An Unpopular War

by J H Thompson

  We left Buffalo Base, a beautiful place, on the northern bank of the Kavango River, so it was actually inside Angola, heading overland to Mavinga. We were all ground forces and had no air support whatsoever. There must have been about 1 000 of us. It was the first real push into Angola. 32 Battalion had been in Angola during ops, but this was major conventional warfare. We went in essentially as sub-units and task forces of 32. The commissioned officers and NCOs were made up of SADF, and originally lots of the special ground forces were made up from the FNLA. I, and two ops medics, were in a Rinkhals – 11 tons of armour-plated steel. It’s a powerful 4 x 4, with diff lock, low range, everything. Essentially it was a self-equipped medical base unit, a mobile intensive care unit in which you could perform operations. We also had Buffels and troops and officers in Ratels. The Ratels were exceptional. They were troop carriers with a 20-mm cannon. Basically, they were gunships, and they had a lot of firepower. They were also exceptionally mobile and extremely powerful. But although they were armour-plated they were not immune to an RPG, which would go right through them. The troops were transported in Buffels, which were the usual V-shaped landmine-resistant shape. We only moved at night, and even then only using parking lights. To this day, if I smell diesel and dust it takes me straight back to Angola.

  – Greg, age 25

  I arrived in Rundu with about 40 troops for my first camp in 1985. I’d grown a beard, thinking it would help me manage the much older guys I had to command. The camp was a waste of three months. The OC didn’t know what to do with us or why we’d been called up. I immediately got on the phone to SA – the OC of my CF unit – and told them to send us back ’cause we were not expected up there. That didn’t work, and so, because they didn’t know what to do with us and wanted us out of their hair, they sent us out of the camp lying ambush. We set claymores on this cut line, which was a waste of time, because it was the same place they’d been lying ambush in for the last three years. The best thing was the prawn braais this Portuguese guy made for us. They’d broken him out of prison and he couldn’t speak a word of English.

  Two years later, my second three-month camp, it was a different story. The situation was very different now: before we had control, but now we didn’t even have permanent air superiority. We had some guys from 32 Battalion come and talk to us and tell us what to do if a Russian Hind gunship found us. We were told the best thing to do was to shoot a signal flare at it and hope the pilot thinks it’s a Stinger! The commandant was so happy to see us. Not one engineer had been killed since ’81, then all of a sudden they’d lost six in the past six months. It was a long time ago and I do recall it was informal info, but apparently one of the engineers was killed by Typhoon – we heard these were SWAPO soldiers that had been brought up in the training camps from when they were kids and were utterly ruthless, determined and crazy. So the commandant appreciated us, which was nice, and we were so busy. As engineers, most of the roads we worked on were dirt, but it was possible to lay a mine under tar. You put a drum down and lit a fire in it. After it melted the tar you cut and lifted it out, laid the mine and then replaced the tar. At 24 I found it a lot more scary than I did when I was 17. We were clearing roads of mines about 100 kays into Angola and saw these MiGs come over. We weren’t sure, but knew they weren’t Mirages or Buccaneers. We radioed our co-ords in, told them we’d spotted MiGs and asked what we should do. We were told, ‘Best you head south.’ We said, ‘Aren’t you sending someone?’ and were told, ‘We don’t have air superiority at this stage.’ That was quite a shock. So we headed south. My plan in the event of an air attack was to instruct all the vehicles to turn left and only mine would turn right, increasing my chances of survival!

  – Paul, age 24

  The night of the actual Lomba Crossing Battle* was unforgettable. When we were moving up, far north of Cuito Cuanavale, we had plenty of time to twiddle our thumbs and pick our noses. And to talk. We spoke about our girlfriends, wives, mothers or whatever. There was this amazing fellow, an artillery commandant – he was 34, a really nice guy, and we talked a lot. He showed me pictures of his daughters, two beautiful little blonde girls who lived back in Potchefstroom. We got to know each other pretty well.

  For the actual battle we had brought up our G5s. These were amazingly mobile, extremely accurate and extremely powerful gun-howitzers with a range of about 39 clicks. We couldn’t just rely on the MVL, the cannons on the Ratels or the 81-mm mortars – we had a lot of G5s as well. From our intel we knew these guys were coming down with tanks, artillery and infantry. I don’t think they knew as much as we did – that there was a big battle coming. They knew we were in the area but didn’t know exactly where we were. If their co-ords were right … disaster for us.

  It started around 11 p.m. We had two batteries of G5s that were looing them. The mortars were going too, 60- and 81-mm mortars – big mothers. Night became day. Absolute daylight. If you can imagine the most mind-boggling fireworks show, then it still wouldn’t even be one percent of what we experienced that night. I mean that. Our G5s were going all around us. Even though we were right next to one, no one bothered with earplugs. It is the most thunderous experience. The G5 has a huge 155-mm shell that stands almost a metre high. When that is fired, it’s absolutely deafening. And it doesn’t fire once, hey, it fires in rapid succession. It’s not just boom. It’s boom boom boom boom. And of course all down the line the other guys are firing too, so you had this almost staccato machine-gun sound of G5s. When all the batteries open up, it is absolutely deafening. And the ground shakes. Then when the shells hit, anything from 50 seconds to two minutes later, depending on the range, the entire subcontinent would light up. And you would feel the earth vibrate like a grade 7 earthquake on the Richter scale.

  They retaliated. They had Stalin Organs, tanks, they had big artillery, big enough artillery. Not the equivalent of the G5s, but big enough. They were firing flat out at us and we were firing flat out at them for at least one and a half hours. We had shells going over us. You reckon your time is up at that stage, and if you get out it’s like a lucky break. It looked like the entire country of Angola was lit from the explosions from their shells and ours. It was so light you could see if a guy had something stuck in his teeth! I wasn’t shooting, ’cause there was nothing to shoot at, but you were armed and waiting for the guys to come in from the flank. This was more long-range, conventional warfare. Initially you shit yourself, ’cause you don’t know where the next shell will fall out of the sky or if they will come at your flank.

  But this is the really bad part for me: at about 1 a.m. my persoonlike call sign came over the radio – there’s no rank or anything that’s mentioned over the air. I was at the edge of a large shona. I was told to be on standby, fully operational – in other words, with all my ammo, my full webbing, the whole toot, plus my medical bag, which had everything, instruments, everything I might need. They would collect me in a chopper while Guy Fawkes was going on overhead. I knew there was big shit, I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but you couldn’t sit down at a conference table and ask the guys to justify why I should be airborne while all this was going on. I just knew I really didn’t feel comfortable jumping into a Puma with this shit going on. I knew something had obviously gone wrong. They were going to drop me and some Recces at the front of these battalions. Luckily we didn’t fly and ended up going in on foot.

  This little Bosbok, a spotter plane, had passed overhead just before everything opened up. This friend of mine, the artillery commandant, was up with this lieutenant, a 21-year-old pilot. I had seen this unbelievably bright red light rocket up from ground to air. It was a SAM. A SAM-7. The Bosbok carrying the commandant and the lieutenant got whacked by the SAM-7. There was a helluva lot going on and they had gone down in this shona between us and them. There was no explosion – it just went straight down into the shona. So we thought they might be alive. That is what they wanted me for, to go in with the Recces and pull them out. But when we got there, it was just mangled
metal. And they were, unfortunately, both dead. As dodos. Okay. It was a stuff-up beyond repair. I hadn’t known my mate was in the Bosbok until I got there. I think they died on impact. We had to pull them out, which was not very pleasant. It was a complete mess. It has been years, but I still remember it clearly. It was a nightmare: I had two very dead guys and I couldn’t work out which head went into which bag. It really was a mind fuck. The guys were all mangled and limbs were twisted and bent off. We pulled back with the bodies, which had to be taken out of Angola. You couldn’t exactly fly them back on SAA.

  The day after the battle, myself and two ops medics loaded the two bodies into a Rinkhals and made our way back three, four hundred clicks on our own, with no support whatsoever, and with, unfortunately, the bodies of the commandant and the lieutenant – the pilot – in the body bags, which were starting to stink. Of course, there’s no aircon and you can’t open the armour-plated windows. It was absolutely terrible. The stench of a dead human is a unique smell and a difficult one to describe. It took us about eight or ten hours to drive back to Mavinga. It was horrendous. There were no roads, you just donnered through the bush, travelling over this black sand. There were MiGs going over, but we were small, just the one unit, and they didn’t pick us up. It wasn’t pleasant.

  The Lomba Crossing Battle was very successful for us, for our forces in general. It was also the biggest sub-Saharan artillery battle in history, and from our Recces, intel and observer posts it was reckoned that there were about 2 500 casualties on their side.

  – Greg, age 25

  I don’t know what the intention was, if it was a final onslaught or what, but there was a massive push in ’89 by SWAPO. It was a Sunday, and my wife and I were just about to leave the house. We were already in the car, when this military vehicle pulls up and I was told to pack my stuff – I was going to the Border. We disassembled Alouette III helicopters to take up with us. We only had a few up there at Ondangwa and the attack was quite huge. Later, I found out that this time, 1 April to 9 April, was known as the Nine Days of War. We could load two Alouettes along with a whole lot of ammo into each C-130 going to Ondangwa. The SAAF had come up with some incredible modifications to the exhaust and air filters on the Alouettes. These were modifications we’d made during the Rhodesian and South West conflicts. The exhaust was called a ‘renegade pipe’. It was only fitted when the aircraft was deployed in the bush, in other words to the Border. The main function was to direct the exhaust air through the rotor blades in order to cool it down and disperse it so the enemy could not lock on with heat-seeking missiles. The sand filters were called ‘olifant ore’ and were a unique invention to keep sand out of the engines. The Operational Area was very dry and dusty and the sand corroded the rotary engine components. These filters protected the engine, but looked funny sticking out of the sides of the helicopter like big ears, hence the name. Another South African invention was ‘blade tape’. It was like a thick plastic tape that we stuck to the outer leading edges of the main rotor blades to prevent sand corrosion. All three of these additions helped keep our helicopters operational and were critical up on the Border. We landed at night, but it looked like day ’cause there was so much activity. Everyone was running around and there were a whole lot of casualties on our side. I guess on SWAPO’s side too. What I do remember was offloading the two Alouettes and the ammunition and then we started loading body bags. It’s difficult to say how many body bags we loaded or how many injured were lying on stretchers waiting to be treated. Body bags are usually black, but I remember these were like a frosted plastic – not transparent, but you could see where the blood had seeped out from the wounds and stained the plastic.

  – Tallies, age 23

  * The Lomba River Offensive

  Township Patrols

  There was a stoning at Sebokeng railway station. Sebokeng was just one of three townships in the Vaal Triangle. A white woman had gone there to drop off her maid when a large crowd started stoning the car, and the woman’s 11-month-old child, who was on the back seat, was killed. Up until then, mid ’84, the military had never been in the Transvaal townships. I remember the call coming that we had to get ready, pack all our gear, full kit, rifles and live ammo, ’cause we were going into the townships. I think a guy’s moral background and upbringing determined how he reacted and what impact township duty had on him. I mean, if you grew up in a home where you called blacks kaffirs and you treated them like they were subhuman, you would handle this, morally, a lot easier. It was all top secret and we weren’t to say anything to our families. We were really nervous, as we were led to believe that all hell had broken loose and the cops weren’t able to cope so we had to go in to support them. You start thinking, yirra, if the SAP can’t handle it, how bad can things be? Then we were told to stand down. Eventually, around 12 at night, we got onto these Buffels. One of the lieutenants thought he was General Custer. He used to stand on the front of his Buffel, haul out his pistol – not the army issue Star but his own Smith & Wesson – raise his arm with the pistol in his hand and shout, ‘Voooooooort!’ What they then told us was that we were going in there to create a better image of the Defence Force among the township dwellers. Like a goodwill mission. They gave us sheets of paper explaining how to greet the elders or call a young boy in the vernacular, and instructing us to alert the locals that planes would be doing pamphlet drops. These would tell them that the army was their friend. I think the government was starting to realise that things were getting out of hand. They had a whole lot of Noddy Cars (small little armoured cars with big black wheels, a turret from where a guy’s head stuck out, and a machine gun) parked behind this sheeting at our camp. Although I never saw them used in the townships, they were obviously there for a reason. The mid-eighties were hectic. But we were told under no circumstances, unless our lives were in danger, were we to shoot. We went in in these Buffels and we heard that some guys had run and lobbed a petrol bomb into the bin of the Buffel and all the guys were burnt alive. I don’t know how true it was, but that was what I feared the most – getting trapped inside a burning Buffel. We were to form a cordon around the entire township. Not one resident was to pass out of the township without getting a tjap from the police. It was a Mercurochrome mark on their thumb. On waking up, every resident had to go to points the police had set up with Land Rovers and Nyalas and get this tjap, which they could then present to us and we would allow them out of the cordon. I’ll never forget this sight: we were on the freeway, on the actual highway, outside Sebokeng, and there were vehicles with headlights on as far as the eye could see. Every single road around the township had vehicles bumper to bumper on it. Cops, military – guys had come from Potch and Bloemfontein. Every two metres there was a soldier, one of us. At about 4 a.m. we followed a Casspir into the township. The residents had put these big steel rubbish bins in the road, so we always went in behind a Casspir, ’cause it was big and heavy enough to put a wheel on a bin and crush it like a Coke can. The curfew was still in place, and we drove right into the middle of the township, among all these little box houses, and started jumping out of the Buffel. I had a weak knee, so I didn’t want to go over the top. I tried to open the flap on the side and it jammed, so I kicked it hard and it flew open and crashed against the vehicle. It was early and it was so quiet, and I thought, oh man, I’ve woken all these people. But the eerie thing was that not one person appeared, not one house light went on, not a curtain flicked, not a face at a window – nothing. I related this story to my mom and dad, and my mom said she remembered being a little girl in Greece, and when the Germans occupied the town she even recalled pulling the curtains aside to look at them as they came in. Yet in Sebokeng, not one thing moved.

  – Nick, age 20

  We had to do township patrols. They were so difficult, because you didn’t know who your enemy was. They were amongst civilians and you’d been given specific orders not to shoot. If a shot came from a house you couldn’t just fire back, because they’d have children
in front of the house. Guerrilla tactics were employed. Often patrols would be done in a simple police bakkie with a canopy, because they were very quick. They were much faster than the Casspirs. It was frightening, ’cause you had children throwing stones, and if a petrol bomb came in the back of that bakkie it was a mad rush to get out quickly. The people there were capable of using any tactics to hurt you. I hated township patrols. They were the worst. We were called in this one night to help locate a consignment of R4s that had been stolen from a base near Soweto. It was one thing fighting a guy who doesn’t know how to shoot properly and who’s using unreliable rounds that might be ten years old. It was another thing to face a well-armed enemy. We went in to try to find these weapons. We were on roofs, in helicopters, zooming around in police bakkies. We ganged up at a door and ran through a house. It was not nice: people were in their dressing gowns tending little fires. We ran right through their homes, invading their privacy. For me, it was far worse doing township duty than Border duty.

  – Brett, age 18

  It was early morning, about seven, and we were sitting on the pavement, chatting, and there were these two burly cops standing at their police Land Rover. This guy and his son, who must have been about 12 years old, came up and the cop said to him, ‘Why isn’t your son in school?’, and the dad said there was no school. And this one cop grabbed the kid and threw him over the bonnet of the Land Rover and started lashing him with a sjambok – full tilt. This father is standing there pleading with them to stop hitting his son and the cop gets aggro with him and wants to beat the father up. It had such an impact on me. I knew if I was a black guy I would be out there planting bombs left, right and centre. – Nick, age 20

  One of the worst things I saw was in the late eighties, when we were deployed to assist the police and security police with their Cordon and Search operations in the Port Elizabeth townships. They conducted house-to-house searches by knocking on the door, and if it wasn’t opened in ten seconds, they kicked it in. They screamed through the houses with total disregard for privacy and with no respect. It was instrumental in making me think: this is not for me.