“Hey, look! Here’s Kruger’s bush hat! Look, here’s his name on the inside!” Badenhorst held up an SADF bush hat he had just found in a desk drawer. He had a huge grin on his face. I was kicking through some clothing lying on the small office floor. I stopped and moved over to have a look.
“Check right here… Kruger… there’s his name!”
I looked at the brown South African bush hat and, sure enough, there was Kruger’s name in faded black pen, visible next to the bright orange DayGlo sticker on the inside of the hat. Soon a group stood around inspecting the bush hat. “Jeez, how about that. It is Kruger’s bush hat! He lost it when we hit those FAPLA in Ceiling. They must have found it and brought it here to the HQ.”
I grinned. Kruger’s bush hat had travelled far. The area where we had made contact with FAPLA by mistake and had to run for it in Operation Ceiling was hundreds of kilometres away. They must have brought it all the way to the HQ here at Ongiva to use as evidence for the their inevitable complaint to the United Nations Security Council that the ‘white racists’ had attacked them. I chuckled. What were the odds of pulling open a desk drawer and finding the bush hat you had lost almost two months earlier in another operation. Kruger had been pulled back to the medics after being shot in the hand earlier but was going to be pleased to get his hat back .
And an HQ indeed this was! Recklessly we opened cabinets and drawers and found piles of packaged documents and dozens of maps with areas circled in red pen.
“Look at this! These are fucking SWAPO locations! Damn, look at this!”
I turned and looked at the pile of maps that Paul Greef was holding. I could see S.W. written in red pen next to at least a dozen circled areas.
“Show Doep.”
Doep pushed his helmet back and shuffled through the pile of maps. His eyes shone as we pointed out the marked spots on the maps as troops brought more maps they had found in some of the other cabinets. We had happened upon one of the main FAPLA intelligence offices in southern Angola.
Doep pressed the receiver attached to his epaulette and it crackled into life. “Tango Lima, Tango Lima, this is Victor Four… do you read, over?”
“Go ahead, Victor Four… over.”
“Tango Lima, we have found what looks like the operations building and have a pile of maps with marked SWAPO locations. We need someone to come and pick them up. Over.”
“Affirmative, Victor Four. Intelligence will be on the way. Stand by and be ready with smoke.”
The base was so spread out that we had to pop a smoke for them to find us. We hung around the buildings and the guys rummaged through every office desk and cabinet. Some grabbed booty and souvenirs and stuffed them into their webbing. I did not. I decided this was too serious a time to be scrambling for souvenirs. I couldn’t think of a worse way to meet your end than to get blown up by a booby trap while scrabbling for booty. (I saw a lieutenant blown to bits by a booby trap in a bunker in a later trip, on Operation Daisy.)
I squatted outside the small group of buildings, smoked a cigarette and scanned the area while they squabbled over prized Eastern Bloc webbing and equipment. A good few kilometres of the base still lay ahead of us but it looked pretty quiet from here. Probably all still hiding in the trenches. Behind some small prefab buildings, behind the ops rooms under some trees we found a large sand model of about four metres square. I couldn’t make head or tail of it but Doep informed us that we had to stay put by the model until the intelligence outfit came over. After half an hour someone popped a green smoke and they arrived with big suitcases and a few infantry troops as escorts. Not far from the sand model under some trees, lay an old stripped-down hulk of a plane that was missing wings, tail, undercarriage and engine and nose. It looked so small that I didn’t even pay attention to it. I thought it must be spare parts or an old civilian plane but later learned it was what was left of a South African Impala Mk II that had been shot down during Operation Sceptic a year before. Our Platoon, Valk 4, had stumbled onto one of the Angolan army’s main intelligence centres. Later, South Africa launched another equally-large mechanized operation because of intelligence gleaned during Operation Protea. I firmly believe that it was this intelligence that the led to next big operation into Angola, Operation Daisy.
We spread out and moved on. A black youth leaped out of a bunker six or seven metres in front of us and took off like a jackrabbit. He was extraordinarily tall and muscular… and unarmed. He had stripped off his shirt and had only his camouflage pants and boots on. His skin was smooth and black as tar. His back muscles flexed and bulged as he ran for his life across the small piece of open ground, heading for a thicket 50 metres away. Five or six of us took a second or two to react, then opened fire at the fleeing man. I bent my head to my sights and aimed between his shoulder blades. My rifle kicked into my shoulder as I fired five or six shots. Dust kicked up all around him as he gained speed, zigzagging and running like the hounds of hell were after him.
He was already maybe 50 metres from us, with his arms pumping in a steady rhythm like an olympic athlete in the race of his life. I quickly changed my footing, held my arm steady and took better aim this time, a little higher, and pulled off another salvo of shots. Through the smoke I saw that he seemed almost charmed. Although the ground around him was alive with spurts of dust from the bullets of the six men who were shooting at him, he ran on untouched. I paused. Inexplicably I took my finger off the trigger and stopped shooting but kept my rifle up so the others could not see I had stopped shooting.
“Go for it, mate, you’re going to make it… Go! Go!”
I lifted my head and watched through the smoke.
“Go, you’re almost there,” my mind willed quietly. Just before the tree line he stumbled and seemed to trip over his feet. His long arms went down to break his fall and he rolled in the sand and lay still.
“Fucking hell… that kaffir can run. He almost got all the way across the chana… see that… with all of us shooting!”
“Shit, doesn’t say too much for our shooting. See how he went down? Looked like he was going to make it,” Fourie hooted.
I said nothing and felt a sadness. We moved past the dead unarmed youth who lay in the sand with his eyes open. Someone put a shot through his head, just to make sure.
By about two in the afternoon most of the shooting had stopped. We had been at it since 06:00. The 1,000-man army we had expected wasn’t there but FAPLA had left a few hundred diehards to face us and now it seemed that they too had retreated through the maze of trenches.
The worst was over. By now we had all got the hang of this thing and were moving methodically, like veterans, though the cavernous trenches, giving hand signals, moving rapidly in small groups. We were about halfway through the huge base. The midday sun baked down on us as we cleared each bunker with fire or grenades. We had got the order to stop using M27s and to use our ‘Willy Pete’ white phosphorus grenades instead, as some FAPLA troops had been hiding in bunkers covered with mattresses and survived the M27 blasts. Later I heard the story of how one plucky FAPLA sergeant had climbed out of a bunker after a grenade had been tossed in and, armed only with a piece of wood, had laid into a South African lieutenant. He had been clubbed down and taken prisoner.