We weren’t doing any kak soek patrols, just monitoring the tar road and watching the area with binoculars. The only real excitement and scare came when, just before dusk one night, Doep shouted that a recce group farther up the tar road had said that a convoy of BTR armoured troop-carriers and a couple of old T-55 tanks were on their way up the road to our position. We flew out, hanging onto the sides of the Buffel and set up a hasty ambush by the side of the tar road. All we had was a couple of RPG-7s and a 60-millimetre mortar. I lay with my puny 5.56 rifle tucked into my shoulder and thought how the 14.5-millimetre guns on the BTRs would turn our little ambush into mincemeat. Then the tanks would ride over us just to finish the job and we’d all die just because they couldn’t spare a couple of armoured vehicles to accompany us. Darkness thankfully enveloped us and no tanks arrived but we did hear vehicles far away in the distance. At about 21:00 we broke the ambush.
At dawn one morning, after eight or nine days of sitting at our little observation post, Lieutenant Doep came with very good news indeed. There was a Flossy (Hercules C-130) sitting on the runway in South West Africa at the paratrooper base at Ondangwa right now as he spoke and it was waiting for us. Replacements were on their way in choppers that would take us from Angola to Ondangwa. Then straight onto the C-130 and home to South Africa. Within two hours we would board the Flossy, fly 1,600 kilometres and be back in Bloemfontein, South Africa… today.
It was fantastic news. We chatted and laughed like school kids as we kitted up and walked the few clicks to the deserted airfield we had attacked two weeks ago, to lay an area defence for the choppers. True enough, 40 minutes later, eight big Pumas came hammering in low over the trees and landed on the deserted FAPLA airstrip, unloading a company of wide-eyed black South West African troops from 101 Battalion to replace us.
D Company had the distinction of being the first of many thousands of troops to monitor and occupy the Angolan town of Ongiva, as from then on the South Africans pretty much controlled of the whole of southern Angola and Ongiva for the next eight years. I walked with John Delaney down the runway to the choppers. Kurt snapped a photo of us just before we jumped in. I scratched my two weeks’ beard and watched the ghost town of Ongiva with its rows of bombed-out houses and its miles of trenches and bunkers disappear below the horizon. We flew at treetop level which was standard procedure in the operational area. I lay on my kit, relaxed and enjoyed the long chopper ride back as I watched Angola flash beneath me like a wide green sea. At least we did not have to drive the long bumpy journey out of Angola.
As we disembarked at Ondangwa we saw the C-130 sitting fat and squat on the tarmac and we chatted and laughed with the realization that we were truly flying out that day. There was our plane, right in front of our eyes. I was ready just to walk straight from the chopper to the Flossy but we headed instead to the paratrooper tents close to the chopper pads, where we found that all our kit we had left at the training area almost a month ago had been piled into one tent (the one I had stayed in on my three-week court-martial vacation). There was a quick hot meal of army slop in the tin-roofed kitchen and even time to catch a shave and shower to wash off the now-hardened Angolan grime before we shouldered our heavy balsaks and tramped across the hot tarmac to the big camo C-130 that sat eager to return to South Africa. I slept cold and cramped in the netting seats, not having had the time or the forethought to dig out a bush jacket for the long, high-altitude flight home. But it didn’t matter.
Landing at Bloemfontein we were told to our surprise that there was a big welcome-home parade going on in downtown Bloemfontein for us and the other units that had participated in Operation Protea. We were immediately loaded into big Samil trucks and taken from the airport straight into downtown Bloemfontein where, to our amazement, there was a full-scale military parade outside the city hall on the main drag. All the streets had been closed off for kilometres around with thousands of civilians and families cramming the pavements as we drove in. Battalion after battalion of infantry, paratrooper, services and panzer troops lined the road, neatly in closed-order formation with patriotic orange, white and blue banners hanging from lamp post to lamp post over the wide main street.
“What the hell’s going on here? Is somebody dead?”
“Yeah, there are a thousand FAPLA and SWAPO dead. This is for us. We’re the fucking heroes!”
When our small convoy of trucks drove up the wrong street, people at the roadside thought that the parade had begun and waved and smiled. We waved back sheepishly. Finally the drivers were directed to the right spot at a parking lot near the centre of town and we hopped off and dubiously eyed the scene in front of us. A few hundred panzer troops who had taken part in the operation were lined up in the parking lot as well. They had some Eland armoured cars with them that they lounged against. It looked as if they had been waiting for a while.
It was unbelievable that the army could have put together such a well-timed manoeuvre. Whoever had planned on having the Parabats present at this parade had done so with precision planning, flying us from deep in Indian country in Angola, then immediately onto a C-130 at Ondangwa to South Africa. Three countries in one day. Perhaps it was just luck, perhaps they would have continued with the parade without us, as they did with our sister H Company which was nowhere to be seen.
We looked a ragged bunch, still dressed in our torn bush browns, faded to light khaki with pockets ripped off. My clean shirt that I had hastily pulled from my balsak in Ondangwa was stiff with white sweat rings and black with dirt on the collar and sleeves. Our boots were scuffed white from more than two months of kicking sand in back-to-back operations. I still had my two quick-change magazines taped together with dirty white medical tape in my rifle. Our hair hung two or three inches over our collars. We looked like veteran bush fighters with our maroon berets on our heads. We were the heroes, welcomed home and cheered. Warriors at last, who had defended the country and fought for the security of all. We formed up into a company in the parking lot and, with a military band leading the way, began marching down the main road.
Civilians packed the pavements and kids waved from their fathers’ shoulders. After months in the bush my eyes were like a hawk and I quickly picked out the beautiful, and not-so-beautiful, girls in the crowd that lined the road waving. In truth, they all looked beautiful, all of them waving their hands and smiling. Lipstick and pretty dresses and soft brushed hair. I stared at them out of the corner of my eye as we marched down the thronged main street with the casual cocky attitude of proud combat paratroopers.
I saw the fresh-faced paratrooper recruits in clean new uniforms staring at us as we marched by and knew how they felt. I had stared in the same way when I first saw a combat-seasoned Parabat company returning from the border and being congratulated on their successes. We came to a halt outside the city hall. Sergeant-Major Sakkie’s legendary voice drowned the 20-piece band as we formed up in open formation. Finally the band stopped and we listened as speaker after speaker congratulated and thanked all of us involved for our part in the biggest and most successful military operation since the Second World War.