19 With a Bullet (17 page)

The shooting came to a ragged halt and the other Buffel came into view through a clearing in the bush. We had driven through the thicket. The whole thing had lasted about five minutes, if that. I became aware again of the gunship still circling above and looked up.

I could see the door-gunner with his big visor and helmet, like a big oneeyed bug sitting behind his long 20-millimetre sting.
Valk
2 went in and swept the small thicket on foot, dragging the dead SWAPO and putting them in a line on the
chana
floor next to where we had parked the Buffels. We had killed four of them; the gunships, for all their shooting, had apparently not got any. If they did, we didn’t find them. The gunship crew must have felt safe with us around, because they landed in the
chana
and waltzed over to look at our handiwork.

“The bush was too thick to see them here, but we got some further back when we first saw them ... back over there.”

The pale-eyed, blond door-gunner smoked a cigarette and pointed with his big bug-helmet into the bush to our right. He was tall and lanky; his flight suit seemed too small for him and his trouser-legs showed his ankles. Doep sent a section to scout for more bodies but they soon returned emptyhanded and we gave up the search.

We all lit cigarettes and relaxed for a minute. My mouth was as dry as a bone and my body felt clammy with sweat. I found myself glaring around with an intense stare and a frown, but apart from that I felt completely cold and calm. It was my first action—I felt no emotion at all. It had not been as much a fire fight as a plain, simple killing. I felt like some old colonial hunter riding high on the back of a elephant in the bush and shooting down at tigers that were trapped and tangled in the bush.

I felt no exhilaration or discomfort. I felt nothing.
Valk
2 had come back from sweeping the area and reported it clean. This had probably been part of the group that had ambushed our guys five days earlier and had bombshelled into smaller groups. I looked at them lying in a row, dead. Three of them wore torn tiger-stripe uniforms, they had makeshift webbing with small round Chinese water bottles. One, who looked about 16 years old, wore a plain khaki tunic and pants and chest webbing stuffed with shiny, worn AK-47 magazines. We dragged them to the Buffels and trussed them to the bumpers at the back and front of the vehicle like deer after a hunt.

I noticed some kind of fuss going on at the second Buffel. When I walked over, I wasn’t surprised to see a couple of our platoon struggling to cut a finger from one of the dead terrs with a big Bowie knife. They were having a hard time, because when they kicked the knife that was held against the middle knuckle of the finger, the terr’s hand slipped into the soft sand. Finally they put the finger against the wheel rim while one troop held the knife in place on the joint of the finger and the other gave it a hard stomp with his boot, which cut right through the joint, leaving half a finger hanging by a thread of skin. I also noticed that there was a white bloodless patch that stood out against the black skin where the terr’s ear used to be. I knew what they were doing was wrong but the only thing I could think of saying was a stupid rhetorical question.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Dries up like old biltong ... show the folks at home what we’re doing up here.”

The troop smiled and popped the finger into his side pouch and then proceeded to truss the terr up against the bumper. I said nothing and turned and walked back to the Buffel. I had heard that it was a popular pastime to take ears and fingers but as far as I was concerned it was bad karma. Not good. What happens if you get zapped and have to explain at the Pearly Gates why you have a string of ears around your neck? “I was going to return them but no one could hear me!”

As we drove away the only thing that was left at the scene of the killing was the small, almost intact brain that had plopped out of the 16-year-old’s broken skull as we tied him to the Buffel and which now lay in the dust of the small
chana
among the tyre marks and boot prints, the only evidence of what had happened here today for anybody who might happen to walk by.

I wondered where this kid’s mother was right now. Did she perhaps feel his death? What was she doing now and how long, if ever, would it take for her to find out what had happened to her young son out here in the bush?
I
knew what happened.
I
could tell her exactly what happened and even show her the only thing that was left at the scene. Her son’s intact brain, lying in the dust among the spoor of big army boots and truck tyres.

We drove back into the infantry camp like deer hunters and the infantry troops gathered around to look at the dead SWAPO, whose faces and wounds were coated in thick dust from hanging from the bumpers. The bodies would be picked up sometime later by chopper and taken to Oshakati. All terrs killed inside the South West African border had to be brought back to base and then taken to Admin HQ at Oshakati to be photographed and fingerprinted. Many more times in the future this requirement would have us riding into a camp with bodies hanging from the sides of our vehicles, sometimes a couple of days old.

That night we had a rowdy celebration with cold sodas, chocolate bars and cigarettes. The next morning, bright and early, just before breakfast, the shit hit the fan. The camp commandant came to inspect the dead terrs and found them missing half their fingers, all their ears and one of them minus a scrotum. We took it lightly and joked but Lieutenant Doep warned us that the infantry commandant was furious and rightly so.

We were told to unpack all our kit from the Buffels. We were supposed to leave that morning to continue with our vehicle bush patrol and then head in a roundabout way back to Ondangwa about 70 clicks away, but the commandant had blocked us from moving out, determined to find out who was responsible for the mutilations.

“Maybe someone heard something,” Stan sniggered.

“Or maybe they should look for some fingerprints!” the guys laughed. No one took the problem—or the infantry commandant—seriously. We soon got to realize his commitment when we spent the morning confined to our hot tents at the entrance of the camp and bored as hell. The hours dragged by slowly; we sat shoulder to shoulder, smoking and sweating and wondering what was going on. Thankfully a cool breeze from the pending rain sprang up and came billowing through the tent flaps, bringing relief after Spike’s mid-morning assault had turned the tents into saunas.

I took a deep breath, sucking in the sweet air that always smelled of iron and pepper. I looked out at the sky. The high clouds shone brilliant white at the edges but were a dull grey in the centre. Everybody kept mum. Blame for the missing digits quickly fell on the jealous infantry troops who had snuck in under cover of darkness and clipped off some trophies to toss around at home like bush fighters and brag about their fire fights.

Later in the morning everyone who had been directly involved with the contact was called into the commandant’s office in the middle of the camp and given the third degree. When my turn came, the commandant said it was a serious crime to mutilate bodies in any way and was punishable with a year in DB and that if I knew anything about what had happened it would be wise for me to come forward, or I would be held as an accomplice. Standing to attention in the small hot tin office I explained what I had seen from when we had dragged the terrs out of the bush into a line on the edge of the
chana
after the contact. I told him how we had searched the dead terrs for documents and that we had relaxed for ten minutes, smoked a cigarette and spoken to the chopper pilots before loading the dead terrs onto the Buffels. I told him, respectfully, that I did not know anything about any missing ears, that it might equally well have been some of his own troops right here in the base who took them and that he should check his men too. His eyes darkened and looked like they might explode. His straight black hair bounced as he jumped up from behind his wooden desk and rushed me like a bull, stopping right in front of me. I blinked instinctively and braced myself for what was surely going to be a punch or a shove, but he surprised me and stopped inches from my face, glaring at me. I could see the sweat running down his forehead, I could smell his breath as he yelled, spitting, into my face in Afrikaans.

“Fuck off out of my office!”

With a hasty salute I turned around and almost fell through the narrow doorway and through the short, dark hallway into the bright morning light.

Stupid fucking idiot. What gave him the right to charge at me like he’s going to do something and to talk to me like that? The prick! The guy’s obviously got some serious personal problems. I gave him the benefit of my psychiatric evaluation as I walked out of the small tin admin area in a hurry, headed back to the tent at the camp entrance and squeezed my way back to my kit. Nobody can have such deep-rooted anger without a serious hang-up, I decided.

In the tent I lay back on an old foam mattress and bummed a cigarette from Stan. The guys laughed when I told them what I had said and how he had reacted.

“You should have told him our trackers followed a spoor to his cook’s tent, and that he should check his steak and onions for bits of terrorist.” Kurt Barnes roared at his own joke.

After the attention had shifted from me, Smitty sidled nervously up to me and spoke quietly as he puffed on a butt. “Was that all you said?” he asked quietly, trying to sound casual and by the way. He looked searchingly into my eyes to see if he could catch me lying.

“Of course ... what did you think I was going to tell him? That I saw exactly who did it?” I said out the corner of my mouth.

He was visibly relieved and gave an empty chuckle. Kevin, who was in earshot, gave me a grin.

“But you know it’s a fucking crime to mutilate bodies! A fucking year in DB! Haven’t you ever heard of the Geneva Convention?” I said forcefully, as if I had a good grasp of military law.

Smitty nodded his head slowly, saying that he had recently heard this.

“Just be cool when you go in there ... don’t freak out ... tell him we found them like that.”

Smitty grinned at my joke, lit up another smoke and prepared himself for his grilling by the commandant.

I sat pondering the situation. I felt relieved that my good sense had kept me from getting involved in this trophy-cutting business when I saw it happening back at the contact. This commandant seemed determined to have somebody’s balls for the incident and it appeared it was going to be paratrooper balls. If Smitty and Kevin were our only guys to take a couple of ears and fingers, it must have been the infantry fucks who took the rest—and it seemed like this prick of a commandant thought his men were beyond doing such a thing! I knew this wasn’t going to go away and that someone was going to have to go down for it, or we wouldn’t be leaving the camp for a while.

I mentally washed my hands of the whole situation and picked up my rifle that was lying on my kit. I inspected the new inscription: one dead. I’d scratched it in English next to the
drie dood
, three dead, that was already scratched deep into the chipped green-and-brown camo paint above the handgrip. I felt that I was entitled to put the notch there, although all four of us had shot the poor bastard. I asked myself if it was altogether the right thing to mark the poor skinny terr’s death with a notch on my rifle. I fantasized morbidly whether my name would end up as a notch on the side of a worn AK-47 somewhere in Luanda. I pushed the thought out of my mind.

“Fuck ‘em.”

At least I had got to see my first contact. Most SADF, South African Defence Force, troops go through their entire service without seeing any action. I thought back to the cold excitement of the contact and the small brown-clad figure flailing desperately, crashing through the bush only to run into our hail of bullets. I was surprised at my cold emotion. I had shot somebody. Aren’t you supposed to feel something? I thought perhaps it would sink in later.

That afternoon we packed all our gear onto the Buffels. Smitty and Kevin, after going back and forth to the commandant’s office a couple of times, had confessed to taking an ear and a finger. The pair of them were charged with corpse mutilation, a punishable offence under the international rules of war laid down by the Geneva Convention many years before. The charged pair would be allowed to leave with us to complete the patrol and return to Ondangwa where their case would be handed over to the proper level of authority. We never found out who else was to blame for the rest of the missing fingers and ears. We drove out of the base, glaring at the infantry troops who looked away as we openly challenged them, jeering at them.

I was glad just to get moving again. The cool breeze blew through our hair and with it came the smell of the coming rain. We were in the bush again, where we belonged, where we were in control and not some dipshit infantry commandant. Our four Buffels immediately left the dirt road and made their own path, winding through the dry bush and heading west. I sat relaxed. After nearly a month of vehicle patrols the Buffels had become our home. We were quite comfortable squashed shoulder to shoulder, kit kneehigh, bouncing through the thick bush. This was where we belonged—in the bush, hunting!

Our senses had adapted and sharpened in the last weeks, becoming accustomed to the sights, sounds and mood of the bush. We were bush fighters. We had all lost weight from living on rat packs. We slept in sand holes under the moon and lay awake at night, waiting for SWAPO to walk into our ambushes.

Late that afternoon, when the sun started to cast long shadows, we crossed a long flat
chana
and entered a most quaint, almost magical forest of tall, flat-topped thorn trees. We drove under this long avenue of trees, whose intertwining crowns totally blocked out the sky above. All the trees grew at almost the same angle and, if you did not know better, you might easily think that the entire scene had been landscaped and maintained by the local parks department. Suddenly the lead Buffel came to an abrupt stop, forcing the four following to brake quickly, sending us tumbling into each other at the front of the vehicle.