“This is how you do it—jump out like it’s fucking D-Day, man!”
I fell through the air as if in slow motion and felt all my battle webbing and 500 rounds of ammunition come flying up around my neck as my body fell and struck the ground.
I had badly underestimated my extra weight and hit the ground hard, losing my breath and rolling onto my side. Immediately I felt a sharp pain shoot through my ankle. With nowhere else to land, the rest of the ten-man stick came crashing down on and around me and we all ended up lying in a pile, dazed and disorientated. I lay at the bottom of the heap and waited as the rest of the stick scrambled to pick themselves up. I dragged myself up and, as I took a step, I immediately felt that I had hurt my ankle. I could still walk but sharp pain shot up my leg and I could feel the warm tingling sensation of swelling.
I limped and skipped, trying to keep up with the stick and retrieve the heavy bag of ammo that had hooked up on my back water bottle which was half strangling me. I couldn’t do it and with a vicious curse I yanked it free and advanced forward with the stick at a breathless hobbled trot to catch up with the other platoons. They were about 30 metres ahead of us and had already linked up and formed a long, jagged sweep line that was advancing on the smoking target that looked a lot closer now that we were on the ground.
Our end of the sweep line was still lagging behind as we got clear of the long chana and started crashing through high dry grass and bushes that had not looked so thick from the sky. I was holding my LMG thrust forward as if doing a bayonet charge, with a 50-round belt hanging and swinging underneath it.
It had become very quiet after the helicopters had left and the only thing to be heard was my own rapid breathing and our boots crashing through dry brush, with a surprising amount of shouted battle-talk going up and down the line as we crunched across the last 100 metres.
“Easy, boys… don’t bunch… spread out!”
It looked like the bombs had started a fire in the grass somewhere to our left; brown smoke rose up from the veld. The grey smoke from the bombs had wafted in several directions now and it was hard to tell exactly where the target was. We came up to some trees and I braced myself but still there was no enemy fire. After a few more metres a shout came down the line.
“Turn around, everybody… Left wheel!… Left wheel!”
“Goddamnit… what’s going on?”
“We missed the base… turn, head this way!”
The whole sweep line started to turn in a more northerly direction and, being at the bottom of the sweep line, we had to move at double-time to keep up with the wheeling line. Personally, I was not doing well. Like everybody else, I was wound up like a spring, ready to uncoil, but having to try and run on a twisted ankle and catch up at the same time was taking its toll. I was breathing hard and sweat was pouring down my face into my eyes, blinding me with the sting of it.
I tried to wipe my eyes with my forearm but this just made it worse because my forearm itself was drenched with sweat. My hands had formed sandy, sweaty grease all over the MAG and I had to readjust my grip every few seconds. To top it, my right ankle was forcing me to kind of roll and skip as I walked, using up twice the amount of energy.
Regardless of everything I kept my burning and blinking eyes firmly fixed on the surrounding grass and bush as best I could. I was determined to nail any SWAPO terrorist bastard—recruit or veteran—before he nailed me. Strangely, I was still unable to visualize a live terr moving in the bush before my eyes. It was a mental block. What did a live terr look like? Would I recognize one?
We had crashed through about 50 metres of high brown grass in the new direction and soon came on another thicket of trees—and then, suddenly, there was the target. There was a huge tree on the edge of the thicket whose thick limbs had been blasted off by the bombing, which now showed big white patches of flesh. Behind the tree, in the shadows and bush, I saw the remains of what looked like two long huts that had been made of branches tied together.
One looked like it had taken a direct hit and had been blown to pieces; only part of one wall remained standing. Behind it stood another hut that seemed untouched but the whole hut was leaning to one side. I realized we were right in the target. No AK-47 shots! No RPGs! Quickly it became very obvious that the base was deserted. We moved forward slowly. My finger was poised around the MAG trigger, ready to let off a 20-shot volley at anything that fucking moved.
“Check that one out!” barked Lieutenant du Plessis, pointing quickly at the hut that had been destroyed by the bombs. Kevin Green and I moved cautiously towards the destroyed hut.
The acrid stench of high explosive was still thick in the air as we walked across a green carpet of leaves and small branches that had been blown off by the powerful bomb blasts. Around the hut were a couple of bomb craters about five metres wide by a metre or so deep, with big clods of earth burned white and grey by the blast. The hut itself was a tangle of twisted and broken branches. It had not taken a direct hit but there was a crater about three metres from the hut and this had been enough to completely destroy it. Kevin Green and I moved through the mess and found nothing.
We discovered a couple of well-trodden paths leading from the hut into the bush behind. I made quick eye contact with Kevin and we gingerly started to walk around a small sprout of bush, our fingers on the triggers—ready. We crept on and came across a small clearing under some high trees that was untouched by the bombing. In the middle of the clearing stood a long, rough but sturdy four-legged table made of branches tied together and about five rows of benches behind each other, made in the same way. It seemed to be some kind of classroom. The ground around this ‘bush furniture’ was well used and even seemed to have been swept. On one side was a long rack that stood at an angle—what looked to be a weapons rack where SWAPO would lean their weapons while they learned new ways to ‘kill the racist boere’. By the looks of it, it seemed that the camp had probably been deserted for a couple of days.
By this time the company had gone through all of the five buildings—or what was left of them—and all found the same thing… nothing. Not even a scrap of paper.
“The bastards are gone,” Lieutenant du Plessis observed with feeling.
We stood in the clearing. Doep spoke briefly into the radio that had quickly been set up. We got a minute to relax and get our breath. I leaned against the table and peered around into the bush, trying to will a terr to come walking out from behind a dusty bush. I examined the way the branches on the table had been tightly tied together with long strips of green bark.
“They were right here, sitting on these benches,” I thought. Standing in their classroom broke the spell and in a second I imagined the bush class of SWAPO sitting on the benches, dressed in tiger-stripe uniform and the little peaked caps. Their faces were coal black and their eyes were bloodshot red— they were sweating. Against the rack they had their AK-47s and RPGs lined up, ready for action. Funny… whenever I thought of SWAPO, I imagined them red-eyed and sweating.
“Back to the chana. Go to the same helicopter that dropped you!” came the urgent shout from one of the other valk’s lieutenant, Dudley Grant.
We hurriedly turned and moved out the deserted little base and made our way back to the chana. The Pumas were already coming in a long formation over the treetops and landing like ducks in a row down the length of the chana. Being ‘cherries’, the sound of the Pumas’ loud chopping turbines biting the air spurred us on and we double-timed it for a couple of hundred metres.