“Hey, hey, hey!” I whooped as I shook my reluctant lizard.
“Come on, lets go… c’mon now!” Doep was beckoning. We ran back and jumped into the Buffels as another huge explosion crashed a click away from us, sending a plume of grey smoke 30 storeys into the air. Small flocks of birds flew over our heads like bats out of hell. It was on!
“Start moving across the chana! No, slowly… slow down!”
Our long line of 20 Buffels slowly emerged from the trees where we had been waiting in the dark for the last couple of hours. We were directly across from the airport runway and half a kilometre from the trenches of Ongiva. A lonesome machine gun opened up in the dawn far away to our right and was answered by sporadic and distinctive AK-47 fire. The fist shots had been fired.
“Slow down, you moron! Stay abreast with the others… fuck it, man, listen to me! Wait for them!” Doep swore in Afrikaans at the driver of our Buffel who seemed determined to be first to reach the trenches and offload us so he could be first back.
We had been told to start the advance when the air force began bombing but, true to form, someone had fucked up again because in the half-hour that the air force strafed the base we could have crossed the chana four times. So we’d all stopped—20 Buffels spread out in the middle of the huge open chana, waiting, observing the show. It was like watching a movie.
Mirages came darting straight down from the heavens, only visible as tiny shiny specks, then becoming small silver arrows in a vertical dive, then pulling massive Gs as they let go their thousand-pound bombs and pulling horizontal, leaving a high column of smoke and a boom ten times louder than any thunder I had ever heard.
“Hey, they’re shooting back… check it out!”
“Fucking hell… look at that!”
A new sound had taken over now. It was the loud burp of the FAPLA anti-aircraft guns that had begun to open up. The early morning blue-and-pink sky filled with small white puffs of smoke.
“Look, they’re almost on the Mirage. I think they got him.”
A Mirage dropped like a pinhead from the sky, followed all the way down by puffs of white smoke that seemed right on his tail.
“These kaffirs can shoot… look at that. Aw, fuck.”
I was coldly impressed. We had been led to believe that when the big bombs started falling the Angolan army would try and find a quick way out, but not so. The gunners were staying right there and keeping their heads with thousand-pound bombs falling among them and they were almost shooting down the Mirages. (A handful of Mirages were in fact hit by shrapnel.) We watched the show, fascinated. Every time a little pinhead dropped out the sky at incredible speed we pointed it out to each other, and every time there was a cluster of flak puffs just behind it. We cheered as the bombs exploded, sometimes two at a time.
Bullets had begun to buzz overhead like angry bees and we put our heads down behind the protection of the Buffels. I risked poking my head up and snapped a picture as a thousand-pound bomb erupted into a huge plume close to the tree line on the other side of the chana.
Kurt was grinning at me with his head bent low. I grinned back.
TRENCHES AND BUNKERS
South Africa said today that it had destroyed Angolan radar installations and killed at least 240 Angolan government troops in its assaults this week in southern Angola. Anti-aircraft installations protecting the radar units were also knocked out, according to South African officers in the area.
Boom… boom… the hollow-sounding explosions of big 82-millimetre mortars.
Shells started to drop among our Buffels. The movie was over; now we were getting involved.
“Drive! Drive!” Doep roared, as we slowly started moving forward.
Boom.
Sand covered us from a mortar exploding 40 metres away. Doep shouted to us that one of the Buffels had been hit by a mortar and couldn’t continue. I don’t know why but he shouted it a couple of times to us. (We found out later that the mortar exploded right next to the vehicle.) I was bending down low and had forgotten about the bombing.
I was saying a quick prayer but could think of no words but “Please, Lord— look after me.” I crouched low and tightened my bootlaces for at least the third time that morning and checked the magazine in my rifle for the tenth time. I smiled at Doogy who was fiddling with his LMG. He had solemn look and nodded back at me. We rolled slowly forward. I was no longer the cold killing machine I had been on the ambush, or when we’d hit FAPLA on Operation Ceiling. I had the jitters.
Perhaps the feeling of impending doom was the legacy of my birthday curse, or perhaps it was because I had gone through no training for this op and had just walked in cold after three weeks of lazy bal bak, goofing off, at Ondangwa. The bombing had stopped. How a half-hour seems to fly when you’re having fun! A couple of anti-aircraft guns were still firing in long burps—the Mirages had obviously not taken out the guns, the main objective of the bombing.
I knew it would be like this. There was some commotion and bullets pinged musically on our Buffel. We were taking some fire from close by. I could not see where from and nor did I really want to look, but Doep had his head half over the side of the Buffel and was pointing to some small huts about 100 metres away.
“Green! Green! Fire with the LMG into those huts!”
It took Doogy a good few seconds to get his shit together but finally he stood up and, even though bullets were buzzing around us, he let rip with a long burst from his MAG. He fired into the huts and down the small tar road that was the landmark both for the beginning of the base and for us to disembark at the banana-shaped trenches. I didn’t see anybody fall or run but Doogy still let out a yell of triumph as he quickly ducked down inside again.
We had fired our first shots.
“Get ready to deploy!” Doep shouted as loud as he could. Bullets cracked over our heads in earnest, twanging on the side of the Buffel. I tried to empty my mind of all thoughts and become as single-minded as I had been in the other contacts but I wasn’t having much success.
“Get ready to deploy… get ready!” Lieutenant Doep was shouting very loudly, almost hysterically.
“You must be fucking mad! What do you mean, deploy? Can’t you see we’re taking fire, you stupid fucking idiot?” my mind screamed. I grasped my R4 in a death grip, my knuckles standing out starkly white. I shifted my body and readied my feet to kick open the steel side panels of the Buffel.
Bullets cracked close over our heads, sounding like the target pits on the shooting range back in Bloemfontein. Now I thought I had some idea how those poor bastards must have felt landing on D-Day. Doep had the radio receiver to his ear, glaring fiercely as he tried to listen into the receiver.
“Deploy! Deploy! Deploy now!” he screamed in Afrikaans but no one moved. “Deploy! Deploy!” but still no one moved; we crouched low in the Buffel with our heads down.
“You fucking stupid person,” I thought. “Why do you want to go out there? Can’t you see we’ll all get killed?” I wanted to scream at him.
The troops at the side of the vehicle fumbled at the heavy pins to release the panel, as we all kicked it over with a loud clang. I leaped out and tumbled to the ground. I immediately got up, ran a couple of metres and hit the dirt. Everybody was hugging the dirt.