“Let’s go!”
The guys closest to the wooden steps gingerly clambered out and when they drew no fire the rest of us jumped up out of the trench and lay flat, looking around.
“Fire and movement, c’mon. Across this chana straight ahead!” Doep was clearly back in charge.
I ran forward and dived into the ground. Ooooff! Up again, three paces, then down. Up again, three paces, then down. Sweat poured off my body. I could hear myself breathing heavily, grunting as I landed in the sand. Shit! I hadn’t spent three weeks training for this like everyone else had. I must be the only troop in the whole operation with three weeks’ training stuffed into a half-hour crash course, and I felt like it. Every time I hit the ground my heavy jump helmet banged down under my eyes, blinding me and I had to shove it up again. Then it was my turn to get up and run three paces and dive down again. I decided that, seeing we were not taking fire right now, I would rather go onto my knees first then drop down, and also run a little further than three paces because I wasn’t getting anywhere very fucking quickly. Also, I wanted to reduce the number of times I had to plough into the dirt. I did it a few times; it felt a lot better. I ran about eight paces, then slowly sagged to my knees and lay down, rather than diving.
“Korff! They’re going to take you out! Keep it short. Just three paces at a time!” Doep shouted. He was three men down from me, on my left.
I felt embarrassed to be singled out and reprimanded. Minutes later, the chance came to castigate myself for my stupidity. Twenty metres straight in front of me, under a tree, was a small mound of sand with a square wood-frame opening on top.
Doep turned his head towards me as he lay in the sand. “Korff… Green… clear that bunker!” he yelled furiously, his face flushed red against his long blond hair.
21 AT LAST
I looked at Kevin Green on my right. He looked back at me deadpan. I rolled onto my side and fumbled in my little pouch for a smooth M27 grenade. I nodded at Kevin and, with the whole platoon keeping cover, we both leaped up and ran across the short space to the bunker and dived down close to it. Although I had never thrown a live grenade before (I must have missed that class during basic training for some reason), I felt no hesitation about doing so. I pulled hard on the pin and held the lever down. Kevin lay on his stomach a few yards from me with his rifle trained on the bunker. I rolled over as I had seen it being done in the movies, lobbed the grenade into the dark hole and rolled away again, stopping only a metre from the bunker with my arms over my head.
Whomp!
The ground beneath me shook and a cloud of white dust and smoke billowed up from the small hole about a metre off. The bunker seemed to be empty. If it wasn’t, they died quietly. We reached a small trench and a long mound of dirt. Shots cracked over our heads.
Fifty yards ahead was a group of FAPLA troops who seemed to have been caught in mid-crossing to another trench. They ran with long strides to make the best of what little cover they had. Fucking targets at last! Their gunsmoke marked them clearly as their comrades already in cover blasted away at us. We got behind the cover of the long mound of sand and fired furiously. I was on one knee with just my upper body exposed above the wall of sand. I could see a couple of woolly black heads bobbing as the group of five or six who had been caught in the open now ran, bent over and at the speed of sound, diving for their lives into the thin trees, where a few brave comrades already lay in the scanty cover. These gentlemen kept up a furious rate of fire in single shots and not automatic, which was the norm. At least when they fired on automatic fire they usually shot high but not this time. Bullets cracked around us. Fighting the instinct to duck down, I stayed up and aimed at the rapidly disappearing bobbing heads. I knew I was shooting too fast and moving my barrel from side to side without staying on one target but I was stuck in a mode and unable to slow down as I pulled the trigger as fast as I could.
They were pretty good shots—a shot cracked past my ear like a ringmaster’s whip, the closest I had ever experienced. This time I did duck down. I took the opportunity to try and wipe the sweat from my eyes against my sleeve but this only made it worse. I’m convinced that the sweat in a fire fight is different from normal sweat. I had noticed this before, when we hit the FAPLA troops by mistake a month ago after the SWAPO ‘breakfast party’ ambush. This variety of sweat seems a lot thicker, saltier and slimier; it floods out of your pores in rivers, almost covering your skin with a goo that is hard to wipe off. Years later, when I boxed, I used to sweat like hell but it would run like water. I looked up again and started shooting but now could hardly keep my eyes open because the sweat was in my eyes, making it almost impossible to keep them open.
“Here I go again—can’t see what I’m shooting at!”
I fired almost blindly. When the shooting finally abated I sat down, took my bandana from around my neck and wiped my eyes. I struggled for more than a minute to clear my stinging eyes. What was this stuff? Adrenaline or something? I could see at least three bodies lying sprawled under the trees.
“Valk 2 needs help! Turn around and go back!”
A desperate fire fight had broken out behind us to the left, the gunshots sounding like a string of fireworks that had been tied together and lit. I couldn’t imagine anyone coming out alive from a fight so furious. We turned and headed back the way we had come—back over the small chana, past the bunker I had cleared—and turned towards the fire fight where gunsmoke and dust hung over the thicket like fog.
“There! There!”
In front of us was a group of four or five black troops in camouflage who were fleeing in long strides but still stopping to take quick shots behind them. From our angle, we were partially hidden by some bush. In their preoccupation with making a good getaway after holding down Valk 2 from a superior position, they didn’t see us.
We had no time to get into position; we just stood there and blasted at them. They didn’t know what hit them. Two dropped spinning to the ground as their luckier comrades disappeared into the trees like greased lightning. The shooting died down and we met up with Valk 2 who were grinning with shock as if they had just come off a roller-coaster ride and had been lucky to make it off. None of them, as far as I remember, was seriously wounded. We inspected the little barricade where the FAPLA troops had made their stand and found two-metre-deep trenches with walkways to stand on if you wanted to look over the top, cement plaster on the walls and bunkers as big as bedrooms dug into the side walls. There were desks, shelves and beds in the bunker. It looked like some kind of guardroom. One Angolan soldier lay still, half-hidden under a tree. He looked dead. A single shot rang out. Now he was definitely dead. A little farther on, next to the big bunker, we found a parked T-55 Soviet tank. Dug into a pit with a ramp, it was invisible from 15 metres away. Made of crude, rough metal and painted green, it looked just like the ones I had seen in photographs of the Eastern Front in the Second World War.
The shooting had died down, except for the odd shot that buzzed over our heads from afar. We moved forward slowly and occupied a trench, and then sat tight for a while, snooping around and waiting for I-don’t-know-what before we moved onto the next section. Every now and then shots rang out, signifying that an Angolan soldier had been found hiding in a bunker and had just joined the ranks of the deceased. We had probably been into Operation Protea for about three hours now. It seemed that the worst was over, with only sporadic shooting coming from ahead. We moved forward over some trenches and came upon a small complex of brick buildings. We entered the building.