“Forward!”
We weren’t out of the woods yet. Fourie had been shot in the leg and was hobbling away with a medic on either side of him. His trouser leg had already been cut off, with bright blood seeping from a hastily applied field dressing. Kruger had a hand wound and was walking doubled up behind the medics, clutching his hand with the other. We were still taking light fire but advanced with fire and movement over the tar road to the banana-shaped trenches, finding them to be old, broken down and abandoned.
The big Ratels had only now moved up among us after the tank scare. About time too. They slowly rolled forward with their huge wheels as we started forward with buddy-buddy fire and movement next to them. We went over the crumbled trenches and into some scattered trees, still with no visible targets. Stan, who was my partner on this operation, bolted four or five metres in front of me and dived into the dirt. I looked around and jumped up, flipping my rifle to ‘fire’ as I did so. I had taken two quick steps when the unmistakable whoosh of an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket went over my head, probably aimed at the big armoured Ratel that had come in directly next to me on my right. I collapsed instantly like a man shot through the head and fell hard to the ground with a loud grunt. It was not a controlled fall; my rifle ploughed into the sand with the fire-selector open and sand poured through the open slot into the working parts. The rocket had missed the Ratel, for no explosion came. I lay on my side and worked the bolt, ejecting a couple of rounds, hearing the sand grinding inside the rifle.
“Fuck it!” I looked towards Stan, who had found cover in a shallow depression and was beckoning me to come over. I leopard-crawled the 15 metres like a snake, just like in the training manual, and fell into the little hole. Thank heavens for basic training.
“I got sand in my rifle!”
“You better clean it! Do it now!”
I flipped onto my back and stripped the R4 in triple-quick time, working like a sea otter and putting the working parts on my chest like seashells as I pulled my bandana from around my neck. I worked fast and smoothly. In training I had always struggled with weapon stripping and assembling, never mind speed-stripping. Now my fingers worked like steel pins, easily forcing the parts together and snapping them in. Amazing how quickly and easily one can strip and clean a weapon and reassemble it under fire. Every part went back into place at the first atempt, with not the slightest hitch.
“Fuck… RPG almost took my head off. Did you see that?”
“Ja, it came from those trees there.”
I crawled to the top of the depression, wiped my eyes with my bandana and adjusted the heavy jump helmet that kept falling over my eyes. We were about 50 metres into the base and were now among scattered trees. I was already drenched with sweat. I saw a sand wall up ahead with thick trees behind it.
“Where? Over there?”
“Next to that wall.”
I put my rifle over, aimed at the top of the wall and squeezed off four or five shots. Stan followed suit. They were the first shots I had fired. I still hadn’t seen a target but it felt good. I was just looking up to search the trees again when a huge burp filled our world as the anti-aircraft guns opened up ahead of us again.
“Jesus!” I dropped down.
“Hey Gungie, look!” Stan lay on his back and pointed to the sky where a small Bosbok (Bushbuck) spotter plane was in big trouble. The spotter plane had thought, as we all did, that the AA gunners had all deserted their guns after the thousand-pound bombs were dropped on them but there was one stubborn gunner who had stayed at his post and seemed determined to fight till the end. The small single-engined aircraft was so high he was just a speck in the blue sky but not too high for the sharp-eyed FAPLA gunner.
The Bosbok seemed unaware that he was being shot at and was putt-putting along slowly, but he must suddenly have realized that he was in the jaws of death. The spotter plane weaved and dived as white puffs of flak exploded around him. At one stage he was totally engulfed in a cluster of about 20 puffs but he emerged from them diving at a 45-degree angle and high-tailed it out of there like a bat out of hell. I’ve never seen a small plane move like that before. He made it out, full of holes, only because the anti-aircraft guns had stopped shooting for some reason.
“Jeez, I never knew a Bosbok could move that fast!” I was grinning and Stan was laughing.
“That’s one lucky damn spotter. Did you see him change down to first gear very quickly?”
“Ja, he turned into a Mirage pretty quick.”
Our chuckling was short lived. The brave FAPLA anti-aircraft gunner was back in the game. He had trained his barrels on us at ground level and sent a salvo of shots over our heads with a sound like doomsday that took the breath out of me. I had been on one knee after the spotter had high-tailed it out and was scanning the bush in front of me but dropped into the sand like a sack. It was the loudest and most frightening sound I had ever heard—ten or 20 anti-aircraft projectiles split the air just metres above our heads in less than a second! The gun, we discovered later, had four barrels.
The anti-aircraft gun was five times as loud now that we were on the receiving end of it. I saw a huge limb crash down from a tree behind us; leaves rained down like a thousand drifting snowflakes. We hugged the little cover that we had.
“Fuck!” My brain was still trying to process and catalogue the sound but it couldn’t. It had never heard a sound anything like that before. We had also begun to take some heavy small-arms fire as rounds cracked close overhead. The anti-aircraft gun was not very constant, but every few minutes he would cut loose again and more limbs would come crashing down.
“They’re not dug in. They can’t shoot lower than seven or eight feet… they’re set too high!”
Stan and I stayed in the shallow hole and hardly said a word, our full concentration on what was going on around us. The whole company was hugging cover again and no one moved. The anti-aircraft gun would burp every so often, sending foliage flying, but we soon learned that his guns indeed were not dug in and so his rounds could only fly two or three metres over our heads. They could scare the shit out of us but couldn’t seem to hit us.
We appeared to be pinned down again but at least now we had cover. We had hardly fired any shots at all. So far FAPLA was the one dishing it out as we had done little more than dive for cover all the time. I still had not seen a FAPLA soldier. All the fire was coming from a spread-out area behind sand walls, inside deep trenches and tree lines and we were doing a good job at keeping our heads down. It was hard to gauge time accurately; looking back this had all happened in 45 minutes or perhaps an hour.
I lay on my back and took the opportunity to get my breath. The anti-aircraft gunner finally seemed to have quit his post—at any rate, we hadn’t heard from him for a while—but now a machine gun was rattling sporadic ally from a hidden position ahead. I wiped the stinging sweat from my eyes with my soaked bandana.
I was surprised what a slow process it was. Not having trained for this full-on conventional attack, I thought we would hit it in a blitzkrieg, charging forward and shooting like in the movies, but apparently not. We had been at it for well over an hour and were moving merely yards at a time, if that.
“Where is the spare headset?” I heard Sergeant-Major Sakkie’s voice roaring during a lull in the firing. I lay still, not much bothered, but then in a flash I remembered that I had been appointed to carry the spare radio receiver and had stuffed it in the side pocket of my pants.
“Aw, shit!” I popped my head up and saw that Sakkie was about 30 metres to my left, a little closer to the sand wall where all the bullshit was going on. Sakkie boomed again as if he was on the fucking parade ground.