by J H Thompson
My clearest memories are of the first few contacts we had inside South West. I recall these SWAPO incursions more than our ops into Angola. We were spending our time doing patrols with little purpose really, just walking from A to B and making ourselves visible to the locals. We were based not far north of Oshivelo, and that evening we were given the opportunity to travel to Tsumeb for a Geraldine concert. She was a corny country and western singer who was a big hit with the troops. I think one of her songs was ‘Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk’. Anyway, about 150 of us are sitting in the dark, watching the show, when the lights go on and we’re told there’s been an insurgency and everyone must get back to their vehicles immediately. We leave Geraldine and her blue jeans behind and head off for one of the kaplyne. We are to form a stopper group on a fence line just off to the south of one of the kaplyne. We form a long line of guys, about five to ten metres apart. There are also these large observation towers and the guys in them have night-vision equipment. It’s pitch dark and completely silent. Nothing happens. We see no one. The next morning we are back in Ratels, about 12 of them in Alpha Company. We check out an area further west down the kaplyn from where we had been the night before. The trackers pick up where terrs had crossed. They all wore Russian boots with very distinctive spoor: a couple of V-shaped notches facing the front of the boot. I’m sitting on the front of the Ratel, and E, a guy from the Eastern Cape, is walking around looking at where the guys had come through the fence and crossed the line. He shouldn’t have been there, on the ground, walking around. There was this boom! and smoke and dust as he stepped on a Black Widow. I was sprayed with sand and he collapsed with one leg blown off. We couldn’t find any part of his leg, only a corner from the back of his boot. The wound wasn’t bleeding much. The edges were ragged and partly sealed from the heat of the blast. He was lying there, conscious but completely quiet. No screaming or shouting. The medic treated him while we waited for a chopper to casevac him out. It felt like we waited forever. I was lucky, because that type of mine is a small concentrated charge, designed not to kill a person but to maim, and this one was buried in soft sand, which absorbed some of the charge. When one goes off, injuring someone, it has a demoralising effect on the rest of us. One minute we were in a hall in Tsumeb being entertained by the sexy singer Geraldine belting out country and western hits, and now this.
E flew out, and some time later we picked up more spoor on the swept kaplyn. One of the Ratels, two behind 13 Bravo, the one I was in, was told to follow the tracks. It hit a sharp right, went straight over farm fences and flattened bushes and trees, ’cause that’s how we drove up there, driving right on top of the tracks. The rest of us kept on, moving westwards down the kaplyn. Suddenly we hear a massive gunfight. There’s just the noise of explosions and rounds going off. We immediately call for gunships and start to turn around, get into platoon attack formation and make our way back towards the Ratel that had turned off. We can’t see it, but we know where it is by the terrific noise. We come into a shona and in the middle of it is this huge blaze. It was the Ratel. Bodies were lying around, some on fire and some squirming around. I’ve never seen such a terrible sight. The terrs had set up an ambush on the south side of the shona, and as the Ratel drove into the open clearing, they had opened fire with rockets, RPDs, which have armour-piercing rounds, rifle grenades and AK-47s. Following our training, the objective is to actually pass right through the kill zone of an ambush to the far side to take out the terrs if they are there. So we had to cross the shona, past the burning Ratel, the burning men and the injured, and check the far side before coming back into the kill zone to see if we could do anything. We’d come in in the Ratels and now we had to jump out and start ‘vuur en beweging’ [fire and movement]. I’ve never been so afraid. It was the most terrifying thing to have to move around in that open clearing expecting to be shot or blown up any minute. At that point we didn’t know if there were any terrs still in the area. There was still ammo going off when we got there, but it was from the burning Ratel. A Ratel carries 11 people; a driver, a gunner, a commander, a tail gunner, two mortars and five riflemen. Some of the troops had been riding on the outside of the Ratel, and one guy who’d been sitting on the Ratel’s spare tyre had been blown off. He lost the back of his legs and most of his arse, but at least he survived.
Although the gunships had got a few of the terrs, we went out the next day with Casspirs, ten Bushmen trackers in each, to pick up the spoor from the kaplyn again. The terrs who had ambushed us had bombshelled completely, so we went back to the kaplyn looking for a larger group to track. We preferred to track a bunch of at least three or more rather than individuals. We found spoor from a small group and then two of the trackers ran in front. Once they had the spoor they would keep on it, rotating trackers every hour or so, so that they were always fresh and fast. It was called hot pursuit. If we picked up tracks that were maybe 12 hours old we could catch up fast, and by the end of the day we would only be an hour or two behind. If we couldn’t catch them that day, we camped for the night. Naturally the terrs didn’t stop to sleep or eat but kept going. Of course, this meant that by morning we were back to a 12-hour-old track. But the terrs knew if they crossed another kaplyn, we would not be far behind them. As they became more tired they started dropping equipment, discarding whatever wasn’t essential.
When we were only minutes behind, we called in the spotter plane. It could fly very slowly and very low, and it was fairly easy for the pilot to spot a person. When he spotted the guys we were chasing, he dropped a white phosphorous grenade as a marker. This rose and expanded and was easy to see over a fair distance. We put foot. All the trackers back on board the Casspir, and it was a flat-out rush to reach that white cloud as fast as possible. We caught up with the terrs, four of them. The contact was brief. They were exhausted; they’d been running for days, so it was over quickly. When the shooting stopped, it was a mad rush to reach the bodies to see what we could take off them. We took stuff as souvenirs: their equipment, uniforms, and of course the first person there usually got the money. It was only about R20 or so, but when you only got paid about R70, that was a lot of money. I ran up to one of the bodies, propped up against a tree. He was a young, skinny black guy with light brown army pants and a civvy shirt. I started going through his pockets, looking for the money when he started making these wheezing, gurgling sounds. Man! He was still alive! I stepped back and – bam bam bam! – I emptied half a magazine into his chest, then stepped forward and continued going through his pockets. I clearly remember finding a couple of crisp, brand new R20s. I split them with an oke from 101 who was next to me.
– Anonymous
Three incidents concerning death stand out in my mind. It was strange: we saw an awful lot of action for a six-month period only, and then, after that, nothing but patrols, patrols, patrols. The first incident involved this big Dutchman. The biggest guys carried the LMG, and this one particular guy was large, windgat and a bully. We had got into a bit of an unusual situation in that we were in a more conventional contact. We were slowly working our way through a small town, building by building, doing house clearing. There was a lot going on. This LMG guy was standing in a small, low tree, his feet braced on a thick branch while firing his machine gun over the top of the wall. We ran around to be on the same side of the wall as him, and as we come around, we see this terr fire an anti-personnel grenade at our LMG’s back. But it doesn’t detonate. It lodges in the wall (which consists mainly of mud) right between the LMG guy’s legs. He swings around, because there is a very heavy recoil and a fierce noise when this type of grenade is launched, looks over his right shoulder and sees us two very tanned Englishmen. It was quite funny. For a split second we could see him thinking and wondering if we had shot at him, but before anything else happened, the lieutenant shot the terr. The LMG guy then looked over his other shoulder and saw the terr who had tried to shoot him. He went as white as a sheet and looked like a nagapie, his eyes were so huge. That guy change
d completely that day. He became a humble and nice human being.
In the second incident, as part of the mortar team, we were on the high ground overlooking a village. We received information that there was a cache of terrorist weapons hidden in the village. The platoon had been split into three groups – two stopper groups and one attacking group – and they were busy in and around the village. We hadn’t even started firing mortars down onto the village when a PKM opened up. A PKM has the most unbelievable cyclic rate – it fires a staggering amount of rounds per minute – and because of that it has a very distinctive sound. It opened up from the high ground on the opposite side of the village and it shredded everything around us. I couldn’t believe that they hit every tree, bush, shrub, everything, but somehow missed us. There were leaves and twigs falling all around us and we were covered in a dusty cloud from the dirt that the rounds kicked up. We were in the open with no cover, and everything around us shot to pieces, but none of us were hit. We did find the weapons, buried in a grondseil in the middle of three scattered huts.
The third experience occurred during a helicopter assault. If we knew where a terrorist base was, we could drop an HE bomb the size of a soccer ball right onto it. The weight of the bomb allowed it to penetrate right through the roof and it would detonate underground, destroying bunkers, tunnels and whatever else was down there. We came flying in on the Pumas. I loved to sit in the doorway with my feet on the step and look straight down at the ground as the helicopters banked steeply and only the G-force kept me safely suspended. The Puma didn’t land; it hovered just off the ground as we jumped out. I was one of the first to exit because of where I liked to sit. As my feet touched the earth, it gave way and I fell straight through the roof of a tunnel. We had been dropped right on top of a hidden base. The terrs could build an entire base underground, even housing T-34 tanks, and you wouldn’t even know it was there ’cause nothing showed above ground. I was completely disorientated when I landed on the tunnel floor. You can imagine: you think you are jumping onto solid ground but end up falling through the air, and you suddenly go from bright sunshine to darkness. I was very fortunate – we all were – that the base was abandoned.
– Clint, age 18
I was with a mobile signals unit. We operated on a certain grid pattern; extending out from Grootfontein up towards the Border. We had our guys at various points, all of us waiting to pick up a transmission. When we did, we could plot it and move into that area of about 40 square kilometres, and then we had to wait again for a signal, cross-reference that and move in closer again. When we picked up that tap-tap Morse code again and were real close, the guys went in on foot in a line searching for this one terr. You had to look really hard and it could take ages to find the guy. This one wasn’t transmitting frequently, and when we found the area he was in, it was really difficult to locate him ’cause he was in cammo, under camouflage netting in a pit dug into the ground, and his aerial was cleverly disguised in a tree. He was the leader of one of the regional detachments. Next thing we could hear gunfire and the Morse code still transmitting. He was frantically signalling that he was under attack. The Morse code kept going and so did the gunfire, and next thing there was just this long unbroken signal. He must have been shot and fallen forward onto his transmission key.
– Anonymous
I lost three colleagues in one day. One guy was a HQ signaller who wasn’t even meant to go out. The usual guy had flu, so he had replaced him. They were out on patrol, led by Section Leader Klopper, and they hit a contact. Klopper survived unscathed, even though all the guys around him, my three friends, were killed. His life was spared big time. Two years after Klopper left the army, he was in a car accident. The vehicle rolled, and even though he was not seriously injured, he lay on the side of the road in mid-winter for so long that he went into shock and got hypothermia. Complications set in, and although he was taken to hospital, he died. He had cheated death twice, once on the Border, and again in the car crash, but finally it was the cold that got him.
– John, age 19
I was a very diligent officer, and if I was told to patrol in a specific direction for a specific distance, I would do so. I enforced my own personal discipline to ensure that the people I was responsible for adhered to what was expected of them and to make sure they respected the environment in which they operated. If you become blasé, you pick up problems. One particular day during rainy season, we picked up tracks, enemy footprints, on this dirt road. Having spent time up there, you got to recognise the different types of boots and what type of prints they left. I knew these were not ours. The prints were fresh, and I saw this as an opportunity to rest up for the day, as it was a prefect reason to justify a stop and to set up an observation post without me being negligent or neglecting my duties as an officer. Although not a hundred percent certain, I thought there was a possibility the enemy might come back along the same route. So we set up a well-concealed post, but in such a manner that the three guys in it could see the road clearly. The rest of the group moved about 150 metres away. I instructed the three individuals who were in the observation post that if they didn’t come back with a strike rate of 75 percent – that is, if four people walk into the ambush and they don’t take out a minimum of three out of four – then they mustn’t come back at all. They must just pick up their bags without saying a word and head south. I waited with the others. One of the guys watching the road tried to make radio contact with me, but he was whispering and I couldn’t hear what he was attempting to communicate. I said to him, ‘Either speak up or revisit your volume control.’ A firefight ensued with three terrorists. One got away only because he was lagging behind the others. He ‘packed out swastikas’ and escaped. Basically, we took out two enemy soldiers because of laziness, wanting to rest. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It really excited the people back at base – the enemy had been engaged and they had two dead to report. I found it rather humorous that this effectively resulted in me being transferred to the Pathfinders for the next year.
– Dudley, age 21
Ballas Bak
I was on an island in the south of the Caprivi doing some monitoring work with five other guys, watching for infiltration of people. It was a beautiful island, like being in the Okavango Delta. Work was great, life was easy, although we didn’t get replenished often, so we lived off the land 90 percent of the time. We didn’t have cigarettes, so we smoked wild tobacco, and the only paper we had was the Bible. I smoked from Genesis to Revelations.
– Ric, age 18
Ja, there were times of pure terror, but there were also times of extreme boredom. To relieve the boredom we graded flies. There was the small, the medium and the large. The small was this fruit fly type of thing, irritating as hell. They loved moisture, so they would sit in the corner of your eye or crawl up your nose. They were very persistent. You couldn’t just flap them away – you literally had to scratch or squash them, which was not a good idea, ’cause then it burnt like hell. The medium was the standard persistent little shit, the normal common fly. Then there were the large, the serious horseflies. We would watch the flies, grade the flies, talk about the flies. If we could catch them, we’d pull their wings off, just to get our own back. But I think they must have got blown up, ’cause they seemed to get fewer and fewer with time.
– Greg, age 25
We were bored, and killed time by making ornaments out of shell casings. We made wine glasses, dinner bells, sugar scoops and other rudimentary things out of the brass. One day the guys showed me something they were working on, and I wondered where they had got the casing from, as we hadn’t shot for a while. I asked them where they’d got it from, and they told me they had cut the live head off with a hacksaw. The head can be triggered by heat, and there they were, sawing a 40-millimetre round apart!
– Dave, age 19
There was a lull on the Border when the seasons changed. This was tanning time. During wet season we couldn’t really undertake major operations
into Angola, because the heavy equipment would get bogged down, so we didn’t do much with regard to ground forces, as it wasn’t conducive to conventional attacks. This was the time the terrs crossed in from Angola, heading for the farming community and such, to carry out attacks. We moved north in the dry season and they infiltrated south in the wet season. Kinda like tides. In the gap between the changing of the seasons, things were generally quieter and we could do some tanning. We’d put on our red joggers, which were hideous. They were these shiny red fabric shorts displaying the unit logo, edged with white piping and a slit up the side. Terrible, but, I suppose, quite fashionable at the time. Then we’d slap on brake fluid or ATF, that red liquid you use for power steering and such. Beautiful. We’d smear it on and lie in the sun for hours.
– Christian, age 18
If you were off duty, you often tanned. We never took our malaria tablets, ’cause they made your skin go this horrible yellow colour, and we heard that when taken long term, they weakened your liver. So we never took them, and tanned using diesel oil. I got a great tan and no malaria.
– John, age 19
We used to sit in the operating theatre with the medics, experimenting with combinations of oxygen and laughing gas. But first choice was Sosenol, a morphine derivative which put you on a plak and made you comfortably numb. The advantage was that no one could prove you had used up the supply on recreational purposes, ’cause it was used in the field as a painkiller. There was also dope on the Border. Some bases were so strict and the discipline so enforced that you never got away with it. Other bases were more lax and it was very easy to get dope and to use it. As long as you functioned and weren’t blatant about smoking dagga, they ignored it. We had a few petrol heads come through our camp once. These were usually support troops, like mechanics, who sniffed petrol in order to get a buzz going. I wasn’t big on it, ’cause it gave me a shit headache, but I remember the one night some of us tried sniffing carbon tetrachloride, the stuff you use to clean records. None of us had tried this before, so we all had a good sniff. We shat ourselves when one of the guys said that even one sniff was enough to make one impotent for life. At our base all the nurses were officers, and no way could we approach a female officer without getting fucked up by the male officers for trying to fraternise with them. We spent half an hour trying to secretly attract the attention of the base nurse while she was having a party with the officers. I’m sure we thought we were being careful and quiet, but we were probably making a helluva racket throwing stones at the window and psssst-ing when we saw her on the balcony. Finally she noticed us and came over. We told her our concerns and she told us that we were stupid, but it was unlikely that we had sniffed enough to be impotent.