I dressed in my clean browns and polished boots and headed off. After going from one idiot clerk to another I was finally directed into a small office with an empty desk and two chairs. A young red-haired lieutenant came in five minutes later and greeted me softly. He looked nervous when I stood up and chopped him, saluted. He told me to sit down and informed me that he was to be my counsel for the court martial. I was surprised. I never knew that I would be provided with, or even need, a lawyer. I was starting to see the seriousness of the whole thing. He sat down and told me to relate my version of what had happened, without leaving anything out.
I told him how we had cared for and raised the kittens before we left for Angola and how they slept with us on our beds and that when I heard that this prick had killed them, especially the way that he had killed them, I had seen red and kicked his ass. Pretty straightfoward.
“What did you do in Angola?”
“We went up on a seek-and-destroy operation in platoon strength.”
“Yes, but how long did you spend on this patrol?” He studied me attentively, making notes on a couple of sheets of foolscap paper. He looked concerned and sincere, but didn’t come across as very assertive or sure of himself. I wondered if he had done this before as he seemed more nervous than me. He stared at me, waiting for the response.
“It wasn’t a patrol, it was part of an operation—Operation Ceiling—and we spent four weeks in Angola tracking down SWAPO.”
“What happened up there? Did you guys have any contact? Was there any shooting?”
I held his gaze and looked at him like he too was an idiot. “Yes, we made a lot of contact… there was lots of shooting… our company got almost 60 kills and a few of our guys got shot up too.”
He stared at me and looked as if he did not believe me, searching my eyes for signs that I was bullshitting, but when I blankly held his stare he bent down and scribbled a long chapter of notes and looked up again, seemingly excited, as if he was onto something.
“Were you involved in any of these contacts… I mean, personally involved?”
“Yes, I was.” I told him about the ambush and how we were led by the SWAPO deserter to his comrades; how we had wiped them all out and how we had to run for it in the night after we had made contact with FAPLA and killed a number of them; and how they chased us with mortars and a BTR or a T-55 tank. I told him about the old man we had shot and how I had bandaged him up and that we had left him there because the lieutenant did not want to call a chopper. He scribbled as I spoke.
“Well, listen, you go back and take it easy… I’ll send for you in a couple of days, and we’ll talk again.”
“When will the court martial be?” I asked.
“I don’t know for sure, but probably in a couple of weeks.”
A couple of weeks!
I rode back to Ondangwa and took refuge in my hidden corner. I started to get a routine going and would go for an early-morning run down the long road that ran around the inside of the 13-square-kilometre base. After I returned I would sneak of for a shower and then hit breakfast. I knew the cooks well so that even if I missed chow, which I often did, I could still score a plate of hot scrambled eggs and bacon or sausage. I also stocked up on canned food from the kitchen, so that I had snacks at night.
I wrote almost daily to Taina or my folks and my brother. I also started to do some sketches on a writing pad. I drew the ambush scene the way I remembered it, with the terrs sitting and standing by the fire under a tree and us lying just a few metres away, rifles pointed at them, waiting for the sun to rise. I called it the Breakfast Party. I suntanned in a plastic chair behind the tent and sipped on ice-cold Cokes from the canteen that opened at about 10:00, and for a few days I forgot about the big operation and the court martial.
One morning some Americans and Rhodesians from 44 Brigade, who had their tents just outside our sand walls, pulled in with their Q-Kars. These were Jeeps rigged up with twin MAGs; one even had a 20-millimetre cannon that had been taken off an old fighter jet, mounted with a big steel protective plate in front of it. On the plate was scrawled ‘The Voice of America’ in thick black Koki pen.
That night I sauntered across as they sat drinking next to a blazing fire. I recognized the lieutenant in command of the small group as being a guy who had been on the Recce selection course with me. He remembered me. I recalled that it was his third attempt at the Recce course. He had not made it. They had just returned from their part in Operation Carnation and were already roaring drunk. I was surprised to learn that they had lost one of the Americans a week earlier in a contact. They didn’t seem too remorseful about it; in fact they scorned the one troop who had been killed because he’d stood up in the middle of a fire fight to lob a grenade like he’d seen it done in a John Wayne movie and had been cut down instantly.
I spent the night drinking brandy with them and they pissed themselves laughing when I told them the sergeant-major story. They accepted me because of this, slapped me on the back and plied me with straight brandy after the Coke ran out. I spoke to a couple of Yanks with thick airborne tattoos on their forearms who said they had been in Vietnam. I tried to prise some stories from them but they seemed tight-lipped and unwilling to talk in front of their comrades. They just shook their heads as they took long swigs of brandy.
“It was a fuck-up,” was about all I could get out of them. (I learned later that one of the unwritten rules when joining a foreign army and its war was not to talk about ‘How we did it in Vietnam or Rhodesia’, but to forget that you’d been there because nobody is interested in how you did it then. This was another army and another war.)
The one guy was still using his old M16 and said it was the same one he had used in Vietnam and that it was a good rifle. His partner jeered him, saying that it was a piece of shit and said that he had almost got killed in Vietnam when his magazine fell out during a fire fight.
“You’ve got to push your magazine all the way in until it clicks, shithead,” his partner said quietly. He patted the South African-made R4 next to him “This is a rifle… it’s made here in South Africa to shoot kaffirs with,” he said in a thick Louisiana accent. He seemed a nice guy, almost out of place. I wondered how he had got involved in a tiny war so far from home.
As the night went on they became raucous and rowdy, with one American falling in the fire and almost catching alight. They laughed and squabbled, and I felt that there could be an argument at any minute, that one of them would pick up his loaded R4 and start shooting around the fire. I decided in my drunken state that I would definitely not like to go into battle with this loose-goose crowd.
They were mostly much older than me, probably in their thirties, but I got on well with a Rhodesian guy around my age, whom they called ‘Mad Irish’. He told me that he had lied to join the Rhodesian army at the age of 16 and had been shooting terrs for five years. They mocked him as being totally mad and because he had driven into contact in the Q-Kar with his two .357 revolvers blazing like a cowboy. Mad Irish and I sat by the fire, as drunk as lords, and had long rambling conversations about bullshit, only getting up now and then to puke or piss. We had become quite good mates by the time the night was through and he encouraged me to try and get transferred to his “merry band of losers”, which would have been impossible.
I made the mistake of sleeping late the next morning, with a huge hangover, and almost fell out of bed when a voice like a bullhorn bellowed at me, rattling my bruised brain against my skull. I was asked who the fuck I was and what I thought I was doing sleeping at 08:30 in his base?