Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

“Left wheel, left wheel!” Doep shouted.

We turned the sweep line around and unavoidably grouped together as we scaled the steep koppie to get to the top, where the gunships had the terrs pinned down. As we topped the rocky hill we could, for the first time, see the two gunships that were flying in tight circles 30 metres in front of us and hammering down into the thick trees.

It was a nightmare scene. We could see figures running and crouching behind trees in the haze of dust and smoke as the gunships circled above them at an angle that looked as though the gunners would fall out but did not. Their long 20-millimetre cannons flashed and the explosive heads blew up waves of white sand. The smoke and dust was as thick as fog.

“Straight ahead! There, straight ahead!”

I dropped to one knee and aimed into the fog at the ghostly figures. I shot as fast as I could. My barrel moved from one spectre to the next, unable to stay on one target for long. I whipped over my quick-change magazine and kept on firing. I had fired 60 rounds. Our own gunsmoke enveloped us, burning my throat and eyes. Now I could see no targets. I pulled another magazine from my chest webbing and dropped my two empty mags into the sand. I fired the third magazine out into the haze.

“Cease fire… cease fire… cease fire!”

Slowly the mad shooting stopped. The gunships had ceased fire and hovered in tight circles over the dust and smoke-filled killing zone, their rotor blades chopping loudly, whap , whap , whap , as they turned.

“Forward… spread out… spread out! Forward!” Lieutenant Doep turned and looked down the line, shouting at the top of his voice.

I sprang up and began to walk forward with my rifle socked tight in my shoulder. I stared intently into the smoke and dust haze now 25 metres in front of us. I saw no movement. I stepped over a log and almot stumbled to my knees as my boot hooked something. My eyes did not even waiver as I stumbled, viciously pulling my foot free. I walked fast, as usual, believing in the blitzkrieg policy that says moving fast into a situation gives you an edge. It was a tactic I always used in street brawls. To cut through the bullshit and get in before the other guy could get his mind working.

John Delaney was off to my right as we walked into the fog. I looked around at the carnage and in a second I realized there was not much danger here. The ground around me had been torn up and was burned white from the sustained cannon fire. Leaves and broken branches covered the ground which looked as if it had been ploughed by the grim reaper. It took a second or two to realize that there were bodies lying everywhere.

“These are children!” John Delaney shouted.

There were four or five kids ranging from five to ten years old. They were in a group, lying in the dust half naked and mangled by gunfire, their bodies caked with sand and blood.

I glared at the scattered small, broken bodies. I pulled my eyes off them and scanned in front of me, my rifle still tight in my shoulder. In front of me and to my left, among the leaves, lay a Bushman woman. There was no mistaking the wrinkled yellow skin and small, almost square-shaped head covered with tufts of peppercorn hair. She was topless and lying on her stomach. The left side of her chest and arm were gone, cut off raggedly by a 20-millimetre round. Her ribs and sternum were exposed; the huge gaping wound looked like a side of meat hanging in a butcher’s shop. In her other arm she still clutched an infant, holding him into her chest. The little tyke was naked and appeared unharmed but was dead from either shrapnel or terror. He lay with his face in the crook of his mother’s elbow. A turd stuck halfway out of his little bottom, testifying pathetically to his last terrified moment. I gingerly moved through the shattered trees.

Dead SWAPO in uniform lay chopped up or whole behind almost every bush and tree. I stood next to one who had circled around and around a tree trunk, hiding in vain from the gunships’ cannons. It looked like he lasted quite a long while as the tree trunk and the ground around him had taken many hits. He was cut in half. There were some more half-naked women and adolescents lying nearby. They were all dead.

Our platoon had split up, with each man on his own picking his way slowly through the carnage. Somehow our company commander had appeared on the scene. I did not know how the hell he got there. He and I stood side by side as we both surveyed the butchery.

A few yards away a SWAPO cadre who had heard our arrival groaned loudly. He tried to move but seemed mortally wounded and could only stare at us with watery eyes, like a dying animal with its head lolling in the sand. He groaned louder and louder as if asking for something but unable to say the words.

“Korff,” the captain called over to me and casually pointed to the terr with his chin.

I knew what he was saying and I had no hesitation in putting the poor bastard out of his misery. I stepped over the dying SWAPO’s feet, coming up behind him. I reached forward with my rifle and put the muzzle point-blank on the bump behind his ear. I looked at his ear and the back of his head for a second, then pulled the trigger. I realized too late that I should first have picked up the AK-47 that had been lying close to his head. I hesitated for a moment, then reached and grabbed it and slung it over my shoulder. It was messy, the light pinewood stock shattered by my rifle shot. Dan Pienaar put a couple of shots in the guy lying next to him as he too writhed and then lay still.

I walked through the stripped thicket. There were bodies everywhere. Thirty or forty of them. Most of the SWAPO men who lay in the sand were small, yellow Bushmen who wore an assortment of Chinese rice-pattern uniform with full kit and webbing. Some were blacks, also in SWAPO uniform. It became clear to me that we had wiped out an entire Bushman clan. The men had joined SWAPO and lived with their whole clan in or around the base, never thinking that it would be attacked being so deep in Angola. They had tried to make a break for it when the base was hit by H Company and would have made it if Commandant Lindsay hadn’t spotted them.

They looked small and broken, like dolls. Some of their wrinkled, wizened-looking faces still showed the terror of being trapped like animals and slaughtered to the man. The sweet smell of blood and guts is a cliché but it was, nevertheless, a reality and clawed at the back of my throat.

I walked out of the thicket and up a little rise. At the top, Paul Greeff stood looking at an old woman who was lying on her side. She was easily in her 90s or even older. Her hair was snow-white; it covered her old head like a cap of white tufts. Her wrinkled yellow skin hung from her body like old, loose, treated leather. She lay quietly on her side, with one elbow pulled up under her head as a makeshift pillow. When I got closer I saw that her abdomen was torn open and that her entrails and liver lay in the sand next to her. She slowly moved her eyes to look at me, like a child falling asleep. Her face was calm and showed no hostility whatsoever; there even seemed to be a faint smile. Three metres away were five or six children standing in a row. They were aged from five to about ten. They stood still and looked on. Their little faces were masks, ashen with fear and shock as they stood silent as statues. They had just seen their entire family wiped out; now they stood and gazed at what was probably their great-grandmother lying in front of them with her guts lying next to her. I put my rifle and the AK-47 in the sand and knelt beside the old lady. I touched her on her forehead and she smiled at me. I looked at her wound quickly, then back into her eyes.

“Its okay, its okay… you’ll be all right. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.” I pointed up, making a whirling action with my arm over my head. “The helicopters will take you. They’ll fix you… you’ll be alright… you’ll be okay.”