It had been a very long night in the middle of a still-occupied enemy base. No one had got any sleep. The chilly dawn brought a long-awaited first light that bathed the bunkers and trenches of Ongiva in a soft grey. We had been up for hours but at first light we jumped into the big trench next to us and saw the spoor of our midnight visitors who had sprayed us with tracers. John’s grenade had missed the trench; we saw the burned white sand a metre and a half from the edge. It had been close.
We walked carefully down the trench and came to a fork and a section where it petered out and we could see open ground. One hundred metres away, the nose of an unoccupied Soviet GAZ-66 truck that seemed to have taken the wrong turn in the great escape poked out from behind a mound.
“Lieutenant, should I take out the truck?” Horn was eager to use his RPG-7 rocket-launcher.
Doep paused. “Ja… take it out.”
Horn grinned, pulled the safety clip from his rocket and knelt down.
“You’ll never hit that, Horn. Why don’t you go closer?”
“Watch, stand away behind me.”
Horn was a farm boy of few words. We watched in silence as he bent his head behind the long sights and closed one eye.
Bang. The launcher lurched in his hands with a huge report. The rocket flew with a whoosh in a rickety line but held its course and, sure enough, caught the truck just above the front tyre and exploded in white smoke. I recognized the whoosh of the rocket flying through the air as the same sound that flew just past my head the day before.
“Shit Horn, not bloody bad… those vehicles were lucky not to come our way last night.”
Horn grinned as the whole platoon ooohed and aaahed.
The fight seemed to be over and the rest of the day was spent in much the same way as the previous afternoon—moving from bunker to trench, but now there was no firing at all except from our own troops as they fired deep into bunkers, moving around at will. New ammunition caches started cooking off again, sounding like fireworks.
We found one of the ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns that had been shooting so well at our Mirages the day before and had scared the shit out of us. The two barrels still pointed skyward. The area around it was littered with big empty shells.
I was amazed to see a thousand-pound bomb crater that was the size of a small house and three metres deep, with burned white sand clods the size of TV sets scattered for 30 metres around it. The bombs had not come too close to the AA gun positions and we didn’t find any bodies at the guns. I heard the infantry found a gunner who had died at his gun while shooting at ground level; a Ratel took him and his position out with 20-millimetre fire. We also came upon the kitchen stores, which was a row of brick rooms filled to the roof with cans of pilchards and ham. In one room there was a mountain of canned chocolate milk. We found cartons of cigarettes, beer, porn magazines from Europe and even a handful of marijuana which we tried to smoke but after a couple of hits tossed the shit away.
We found and captured a skinny man with desperate, burning eyes who was lying flat in an open field next to the buildings. He was dressed in civvies and said that he was trying to get home but when we searched him we found a camouflage epaulette with two black stars in his pants pocket. We trussed him up with parachute cord and put him up on a Ratel where he sat looking quite relieved. At midday we made a loose laager with the Ratels and Elands and sat down under some trees to feast on fish and chocolate milk. There were at least three of our platoons and thirty other personel walking around laughing and chatting in the lightness of the moment. Half an hour later we all jumped as gunfire erupted in the middle of the laager. I looked up to see John Glover standing, legs wide apart, shooting into a deep narrow hole about the size an antbear hole. After seven or eight shots he emerged from the wreaths of gunsmoke and spoke loudly to the hundred surprised faces looking at him.
“There’s a terr right here in the fucking hole! I’m sitting brewing some tea and I hear this rustling in the hole. I look down and see a pair of fucking eyes looking up at me. He must have been sitting in there for two days!”
I didn’t even go over to look. I sat with my back against the tree, enjoyed my pilchards and washed them down with warm chocolate milk. I had another five cans in my kit.
Soon the whole area was teeming with Engineers and all sorts of other troops, loading up mountains of ammunition crates, equipment, generators, tools and office equipment. Abandoned FAPLA T-55 tanks roared into life, billowing black smoke as SADF drivers drove them out of their underground ramps and parked them in the open. Dozens of anti-aircraft guns were being towed away or loaded onto rows of captured Soviet-built GAZ-66 and Ural-375 trucks. The SADF booty from the operation was enormous. I later saw photographs in a magazine of the equipment and vehicles captured—just the crates of ammunition alone would fill a football field, never mind the more than 200 trucks, 16 tanks and more than 50 artillery and anti-aircraft pieces.
It had taken two days to overcome the big FAPLA base at Ongiva but we had done it. Apparently the operation was a huge success.
The armoured Buffels that had brought us to Ongiva had been brought forward. As we walked warily in a long broken line through a thicket of trees towards them, I carried my kit over my shoulder with one hand and my rifle at the trail in the other. Botha, who was a few metres in front of us, suddenly stopped and started firing into the bush next to him. I dropped my kit and John and I ran forward. A FAPLA soldier, already mortally wounded by Mark’s fire, lay huddled under a thick bush. I aimed and put two shots into him. He jerked but was still moving. Botha and I shot again. Half his head was gone but he still writhed and kicked and his chest heaved as he took big gulps of air. I felt very distressed by it all as we all dumbly watched him thrashing. All I wanted was to put the poor bugger out of his misery but he would not die. John the Fox hopped over the little ditch, leaned over into the bush and held his rifle in one hand like a pistol, placing the muzzle point-blank on the poor soldier’s heart and pulled the trigger. It seemed to do the job as finally he lay still. It was very messy. I walked away trying to push it out of my mind. Why couldn’t we have taken the poor man prisoner? I didn’t see an AK lying anywhere near him. As we were walking away Botha, who was a part-time company clerk and a slight, anaemic-looking fellow with yellow-blond hair and glasses, boasted that he had got 14 kills in the last couple of days. One of the other troops in his platoon backed up his claim when we told him he was talking shit. Botha, the company clerk, with 14 kills?
That night we slept in a big laager of Ratels and listened to the howitzers shelling who-knows-what many miles away. The only excitement came when a machine gun from a Ratel opened up just above my head at a sound in the bush around us. I had heard it too. It must have been a donkey or something. I dozed off into the first sleep in days, safely under the wheels of a big armoured Ratel.
The following day we drove through the ghost town of Ongiva. It was a surprisingly built-up little town, with a town centre that consisted of a couple of main roads with street lights and several three-storey, modern-looking buildings. The orange tile roofs of several of the buildings were caved in from mortar hits and thick black smoke from a building that had been smouldering for two days still rose in a pall on the outskirts of town. About a kilometre from the town centre were the suburbs—long rows of a few hundred deserted, small brick houses, their contents spilled out into the streets. Paper, furniture, money and everything imaginable littered the roadways and sidewalks, and before long we all had thick wads of useless Angolan money. It looked as if the infantry had done a thorough job of going through the town with nothing left unturned. There were still large groups of infantry or intelligence troops going through the buildings with fine-tooth combs and examining every document.