Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

“Bunker at 2 o’clock… RPG take it out! Forward! Keep the line straight… don’t bunch up!”

For three nights we practised till well after midnight. Then we would try fix a hot meal in the dark and catch some sleep, still full of sand from diving into the dirt. To help matters a bitter cold and windy spell had sprung up since our return to the border.

The target base was manned by 300 SWAPO terrs, very deep in Angola. Once again the leaders had in their wisdom decided to send just over 100 of us to do the job. Everyone seemed relieved when the day before we were supposed to go in, a cold windy morning, we were brought together and told that the president himself had called off the operation the night before, deeming it too dangerous. (I found out later that apparently every cross-border operation had to be approved by then President P. W. Botha.)

We returned to Ondangwa happy to resume Fireforce and our suntanning duty, but after a week of chilling out, a jubilant and smiling Commandant Lindsay hurriedly called us together next to the pool and announced that another very big operation was in the offing. The man loved war with a passion. He once again paced with enthusiasm in front of the company in his short pants, flashing his teeth. He told us that this was going to be as big as Operation Protea , but that this time we would be going even deeper into Angola to look for Boy who had retreated from the bases close to our border, but was still running the training camps hundreds of kilometres inside Angola— business as usual. Lindsay told us that all this new information had come to light from the enormous quantity of maps and intelligence we had gathered in Operation Protea . (I realized later that all this new info, without a doubt, had come from the mountain of maps and documents that Valk 4 had discovered in the FAPLA ops room at Ongiva, where we had found Kruger’s bush hat in the desk drawer.)

It was going to be a full mechanized fighting group, just like Operation Protea , where the convoys of each group were perhaps eight or ten clicks long. The target was a cluster of SWAPO training bases hundreds of kilometres into Angola. This was going to be the deepest operation into Angola since Savannah in 1975. This time our sister H Company, with infantry, who were already in training at Etosha, was going to spearhead the attack on the bases at Bambi and Cheraquera farther north, while we would be on standby as reaction force at a FAPLA airstrip called Ionde, 120 kilometres into Angola. Ionde was still to be captured. Three C-130s would be dropping a few companies of paratrooper ‘campers’ (paratroopers who had completed their national service but who were doing their compulsory annual three-week to three-month camp that was required of every army-going South African for 15 years after their initial spell of national service) who would be stopper groups waiting behind the target areas.

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.