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.{Afrikaans insult applied to those of South African/British dual nationality. Literally ‘salt dick’, it refers to having one foot in either country with your dick hanging in the ocean between} 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.”
“What did they say about it?”
“Angola contacted South Africa and said they were going to wipe out any South African forces in the area north of the line; that’s why we had to run for it!”
“We started a fucking international dispute!” John Delaney stood up, did one of his trademark jigs and shook his head in disbelief. “We’ve started a war! Trust fucking Valk 4 to start a war!”
We all smiled stupidly at each other.
“Oh, I can just fucking see it now… Valk 4 will be asked to step forward at parade to be congratulated for finally starting the long-awaited war with Angola and the 50,000 Cuban troops stationed there. We’ll get special recommendations and 21 days’ leave when Russia and East Germany send in their reinforcements to help against the South African racist aggressors. Then, when America steps in to help us, we’ll get even more praise and a chestful of medals for being the match-head that lit the global nuclear war!”
“Did we know about the boundary?” I asked, smiling at John’s performance.
“Yes.” Doep’s brown eyes twinkled for a couple of seconds and he smiled. “Never knew it was so damn close!”
We all chuckled together and finished our cigarettes. Lieutenant Doep field-stripped his cigarette butt and instinctively put the filter in his pocket. Serious again, he looked around at his little group of soutpiele—John Fox, John Delaney, Stan, Doogy and me—as he nodded his head stiffly and got down to saying what he had come over to say, somewhat awkwardly.
“You guys have done some good work in the last couple of days; keep it up.” He quickly looked at each of us, seriously, making eye contact, then got up, nodded again and left our little group under the tree.
It sounded strange, coming from Lieutenant Doep in the tone that he’d said it, as though it had been difficult for him to say, that he had rehearsed it a couple of times in his head before coming over and spitting it out. He would normally blurt out something like that to the whole platoon when we came back from a run or a chasing, but there wasn’t much sincerity on those occasions. This was a different Lieutenant Doep we were beginning to see. Not so lumbering, brash and quick to blurt out orders like a school prefect. It was Doep’s first action as well as ours; we were all maturing together… very quickly.
Yeah! It was about time someone noticed that the soutpiele were a sharp bunch and didn’t horse around with brown-nosing platoon politics and bullshit, but that we were always there when the shit hit the fan.
We spent a few more uneventful days patrolling the area half-heartedly. Then one morning came the order from Commandant Lindsay for the whole company to head back to South West Africa. The walk would take us a couple of days, as our valk had already back-tracked south a fair bit since the FAPLA incident when we had run for half the night. The other platoons were still a day’s walk farther north into Angola than us. We would be the leading platoon on the long walk home. We were dirty and fatigued after three weeks in the bush, with bad sleep and rat pack food. We looked like a platoon of SWAPO ourselves, with three weeks’ growth and old, crusty, black camo grease that was still applied every couple of days. We were glad to turn south and start the long walk out of fucking Angola.