We had seen real action at last.
Most of the guys immediately took off their boots for the first time in four weeks and wiggled their toes into the sand. Cigarettes were lit amidst loud calls for the canteen to open. I had been sitting on my kit for about ten minutes, enjoying my third Camel and grinning at the schoolboy-like activity around me when my ears picked up a hauntingly soulful drumbeat and horn coming from the tin camo-painted canteen some metres away. The solid, moving drumbeat and mournful horn compelled me to find out who and what the heck this song was. I got up and walked to the door of the canteen, still in my filthy, torn uniform, pushed my way through a few 3 SAI troops who quickly gave way, and watched Phil Collins on a music video for the first time, breaking into “I can feel it coming in the air tonight”. He crashed into the chorus as he changed tempo halfway through the song. I stood and watched the whole video, mesmerized, and afterwards walked back to my kit with the drumbeat still thumping through my head, thinking it was probably the best song I had ever heard. I still, to this day, think it is one of the best songs ever recorded—the haunting beat still grabs me by the throat whenever I hear it and I am still compelled to turn the volume up high wherever I might be.
3 SAI had occupied the base in our absence. SAI troops with short, regulation haircuts were walking around in twos and threes in squeaky-clean browns and PT shorts. They seemed awed by this company of unshaven paratroopers dressed in bits and pieces of SWAPO uniform and quickly disappeared from view into the tents, gawking from the shadows of the tent flaps.
“These fucking infantry look like they’re about to shit themselves,” Stan snarled, giving them a hard bush-killer stare as they scurried by, looking straight ahead.
“What are these pussies doing in our base anyway? I’ll be fucked if I’m not sleeping on a mattress tonight! Those are our beds they’re sleeping on!”
“Take it easy, they’re on your side.” I sat on my kit savouring the sweet burn of an ice-cold Coke and a chocolate bar that tasted like heaven.
“Fucking morons,” Stan was pushing the mad bush fighter thing and motioned with his chin in a ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ to a cleancut infantryman who was hastily walking past. The junior soldier braved a look but quickly turned and looked straight ahead. The company sat around the canteen, laughing.
We had come a long way together since we’d stood under the paradeground lights at 05:00 twelve long months ago, the survivors of the 700 who had tried to take the PT course to become paratroopers. Now we had been tempered in the heat of battle, the very reason we had all joined this outfit. We had become like one another, knew each other’s strengths, weakness and character flaws and now babbled together like a big family, sipping cold drinks and eating chocolate bars, shouting for the bar to be opened. Most had taken off their torn shirts and filthy boots, skinny torsos shining white in the sun in contrast to the crusty Black is Beautiful camo-smeared faces and arms, joyfully wriggling their blistered feet and toes in the hot, fine, white sand.
I looked across at our old tents and saw a group of short-haired, worried faces peering out through the tent flaps.
“Looks like these boys are dug in permanently in our tents—we might not get a foam mattress tonight!” I said, now also appreciating the seriousness of the new sleeping arrangements.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”
Corporal Pretorius came strolling out of the HQ and addressed us. “Pack your kit neatly down at the bottom there by the chopper pads. We’re not going to be staying here and will be moving out in the morning back to Ondangwa. We’ll spend the night outside the walls, next to the pad.”
He spoke gingerly, as a new pecking order had been established in the last four weeks of combat and patrolling in Angola and he wasn’t at the top of it any more. He had sat on his ass, not wanting to continue, just before the FAPLA contact. Not that I blamed him—I had wanted to turn around too. He smiled awkwardly as he was met with jeers and shouts of anger at the thought of sleeping another night in the dirt while the 3 SAI troops snored in our beds.
To me it wasn’t a big deal. I stood up with John Fox and slowly walked across the tent square to the chopper pad and dumped my kit against the outside of the sand wall.
John Delaney, always the first to pick up any news, came and dropped his kit heavily next to mine, spraying a cloud of dust into my face. His eyes were wide. “I hear there’s a big op going down… just heard it from an infantry guard. It’s supposed to be a big one. He says they might be going all the way up to Luanda, like in ’75. Maybe take the whole of Angola!”
“Bullshit.”
“Serious. Ask Lieutenant Doep. And we’ll probably be involved.”
“You mean we’re going to hit FAPLA?”
“FAPLA and SWAPO and the Cubans and anyone else in the way from what it sounds like. I told you we started a fucking war, didn’t I?”
I tilted my head back, swallowing the last of my second cold Coke.
“When’s it going to happen?”
“I don’t know but it sounds like soon. All the infantry guys are talking about it.”
I wiped some sweat off my brow and for the first time thought of a shower. Funny, you would have thought a shower would have been the first thing on our minds but after four weeks you get to feel quite at home in filth. I had always wondered how those bums on the street could stand walking around black with grime. Now I knew. After a while you don’t even smell yourself or feel the grime.
John stood up and pointed back into Angola. “I know what’s going on. FAPLA is getting too buddy-buddy with SWAPO and even training them. That’s why we hit FAPLA by mistake… that ambush we did wasn’t far from their main base.”
We looked at him sceptically.
“Doep told me. Ask any of these infantry cunts—they all know about it.” I always doubted John with first-hand news, not because he was untruthful but because I knew he could not resist adding a tale or two.
I looked across the chopper pad trying to decide if I should lift my ass and go and shower, even though I felt quite comfortable sitting filthy in the sun. I saw Kurt coming across the chopper pad, lugging his kit over his back with one hand and with a big cheese, onion and tomato sandwich clutched in the other. His cheeks were bulging and he smiled as he put down his kit.
I caught a whiff of onion and my saliva glands reacted instantly. “Where did you score the sandwich?”
“At the kitchen. The cook.”
“Oh, I forgot you’re in with the cooks, being an alumnus and all.”
“Nah, he’ll give you one… ask him.”
He took another huge bite of the sandwich, speaking around the mouthful. “Hey Gungie, the cook says that the sergeant-major here killed those two little cats we had.”
“Whaaaat?”
“The cook says he was feeding them, like we asked him to, but one day this sergeant-major stomped on the one cat in the mess while they were eating and broke its neck and the next day picked the ginger one up by the back legs and slammed it against the wall, killing it. He says the cat lay there crying for 20 minutes before it died.”
“Who the fuck is this cunt?” I said, sitting up, stunned at the news.
“Cook says he’s a mean fucker. All the troops are shit scared of him and he runs this camp like he’s God, ex-boxer and all.”