19 With a Bullet (27 page)

There was one long, straight, white sand road that led into Ombalantu. For security reasons the small camp was situated in the middle of a wide, white
chana
, with open ground for 200 metres around the camp in all directions. The camp itself was about ten clicks from the Angolan border, and consisted simply of a 400 x 400-metre tent square enclosed by high sand embankments with a couple of lookout towers and old steel-fenced horse corrals. The only interesting feature was that on one side of the base, near the HQ, there stood a massive baobab tree wide enough to drive an army truck through, which had been hollowed out and had a small chapel inside it, complete with chairs and a pulpit.

Being so close to the border we were told to be on extra alert because the camp had come under mortar attack from SWAPO in the past. Stan, Johnny Fox, John Delaney and I surveyed the scene. There was no air force bar, just a small canteen that sold basic supplies such as shoelaces, soap and sweets. Once again, no beer for the paratroopers.

“This place is a dump,” declared Stan with feeling, after a quick recce of the situation. He glared as though he had just smelled shit.

“Well at least its peaceful—listen to the birds.”

“It’s like a French Foreign Legion outpost in the fucking Sahara desert— look at those palm trees—all you need are some camels and ragheads to come across the
chana.
”

Stan scowled with his usual look of distaste and disgust. I sat on my kit bag and looked at the sun-bleached tents and high sand embankments that surrounded the small empty base. He was right. The wide, white
chana
and tall palm did give the appearance of a French Foreign Legion outpost and, to boot, it seemed as though the cool season had forgotten about spring and had moved straight into summer. Or perhaps this
was
spring, and summer would be twice as bad. Our old friend Spike was blazing away happily and once again would turn our tents into ovens. Stan, John Fox, Kurt (the giant ex-cook) and I bunked together in a tent and we soon got back into the ways of life on the border.

There were two stray kittens that we had coaxed into our tent and adopted. They were wretched little things at first, but we fed them up with raw meat and scraps that they wolfed down and held onto so fiercely that you could lift them head-high as they held onto the meat with their jaws locked, growling. They soon became our mascots and would not wander far from our tent. They took turns sleeping on each of our beds at night, happily purring and tramping their feet in pleasure. One of the kittens was a fiery ginger colour, with a great bush of a tail like a squirrel. He was a fiercely tough little character who would swagger around as though he owned the place. He normally slept with me, purring away happily like a little hairy generator at the bottom of my bed.

It seemed we were set for a peaceful bush trip. There was no deafening roar of Mirage jets taking off next to out tents, or the constant
boom boom boom
of the gunships practising with their 20-millimetre cannons, which was the daily background at Ondangwa. The only drag was that we had to stand guard at night, which the air force had kindly taken care of for us at Ondangs, what with it being an air force base. We also started doing daily dawn mine-sweeping patrols of the long sand road that cut through the bush like an endless, straight white knife and led to our camp here at Ombalantu. The group of field engineers whom we escorted could walk faster with their detection wands and earphones than we could run and it amazed me to watch them scoot down the endless road like speed-walkers in a race, with their legs shooting out in front of them.

These early-morning patrols turned out to be pretty enjoyable, especially because those going on the five-hour mine-sweep patrol did not have to stand guard the night before and would have time off when they returned to camp.

We pulled a four-day patrol around the area but it was quiet with no sign of any activity. It was a relaxed patrol with long breaks; all we ran into were some smiling locals with herds of goats and skinny brown cattle. We relaxed in the shade to eat, the only excitement being when the two top boxers in the company got into a short but vicious fist fight in the middle of a small rural
cuca
, a shop, and smashed up all the flimsy shelves of tinned foods, literally tearing the small tin shack down.

“That Louw needs to get fucked up one of these days. Why don’t you take him out?”

“He’s never messed with me,” I said as we watched Lieutenant Doep talking and waving his finger at McKee and Louw. Kevin, an ex-professional boxer, had recently rejoined the company after serving 60 days in DB over the missing-fingers-and-ears incident of our last bush trip. He had a large welt under his eye; it looked like he’d got the worst of the scrap. Louw swaggered away with a smirk on his face and rejoined his little clique under a tree. Kevin came to us shaking with anger and told us that Louw had just slugged him out of the blue when he’d had some words with another troop over some cans of warm Coke.

The tension broken, we continued on an easy patrol through some enchanting terrain that was a montage of thin bush and many small
chanas
that interlocked with each other and looked like small secret clearings, like the magical ones we used to play in when we were kids.

It actually became enjoyable as it seemed such a quiet, undisturbed area, even though it was so close to the border. The only shit came when I puked after drinking too much Johnny Walker in the middle of the day on patrol. I caught up with the platoon after hurling and ceremoniously poured the rest of the Red Label bottle out onto the sand.

*****

“Hey, we got to get down to the HQ—the whole company is
treeing aan
.
¹²
There’s something going on!”

I took my time finishing the last sentence of a letter to Taina and was one of the last to get to the small white-brick HQ at the side of the tent square where the whole company was assembled, sitting crouched in front of Commandant Lindsay who had already begun his orders.

“I told you we would be looking for Boy, and that is what we are going to do. Enough of this waiting to run into a SWAPO patrol; we are going to go into Angola and find him!”

He paused for effect, looked around and grinned. There was a chorus of whoops from the company.

“We will be going in in company strength, but splitting up into four
valks
, eight kilometres apart, crossing the border to do a zigzag
kak soek
¹³
patrol into Angola.”

Lindsay was in his element as he drew out a rough sketch of how the operation was to go. His short hairy arms moved quickly on the large sheet of paper stuck to a folding table lying on its side; he was surprisingly artistic. He drew the four platoons as arrows that would move parallel to each other, yet kilometres apart, in a wide sweep. He loved making war and could hardly contain his delight. “We will cross the border right here and patrol in a zigzag fashion north into Angola. We will spend four to six weeks in Angola, and cover about 15 to 20 kilometres a day, getting resupplies dropped in every five days.”

“I tuned you it was going to happen. It’s what we’ve been waiting for,” John Delaney whispered and nudged me with an elbow. I nodded my head in agreement, grinning.

“This is not a
jollie patrollie
,” Lindsay carried on, looking around slowly. “You’re going deep into Angola. It’s SWAPO’s backyard and he will be there, make no mistake about that. SWAPO has been getting too comfortable, moving around too freely close to the border—they seem to have forgotten about the last time we gave them a hiding. You will be going in to find and make contact with these small patrols, to establish a presence and a buffer zone in this section between these beacons.”

He tapped the layout with his pointer, indicating the bushy area across the border north of Ombalantu. “We want to take control of this area. You will have gunship support on standby and Mirage fighter jets if it becomes necessary.”

Lindsay beamed as he told us that there had been a build-up of FAPLA activity closer to the border and that we might even run into FAPLA patrols the deeper we went. (He failed to mention that FAPLA would be a lot more heavily armed, with tanks and troop-carriers armed with 14.5-millimetre anti-aircraft guns.) We would also be carrying RPG-7s and claymores; in addition each man would carry four 60-millimetre mortar bombs as well as full kit with five-days’ rations.

His explanation of the operation was short and sweet and simple. We were part of a larger operation with 32 Battalion, hitting smaller SWAPO bases throughout southern Angola. Our plan was to cross the border into Angola in a long-range sweep lasting four weeks, or longer if necessary, to look for and make contact with SWAPO. Sounded easy enough!

“The name of this operation is
Ceiling
,” he added as an afterthought and then dismissed us to immediately pack and draw supplies to leave the next day.

Full of surprises, I thought. Just as I was getting set for a relaxing bush trip, we get a six-week cross-border patrol hundreds of kilometres into Indian country!

That night there was a merry, excited buzz over the camp. The tent lights burned late into the night as we readied our weapons and packed our kit for a long stay in the bush. I nipped off to the kitchen on a search-and-seize recce for any cans of decent chow and came away loaded with canned peaches and vienna sausages, or
wambo piele
.
¹⁴
I also gave instructions to the cooks to leave scraps out for the two kittens and they said they would happily do so.

*****

A feeling of excited vulnerability was evident in the platoon, which suddenly seemed very small and under-armed as we stepped over the old collapsed barbed-wire fence into Angola. We crossed the lush cut-line. We patrolled slowly in a V formation, heavily laden with kit, mortar bombs, full line ammo and water. I scanned the bush continuously. I had been cured of my inability to visualize SWAPO; now that I had shot one I had a clear picture in my mind of what a terrorist lurking in the bush looked like. I almost expected to suddenly come across a group of SWAPO sitting relaxed under a tree, at ease in their backyard, planning their next insurgency raid across the border. I was almost disappointed when we stopped uneventfully in a small thicket for a late lunch-break.

I sat with John Fox, who was my partner for the operation. I had chosen John as my partner for a couple of reasons. He and I had become pretty good buddies on this bush trip, bullshitting about girls all the time. He would tell me about his girlfriends’ figures, going into great detail about their anatomy, and I would describe a few of my own conquests. I admired his outlook. He was always as neat as a pin and kept a low-key but upbeat and positive attitude which was the opposite of mine, as I occasionally suffered from spells of depression and was quite probably the most untidy troop in the platoon.

“They’re here, I can feel it,” he said in a hushed tone as he brewed a fire bucket of tea on a heating tablet.

I looked around at the bush as he spoke. I, too, had the feeling that we were not alone. I brewed up some tea and sat quietly scanning the bush and sipping the refreshing sweet brew.

We carried on and walked hard, covering about 15 clicks, hard-humping with our heavy kit. Late that afternoon we dug into a small TB for our first night in Angola.

We stood a watch of two at a time, while the others slept uneasily. Even the night sounds seemed different in Angola and no one got a good night’s sleep—me especially, as from first-hand experience I didn’t trust our platoon to be conscientious on night watch. One of my fears, besides landmines, was to be shot in my foxhole at night while I slept. It had happened to a patrol of South African reservists a couple of years back, when some of them had had their throats cut as they lay snoring, sound asleep. Or so the story went.

The next morning our security patrol rose at daybreak to scout the area before the whole platoon rose from its foxholes and—sure enough—found some chevronpattern SWAPO boot spoor not far from our TB. It spooked everyone and we moved out very cautiously at a right angle to the way we were heading in order to avoid an ambush, before gradually wheeling north again.

Lieutenant Doep was second in command for this operation. A first lieutenant we didn’t know, who was on leave from a military college, was in charge. He was a small, good-looking guy with collar-length blond hair, who was friendly and smiled easily. He explained that we could not follow up on every SWAPO spoor we found but had to keep heading north and stay alongside the other platoons moving parallel to us and see what we ran into.

The following night we dug in early once again and had chow, but after darkness fell we quietly moved out and made another TB about 100 metres away in a small, odd-looking thicket of tall trees. No one could really sleep and at around midnight we were all jolted out of our half-sleep by the unholy shouting and chanting of a man not more than 50 metres from our TB. We lay quietly in our holes, our rifles ready as the babbling and chanting rose steadily like an evangelical preacher building up to a fiery crescendo. But it did not stop; it carried on to a fever-pitch. Now, like a man possessed, he screeched and shrilled into the night like an animal, then went into warlike chants, repeating the same chant dozens of times over. We all lay as still as death, listening for more than half an hour to the maniacal voice whose intensity never faltered as it shrilled its crazy message—and then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped, so that all that was left was the night stillness that seemed to ring in our ears.

No one moved a muscle. I lay with my finger on the trigger, hardly breathing, straining my ears to an almost painful point, willing them to pick up any sound approaching us in the dark. I lay like this for at least an hour as I peered into the darkness, ready to shoot, but hearing only the night sounds that had now started up again.