“You’ll get your turn; don’t worry. Soon enough we will go looking for Boy in his own backyard and show him just what it’s like making war with the Boere!”{Afrikaners, der. farmers}
There was a chorus of whoops from around the fire. We knew that if Lindsay said we were going in after them, then that’s what was going to happen.
He was a born warrior and had been up here making war since Operation Savannah in 1975 when the South Africans almost reached Luanda. The story was that Lindsay only went back to South Africa for two months each year and had been doing so for the last five or six years. After a shit, shave and shampoo we chatted like happy school kids and wolfed down the huge chops with thickly buttered bread, followed by cans of ice-cold Castle lager and slabs of refrigerated Cadbury’s chocolate. It felt great to look like a white man again after washing off weeks of dry layers of Black is Beautiful camo grease.
Later that night, after a foray to the air force bar for additional supplies, we partied late into the night without any sign of the leadership element who, by the sound of it, seemed to be having a party of their own. The next morning we were told that Valk 2, while we had been partying the night away, had made contact while doing foot patrols near Beacon 10, about 80 clicks east of where we had been, and had got four kills in a night ambush at a waterhole.
Apparently the SWAPO had been on a long-range patrol, heavily laden with landmines, heading deep across the border for the mining town of Tsumeb, a few hundred kilometres south of Beacon 10. It seemed that SWAPO was doing a big push which was apparently normal in the rainy season.
We settled into Fireforce, which was a pleasure. A short parade at 07:00, followed by morning situation reports and a few menial chores like cleaning ablutions and storerooms, then lying around the pool the rest of the day writing long-overdue letters and just generally bullshitting.
Luck was with us; RSM Louw, for some reason, had been shipped back to South Africa and life on the border was like it was supposed to be—no bullshit and let’s concentrate on killing terrs, not pulling up fucking weeds. It wasn’t so blazing hot these days and I began going for a run in the afternoons. I felt weak after almost a month in the bush, living on rat packs and cigarettes, and started slowly at first, but I was soon running halfway around the big air force base, a distance of 13 kilometres. I would then go to the small homemade weight gym next to the hangar, which consisted of a pull-up bar and a few paint cans filled with cement with poles in them that served as barbells. I even began shadow-boxing when I was alone, working my right cross and left hook but it felt useless—boxing seemed so far away and irrelevant to where I was in the middle of Owamboland.
I also got to see how the PF, the Permanent Force, lived. Their accommodation, surprisingly, was just as sparse as ours, except for their wellstocked bar, snack canteen and new swimming pool—it was strange to see Commandant Lindsay and company relaxing at the pool, because somehow I could never picture him relaxing anywhere.
It was here that I first saw a group of about nine American dogs of war who had sauntered into the HQ to report their arrival. Their spokesman was a tall captain, with dark aviator sunglasses, who wore a maroon airborne beret at a rakish angle on his clean-shaven head. They wore South African browns. A couple of them were shaved bald with eagles and parachutes tattooed on their forearms. They had R4s slung over their shoulders but a few had old, well-used M16s hanging on their shoulders and pistols at their sides. They were part of 44 Brigade, a newly formed outfit that had moved into some tents next to us behind the kitchens. They seemed to be mostly made up of ex-Rhodesian soldiers who had come over to South Africa. Now that their war in Rhodesia had been lost for them by the politicians, they had come to join our little war in Angola.
The Rhodesians looked like a tough bunch, having fought a long brutal bush war for the last however many years. Their kill rate against ZANLA and ZIPRA{ZANLA: Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army; ZIPRA: Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army} was sometimes a thousand to one. I had read somewhere that their paratroops would often do three combat jumps in a day. I had read that between 1950 and 1952 the French Colonial paras had boasted of 50-odd combat jumps, while in Vietnam the French had made 100 major jumps and the Americans only one. These Rhodesian troopies beat them all with hundreds and hundreds of jumps. Most of them had probably grown up in the bush and had been exposed to their bush war from a young age. Some of them looked not much older than us, but had years of bush-fighting behind them in the hot Rhodesian sticks.
After the Yanks left the HQ, I overheard Commandant Lindsay and his staff laughingly saying that the Americans were a bunch of cowboys and boozers who thought they were in the movies. His words would later prove true when one of them was killed by SWAPO in a contact while he performed moves that belonged in Hollywood and not in the Angolan bush war. When Stan mentioned that the Yanks’ airborne tattoos looked cool, I told him I could easily do a tattoo of an eagle and a parachute on his shoulder. He hesitated at first, but was soon enthusiastic about it and wanted me to start right away.
I had done a couple of tattoos on my brother and a friend at home, so I found two needles and glued them together between two matchsticks like a small harpoon, broke open a pen for ink and we had an instant tattooparlour in our tent. Stan was cheerful once he had made his mind up and sat in the chair with a pillow under his arm and smoked as I drew the swooping fish eagle and parachute, our battalion emblem, on his shoulder.
“The fucking 101st Airborne was a crack outfit in Vietnam. Over there they were called the Screaming Eagles. They were the ones who fought that battle at Hamburger Hill. They got the shit shot out of them, but kept on going for two days until they took the hill. They also took that bridge, didn’t they?”
“You got your wars mixed up— that’s in the Second World War, and I think that was the British Airborne. Stop moving around! Keep still, for fuck’s sake!”
“Huh?… hey, that hurts!”
I had read a book about the 101st Airborne during basic training and was familiar with their actions in the Second World War. They had dropped into France on D-Day and had fought gallantly against the Germans but, as was usual with paratroopers, their drop zone had somehow been fucked up and they landed in separate pockets and fought for days in small groups with no communications with their HQ.
“They shaved their hair like Mohicans, with a strip down the middle and painted their faces like fucking Red Indians on D-Day.”
In the meantime the tattoo that I was needling on his shoulder was taking on a different dimension as I began to ink it in. By the end of the sitting the aggressive, fluid swooping eagle I had drawn with the pen had come out as a motionless lame chicken with its stiff wings in the air and its head bowed as if scratching in the dirt for worms.
I wiped the bird clean of the blood, hoping I was seeing it wrong but it jumped right out at me, plain to see. It was a fuck-up, plain and simple. Stan stared at it in the small hand-mirror and was quiet for a very long while as he contemplated his inflamed, smudged right shoulder.
“What’s wrong with the wings?… They’re kind of… too high up… and stiff.” He laughed a bit with everyone else but by the time he returned from looking at it in the bathroom mirrors he was fuming.
“It looks like a fucking kaffir chicken pecking mielies! You better fix it up, or take it off! I’m not going to walk around with this fuck-up on my arm!”
He was seriously upset and was threatening to burn it out with a hot knife. I told him that there wasn’t much that I could do to improve it, but consoled him by saying that he shouldn’t worry about it too much because it would probably look better when it healed and, if not, he could get a professional to go over it back in South Africa and he would never be able to see that it had even existed.