Company went off to do the threeweek jump course while I worked in the stores on light duty. I would do the jump course a month later with H Company. I found myself side by side with the shithead staff sergeant who wouldn’t change my boots in the first place. He was a real prick, oblivious to the suffering and pain he had caused me, but needless to say I got the perfect size boots for myself. I also picked up some old, faded uniforms, which was cool because all of us had stiff, brand-new brown uniforms. Only after a long time and many washes would they fade to a light khaki colour, the symbol of an
ou man
, an ‘old man’, a veteran.

One crisp winter morning we were all standing stiffly on the parade ground as usual when the fish eagles in the huge aviary at the battalion gates whooped loudly. Eight large trucks, billowing black smoke, came roaring through the gates, past the admin offices and pulled up to a stop on the parade ground, sending a cloud of brown dust drifting over us. The open trucks were piled high with brown kit bags. Wild-eyed troops with long hair bleached blond from the sun and uniforms faded almost to white leaped out from the backs of the closed trucks.

They were all tanned a deep brown, while well-used R4 rifles hung loosely from their shoulders and long bush knives hung from their web belts. Some had monkeys sitting on their shoulders or clutched under their arms as they passed bulging kit bags down from the trucks. They all jabbered excitedly to one another, hardly taking notice of us and giving the distinct impression of a group of men that had been very close for a very long time. They were one of the senior operational paratrooper companies, just arrived from the hot, dry South West African/Angolan border, which was a four-hour flight from the northwest in a C-130.

It was the first time that we had seen a proper operational paratrooper company who had been doing the real thing—fighting in Angola—and not just running around the base camp singing and shitting off.

The following morning there was a parade with everybody present, where the battalion commander, Archie Moore, warmly welcomed the seniors home and congratulated them on a successful Operation
Sceptic
in Angola, and on one apparently particularly successful ambush . The seniors stood at ease in their faded uniforms, long hair and maroon berets at rakish angles on their heads. It was a breath of fresh air for me and a light at the end of the tunnel. The excitement that had faded in the face of all that cruel PT came back to me as I looked at them and I saw what we were was going to be. Fighting soldiers! After lengthy congratulations and a patriotic welcome home, Moore, beaming from ear to ear, waved the company off on a twoweek pass, like a happy father seeing off his favourite children.

The seniors came back to camp two weeks later, this time all sporting short, new, regulation haircuts. After a couple days of harassing us, making us drop for 50 push-ups and stealing our kit and cigarettes, they sat down and told us about Operation
Septic
. They had attacked a SWAPO base, codenamed ‘Smokeshell’, deep in Angola. The base was difficult to hit, because it consisted of 13 smaller bases spread over an area of about three by 15 kilometres, surrounded by thick sand and dense bush with deep, well-concealed trenches and bunkers. They told us how 18 Mirage jets had attacked the base first at around 08:00, dropping like arrows from high in the sky and throwing 250-pound bombs to try and take out the anti-aircraft guns that were filling the sky with white cottonwool bursts of flak. After the Mirages had left there was apparently some sort of fuck-up and a two-hour delay before the paratroopers moved in with armoured troop-carrier support, fighting from trench to trench, but they had a hell of a time of it because the element of surprise was now lost and SWAPO was ready, angry and waiting. Some of the anti-aircraft guns hidden in the brush had been cranked down and were now firing at ground level, wreaking havoc. Early in the battle they took out two Ratel troop-carriers, killing 12 infantry troops inside the big armoured vehicles. The Bats also lost one man on the ground as they advanced through the initial defences; he was shot by a wounded terrorist lying under a bush he happened to be passing. SWAPO fought doggedly, holding their ground, and only after vicious trench-to-trench fighting that lasted the whole day did the fighting finally die down. Seventy-six SWAPO terrorists had been killed and 14 South Africans had lost their lives. It had been a high price to pay.

“It was fucking heavy,” said Richard Dawson.

I had known Richard since first grade, and had gone to Sunday school with him as a kid in my home town. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes burning with an emotion that I was yet to feel. His face was serious as he described the operation. Richard did not have a ‘senior-junior’ attitude like most of the others in the senior company; he had no trouble sitting in our bungalow and talking to us, and I knew he wasn’t bullshitting.

“We were crawling on our bellies with anti-aircraft guns shooting two metres over our heads, with branches falling on us. You can’t believe the sound of an anti-aircraft shell going a couple of feet over your head. You shit yourself.” He looked around, deadpan, at the rest of my platoon standing bunched around him, listening eagerly, trying to not miss a word.

“We shat ourselves when SWAPO took out the two Ratels. The fuckers killed 12 infantry … I thought we were going to get it right there. Then the Mirages came in again and they abandoned their guns. We had to flush out each bunker with machine-gun fire and white phosphorus grenades,” he said, shaking his head.

I spoke to an infantry troop later who was involved in the operation, and he told me how one second his section was advancing slowly through the scrub, and the next it was obliterated by 23-millimetre anti-aircraft fire. His section leader’s head was blown off and the guy next to him cut in half. He dropped everything and crawled away, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, and flagged down an armoured Ratel troop-carrier that stopped to pick him up; but then the Ratel too was taken out by the anti-aircraft guns. He was blinded in one eye but survived to tell the tale and drank a beer with me full of goose bumps as he told me his story. Oh, yes—he told me that he also had to do a cutaway on his first solo skydive as his main parachute had malfunctioned. He had a lot of bad luck.

The South African fighting group ended up spending a few more weeks in Angola when more bases were found from new intelligence gathered during sweeps of the area. These smaller bases were easier targets than the first and were quickly overrun by the South African fighting group, which got a lot of kills. A lot of these kills apparently came when SWAPO troops ran wildly into the Bats’ stopper groups hidden in the bush a mile or so behind the small bases. The Bats even wound up having a punch-up with the Angolan army, FAPLA, when they tried to intervene to help SWAPO and the South Africans killed about 90 of them. A South African Impala jet was shot down, as well as an Alouette gunship, killing the flight engineer. Overall, some 380 terrorists had been killed, with a total loss of 17 South African troops.

“That’s what it’s all about,
broer
!” exclaimed John Delaney after we came back from the full military funeral in Bloemfontein of the paratrooper who had been killed in Operation
Sceptic
. We had hurriedly practised the slow funeral march on the parade ground until late at night with legendary Parabat RSM ‘Sakkie’ roaring at us until we got it right, shooting our legs out stiffly in unison like a slow mini-goose-step.

“That’s what it takes to get SWAPO. Sometimes you lose men. It could happen to any one of us when we get up there—it could happen to you or me, my
broer
, but someone has to kill them, and it’s going to be us.”

“Hey—we’re always going to go in first, I can tell you that.” John stared at us with his blue John Travolta eyes as if he was shocked. He always looked as though he was startled and lost for words. “That’s why we’re here; trained to kill and wreak havoc,” he said, taking off his step-out trousers and putting on his shorts.

“They’re communists, and they want to take over South West Africa— the next step will be South Africa. Until they run into us, the Bats,” Hans laughed, emphasizing his point by pounding on his locker so hard with his fist that the doors fell off.

Because of my fucked-up feet I had waited a month and done the jump course with H Company, not my own D Company. I still had a week to go to finish the jump course. I had already made five jumps and had four to go before getting my wings and maroon beret like Hans, Johnny and the others. Perhaps after I got my wings I would also be full of piss and vinegar.

After my first jump I was surprised when they called my name out, giving me the highest score of the whole company. I sat on a high mock-up and the company clapped as the jump course commander praised my perfect exit and landing.

“Good exit, knees together, perfect drills and a good sideways-right landing,” said Kieser, the legendary jumpmaster and one of the small nucleus of men who had founded 1 Parachute Battalion back in the 1960s. I think they only noticed me because I was first in my stick and first one out the door of the C-130 at 1,000 feet.