“Fire and movement… go!” my mind shouted at me. I looked at Stan on my right and he nodded furiously. He leaped up and ran a couple of metres and dropped. I looked around and did the same. The tar road was 20 metres in front of us but we were in an open chana as flat as a bowling green with not a stick for cover. Bullets cracked and kicked up dirt around us in big squirts. Stan moved again but quickly dived for the deck. I, too, leaped up in sequence but dived for the sand almost at once. I leopard-crawled some metres to a shallow depression in the sand, quickly looked up and saw no targets in the bush line 50 to 70 metres away, but the sudden loud crack of a bullet very nearby made me shove my cheek into the sand.
“We’re taking too much fire, stupid motherfuckers… we can’t move,” I swore at no one in particular. I looked at Stan who also had his head flat against the sand with his ear on the ground. I dared not get up. I dared not move a centimetre. Without moving my head I could see that the whole advance had stopped and was lying prone in a scraggly line. Some had not moved from where they had landed next to the Buffel, which was now very quickly backing away. We were pinned down; we could not move. We could not even look up, never mind shoot back. Sand kicked up around us in terrifying sprays.
I lay still and involuntarily tried to wriggle my body deeper into the soft sand. I could hear myself breathe. It was not even 07:00 and already the sweat was pouring into my eyes, stinging them. I was afraid to even move my hand to try and wipe them. I closed my eyes and lay still.
“Any time now I’m dead… any time now.” I expected a bullet to blow the top of my head off. I would not even feel it. My brains would lie there steaming in the morning chill, just like the SWAPO’s at the ambush had done. These might be the final seconds of my life right now, right now as I lay thinking about it. Stupidly it crossed my mind that it would be sad and wasteful if I were to be killed here today.
“Fourie is down! Medics! Fourie’s hit!” the shout came down the line. I shouted the message on without turning my head. I could do nothing so I just lay still with my cheek in the sand. It was strangely relaxing; my mind was working in slow motion and I felt almost that I wasn’t really there at all but I was an outsider looking on. I took the chance to breathe deeply and get a grip.
For some reason I became fascinated with my rifle, centimetres from my face, as its image burned into my brain. I looked at the four notches scratched into the chipped green paint above the hand grip. Each symbolized a man killed with this rifle. Two were already scratched into the rifle when it had been issued to me. Suddenly I almost forgot where I was and felt an acceptance, a relaxing, cozy detachment from the present, as if I was lying in the sun in my backyard while bullets cracked head-high.
I inspected the granules of white sand that covered my sweaty forearm and noted how my arm hairs pushed out through the sand and glistened with sweat. I suddenly noticed a tiny, almost transparent green bug struggling across the wet sand granules on my forearm. He wasn’t much bigger than a grain of sand himself. His little antennae waved frantically and his green legs worked as he climbed over each grain one at a time. “Where the hell does this little bug think he’s going? Doesn’t he know what’s going on here?” I watched him with amazement. I had never seen a bug so small. He struggled on, slipping and falling back, but carried on, determined to get where he was going. “What’s his fucking objective? What’s this little thing’s purpose? For what possible reason on earth does a bug this small exist?” I questioned. Idiotically I noted too that if I had not been lying in this position, unable to move and with my face so close to my arm, I would never in my life have seen this wonderful, stupid, determined little bug.
“Kruger is hit… Kruger’s hit!” the call came down the line. Numbly I shouted the message on. It was sinking in now. It was a fuck-up! We were pinned down in the open and we were all going to get shot to hell. Two guys are down and we haven’t moved ten fucking metres. And we only have another 13 kilometres of base to get through! We had been pinned down now for about ten or 15 minutes and nobody seemed to know what to do.
“Why don’t the fucking Ratels come forward? What are they here for?”
“Keep your heads down… the Mirages are coming in for a run!”
I didn’t bother relaying the message. Everyone had heard it. I turned my face up to see if I could see the Mirage dropping out of the sky but saw nothing. Thirty seconds later I caught the flash of a plane darting in low above treetop level and a couple of huge explosions followed almost at once, 300 metres in front of us.
They were not as big as the thousand-pounders but big enough to shake the ground under me. A cheer went up and the shooting stopped. After 30 seconds I reckoned it was safe to get up on my haunches. The bomb smoke drifted lazily over the trees just ahead.
“Vorentoe! Forward!”
At the far end of the line one Buffel with a bit of cover had advanced about forty metres ahead of us, having taken advantage in the lull in the firing. Paratroops were even futher forward, running bent over and not even doing fire and movement. They were about 50 metres ahead of our side of the line. Suddenly, when I looked again, they had all turned and were sprinting back at full speed, breaking into different directions.
“What the fuck’s going on to make them run like that?”
Soon the shout came down the line. “Tanks! There’s a fucking tank coming!”
I stayed put and could now plainly hear the clank and squeak of something approaching on the far side from the trees.
“Tanks, tanks… we got tanks coming out right on us!” Lieutenant Doep was close to me to my left and shouting as loud as he could into the receiver.
I sat watching with a numbness in my gut. The whole line had started to scatter wildly in all directions.
John Delaney was shouting as he ran doubled over towards me. “Tank, right here… right here!”
I sat and watched, unable to pull away from the movie scene unfolding before my eyes. Sure enough, an old T-34 emerged from the tree line about 100 metres to our right and stopped, only partially exposed in the trees. I could see its long barrel sticking out confidently and could now hear its big motor roaring at high revs. Perhaps he was stuck in first gear or something. I turned and ran crouched a little farther to my left, away from the tank, then stopped and turned. There was nowhere to run to. We were on a bowling green of fucking sand! I flung myself flat on the sand.
Stan almost fell over me as he too ran doubled over past me. Minutes passed that seemed like hours, before I heard an engine gunning behind me. I turned to see one of our small, odd-looking Eland armoured ‘Noddy’ cars with its long 90-millimetre gun barrelling towards us at almost top speed from across the chana. He became airborne as he bounced over bumps and turned nimbly, kicking up a cloud of dust as he came directly through our scattered line and then turned again, this time towards the tank. The little armoured car came to a quick stop right in the middle of the open ground about 80 metres from the tank, waited a couple of seconds and then fired one shot from his 90-millimetre with a loud bang.
The shot was right on target. When the smoke drifted away the T-34’s turret was lying off to one side and the open body was burning, belching dense black smoke. I couldn’t believe it. My admiration went out to the panzer men in the Eland. The panzers had been our neighbours in Bloemfontein, the traditional arch-enemies of the paratroopers during training. We used to jump over the fence at night to kick their arses but I knew that from here on they would have my full respect. I quickly pulled out my camera and snapped a shot of the burning tank billowing black smoke.