During the day some civilians emerged from somewhere and gawked at us warily. The kids were not as suspicious and laughed as we threw them sweets from our rat packs. I finally gave my wad of money to a skinny woman in tattered clothes with three kids running around her. It was useless to me. I couldn’t see myself ever coming back to Angola on a shopping spree. I even saw an old white man who sat on a chair and quietly watched us. He was probably a Portuguese leftover from the colonial days, one of the few who did not leave with the others when the communist-backed MPLA took power.
We spent the day moving around and riding shotgun while an army of troops drove out, loading up everything of value from the big base and the town. We swept the surrounding bush on a few false alarms, until it was finally announced that we were moving onto Xangongo.
Xangongo was another FAPLA base almost as big as Ongiva, about 80 clicks away to the east. Xangongo had been hit by our sister H Company, infantry and another mechanized fighting group a few days before we hit Ongiva, but a battalion of FAPLA tanks had apparently reoccupied the base and had sent a message that they were waiting for us. Or that was the story that was being passed on through the troops.
The entire kilometres-long Mechanized Fighting Group 20 took off slowly along the tar road to Xangongo. On the way out of Ongiva I saw a black civilian I remembered having seen sitting under a tree with his bicycle when we had started the attack three days before. I recognized him by his bright red pants, I was amazed that he hadn’t moved from under that tree in three days. He sat casually and smiled and waved as we passed him in the Buffels. I think he was glad to see us go. Presently I saw an old donkey, also a casualty of war, and quite a sight crossing a big chana all alone, dragging his shattered back leg behind him away from Ongiva.
It was a painfully slow journey, because long sections of the road were lined with trenches and bunkers containing more ammunition and supplies. Some trenches were old and collapsed, while others looked well kept. We stopped while each one was searched and the contents loaded up. Some suspicious bunkers were blown up which erupted in huge explosions that set off thousands of rounds popping in the inferno. We crawled along at a snail’s pace, spending the night in a big armoured laager. The following morning we finally crossed a small bridge and came to Xangongo, halting in sight of the base. It was deserted. There were no tanks to meet us. We spent a couple of days moving around Xangongo which looked similar to Ongiva with a maze of trenches and thick World War Two-like cement pillboxes with machine guns at intervals along the trenches. Some of the trenches had cement-plastered walls.
After about two weeks of chasing phantoms in the bush and with Eastern-Bloc canned fish and chocolate milk coming out of our ears, Operation Protea finally came to a end. We headed south, out of Angola, on a tar road in a slow 16-kilometre-long column of Buffels, Ratels, bellowing T-55 tanks and an almost endless column of hundreds of captured Soviet trucks.
The operation had been a great success. On the radio (every troop now had a transistor radio because there had been one or two in just about each bunker or trench that we entered) we heard a slow-talking, reassuring newscaster’s voice assuring everyone in South Africa that all the SADF troops had been safely pulled back out of Angola days ago (we were still some distance inside Angola at the time). The radio said that 1,000 FAPLA and SWAPO troops had been killed in the operation. Among them, apparently, was the SWAPO deputy commander-in-chief and the deputy for political affairs. The SWAPO artillery commander had also been captured.
The SADF had lost only ten men, most of them when a Ratel troop-carrier fully occupied with infantry was taken out by anti-aircraft guns shooting at ground level, just as in Operation Smokeshell.
The long slow convoy drove back to the staging area in the Etosha game reserve where we had trained for the op. We spent two depressing days sitting around in the red sand and getting drunk at night, celebrating our success. Everybody seemed to be sick of this bush crap. D Company (with the exception of me who had spent three weeks sleeping in a bed waiting for my court martial) had been roughing it in the bush and sleeping in holes in the ground since the start of Operation Ceiling more than two months ago.
“I can’t wait to walk into a Black Angus steakhouse, sit down and order a juicy steak with pepper sauce. Then two slices of cheesecake and an icecold beer. Stroll down to the beach and check out the dolls. Lie on the beach and sniff that good old Cape Town salt water.” Even hard-nose Stander was getting homesick.
“Cheesecake and beer? Makes sense… you’ll probably be in your browns… you know it’s pretty hard to walk on the beach with jumper boots. Also, it’s not allowed, you know… the MPs tend to frown on it.”
“Fuck the MPs… if I want to walk in my browns on the beach, I will. I don’t give a shit about the MPs. If I want to eat cheesecake and drink beer, I will. We’ve just come from the front line of one of the biggest operations the SADF has ever done. Fuck the MPs. There were over a thousand kills in this operation. No other operation has come close… and we were front line!”
We were sitting around the same ashy fire-pit where I had got wasted and passed out the night before the op and hallucinated. I sipped my warm beer.
“That’s bullshit. Where do you get a thousand kills?”
“That’s what it is… there were a thousand kills in the whole operation… that includes Xangongo and the small bases that were hit around the area too.”
“Well, I still say it’s bullshit. I didn’t see a thousand dead bodies lying around… did you?”
“It was the whole fucking area, man! You know how many of our troops were in on this op? Probably well over three thousand, what with all the stopper groups.”
“Well, then, they must have had all the kills because I was there on the front line attacking the biggest base of the operation and I didn’t see anywhere near a thousand kills.”
Stan and I were at it again. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and I told him that my eyes didn’t lie and that I hadn’t seen many rotting corpses at Xangongo either. He shook his head in disgust.
“Hey, cool it, you two. Let’s go back to where you were sniffing the salty sea air, but I’m telling you I’d rather be sniffing some good salty Cape Town babes.”
We all cracked up as the conversation changed to girls.
A chaplain stood on a Ratel, read from the Bible and gave a long prayer of thanks to God for watching over us. I couldn’t hear a word he said. A thousand troops from different units assembled in the fine red sand and were given sky-blue T-shirts with ‘Operation Protea’ on them in tiny letters to show that the wearer had been there. Mine was too small and I was never able to wear it. We were told what a good job we had all done and what a setback for SWAPO this operation had been. A brigadier or a general, who had a bigger voice that the chaplain, told us we had set back SWAPO’s activities in southern Angola for many years to come and that South African presence would be maintained in Ongiva and Xangongo, forcing SWAPO to pull its bases and training camps much farther back into Angola. We had taught the Angolan army a huge lesson about aiding and abetting SWAPO and allowing them to set up bases under their protective wing. FAPLA forces had also been driven back and South Africa would henceforth basically control southern Angola. We were then all dismissed from Fighting Group 20 to return to our different units.