19 With a Bullet (46 page)

They were pretty good shots—a shot cracked past my ear like a ringmaster’s whip, the closest I had ever experienced. This time I did duck down. I took the opportunity to try and wipe the sweat from my eyes against my sleeve but this only made it worse. I’m convinced that the sweat in a fire fight is different from normal sweat. I had noticed this before, when we hit the FAPLA troops by mistake a month ago after the SWAPO ‘breakfast party’ ambush. This variety of sweat seems a lot thicker, saltier and slimier; it floods out of your pores in rivers, almost covering your skin with a goo that is hard to wipe off. Years later, when I boxed, I used to sweat like hell but it would run like water. I looked up again and started shooting but now could hardly keep my eyes open because the sweat was in my eyes, making it almost impossible to keep them open.

“Here I go again—can’t see what I’m shooting at!”

I fired almost blindly. When the shooting finally abated I sat down, took my bandana from around my neck and wiped my eyes. I struggled for more than a minute to clear my stinging eyes. What was this stuff? Adrenaline or something? I could see at least three bodies lying sprawled under the trees.

“
Valk
2 needs help! Turn around and go back!”

A desperate fire fight had broken out behind us to the left, the gunshots sounding like a string of fireworks that had been tied together and lit. I couldn’t imagine anyone coming out alive from a fight so furious. We turned and headed back the way we had come—back over the small
chana
, past the bunker I had cleared—and turned towards the fire fight where gunsmoke and dust hung over the thicket like fog.

“There! There!”

In front of us was a group of four or five black troops in camouflage who were fleeing in long strides but still stopping to take quick shots behind them. From our angle, we were partially hidden by some bush. In their preoccupation with making a good getaway after holding down
Valk
2 from a superior position, they didn’t see us.

We had no time to get into position; we just stood there and blasted at them. They didn’t know what hit them. Two dropped spinning to the ground as their luckier comrades disappeared into the trees like greased lightning. The shooting died down and we met up with
Valk
2 who were grinning with shock as if they had just come off a roller-coaster ride and had been lucky to make it off. None of them, as far as I remember, was seriously wounded. We inspected the little barricade where the FAPLA troops had made their stand and found two-metre-deep trenches with walkways to stand on if you wanted to look over the top, cement plaster on the walls and bunkers as big as bedrooms dug into the side walls. There were desks, shelves and beds in the bunker. It looked like some kind of guardroom. One Angolan soldier lay still, half-hidden under a tree. He looked dead. A single shot rang out. Now he was definitely dead. A little farther on, next to the big bunker, we found a parked T-55 Soviet tank. Dug into a pit with a ramp, it was invisible from 15 metres away. Made of crude, rough metal and painted green, it looked just like the ones I had seen in photographs of the Eastern Front in the Second World War.

The shooting had died down, except for the odd shot that buzzed over our heads from afar. We moved forward slowly and occupied a trench, and then sat tight for a while, snooping around and waiting for I-don’t-know-what before we moved onto the next section. Every now and then shots rang out, signifying that an Angolan soldier had been found hiding in a bunker and had just joined the ranks of the deceased. We had probably been into Operation
Protea
for about three hours now. It seemed that the worst was over, with only sporadic shooting coming from ahead. We moved forward over some trenches and came upon a small complex of brick buildings. We entered the building.

“Hey, look! Here’s Kruger’s bush hat! Look, here’s his name on the inside!” Badenhorst held up an SADF bush hat he had just found in a desk drawer. He had a huge grin on his face. I was kicking through some clothing lying on the small office floor. I stopped and moved over to have a look.

“Check right here ... Kruger … there’s his name!”

I looked at the brown South African bush hat and, sure enough, there was Kruger’s name in faded black pen, visible next to the bright orange DayGlo sticker on the inside of the hat. Soon a group stood around inspecting the bush hat. “Jeez, how about that. It
is
Kruger’s bush hat! He lost it when we hit those FAPLA in
Ceiling
. They must have found it and brought it here to the HQ.”

I grinned. Kruger’s bush hat had travelled far. The area where we had made contact with FAPLA by mistake and had to run for it in Operation
Ceiling
was hundreds of kilometres away. They must have brought it all the way to the HQ here at Ongiva to use as evidence for the their inevitable complaint to the United Nations Security Council that the ‘white racists’ had attacked them. I chuckled. What were the odds of pulling open a desk drawer and finding the bush hat you had lost almost two months earlier in another operation. Kruger had been pulled back to the medics after being shot in the hand earlier but was going to be pleased to get his hat back .

And an HQ indeed this was! Recklessly we opened cabinets and drawers and found piles of packaged documents and dozens of maps with areas circled in red pen.

“Look at this! These are fucking SWAPO locations! Damn, look at this!”

I turned and looked at the pile of maps that Paul Greef was holding. I could see S.W. written in red pen next to at least a dozen circled areas.

“Show Doep.”

Doep pushed his helmet back and shuffled through the pile of maps. His eyes shone as we pointed out the marked spots on the maps as troops brought more maps they had found in some of the other cabinets. We had happened upon one of the main FAPLA intelligence offices in southern Angola.

Doep pressed the receiver attached to his epaulette and it crackled into life. “Tango Lima, Tango Lima, this is Victor Four … do you read, over?”

“Go ahead, Victor Four … over.”

“Tango Lima, we have found what looks like the operations building and have a pile of maps with marked SWAPO locations. We need someone to come and pick them up. Over.”

“Affirmative, Victor Four. Intelligence will be on the way. Stand by and be ready with smoke.”

The base was so spread out that we had to pop a smoke for them to find us. We hung around the buildings and the guys rummaged through every office desk and cabinet. Some grabbed booty and souvenirs and stuffed them into their webbing. I did not. I decided this was too serious a time to be scrambling for souvenirs. I couldn’t think of a worse way to meet your end than to get blown up by a booby trap while scrabbling for booty. (I saw a lieutenant blown to bits by a booby trap in a bunker in a later trip, on Operation
Daisy
.)

I squatted outside the small group of buildings, smoked a cigarette and scanned the area while they squabbled over prized Eastern Bloc webbing and equipment. A good few kilometres of the base still lay ahead of us but it looked pretty quiet from here. Probably all still hiding in the trenches. Behind some small prefab buildings, behind the ops rooms under some trees we found a large sand model of about four metres square. I couldn’t make head or tail of it but Doep informed us that we had to stay put by the model until the intelligence outfit came over. After half an hour someone popped a green smoke and they arrived with big suitcases and a few infantry troops as escorts. Not far from the sand model under some trees, lay an old stripped-down hulk of a plane that was missing wings, tail, undercarriage and engine and nose. It looked so small that I didn’t even pay attention to it. I thought it must be spare parts or an old civilian plane but later learned it was what was left of a South African Impala Mk II that had been shot down during Operation
Sceptic
a year before. Our Platoon,
Valk
4, had stumbled onto one of the Angolan army’s main intelligence centres. Later, South Africa launched another equally-large mechanized operation because of intelligence gleaned during Operation
Protea
. I firmly believe that it was this intelligence that the led to next big operation into Angola, Operation
Daisy
.

We spread out and moved on. A black youth leaped out of a bunker six or seven metres in front of us and took off like a jackrabbit. He was extraordinarily tall and muscular ... and unarmed. He had stripped off his shirt and had only his camouflage pants and boots on. His skin was smooth and black as tar. His back muscles flexed and bulged as he ran for his life across the small piece of open ground, heading for a thicket 50 metres away. Five or six of us took a second or two to react, then opened fire at the fleeing man. I bent my head to my sights and aimed between his shoulder blades. My rifle kicked into my shoulder as I fired five or six shots. Dust kicked up all around him as he gained speed, zigzagging and running like the hounds of hell were after him.

He was already maybe 50 metres from us, with his arms pumping in a steady rhythm like an olympic athlete in the race of his life. I quickly changed my footing, held my arm steady and took better aim this time, a little higher, and pulled off another salvo of shots. Through the smoke I saw that he seemed almost charmed. Although the ground around him was alive with spurts of dust from the bullets of the six men who were shooting at him, he ran on untouched. I paused. Inexplicably I took my finger off the trigger and stopped shooting but kept my rifle up so the others could not see I had stopped shooting.

“Go for it, mate, you’re going to make it … Go! Go!”

I lifted my head and watched through the smoke.

“Go, you’re almost there,” my mind willed quietly. Just before the tree line he stumbled and seemed to trip over his feet. His long arms went down to break his fall and he rolled in the sand and lay still.

“Fucking hell … that kaffir can run. He almost got all the way across the
chana
… see that ... with all of us shooting!”

“Shit, doesn’t say too much for our shooting. See how he went down? Looked like he was going to make it,” Fourie hooted.

I said nothing and felt a sadness. We moved past the dead unarmed youth who lay in the sand with his eyes open. Someone put a shot through his head, just to make sure.

By about two in the afternoon most of the shooting had stopped. We had been at it since 06:00. The 1,000-man army we had expected wasn’t there but FAPLA had left a few hundred diehards to face us and now it seemed that they too had retreated through the maze of trenches.

The worst was over. By now we had all got the hang of this thing and were moving methodically, like veterans, though the cavernous trenches, giving hand signals, moving rapidly in small groups. We were about halfway through the huge base. The midday sun baked down on us as we cleared each bunker with fire or grenades. We had got the order to stop using M27s and to use our ‘Willy Pete’ white phosphorus grenades instead, as some FAPLA troops had been hiding in bunkers covered with mattresses and survived the M27 blasts. Later I heard the story of how one plucky FAPLA sergeant had climbed out of a bunker after a grenade had been tossed in and, armed only with a piece of wood, had laid into a South African lieutenant. He had been clubbed down and taken prisoner.

We had just come through a long field of trenches. We turned our sweep line at a 90-degree angle to our right from the way we had come and were preparing to sweep through a long open field in front of us that was kneehigh with patches of dead grass.

“Okay, go down and take a smoke break,” Lieutenant Doep barked.

He was two men to my left. It was our first official break in eight hours. Feeling pretty safe and in control, most of us took off our heavy jump helmets and sat on our haunches, still holding the formation of our sweep line. It was the first time in eight hours I had taken my helmet off and it felt great to feel the hot air on my head. My hair was drenched with sweat and I had a sharp headache down the middle of my head from the weight of the helmet. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

Once again I took the bandana from around my neck and wiped my eyes. “They should make a headband standard army issue—a person could get killed with sweat in his eyes,” I thought. I made a mental note to mention it to someone later on.

“Hey, Gungie! What do you think about your birthday curse now? Looks like you’re going to be okay, eh?”

I had completely forgotten that today was my 21st birthday. Everyone in the
valk
knew of my uneasy feeling about this op. A chorus of laughs went up around me. Even Lieutenant Doep turned to me with a big grin on his thin, shark-like lips and said in Afrikaans, exhaling a cloud of smoke: “Well Korff, are you going to make it?”

“Looks like it, lieutenant,” I answered sheepishly and laughed too.

We sat on our helmets for five minutes, chatting and laughing down the line. Fourie was still going on about the FAPLA troop who almost got away. “I’ve never seen a man run that fast! I know what they mean now when they say it’s hard to hit a moving target. That guy looked as if he was always just in front of the bullets.”

I thought about why I had stopped shooting. I had no real answer. “Stupid! If he had got away and picked up an AK, do you think he would have stopped shooting if he had you in his sights?” I asked myself. The small voice inside me answered clearly: “He was unarmed and running for his life, that’s why you stopped.” The other side of me said: “So what? He would have shot you.” I was glad no one had seen me stop shooting. I laughed and agreed that I never knew how hard it was to hit a man running.

Lieutenant Doep was the only one standing. He walked in small circles, talking loudly into the handset pushed to his ear. I was looking his way, just finishing my second cigarette when a loud shot cracked out from the dry grass ten metres in front of us. Doep flipped violently backwards, his feet kicking forward from under him with the receiver flying into the air. He fell flat on his back. I snatched up my rifle. A single puff of grey smoke rose from the grass, just metres in front of us. The six of us closest rose as one man and, with helmets off, charged the suicide sniper’s position, shooting as we ran. The FAPLA troop did not even have time to turn over. He died on his belly, still in his shooting position, in a hail of South African bullets. We stood over the FAPLA soldier for a moment. A second later I turned to see that Lieutenant Doep was not dead. He was now flying towards us, almost in mid-air, with his long wet blond hair flowing behind him and his face flushed red, locked in a murderous mask. His eyes bulged with rage as he landed and fired four or five shots into the already-dead soldier, almost decapitating him. Lieutenant Doep was visibly shaken. He put his rifle down, his eyes still bulging. He felt his head with his fingers. The skin was not broken but he said he’d felt the bullet pass through his hair. He checked himself, not believing he was unscathed, but after a minute when he found himself intact he broke out in a huge boyish grin.