The long mechanized attack convoy took off pre-dawn one morning and we snaked our way slowly through the bush. The dawn light was still blue-pink. We had just crossed the border into Angola when we hit our first landmine. There was a muffled explosion up ahead and the column ground to a halt. The news filtered down from vehicle to vehicle that the lead Ratel had hit a landmine. We waited an hour, huddled shoulder to shoulder and shivering in the cold before we started moving again.
No one felt like doing this operation. We only had about seven weeks left in the army. Operation Protea had been a massive operation and enough excitement for anybody for a while, and that had only been some seven or eight weeks ago. The long 21-day pass had also softened us up and the talk was more about tits, ass and Civvy Street than about shooting Boy. We lacked the resigned gloom and morbid focus that had been present just before Op Protea. I guess being downgraded to standby Fireforce was also part-reason for the lack of commitment.
Late that afternoon the convoy stopped. We were probably some 50 or 60 kilometres into Angola. We heard shots popping from far up front. After half an hour we heard that three big knobs had been killed when they saw some black troops in the bush and, thinking them to be UNITA (Dr Jonas Savimbi’s boys, also fighting for democracy in Angola and therefore supported by South Africa), jumped off to speak to them and the rag-tag group gunned them down. It had been a group of SWAPO who then quickly disappeared into the bush. We never did get the details of what really happened.
“It’s a bit off a cock-up, ain’t it?” John Glover scoffed.
“Haven’t even got to the target yet and we’ve already lost three brass and hit a landmine. Sounds to me that someone knows we’re coming.”
“Ja. I thought they said SWAPO wasn’t even this close to the border after we fucked them up.”
It seemed to take forever, crawling stop-start through the bush but the next day we finally came upon the small FAPLA airstrip. All it consisted of was a handful of small brick buildings with a potholed runway situated between two big chanas. It was deserted. We drove in without a shot being fired. We were told to dig in for a couple of weeks among the scattered trees, 50 metres from the airstrip, where we would be on standby if the shit hit the fan with H Company. The main column of Ratels, water trucks and Buffels carried on northward to the targets at Bambi and Cheraquera 50 or 60 clicks away. In a relaxed picnic atmosphere we dug in under the trees. I built a bivvy from branches and managed to get my hands on some clear plastic body bags which I cut up and stretched over the frame to build a fine, sloped roof. There had been a slow on-off drizzle, brought in by the coming winter winds. I was pretty proud of my architecture and checked it against the others to compare. Mine was structurally sound and had no leaks. At least I would be dry.
Early the next morning before dawn I woke to the sound of heavy droning engines in the sky above and looked up to see the big shadows of three C-130s flying directly overhead in the moonlight and heading north. I could just make them out. It was our Parabat stopper groups who were being dropped behind the targets.
By midday we were all told to hand in our water bottles for the stopper group who for some reason or other had no water. Later it became widely known that there had been a major fuck-up in the drop zones and that the poor paratrooper campers had stood in the door with full kit, ready and hooked up for 45 minutes, while the C-130s flew up and down looking for the DZ. (As any paratrooper knows, once you have stood up and hooked up with full kit, there is no sitting down again.) Everyone was puking in the plane and, to add to it, when they finally did the bush jump, for some reason they were critically short of water.
We sat under our trees kicking back and smoking. An old DC-3 Dakota was parked on the runway. The wounded had begun to arrive. We watched from under the trees as they loaded a couple of badly wounded black soldiers onto the DC-3 to be flown back to South Africa.
“This operation is fucking jinxed. They hit the main SWAPO base and only got 20 kills and a few of ours wounded.”
“Uh huh.”
I sat next to my bivvy and smoked as we watched from a distance. By the fourth day it was beginning to get boring.
“Hey… you guys, kit up! Valk 4, c’mon, lets go!” The call came for us to move. We piled into the Puma choppers and shot off at high speed, just skimming the treetops. H Company was apparently in trouble and we were going to help them out. When we arrived at the front with the fighting group we hung around some armoured cars and Ratels for an hour, before we were told that we were not needed and that it was a false alarm. We got in the Pumas and flew back to Ionde.
We were deeper in Angola than we had ever been and the bush was very different to what we were used to. Gone were the desert features and scrubby, scattered trees of Owamboland. They had been replaced by sizable tropical koppies and small rocky mountains. The trees were thick, high and green. Beneath us a huge herd of 300 wildebeest scattered and galloped wildly, tossing their heads as our Pumas hammered low over them. I nudged John Delaney sitting next to me and pointed it out to him. It was a sight to see. I thought they looked happy that the noisy choppers had provided a break in the boredom of grazing in paradise. Some of them kicked up their back legs and pranced as they ran.
Back at Ionde we couldn’t believe it when Commandant Lindsay, who was a running buff, made us run up and down the airstrip early one morning.
“He’s fucking crazy, running in the middle of fucking Angola on an operation. He’s carrying this paratrooper thing too far. Just because he’s addicted to running, we have to follow?” Stan was pissed.
“Keeps you in shape, man. What you talking about? You want to be a top-notch paratrooper?”
“Don’t need to run to be a top-notch soldier. You think the German Wehrmacht had time to run on the Eastern Front?”
“No, but they did plenty of running at the end.”
“That’s bullshit… but anyway, do you think then that the Russians had time to run in the middle of the winter?”
He had a good point.
We sat around smoking, arguing and debating over stupid things. I told Kevin McKee, who had boxed professionally as a club fighter before the army, that I wanted to maybe box seriously when I got out.
“Its a hard game, my broer. But you can do it if you get into it. You’ve got to stay focused. It’s like going on a operation—if you let your mind wander for a second you get nailed. It just takes one good punch to change the fight and turn it all around. You think that you’re doing all lekker and then, boom! You seeing fucking stars and the crowd’s shouting for your blood. It also takes a while to learn to be relaxed in the ring. You got to be relaxed, my broer. Your mind should be almost as relaxed in the ring as we are talking to each other now. But if you got a good punch, Gungie, it will help a lot and save you in tight spots.”
I pondered on it. I did have a punch. I could punch with both hands. I also had a cold, dead, unfamiliar anger that had recently come to light. The drizzle had set in and I spent more time lying in my hooch under the body bags. My mind was on Civvy Street which was only six weeks away but seemed like six months. I thought what it would feel like to get back into the real world. Or was this the real world? Which one was reality? This seemed pretty fucking real right here. I wondered if I would be able to hang with all the bullshit things that we used to do and talk about. I thought about the band and wondered if I would be able to get back into music again and sing. Get into a good rock band and hammer out some good hard rock and maybe make an album and play at some top Jo’burg clubs. But it felt as if I had no more music in me, that it had all been hammered out. All the dreams of doing things and flying high. I realized that most of my dreams had disappeared. I toyed with the idea of signing up short-term, even going back and trying for the Recces again. I would probably make the tough selection course now that I knew what to expect. (I spoke to an American SEAL in later years. He said they didn’t even do the long, gruelling selection that we did, although they had a few weeks of non-stop hell that they called ‘Buds’. Even my platoon buddies didn’t believe the shit we had gone through on Recce selection and how far we had walked with next to no food.)