19 With a Bullet (13 page)

That night I filled my water bottles, took the MAG, stripped it clean and oiled all the moving parts. Then I pulled out all my ammo belts, laid them out on my bed and carefully checked all the rounds, making sure they were snug and there were no breaks or chips in the belt. I made sure that my second, Aaron ‘Doogy’ Green, checked his belts too. It was the first time we had been issued white phosphorus grenades and I laid them out in a line on my pillow like favorite toys. We would be wearing our jump helmets and not our regular floppy bush hats. We had also been given DayGlo, a bright orange sticker to put on top of our helmets so that the gunships would be able to see us from the air and not mistake us for terrs and take us out with their 20-millimere explosive-head cannon shells.

“What did I tell you? It’s only our third week on the border and we’re flying into Angola to hit a terr base!” John the Fox had stripped his rifle to pieces on his bed and sat polishing every moving part until it shone.

“Yeah, but I thought there’d be some armour to go in with us!”

“That’s what the fucking bombs are for! We’re going in as the bombing stops to clean up what’s left!”

I didn’t say anything. I sat carefully cleaning out the firing mechanism on the MAG and slammed the top cover-plate closed. I sat and worked quietly and smoked a couple of cigarettes. I felt a twinge of nervousness but nothing too bad. I was sort of puzzled why it was such a quick and simple plan to attack a base. I thought there would be more detailed planning, with some armour for support and a couple of days to go through the drills. Some sort of emergency plan if things went wrong … and what if a company wasn’t enough to take them, or we were outgunned? But I was learning how the military worked and that they didn’t seem too preoccupied with such details.

Stan walked into the smoky tent and sat down at his kit. He seemed excited. “Lieutenant du Plessis said there’s a chance that these guys aren’t just raw recruits, that there could be some old hands who’ll put up a hell of a fight.” He looked around the tent for some reaction.

My emotions were carefully veiled and I stood calmly in the middle of the tent and started to do some curls, using my heavy LMG as a barbell. “Well, all the better for us to cut our teeth on,” I snapped, feeling a flash of anger. I was getting a bit tired of the stupid little mind games that Stan always played. I finished the rep, put the LMG gently down on its bipods and went outside to get some air and have another smoke. The high bush sky was inky black and filled with a million stars. The hot day had changed abruptly and a cool night breeze brought the pleasant pepper-bush smell of sand and sweet crushed leaves.

All the tents had their lights on; the place was a hive of activity. I could hear music from half a dozen different cassette recorders mingling outside the tents. Troops were bent over, cleaning their weapons and readying their kit, or going from tent to tent to borrow this or that and have a nervous chat. Even the ops room across the square was active which, as far as we had ever had anything to do with it, was unusual. I had never been shot at before and wondered what it was going to be like. How I would react under live fire. Would I shit myself? I started thinking stupid thoughts like putting myself in SWAPO’s place … I wondered what they were doing now and whether they knew that tomorrow their world was going to be blown apart. It was like knowing someone’s future—what was going to happen to them; secrets they did not share—like sitting facing forward in a train and seeing the guy facing the future backwards.

I snapped out of it and walked to the tent next door to see what else Doogy had heard about the ‘old hands’ we might get to face the following day.

*****

I sat cross-legged in the open door of the Puma with my LMG poking out and the 500 rounds of ammo weighing heavily in my kit. The taste and smell of the Aftur fuel was thick in my throat and gave me an instant headache. Thankfully the noise ruled out any conversation. I looked around the chopper. Everyone looked solemm and grim with their rifles pointing down at the chopper floor, the men avoiding eye contact with each other. Each man concentrated on his own thoughts, hypnotized by the bush flashing by beneath us. This was to be our first action. We flew low and fast over Owamboland in a formation of eight Pumas and a couple of gunships. Small kraals, skinny cattle and tatty
muhangu
fields flashed past in a backward-disappearing blur. We skimmed the patchy bush and it seemed that I could almost reach down and touch the treetops. Within minutes we reached the Angolan border and the cut-line, the kilometre-wide no-man’s-land separating South West Africa and Angola, and the terrain immediately changed.

Inside the cut-line it looked like an overgrown, lost Garden of Eden, untouched for years by human hands, hungry cattle or goats. The zone between Angola and South West Africa was strictly enforced; any cattle or person crossing it was open game to be shot. As our chopper hurtled across the border into Angola I immediately felt my excitement rise. This was the real thing. We were raiders flying into another country on a cross-border operation. We were paratroopers hitting a terrorist base in Angola.

Suddenly the bush was a lot thicker and wilder, with no sign of any kraals or cultivation like there were in Owamboland. Our chopper veered and changed course slightly and seemed to accelerate as we straightened out again. It flashed through my mind that if this craft went down it would be all over for us in a second, at this speed and 30 metres off the ground! (A fate that awaited our juniors in E Company when they were shot down by anti-aircraft fire as they flew an operation on their first bush trip, killing 12 paratroops and three crew.)

After what seemed like five minutes’ fast flying the Puma veered aggressively upward, then turned at a slight angle, which it held. I looked out the door and saw that the eight Pumas were now flying in a big circle in a follow-the-leader. As the machine gunner, sitting cross-legged at the door, I found myself looking straight down at the bush as we flew in a wide orbit—but I was held perfectly in place by the strong centrifugal force of the chopper. It felt like I should be sliding out the open door.

Something caught my eye on the horizon. As the chopper came around again, I saw that it was the target that was being bombed. A couple of big clouds of dirty brown smoke billowed up in columns from the target area in the bush kilometres away. I saw the jet that had just delivered them streaking away at low level.

“Shit, look at that!” I nudged John Delaney and pointed, but he had already seen it and in turn was showing it to the troop next to him. The strafing must have been going on for quite a while; already a couple of the big dirty grey-brown clouds of smoke and dust had wafted a couple of kilometres downwind of the target and hung lazily over the treetops. I looked back, just in time to see another Buccaneer shoot in low, like an arrow above the treetops, drop its load and veer off, a silver streak. The 500-pound bombs blasted dust and smoke hundreds of feet into the air.

The guys all strained to get a look out the door at the show, but everyone was pretty well stuffed in and could not move without upsetting the applecart. The whine of the big Puma turbines drowned out any words as we watched the bombs silently exploding for a few more minutes. I felt as if I was watching some Vietnam war documentary or TV footage; it seemed surreal. I felt calm. My previous night’s nervousness was well under control and I had decided that if I was going to die here today, then let’s get on with it!

Suddenly the explosions stopped with just the great clouds of smoke lingering, thick and grey, hanging over the target area. One Puma broke out of the orbit and headed low and fast towards the clouds of smoke, the other choppers following like ducks in a row, with us the last in line. This is it! Let’s go! I would be the first one out of our chopper because I was sitting at the door with the LMG. I got up onto my knees and shouldered the strap of the heavy machine gun. I held onto John the Fox’s shoulder for support and felt like a spring ready to uncoil. I saw that the lead choppers had landed at the far end of the long
chana
and that our guys were already out on the ground and starting to form a ragged-looking sweep line. The target was still smoky and about 400 metres ahead of them.

Our Puma was last to land; it seemed that there was no more room on the long
chana
where the other Pumas had landed to drop their troops. I saw that we were coming down right on the end of the
chana
and there was some pretty thick foliage underneath us. I sat undecided at the door as I watched our approach, not sure what was going on. The Puma stopped about 20 feet from the ground and shuddered as the pilot pulled the collective up and we hovered. The prop wash bounced off the ground, creating a windstorm that blew sand right back into our faces. I heard a muffled shout, looked back and saw the helmeted flight engineer frantically waving his hand, gesturing for me to exit the Puma.

Being in the middle of the door, with the LMG and Delaney next to me, we were the only ones privy to the fact that we were still some way from the ground. I looked around at Lieutenant Doep who was unaware of the situation sitting deep in the chopper with a stony mask of determination on his face. Once again the helmeted figure waved me out urgently. I looked out hesitantly and saw that we were still at least ten to 15 feet from the ground, but that we had at least moved away from the foliage. I finally got the message that he wanted me to leave his craft, so I took a deep breath and leaped out into the dust storm with my LMG at my chest, like I had seen in the movies.

“This is how you do it—jump out like it’s fucking D-Day, man!”

I fell through the air as if in slow motion and felt all my battle webbing and 500 rounds of ammunition come flying up around my neck as my body fell and struck the ground.

I had badly underestimated my extra weight and hit the ground hard, losing my breath and rolling onto my side. Immediately I felt a sharp pain shoot through my ankle. With nowhere else to land, the rest of the ten-man stick came crashing down on and around me and we all ended up lying in a pile, dazed and disorientated. I lay at the bottom of the heap and waited as the rest of the stick scrambled to pick themselves up. I dragged myself up and, as I took a step, I immediately felt that I had hurt my ankle. I could still walk but sharp pain shot up my leg and I could feel the warm tingling sensation of swelling.

I limped and skipped, trying to keep up with the stick and retrieve the heavy bag of ammo that had hooked up on my back water bottle which was half strangling me. I couldn’t do it and with a vicious curse I yanked it free and advanced forward with the stick at a breathless hobbled trot to catch up with the other platoons. They were about 30 metres ahead of us and had already linked up and formed a long, jagged sweep line that was advancing on the smoking target that looked a lot closer now that we were on the ground.

Our end of the sweep line was still lagging behind as we got clear of the long
chana
and started crashing through high dry grass and bushes that had not looked so thick from the sky. I was holding my LMG thrust forward as if doing a bayonet charge, with a 50-round belt hanging and swinging underneath it.

It had become very quiet after the helicopters had left and the only thing to be heard was my own rapid breathing and our boots crashing through dry brush, with a surprising amount of shouted battletalk going up and down the line as we crunched across the last 100 metres.

“Easy, boys … don’t bunch … spread out!”

It looked like the bombs had started a fire in the grass somewhere to our left; brown smoke rose up from the veld. The grey smoke from the bombs had wafted in several directions now and it was hard to tell exactly where the target was. We came up to some trees and I braced myself but still there was no enemy fire. After a few more metres a shout came down the line.

“Turn around, everybody … Left wheel! ... Left wheel!”

“Goddamnit … what’s going on?”

“We missed the base ... turn, head this way!”

The whole sweep line started to turn in a more northerly direction and, being at the bottom of the sweep line, we had to move at double-time to keep up with the wheeling line. Personally, I was not doing well. Like everybody else, I was wound up like a spring, ready to uncoil, but having to try and run on a twisted ankle and catch up at the same time was taking its toll. I was breathing hard and sweat was pouring down my face into my eyes, blinding me with the sting of it.

I tried to wipe my eyes with my forearm but this just made it worse because my forearm itself was drenched with sweat. My hands had formed sandy, sweaty grease all over the MAG and I had to readjust my grip every few seconds. To top it, my right ankle was forcing me to kind of roll and skip as I walked, using up twice the amount of energy.

Regardless of everything I kept my burning and blinking eyes firmly fixed on the surrounding grass and bush as best I could. I was determined to nail any SWAPO terrorist bastard—recruit or veteran—before he nailed me. Strangely, I was still unable to visualize a live terr moving in the bush before my eyes. It was a mental block. What
did
a live terr look like? Would I recognize one?

We had crashed through about 50 metres of high brown grass in the new direction and soon came on another thicket of trees—and then, suddenly, there was the target. There was a huge tree on the edge of the thicket whose thick limbs had been blasted off by the bombing, which now showed big white patches of flesh. Behind the tree, in the shadows and bush, I saw the remains of what looked like two long huts that had been made of branches tied together.

One looked like it had taken a direct hit and had been blown to pieces; only part of one wall remained standing. Behind it stood another hut that seemed untouched but the whole hut was leaning to one side. I realized we were right in the target. No AK-47 shots! No RPGs! Quickly it became very obvious that the base was deserted. We moved forward slowly. My finger was poised around the MAG trigger, ready to let off a 20-shot volley at anything that fucking moved.