We were sitting under the tree in the fading light and had put our own letter-reading on hold to console and poke fun at Stan when Kurt came walking slowly into the circle with a couple of white pages clutched in his big ham hands.
“Doreen’s pregnant… from another guy!”
There was a brief silence as we looked at him to see if he was screwing with us—which was usual—when he spoke in that low serious tone but this time he was not as he looked at us quietly with his speckled blue eyes in his big pink face. I cracked up and flopped down on my back, laughing.
Kurt sat down, shoulders hunched, his huge frame bent over as he read the good parts to us. “She’s pregnant by this other guy… I know the guy, too. He works with her sister. I’ve met him.”
I could not stop laughing and had tears in my eyes. Kurt and I were always taking the piss out of each other and bullshitting, and seeing him sitting there, hunched over, talking in his low, barely audible voice was just too much. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I laughed and laughed. I had met his girlfriend. We had AWOLed to her hotel room in downtown Bloemfontein when she had come to visit him and got drunk on wine before going bar-hopping, getting motherless and ending up having five fist fights in one night. I had been arrested and put into a police van while the cops pursued other drunken AWOLees involved in the inter-unit war that was raging outside the disco, but while they were busy some strange dude with hair down to his arse came and unlocked the police van and said in Afrikaans, “Kom, ma wag vir ons” (Come, mother’s waiting for us) and let me out. It was the strangest thing—and then he disappeared, and so did I. Quickly. I have always thought he might have been some weird angel who had been sent to set me free.
John Delaney and I were two of the few who still had our girlfriends. We bragged about how we knew how to treat them right and poked fun at Stan and Kurt till it was pitch dark when we rolled out our smelly sleeping bags into shallow holes. That night we had the first good night’s sleep in four weeks, while the infantry stood watch over us with new South African-made night-vision equipment that had just been issued.
My last thought was of Taina, who in her letter had told me that her father had sent her pet pig to a friend’s farm “where he would be more comfortable and would be used to breed”. I had raised pigs while at high school and had 22 pink pigs in neat stalls at the back of the plot. I had given her a squealing piglet, the size of a small puppy, for her birthday. Of course the pig grew huge and had the run of their five-acre plot, beating up the dogs for their food and shitting on the front lawn. I hoped that she had believed the breeding part because I knew the next time she would see Pig would be as the sausages her mother cooked for breakfast.
BUSH JUSTICE
For us, Operation Ceiling had come to an end. 32 Battalion were still busy in Angola with Operation Carnation, which had been run hand in hand with our seek-and-destroy operation, Ceiling, and would continue for weeks to come; they would still be going strong when the next big ops started, but for us, thankfully, it was over.
The other three D Company platoons all came into the rendezvous by midday the next day and we walked the last 20 or so clicks back across the border in a huge company V formation, swapping war stories with the guys from the other platoons and showing off booty that we had picked up.
Willy Bray told me how he had shat himself when they were mortared during the night and said that SWAPO troops were doing fire and movement into their TB. He felt bad but said that they had no choice but to run, and that they had sat tight through the night in small groups until they regrouped the following morning at their emergency RV on a chana many kilometres south. (There was always an emergency rendezvous given before we bedded down so that we could reunite later if the shit hit the fan during the night.)
I told him how we had hit FAPLA—the Angolan army—by mistake, how we’d had to run from the tank or BTR in the middle of the night and how we had hardly any ammo left.
We also heard how Valk 1 had had a desperate, almost hand-to-hand contact in some thick shrub that lasted a few minutes, how Swanepoel had been seriously wounded through the groin and how the university lieutenant leading that platoon had been shot in the hand. Both had been casevaced out and more than half a dozen terrs had been killed.
Our part in the operation had been successful—all in all D Company had got over 60 kills and not lost a man. Commandant Lindsay would surely be proud of his boys.
The next morning we stepped over the remnants of a rusty barbed wire fence that was the border and crossed into South West Africa. I was still dressed in my blue sneakers and my assortment of SWAPO and FAPLA clothes and got Doogy to snap a photograph of me standing on the broken-down fence that symbolized the border. I flashed a grin and a peace sign. I took a photo of him as he scowled at me with one foot in Angola and the other in South West Africa. Inside South West Africa I changed out of my terrorist outfit and donned the hated army boots again.
We dropped the V formation and walked the last ten clicks in a loose company group, not at all concerned about running into any SWAPOs who happened to be south of the border.
D Company had proved itself in battle, in a four-week cross-border operation with hardly any support and only in platoon strengths. We were warriors at last. We had faced the enemy in their own country, kicked their ass and had bragging rights to almost 80 kills, if you included the contacts on the previous bush trip. Our senior company, I had heard, had finished up with 130 kills, which I had thought very high, but we were well on our way to beating them. Those 12 months of hard training were now bearing fruit and we were getting all the action we could handle. We did not know that in a few weeks we would be part of the biggest conventional cross-border operation into Angola that South Africa had yet to launch.
We crashed through the bush like happy school kids going home after a football game, joking and shooting the shit.
“Why can’t they send some Buffels to pick us up at the border, instead of walking all the way back to base?” John Delaney was walking happily along with a bounce in his step, flitting from group to group, chatting and swapping stories.
“Can’t wait to have an ice-cold Coke and a honey sandwich and get these fucking boots off.” No one had taken off their boots for three weeks, but I’d had it easier with my sneakers.
“All I want to do is sleep on an army foam mattress and shave. I feel like I’m back on Recce course,” John went off on a tirade, telling everyone in earshot how this four weeks in the bush was nothing compared to the seven weeks of hell that he and I had spent on the Recce selection course where we had walked close to 700 kilometres.
“Think this is bad? Try seven weeks.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been that bad if you two almost made it to the end— you both look like hell now.”
I looked at Dan Pienaar who had a pair of brand-new SWAPO boots dangling around his neck. “Better than you’ll look hanging from a tree by those fucking SWAPO boots.”
We soon sighted the white sand walls of Ombalantu base camp and walked through the small gates which were guarded by two serious-looking infantrymen who gawked at us as if a company of SWAPO was walking into camp. We looked at them with the thousand-yard stare we had picked up from weeks of constantly peering through the bush. We walked with the long stride of men who have walked far and fast for a long time. We walked past the little white-brick HQ building and the six-metre-wide baobab tree and flopped our kit down in a heap around the small tin canteen in the centre of the tent square. I felt tired and bone weary from our four weeks in the bush… but I felt good.