19 With a Bullet (7 page)

The night jump was exciting; this time we jumped from an old DC-3 Dakota, which wallowed round the night sky like an old ship. We were cramped beside each other and were jumping with PWCs (personal weapons containers), substituted in this case by the 30-kilogram concrete ‘marble’ of ill repute that we’d had to carry and sweat with on the PT course. It would be wrapped in canvas and strapped to our sides, to be released on a four-metre rope when our parachutes deployed.

Everything was bathed in the soft red of the ‘no jump’ light with only the full moon sending soft white flashes through the windows as the plane rolled up and down, lighting the face of the man opposite you.

“Stand up, hook up!”

We heaved to our feet and fought to keep our balance as the plane lurched and the tail swung to one side, pushing the plane into the wide final turn to the drop zone. A quick kit-check of the man in front of you, and then:

“Stand in the door!”

It was difficult to maintain balance as the old Dakota struggled to slow down to the ideal jumping speed, making us lurch forward with little to hold onto except the man in front. Then the green light came on and there was the long-ringing buzzer, like a smoke alarm, a mad shuffle-run to get to the door and the hard slap on the rump from the dispatcher. Then down into the night, upside down, head over heels through the aircraft’s cold slipstream to be tossed up behind the plane and start falling; all the time trying to maintain a good exit position with knees and feet together and arms over the emergency parachute. Suddenly—and thankfully—the
pop
as the parachute canopy snaps open, filling with air. Breathlessly you try and do your drills: look up to check if the canopy is fully deployed or whether the guide lines are entwined around each other, or perhaps over the canopy. Everything looks okay—now look down and kick your legs out, pulling the leg straps to a better position, and then jettison the heavy PWC at your hip. With a jerk it drops away, four metres beneath you, as you hold knees and feet together in a good parachute position.

Only then can you relax for a second and look around at the floating canopies around you, or do a Red Indian whoop into the night. Then there’s barely time to get ready as the moon-tanned ground comes rushing up at about forty feet with ground rush, and to roll on good Mother Earth with a crash. It was a training jump, but for a while I was a World War II paratrooper jumping over Normandy on the night of June 6, 1944 … D-Day.

On the day of our last jump, our families were allowed to come and watch the jump and we were all, unceremoniously, handed our maroon berets and fabric wings to sew on the berets. And that was that. I was finally a paratrooper.

I felt great, and we headed home for a long-weekend pass. It was only my second pass in 16 weeks, and it was great to be back in Civvy Street again. The farm was winter-dry and brown; the tall trees stood nakedly against the cold winter sky. It was great to have mom’s home-cooked stew again and to chat and joke with the black workers and hear what had been going on with them, and in the area generally.

My father was pleased that I had got my wings. We had a few whiskies together as I told him what I had been up to. He told me that they had all heard about Operation
Sceptic
on the news, that it had been a big operation and a great success. He also gave me the latest news on what was going on in South Africa. He said there had been quite a few bomb blasts in downtown Johannesburg, and that the ANC was to blame. They were stepping up their campaign against the apartheid government.

We all vaguely knew that the apartheid system in South Africa was wrong and would have to change one day; but likewise, everybody also knew that to accede to majority rule, then the banned African National Congress would surely rule. They and their jailed leader Mandela had direct communist links. Their small band of ‘freedom fighters’, or terrorists—or whatever you wanted to call them—were being trained and supplied by a host of communist countries that backed the whole anti-apartheid struggle. Red stars and hammer-and-sickle flags were waved openly and enthusiastically at large rallies in the townships for the whole world to see. The world saw it as a black-versus-white thing, South Africa as an evil white empire, trying to keep the noble black man down. We saw a party, the ANC, with strong communist ties that would take over the country if there was the muchclamoured-for ‘one-man-one-vote’.

“If the ANC gets control of the government the country is fucked!” my father said with feeling as he cleaned his FN rifle, his Sunday-morning ritual. He was one of the best shots in his reserve regiment, with a stack of trophies.

“These guys want to nationalize all the gold mines and big industry in the country. Next minute we’ll be communist.”

“But we can’t keep them down forever, pa,” I argued, playing devil’s advocate. “The blacks live better here than anywhere else in Africa; we bend over backwards to help them with jobs and housing, and they just fuck everything up ... but they are the majority.”

“I say ... tell the world to mind their own business, and let us look after ours. If it wasn’t for the whites, this country would be like Zambia or bloody Ghana.” He ran the rod through the barrel, sipped on his Hansa lager, and gave Taina a smile as she walked onto the verandah.

“Free Mandela …free Mandela. Mandela belongs where he is, in jail. He’s the one that’s connected to these communist countries.”

I looked out over the large well-kept garden with its sweeping lawns and beautiful flowerbeds. The huge hedge was brown with the winter dust from the dirt roads, the birds were chattering in the tall bushes and doves cooed in the high trees that surrounded the park-like garden. The winter morning sun was weak but warm on my forearms and made Taina’s large green eyes twinkle as she held up her hand to shield the rays and squint at me in the way that wrinkled up her pretty nose.

“And that’s not counting what’s going on at the border with you guys,” my dad carried on. “There are 40,000 or more Cuban troops on our doorstep, helping SWAPO and the MPLA. We’re surrounded by communists and the world wants us to hand over the country to the ‘people’.” He shook his head.

I wasn’t thinking about communists anymore, and looked at Taina, thinking how she had filled out in the last couple of months. It seemed that she had matured a lot; she sat in the chair and gazed at me flirtatiously. I knew that look and the way that her lips puckered. I couldn’t wait for my mother to serve up brunch out on the garden table so that Taina and I could disappear for a while and catch up on four lost months.

1 RECONNAISSANCE
COMMANDO SELECTION
COURSE

Walk like a man—Grand Funk Railroad

Walking in the thick, white Caprivi Strip sand was hard, and the mortar case filled with cement on my back made it all the harder. I had eaten two meals in the last ten days and had walked almost 150 kilometres. The three weeks before that, we’d had the luxury of a meal every third day. So, in a month, we had had 12 small meals and walked about 500 kilometres.

It had been Hans’s idea that we volunteer for 1 Reconnaissance Commando when they came around looking for a few good men. These were the elite— the guys who dropped hundreds of kilometres inside Angola or Mozambique in four-man teams for months at a time, observing the enemy and blowing up bridges and installations. These boys were the real thing, legendary in South Africa and around the world. We where impressed with the movies they showed us of camouflaged soldiers doing HALO drops from 20,000 feet in the middle of the night; small sticks of men sneaking around the bush watching every enemy movement. It sounded pretty exciting, so John Delaney, Hans and I casually put our names down and were surprised when a month later, after we had almost forgotten about it, we were told that the three of us were among six who had been selected from around 30 applicants from 1 Parachute Battalion to undertake the fearsome Recce selection course, and that we were to leave the next day.

So here we were—a group of sweating, skinny, filthy men trudging through the harsh bush and thick sand of the Caprivi Strip and trying to hold on to the very tiny part of our brain that pushed us on, one step after another, to the next rendezvous point 25 kilometres away, knowing that we would simply be sent back again when we arrived. It was one of the toughest selection courses in the world. (Recces’ equivalent would perhaps be the United States Navy SEALs who, as far as I understood, did not spend seven weeks of their selection course walking 700 kilometres with next to no food.) The first phase of the selection process was a nine-week PT course, which we were spared because we had already gone through the gruelling PT course at 1 Parachute Battalion.

When the six of us paratroopers arrived at the infamous Bluff in Durban (1 Reconnaissance Commando’s base was on a large bluff, concealed by trees overlooking the sea), it was at the end of the nine-week PT course. We watched as straggling lines of dead-beat troops came in from kayaking around the bay and were now running with their kayaks on their shoulders. We climbed down from the trucks and felt awed standing in the legendary 1 Recce base camp, but were quickly hustled off to our quarters overlooking the sea. We had arrived just in time to be shipped off in trucks to Zululand for the second phase of the selection course, bush orientation.

It began with not being fed throughout the day-long drive to Zululand—a wilderness area a day’s ride north of Durban. When we arrived in the middle of the night, we immediately set out on a 25-kilometre route march. This sort of thing went on for two weeks.

Zululand is humid and subtropical. It was beautiful and lush on the coast, so we were able to get an occasional green wild banana or some maize meal from the local people who lived in scattered villages. We had to cross high mountains on our route marches, and would walk for miles on the long, deserted beaches carrying telephone poles. It was fun at the beginning to get away from 1 Parachute Battalion and all the bullshit. At least we were in the bush, sleeping in the dirt and walking all day covered with ‘Black is Beautiful’, a thick black grease that is used as camouflage cream—but after two weeks of marching 15 to 25 kilometres a day with little or no food, the adventure began to pall. One of the paratroopers, a senior bloke we didn’t know well, got lost. They had to send a spotter plane to find him.

The two weeks in Zululand weren’t that bad; only when all 200 of us volunteers left Zululand in a C-130 and flew thousands of miles north up to the Caprivi Strip for the third phase, did the shit really start.

The Caprivi is a piece of beautiful South West African bush that stretches in a long finger between Zambia and Botswana. It has tall trees and scattered evergreen scrub grows everywhere. At the start of the border war it had been a hot spot for SWAPO infiltration from Zambia but when Zambia lost interest in the ‘cause’ it became inactive, but it was still a ‘red area’—ideal for a Recce selection course. It is usually very hot and dry but it was the rainy season and the tough thorn and big mopane trees were thick with green leaves while the bush teemed with game.

Sightings, spoor and brushes with buffalo, wild dog, hyena, elephant and lion would be fairly common, as we were to find out in our hundreds of kilometres of meandering. Rainy season or not, when we climbed off the C-130 onto a small landing strip in the bush, the heat hit us like a wall. The glare from the white sand was intense and we were greeted by rough-looking black and white Reconnaissance troops dressed in terrorist camo and holding strange machine guns.

“This looks menacing,” I thought. “These guys look like they live in the bush.”

We were strip-searched and all hidden watches, cigarettes or anything that could make life easier in the bush was taken away. We were then divided into six-or seven-man teams, given a compass and a compass bearing and told to start walking through the bush to the rendezvous 20 ‘clicks’ (kilometres) away.

We walked and walked and walked. Then we walked some more. Day in and day out. Through nights, days, and nights again. We walked for five more weeks, 20 to 30 clicks every day, through the African bush.

No mad PT to fuck you up like there had been at 1 Parachute Battalion, just trudging through the Caprivi bush day after day, week after week, for 500 kilometres, until my brain screamed “No more!”

I pushed on.

My stomach shrunk to nothing, so did my body fat. We now had one meal every five days. We were given three cans of food and a loaf of bread to share between two guys every five days. And, every day, relentlessly, without flagging, another 20 or 30 kilometres. No nutrients; zero energy. Day after day. I had no idea that walking could be such prolonged torture. And now they gave us 60-millimetre mortar cases filled with cement to carry in our kit.

My mind started to play games with me. Some days I felt okay, gripped my mind and pushed on, step by step, but the next day I was depleted and could hardly move or think properly.

“Fuck this … I can’t carry on … no, carry on, you can do it … I can’t go on. I’m stopping at the tree! Carry on, boy … go past the tree and keep on … don’t stop now!”

It became a second-by-second mind-fuck.

We were a mixed bunch, but most of our course mates were older Permanent Force personnel with rank. Their rank was meaningless on this course and we spoke on an equal basis to sergeants, lieutenants and captains. Some were civilians who had finished their military service and had come back to try out for the Recces, like the skinny blond-haired bus driver who ended up coming first out of everybody on the course. There was Jan Muis, a huge bull of a man with bright blue eyes and a big walrus moustache, whose quiet manner kept us going. He had come from Civvy Street after his brother, a Recce apparently equally as big, was killed on a mission deep in Angola. The story was that he had taken 12 AK-47 rounds before he went down, taking a handful of SWAPO with him. Everyone had their own reasons for wanting to become a Recce. I was running out of reasons.