Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

Operation Daisy was over. It had been a fuck-up from start to finish, as far as I could tell. From what I heard, the whole huge mechanized fighting group of many hundreds of troops brought in 70 or so SWAPO kills in a period of about two weeks. I never did find out our losses but I’m sure it was a worse ratio than the our ten to their 1,000 kills of Operation Protea .

Valks 4 and 3 and the gunships between them had brought in 29 of those kills (not counting the families of the 29) in the last days of the doomed op. I heard that we had the largest single kill in the whole operation. Trust D Company to save the day. It was another feather in our cap. No one spoke about the Bushman clan we had wiped out—they only bragged about the 29 AK-47s we had brought back. The families were merely casualties of war, or as the Americans would say today—collateral damage—incidental.

A few days later we arrived at the white sands of Ondangs after the long bumpy ride through the Angolan bush. Back at Ondangwa there was a festive atmosphere. We had less than three weeks left in the army and should be flying back to South Africa any day to get ready to klaar out and hand back all kit, uniforms and equipment.

“Oh, yeah… Civvy Street, here I come! Gonna be walking down that main road. Wake up when I want. Gonna be dancing and jolling all night.” Delaney was on top form.

“What are you going to do? Become a bum?”

“For a while, yeah… just going to jol … do what I want.” John was sipping a Coke, smiling from ear to ear. “What are you going to do, Gungie?”

“I don’t know… my old man says I should look into being a plumber… I don’t know if it’s what I want to do. Bit of an anticlimax, hey?”

“Ja… that’s for sure. Maybe we should sign up for short term, try for the Recces again… carry on with the war. It’s still going to get hotter, I can tell you that.”

I sat silently and brooded. Naawwww… fuck the army. I’d had enough of this bullshit. I had seen enough to discourage me from signing on for any extra years.

It was strange, though… no one even mentioned the Bushman family. I tried to just push it out of my mind. When I think of it now, there was no way that old lady could have survived with a wound like that and the choppers wouldn’t have even attempted to take her to a hospital. What was I thinking? Maybe I just thought too much to be a good soldier.

Troops were openly drinking and horsing around in the small swimming pool, somersaulting and hurling each other in, splashing up waves that sloshed over the side of the pool. We had done our duty and given two years for the country. We had come together from rookie juniors just out of high school to become one of the two senior operational paratroop companies in the border war. We had done well. We had made a small dent in the communist threat that was infiltrating our borders and we had seen more combat than any other paratroop company before us. We had been key troops in three big cross-border operations and had, all in all, spent about three months of our operational time deep inside Angola, seeking and destroying the often elusive Boy. Our two paratroop companies, Delta and Hotel, had made a tangible difference in the outcome of this bush war we were fighting.

Just then the rowdy swimming pool group walked into our tent. They were still drunk but were in the tent grouped together with purpose.

“Hey, have you seen Baba anywhere?”

“No. Why? What’s up?”

“Well, we can’t find him anywhere… he just disappeared…”

“When did you last see him?” I asked, still leaning back in my chair.

“Naw… dunno… we were all swimming here half an hour ago. His stuff is still at the pool.”

Kurt looked up from his card hand and we exchanged looks.

“Have you checked the pool?” I said, stating the obvious.

They shook their heads. “Ja… no, we thought of that… but no… we haven’t.”

Kurt and I stood up at the same time and hurried towards the pool just metres away. Kurt and I were drunk but a lot less so than the pool crowd, who followed us. Kurt quickly took up the long pool brush and started to sweep the bottom of the pool. We all watched quietly. Kurt’s big frame was a dark shadow in the moonlight as he pushed the brush back and forth into the black water that still lapped the sides after the horseplay of 20 minutes before.

Suddenly he turned and looked at us, speaking in his low monotone voice. “He’s here. He’s right here, Gungie… I’ve got the broom on him, right here.”

We all looked at him for a second as he gave a few small shoves on the long broom. I was the first to react, leaping into the warm water, landing right on top of Baba. It was a sick feeling to feel him under my feet. I ducked down to grab him but could not. He was under the plastic liner of the pool. I spluttered up to the surface.

“Get me a knife, quickly… get a knife!”

Kurt reacted quickly; it seemed like mere seconds before he returned from the tent and tossed me his bush knife. I snatched it out of the air and in one move dived down, cut the plastic liner and heaved Baba from underneath it. I pulled him up and carried his limp body to the edge of the pool where many hands reached out to grab him. I jumped out of the pool and pushed the crowd away.

“Turn him around!”

I knew little about life-saving but I did know to get the water out of him. I put him on his back and pumped his knees into his chest like a water pump. With every push gushes of water and puke shot out of his mouth like a hose. I lifted him up around his hips and held him upside down as the water streamed out of his lungs. I started to perform what little I knew of CPR. All I did was to blow as much air into his lungs as I could while Kurt Barnes pumped his chest. The air came back out at me like air escaping from a balloon and flapped through his lips. I blew and blew until my mouth was covered in his puke.

I finally stood up when a Jeep came crashing through the small pool barricade and two medics jumped out. They took over and loaded him into the back of the Jeep. I knew it was too late. I walked away across the empty tent square. Most of the tents were in blackness, their occupants asleep or passed out for the night.

I sat on a sandbag bunker outside a tent and smoked. How stupid could they have fucking been! The old swimming pool in the middle of our square of tents was just a big hole in the ground with a thick plastic liner. The liner of the pool was old and ripped. They had been playing a deadly game of crawling under the ripped plastic liner, crawling with the weight of the water on top of them and coming out the other end of the pool through another torn section.

I looked at the big three-quarter moon that hung in the late night sky, casting a milky-white sheen across the vast African horizon. The moon mesmerized me like it had done a thousand times before. I thought of Julius Caesar looking at it and pondering. I thought of Jesus Christ… he must have looked at this same moon. I thought of every living soul over the ages who had stood and looked at this same timeless moon and asked questions of it and wondered. I shook my fist and cursed God aloud. I damned Him for letting this happen two weeks before the end. Having got through all this shit, to have Baba drown in such a cruel way, trapped under the plastic liner of the pool at the party celebrating the end of two years’ national service… coming out of it in one piece just a couple of weeks before we all went back to our families and loved ones. Emotional and drunk, I sat on the sandbags and wept tears of frustration and stared at the moon. I thought of Baba, who was the smallest guy in the company and looked as if he was a kid of fifteen.