Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

“What happened to you?” he hissed. “You’re the one who was always asking to go to the Parabats. What’s wrong? What happened?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. I had no explanation for him. He shook his head at my failure, jammed the gear into first and pulled off, spraying me with stones and dust. When I got to camp the troops who had finished the run stood in line, their chests heaving, waiting to give their times.

I was walking dejectedly past them, heading for the bungalow, when someone grabbed my arm roughly and literally shoved me into the front of the line at the desk, barking a passing time to the clerk. I turned to look into the black eyes and pock-marked face of the lieutenant whom I had known as a sarcastic, mean son-of-a - bitch. He held my arm tightly, his fingers digging into my bicep, and glared at the clerk until he was sure the corporal had written down my passing time; then he shoved me in among the crowd of potential paratroopers standing wheezing nearby.

I felt a rush of hope as I stood quietly among the group of passing candidates who were still huffing and puffing. I couldn’t believe he had done that. I was eternally grateful to the man. I would meet him later in a similar circumstance and be able to return the favour. Oddly, I didn’t feel like a cheat, or that I should not be there. I knew it was through some freak occurrence that I had fucked up on those simple preliminary tests, probably because I wanted to get to the Bats so badly that when they did surprise us by showing up, I was too nervous to get myself together.

Anyway, I didn’t give a shit. It was very unlike me, and I vowed to myself that I would push myself with whatever I had and through whatever it took to pass the real paratrooper physical tests that lay ahead.

Later, the group of us which had ‘passed’ the tests was sent to wait on the lawn outside some admin offices, and told to wait to be individually interviewed by the Parabat lieutenant.

This was the next tricky part, but I had long ago prepared for it. I knew that they would strip us to our underwear and inspect us physically, and I knew the Parabats wouldn’t take anybody with tattoos.

Before leaving home, I had bought and carefully kept a jar of skin-coloured theatrical make-up to cover up the butterfly I had tattooed on my shoulder in my early schooldays. As they began interviewing the guys I dashed off to the bungalow on some flimsy excuse, pulled out my special make-up and applied it liberally to my left shoulder and the back of my neck, already pretty badly sunburned after my new no. 4 haircut. I did a good job and dashed back again, full of cream. When my turn came I stripped down to my underwear and walked into the office.

The red-haired Parabat lieutenant was sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. A second lieutenant leaned against the desk, his arms spread wide, supporting him. He was a blond-haired, raw-boned man with thick black eyebrows that met between his eyes.

“Hold your hands straight out in front of you,” he barked after glaring at me for a minute. “Now turn around.”

I turned around 180 degrees, slowly.

“What’s all that shit on your neck and arms?” the fierce blond-haired lieutenant asked in brisk Afrikaans.

“It’s for my sunburn on my neck, lieutenant,” I answered quickly and confidently.

He stared at me for a moment with fiery green eyes. “Why do you want to join the Parachute Battalion, and why should we let you try?” he demanded, still leaning against the wooden desk.

“I want to see action, lieutenant. I also want to learn how to jump from a plane,” I replied quickly.

He stared at me for a long second, as if trying to look into my mind, then bent and mumbled something into the ear of the red-haired lieutenant sitting next to him. It seemed that he was in charge, even though he was the lowerranking lieutenant of the two. It was cold as I stood in my underwear and bare feet on the cold tile floor. As he broke his stare I looked quickly at his name patch. Lieutenant Taylor wrote something brief on a notepad in front of him and dismissed me.

About 40 of us waited outside the offices while everybody was interviewed. We were told that the Parabats would only take nine volunteers out of the 40 so of us from the Engineers’ camp. The make-up covering my tattoo was beginning to melt in the midday sun, and I was thinking about making an excuse to go back to the bungalow and get some more when the two paratrooper lieutenants came out the office, brought us to attention and quickly started to read out a list of names.

I got a cold feeling in my gut when, by the time he got to the sixth or seventh name, mine still hadn’t been called. Then, on the ninth and last name, he paused for a second, unable to pronounce the next name. With the usual difficulty he coughed out my name: “Korff.” I quickly went to stand with the other—chosen—eight. They were only taking nine of us from the whole camp, and technically I shouldn’t have been there. I smiled. I smiled, but I didn’t feel bad; I knew I was supposed to be there. By hook or by crook or good luck.

Two of the guys they had chosen were from my bungalow. Hans Kunz was a tall, strong, good-looking German Afrikaner with intense blue eyes and a strong square jaw, and looked like a fine example of the ‘master race’. The other guy was Anders, who was one of the toughest-looking blokes I had ever seen. He was short, with curly black hair, olive-brown skin and eyes with an almost unreal white and blue brightness to them, like a Husky dog. He had veins that bulged on the front of his short, thick forearms, and I don’t think he had trained with a weight in his life.

We were to klaar out immediately and start handing some of our kit back to the stores. I had to take my routing form to my platoon lieutenant to be signed and released. He looked at me with his pock-scarred face and the same look of bored hatred, and gave absolutely no indication or acknowledgment of the incident on the parade ground when he had shoved me in among the chosen, with a passing time. He signed my papers and thrust them at me as though I was a piece of shit.

‘Signing out’ took the rest of the day, running around the camp—but it was a great feeling. I was getting out of this dump and going to a real fighting unit.

The truck took us to Bethlehem station, where we were met by the redhaired lieutenant. He turned out to be a pleasant fellow and he told us what to expect when we reached 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein, a few hundred kilometres away. There we—together with hundreds of troops selected from dozens of other units—would undergo basic training. Only after basic training would we move on to the notorious PT-based paratrooper selection course, designed to “fuck you up”, as he put it, and to weed out most of the original 700 candidates and leave about 200 troops for paratroop training. The troops who didn’t make it would be RTU’d—the dreaded ‘returned to unit’.

I had already fucked up once. By luck or fate I had got this far, and vowed to myself right there and then that I would not be among those returned to unit.

The Bedford truck lurched as it drove over the speed bump at the big wrought-iron gates of 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein. Smartly dressed guards with maroon berets and full webbing stood solemnly on each side of the big black gates. Behind them stood the yellow-brick guardhouse with old ivy covering the walls, while on the other side was a busy-looking duty office with sliding glass doors. As we drove up to the parade ground, a huge brown and white fish eagle in a ten-metre-high dome cage whooped loudly at the passing trucks.

“This looks like the real thing,” said Hans Kunz in his thick Afrikaans accent with a touch of German. “This is where we belong… this is good.”