by J H Thompson
We had collected the bodies of the dead terrs, but had run out of daylight and had to remain in the HAG in Angola. The bodies were left in our Pumas overnight. We were sitting under trees for a briefing when we heard loud laughter. A large crowd had formed around one of the choppers, and a 32 guy was pointing with his rifle barrel to something inside. It looked like he was giving a very humorous lecture. We walked over and saw that he was pointing at the body of a SWAPO female. She was naked and her legs were open to the men, and they were clearly getting a very descriptive and humorous lecture on female anatomy.
– Anonymous
One afternoon, during a large operation, a radio call came through saying there had been a big contact. None of our guys had been hurt, but the choppers were bringing out enemy dead and wounded. I was ordered down to the helipad to assist in unloading the choppers. While I was waiting for the helicopters to come in, I met the base doctor, newly arrived and freshly qualified. He seemed younger than me, though he couldn’t have been. After half an hour the choppers came in, and soon the helipad smelt of hot exhaust gases, and the rotor blades were going whoosh, whoosh, rotating above our heads. There was dust everywhere and it was noisy and very hot. The choppers had to be unloaded fast ’cause they were returning, so they didn’t even shut down. One helicopter had bodies and the other was carrying wounded terrorists. I was assigned to unload corpses, while the doctor and a medic unloaded the wounded from the other. The flight sergeant had quickly busied himself on something near the engine, leaving me by myself. There was blood and bits of bodies everywhere. I could barely drag each bloody body out of the helicopter. At first I tried to keep the various shot-off body pieces together, but soon the corpses just became things, like bags of potatoes. Just grab a body, pull it out and let it fall to the ground – a drop of about a metre. Grab another, pull it out and let it fall. I remember the sound of the skulls hitting the tarmac. Thud. Thud. I worked as fast as possible so the helicopters could leave quickly. The bodies were just things. There was no respect. On the other hand, dead South African soldiers were treated with absolute reverence. The treatment for terrorists and for us was worlds apart. Our dead were carefully lifted out of a chopper and placed gently on a stretcher before being taken to the morgue at Ondangwa. For the bodies of the enemy there was absolutely no respect. The Intelligence guys would go through their clothing, looking for intel, and then the bodies would be put on display outside the base. There were civilians in the area, and displaying the bodies was a message to them. The bodies were also used in posters and photos for propaganda purposes. The more covered in blood I became, the more the bodies became like bags of potatoes, just to be thrown on a pile. In the end I was worried about which head matched which torso. As I pulled the last corpse out, the helicopter flew off, leaving me covered in bloody dust, crouched over this pile of bodies. Meantime the doctor had finished with the wounded. Wounded terrorists were treated, but I think it was only to make them fit enough for interrogation. He came over and saw that one of the corpses I had pulled out was alive. I will never forget him looking at me with complete shock and revulsion. As he frantically began to look for other signs of life, I wondered how many others I might have killed because of the rushed and rough offloading. I wanted a shower to try and cleanse myself of the afternoon, but during the week the showers were off due to water rationing, so I tried to wash from a bucket. That evening I walked out to the perimeter walls and tried to watch the sunset, wondering if I really had become the monster I saw in the doctor’s eyes. It was a sad sunset.
– Chris, age 17
When you form a battle group, you get an objective, for example to invade the entire southern Angola area. From that main battle group, they split off certain companies and give them specific objectives. It was a stuff-up because the Intelligence we received was wrong. Our objective was a certain SWAPO and FAPLA base. We hit it from the wrong angle, and we had been told it was defended by a platoon, but they had brought in a company in the last 48 hours, so it wasn’t a platoon but a whole fucking company we were attacking. The whole fucking thing was a fuck-up. I was near the rear, mortaring the objective as the sun was coming up, and the infantry moved in after we had mortared the shit out of the base and the surrounding trench system. After the attack we all moved up through the objective, and I remember the place was completely fucked and bombed out. There were plenty of burnt enemy corpses lying around and I saw guys pissing on them. I guess it was about dehumanising them. This one FAPLA soldier had been blown in half, and the upper body rested upright on the ground with the arms outstretched. His lower torso was lying elsewhere. Someone stuck a sign in his ear saying ‘Stompie’, and you could get your photo taken with Stompie.
– Anonymous
It was a bit of a strange place for a camp, but it was central to the areas we had to move in and out of. It was about a kay away from the South West African and Angolan border. We were based at an airfield that had been bombed out and there was only this basic concrete structure left. We stayed there for a while, 14 of us and a bunch of terrs that had been shot. There were about five or six of them in Jiffy bags. For reasons that were never made clear to us, we were told to keep them in the Jiffy bags and not bury them yet. I guess they wanted to check the bodies for any ID or documents, and to see what uniforms they were wearing. Intelligence could tell all sorts of stuff. There was this old ammo storage bunker and we kept them in there. After two days, the stink was hectic. Eventually we were told to dig a six-foot trench to bury the bodies in. I remember it was deep, ’cause when I was standing in it, it was higher than my head. This is how we were: we were so excited we ran in there to get the bodies, and the smell was so bad we all gagged, but we grabbed the bags and dragged them to the trench. We had to tip the bodies out, and the Jiffy bags were full of gunk and blood. We poured high-octane airplane fuel over the bodies and set them alight. It smelt just like meat braaing. I mean exactly like a braai. As the flesh burnt, it sort of shrunk off the bones and you could see the skulls. We threw rocks at the skulls trying to see who could smash them in and crush them. It’s the most inhumane thing I’ve ever done in my life. I mean, shooting people when you are under attack is nothing – that doesn’t count. Sure, psychologically we were a mess, but you can’t keep fighting it, you’ve got to accept it, the madness, the system, and just go with the flow.
– Andy, age 18
We were on standby in Bloem. This meant we slept with our chutes packed and under the bed. At about two in the morning we got a call that Mpacha, a base not far from Katima Mulilo, had been Red-eyed. We landed at Katima and used helicopters to ferry the troops to Mpacha. I suspect that napalm had been used, because I saw one of the Superfrelons come back stacked high with charred bodies. It was not a pleasant sight. Justice S was standing right next to me and he said, ‘Dis mooi, dis fantasties’ [This is beautiful, this is fantastic], so they must have been enemy bodies and, ja, at the time I was pleased that they were not our dead. We always believed that we were winning the war.
– Anonymous
We went out to Fort Doppies, which is a Recce base west of Katima, with some very strange people. I think some of those Recces had a reputation they felt they had to live up to. Some really nice guys, but some … I was talking on the phone and this one guy pulled out this huge knife and pointed it at me saying, ‘I want to use the phone.’ Ja man, whatever.
– Paul, age 17
I had a photo taken of me drinking a beer while sitting on this dead SWAPO body. He had rands on him, obviously for when he infiltrated south, and we took the money off his body and used it to buy beer from the nearby cuca.
– Anonymous
I almost shot someone unintentionally. He was a little Ovambo boy. He was standing near a water purification plant. We’d just received our new R4s to replace the R1s, and I was sighting the rifle. It was instinctive: I had this black person in my sights, my finger tightened on the trigger and something happened. I dropped the weapon. Everyone asked m
e what was wrong. I just stared at the weapon on the ground and said I didn’t know, but I thought, oh my God, am I that unstable?
– Andy, age 18
Working as a journo for Uniform, we could pretty much do what we wanted. Our colonel was preoccupied with many other things. The newspaper fell under him, but he wasn’t an editor and wasn’t that concerned with what the journalists and photographers were up to. We would pick an area we wanted to visit and tell him that we needed to go there to cover a story. A Cape Town two-day SADF soccer tournament became a five-day one. We would fly up to the Border for a day, which really used to freak the troops out, as they could not believe we had just arrived on the Border and were flying home the next day. I enjoyed flying in the Flossie. There was something special about getting onto that old military aircraft. What I didn’t enjoy was the faces of the guys going to the Border. They were so, so frightened. I remember meeting this one very short little guy in the mess at Buffalo, a camp on the Border. He was with a Mechanised Battalion, and he told me about a time he was in his vehicle and drove around a corner, only to come face to face with a long line of Angolan tanks. He said he was so frightened that he jumped out of his vehicle and hid underneath it. Fortunately, the Angolan tanks all just drove off. Even recounting the story, I could see this little guy was still terrified. A little later, another guy came up and asked me if the short guy had told me his tank story. I said he had. He told me it never actually happened. The guy had hallucinated. Without a doubt there were guys up there who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who should not have been on the Border. They should have been sent back, to the old 1 Military Hospital in Voortrekkerhoogte, a low red-brick building where they sent all the loonies. I would have liked to interview the guys there, but I never got permission to do the story. I don’t think they wanted anyone to read about people who had lost their minds because of the war.
– David, age 22
We hung around St Mary’s Mission, which is right, right on the Border, because we believed SWAPO was getting food and assistance from the European priests and nuns there. So we laid an ambush just south of the mission. We lay there for two days and fuck-all happened. You just lie there for two days, getting very gatvol and bored. Then we heard this singing coming from this little church. B, this mate of mine, stands up and takes this MAG, a light machine gun – y’know, like the M60 with the belt you see in the Rambo movies – and walks towards the church and disappears inside. I thought, fucking hell, B is mal, he’s off his rocker and he’s pissed off and gatvol and here he is walking into this church with a loaded LMG. I thought, fucking hell, I’d better see what’s going on. I walk in there after him, and he’s standing at the back of the church with this machine gun and the belt fed into it and the church is packed full of Ovambos, and the choir’s there and everything. And this Belgian monk says to him, ‘Get out of my church.’ B says to him, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Because you’re frightening my people.’ And B says to him, ‘You are killing my people.’ And he adds, ‘In any event, I’m also a Christian.’ And this Belgian monk says to him, ‘You are standing here in my church with a machine gun and you call yourself a Christian?’ This argument starts and I thought, fuck, how is this gonna end? It could end with him going bos and shooting the whole congregation. I took him by the arm and said, ‘Come with me.’ I took him outside and we took the ammo belt out of the MAG and made it safe. We then cleared the ambush we had set up and went back to our fire base about nine kays away.
– John, age 18
One night, while drinking in the bar of one of the many bases we moved through, I met a medic. He was telling tales of ‘helicopter safaris’. Flying over the Kaokoveld, they would shoot game from the helicopter. Once they saw an elephant and landed nearby. They chased the elephant and shot it with an RPG-7 rocket launcher. Apparently the elephant stood just looking at them, while the whole ribcage and stomach had been blown away, before collapsing on the ground. They just left the elephant lying there, and flew back to base, to boast in the bar. The Pumas were used more for transportation, but the Alouettes were gunships and heavily armed. I heard stories of how some of the gunship pilots shot game with their .50 Browning machine guns. I don’t think they all did it, but I’m sure it happened.
– Chris, age 18
32 Battalion wore the same clothing as SWAPO on certain ops. The area in which they operated was frozen, and we didn’t patrol in there for obvious reasons. We might mistakenly shoot one another. A group of our people were west of this one particular frozen area, and there was a huge firefight. No report came in from them, but 32 Battalion reported hearing this massive firefight to the west of their frozen area, lasting about two and a half minutes, which is a long time. Our commandant, who was overseeing everything, got very excited and said, ‘Skuimballe manne! Ons het weer koppe!’ [Scumballs men! We’ve got heads again!] Meaning we had more dead enemy heads. I said to him, ‘Commandant, given the nature of the person leading that patrol, I guarantee that when they make contact they will say, “Stand by for my grid reference.”’ Meaning simply that they are reporting their physical position and they have nothing further to communicate. So the commandant was waiting for them to radio in to confirm how many enemy they had killed. The transmission came in and it was exactly as I said it would be: ‘Stand by for my grid reference.’ The commandant called the individual on the radio and asked for an explanation, and the saga unfolded. They had arrived at this kraal and found a whole lot of terrorist tracks, but couldn’t find any terrorists. They assumed that it was utilised as a transit camp for terrorists, so they set up formation and shot the living daylights out of the livestock. They just shot up all the cattle, goats, everything. They shot it all to smithereens.
– Dudley, age 21
You lose your fear. You become blunted and depressed. You become blasé when you are under constant pressure and guys are trying to kill you 24 hours a day. We weren’t supposed to move before dark. There are certain rules you don’t disobey – if you do, you get killed. You die. One of those rules is, don’t move before sunset. But we were windgat and we were gatvol and we wanted to get moving. It was late afternoon, still light, and we started moving around, removing the cammo nets, and the next thing a couple of MiGs come screaming in low and rocket us. They’re supersonic, so they make a helluva noise. We took cover under the Rinkhals. They were blowing up shit all around us, but luckily they were off target. No direct hits and no shrapnel. We were careful about when we moved after that wake-up call.
– Greg, age 25
On one changeover, we came careening into the base and sat on the runway while we proceeded to get completely motherless so that fuck-all mattered. Within minutes we were being chased out of the base by some still-wet-behind-the-ears major, who actually thought the castles on his shoulders would impress us. To impress us he should rather have given us a warm welcome and a few cold Castles. Instead he told us we were not welcome on his base, and ordered us to sleep in the bush outside the camp walls. In his mind he was sentencing us to a hazardous night, but compared to where we had just been, we hardly cared. Since we knew there was no way the major was going to come out of his base during the night, we shot off all our spare ammunition, rockets and flares into the sky and treated ourselves to a memorable fireworks display.
– Chris, age 18
One drunken night we were playing poker while the guys in the neighbouring house partied to Abba. Now Abba is not very good at the best of times, but after 18 replays on a distorted sound system, it was just too much. What started as a petty argument ended when one of the guys from a neighbouring house picked up his machine gun, calmly walked over to the neighbours, and shot the roof off the house. We rolled around laughing.
– Chris, age 17
Full Metal Jacket is one of the few war movies I could identify with. The aspects of training were as I remembered them. Our experiences were not like Vietnam, with the ambushes and patrols and such. There was very, very little of th
at. But in that movie they are coming back from this one battle singing that Mickey Mouse song, and I remember coming back from ops in Angola and we started singing nursery rhymes.
– Paul, age 17
At War
We went in in June ’87 when Intelligence revealed that a battalion of enemy tanks was heading down from northern Angola to annihilate UNITA and the FNLA. Mavinga was Jonas Savimbi’s Log Base. That’s his logistical base, with all his food supplies, weapons and ammunition. It was way into Angola, about three or four hundred kays in. The brass boys and politicians didn’t want the UNITA leader taken out. He and the FNLA were backed by the West – the States – and us, and were fighting against FAPLA and the MPLA, who were backed by Cuba, East Germany and Russia. They were coming down to take them out, and it wasn’t just a couple of armoured cars, artillery and a few guys on foot. There were also about 85 tanks heading south. They also had Stalin Orrels, which were excellent killing machines. They could launch 20, 30 rockets within seconds and were very mobile. But our MVLs – multiple rocket launchers – had a greater range and could fire about 22 kays to their 20 kays or so. That made a big difference.