19 With a Bullet (33 page)

Horn, who looked more like a sad office clerk than a paratrooper, slowly picked up his kit and moved into position. All eyes were on him as he moved deliberately, lay down in the shallow hole, loaded the RPG rocket into the launcher and pulled the silver safety pin from the rocket, arming it. He braced his loaded weapon against his kit bag and pointed it towards the sound of the growling engine. He had a little crooked smile on his face as he acknowledged that he held the fate of the platoon in his hands. If that BTR or tank came breaking through the moonlit bush it was up to him to stop it ... or we would all piss blood.

“Horn, you had better make sure of that rocket, boy,” I said with a nervous laugh. A string of warped humour and encouragement followed as we watched Horn slowly settle in on his belly and fiddle with his sights in a slow ritual.

“If that T-55 comes through those bushes, I’ll have him,” he looked back and assured us in his slow Cape way, still smiling his wry half-smile. “But you better clear the way for back-blast behind me!”

“Get to your holes!” Doep barked, and went back to the radio in the centre of the small circle.

I lay in my shallow hole, fidgeting with my rifle, checking my one-and-only full magazine and placing the half-used one next to me in the hole. I pulled the two M27 grenades from my pants pocket and laid them next to me too.

I too had a weird little smile on my face that I couldn’t seem to wipe off. Stan’s words came back to me about being gutted like the goat. I thought of the dead SWAPO we had left hanging in the trees, stiff and bloated, with parachutes cut into their chests. In my mind, I could clearly see FAPLA soldiers laughing and cutting us up for trophies, then pissing on our corpses in retribution. What goes around comes around. I could see the headlines in South Africa:
SA troops massacred in Angola; no survivors or prisoners taken; bodies mutilated.
I thought of my family and of Taina. What would they say when they heard about it? I couldn’t stop smiling my sick grin. I noticed that I wasn’t the only one; quite a few guys had stupid smiles on their faces.

The engine had gone quiet as we lay listening into the night ... silent now, not even the sounds of the night animals, just the sound of Doep’s radio … but it sounded now as though he was talking quietly on the radio? He was! He had got through! They’ll send choppers to get us out in an extraction, or Mirage jets to blow these fucking FAPLA laddies to the dark side of the moon! All heads turned to hear his hoarse, low voice rattling off in Afrikaans in a serious monologue and then a long inaudible response.

After a minute he jumped up. “Kit up, let’s move, and fast. FAPLA is on our trail and they’ve radioed a warning to South Africa. They are following up and have said they will wipe out any SADF troops within 15 kilometres of their base. Kit up now! let’s move …
loop pas
, let’s jog. Come on!”

We were standing, strapping our kit to our backs before he’d finished his sentence. We struck out at a slow run, heading south once more. It was the obvious direction of retreat, the safest way to get as far from the FAPLA base as we could. I held my chest strap with one hand, pulling it tight to try and stop the heavy backpack thumping on my back. I held my rifle low with an outstretched arm, at the trail.

Blowing caution to the wind, Doep chose to run along
chanas
whenever we came to them, making us easy targets for any sharpshooters lurking in the trees. In the red operational area there was a strict night curfew on everybody—SADF and civilians alike. That’s why Lieutenant Doep had TB’d in the first place—probably scared to move at night as we could have been shot by our own troops in the area. This being a secondary worry right now, we ran stop-start through the bush ... and this time there were no sick jokes.

My arms were ripped by thorns and low branches again and again. I did not even feel it. I got a good rhythm going and breathed evenly, like a long-distance runner. My earlier almost deadly, asthma-type attack had been and gone. I thought about how, back in training, one of the qualifying tests at the end of the gruelling PT course was to run 3.5 kilometres with full kit in a certain time. I had become pretty good at it and recalled the arduous route we used to take. Out the gates of 1 Parachute Battalion, along the tar road and over into the big sports complex, down to the turnaround point under the big trees and back again, this time uphill all the way. It was tough to make it in the required time, although I had always done okay but would, like everyone else, almost drop from exhaustion at the end of it. Now our big H-frames weren’t packed with five days’ rations and my magazines were empty.

Tomorrow was a scheduled resupply day ... that is, if there was going to
be
a tomorrow. When we stopped and walked, we walked like speed-walkers, zigzagging south, choosing the easiest way through the bush. All that could be heard was our laboured breathing and the occasional curse as a thorn tugged out a chunk of bloody skin. We moved like this for about two hours before we had our first rest by the white sand walls of a large old Portuguese water reservoir and collapsed onto our kit, sweating in the cold night.

Doep said we were probably long past the 15-kilometre ‘death perimeter’ set by FAPLA and that they were unlikely to follow us this far south, because FAPLA did not want to get tangled up fighting SWAPO’s war and didn’t want to fuck with South Africa.

Stan came over as I sat leaning on my kit, smoking a cigarette that burned my lungs after the exertion. He too was wet with sweat in the dwindling full moon that had lost its eerie brilliance and was starting to dip behind the trees. He looked excited as he sat down next too me. “Why didn’t they just come and pull us out or send a Mirage to bomb them? They said we had support for this op, so what’s the fucking problem, then?”

I had been thinking about just this for the past three hours.

Stan was smiling and spoke in a hushed voice. “Doep said we were too close to the base camp to be pulled out. Gungie, this could start a fucking war with FAPLA,” he said, with his bush hat pushed high on his head. “The last time South Africa took out FAPLA troops was five years ago, in 1975, in Operation
Savannah
. Those Cubans are itching to have a go at us.”

“You think those were Cubans chasing us?”

“Hell, yeah! There are 40 or 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola ... where do you think they all are? Right here in southern Angola where the trouble is! Half that FAPLA base is probably Cuban troops. Some of the ones we shot were probably also Cuban.”

I pondered this and took a shallow drag of my cigarette that made me cough. I looked back slowly in the direction we had come from. Come to think of it, a couple of the dead FAPLA had looked a bit different, lighter-skinned. I stared into the night.

“That’s why they didn’t send a Mirage to bomb them. That would really piss Castro off.” Stan was standing up now and looked as happy as a pig in shit as he smiled and pointed back into the bush. “I can tell you, that was close … if we had stayed another half-hour, that T-55 would have come right through us and you’d better believe they would have had more than a platoon with them, coming after the South Africans!”

He seemed to relish the thought of us being massacred.

“Yeah, we would have lasted two minutes. How much ammo have you got?” I asked glibly.

“Two mags.”

I looked down at my burning forearms and in the moonlight saw a dozen long scratches where the thorns had torn my skin. As I rubbed them I could feel the hard pieces of thorn that had broken off under the skin. Stan was right—South Africa had not had a clash with FAPLA for several years. The Angolan army had always tried to stay out of SWAPO’s fight even though Angola let SWAPO set up bases in her territory. Recently, with the escalation of cross-border raids on SWAPO bases, SWAPO had moved their bases deeper into the interior, sometimes right next to FAPLA bases in an attempt to avoid getting fucked up. Trust
Valk
4 to start a fucking international incident. Go on in and attack the Angolan army and get away with it. I thought how my brother would laugh when I told him about it. Little did I know that he would hear about it the next day on the six o’clock news when it was reported that South African troops had clashed with the Angolan army while carrying out strikes against SWAPO in Angola, killing 16 Angolan troops, and that Angola had complained bitterly and lodged a complaint at the United Nations.

He would only find out months later when I told him that it was my merry bunch of men who had carried out the raid. We would also find out pretty soon that South Africa’s policy of avoiding confrontation with the Angolan army was about to change and that soon we would be the spearhead in a massive offensive against FAPLA, deep into Angola.

¹⁵
casualty evacuation, in this case by helicopter

¹⁶
Wake up, Gungie … he almost took you out! (Afrikaans)

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Misunderstanding—Genesis

We moved a bit farther south and felt safe enough to be resupplied with ammo and food early the next morning. We were also able to stay put in a TB and relax for a couple of days. I stripped and cleaned my rifle that was thick with carbon and dust. We even had the chance to rinse our filthy clothes in a smaller second reservoir with less than a metre of water in it, but enough for our needs. The rains had disappeared. I washed and donned my olive-green FAPLA pullover and scrubbed the thick bloodstain from the SWAPO cap which I pulled onto my head. The pullover still reeked of scented soap from when I had found it in the satchel stashed in the trees at the ambush. Now I saw why during training they had emphasized that we could not use soap on operations, as after weeks in the bush the scent was still strong enough to be picked up from a fair distance. For many years afterwards, whenever I smelled a bar of soap my mind would flash back to FAPLA, the ambush and the dead man’s clothes.

At one of our early-evening TBs we came upon a troop of
nagapies
, a kind of small monkey with bulging eyes that comes out at night and once caught is quickly tamed.
Nagapies
, Afrikaans for night apes, or bushbabies, are about the size of a small rabbit, and prized possessions to be smuggled back to South Africa. It was a powerful symbol of a true bush fighter to walk among the juniors with one of these little primates perched loyally on your shoulder. Now I watched as half the platoon, the war forgotten, dropped their rifles and whooped like kids as they ran around some thorn trees where a small troop of
nagapies
had become marooned and were clinging onto the thin branches, staring down and foiling the paratroopers’ clumsy attempts to capture them. The troops formed a circle around the trees and began to shake the branches to try and get them to fall out, but this proved impossible as the bushbabies simply bounced up and down, their long fingers holding on with ease.

Smit, who was a small chap, scaled the trunk of the one thin tree to try and get closer to the branch that four or five of them had moved up to. The little creatures screeched as they leaped with ease to the next branch, where they grabbed on with their strange-looking fingers, glaring at their would-be captors. After five minutes of playing ‘musical branches’ they took a chance, leaped screeching from the tree, one after the other, and landed almost among the circle of troops beneath them. But, like lightning, they scampered away to the closest clump of trees, kicking up puffs of sand, lost from sight and gone forever.

One, who seemed younger than the others, remained clutching the branch as Smit climbed up. At the last minute, as Smit lunged to grab it, he fell and grasped onto a branch just in time to break his fall, but the awkward manoeuvre left him hanging in the tree, looking like an ape himself. I sat next to my kit brewing a fire bucket of tea, watching with interest and roaring with laughter at the show. In falling, Smit had persuaded the young
nagapie
to make a desperate leap to the ground as his companions had done but with a superb rugby-tackle dive, Lange van Rensburg snagged the creature. Everyone cheered as Lange held up the little bloke triumphantly. After a few minutes the
nagapie
became totally quiet and seemed quite accepting of his new parent. Lange would keep this little fellow for the rest of the bush trip and eventually take him home with him to the Karoo, where Lange would die in a car accident soon after leaving the army.

Even Lieutenant Doep, who had little interest in personal relations and even less in the English-speakers in the platoon, had eased up a bit. He sauntered up to our little group of
soutpiele
.
¹⁷
It did not matter that we spoke almost fluent Afrikaans and had been three or more generations in South Africa. He lit up a cigarette, squatted next to us and slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“How’re your feet, Korff?” he asked in Afrikaans.

“They’re holding out okay, lieutenant ... not bad.”

“You’ll have to put your boots back on before we get back to the base.”

“Ja, I know. I will, lieutenant.”

He looked at Doogy who had his LMG propped up against a small tree behind him.

“That LMG of yours has been talking a bit of Afrikaans lately, eh?”

Doogy smiled, gave a quick account of the contact and demonstrated how he’d had to change a broken ammo belt while half on the run. We took the opportunity to question Lieutenant Doep on what had been said to him on the radio about the FAPLA incident. He took a long drag of his cigarette and instinctively blew the smoke forcefully downward so as not to make a cloud. “We went too far north and crossed over the agreed line into FAPLA’s immediate area. Angola’s agreement with South Africa is that we can’t cross this line on operations against SWAPO. We fucked up and were too far north and crossed it ... and we are definitely not allowed to shoot FAPLA troops. There is still going to be shit about this.”