Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

I suddenly couldn’t wait to get out.

I never returned to live in my beautiful South Africa. The lure of a new country and life in the big bad city was hard to resist and my six-month stay in America turned into many years of ups and downs, struggles and victories.

I boxed for a couple of years and quit when I realized that I had lost the focus and dedication that was needed in the professional ring. I would take a fight because I needed the measly paycheck, doing most of my training at the ‘Cat and Whistle’.

When I quit boxing, a surprise was waiting for me. As my channel and outlet for tension was now gone, I was ambushed by the past. Ambushed by dead ‘freedom fighters’ with their brains blown out, ambushed by the spirits of dead men, old women and children and their spilled blood on the white sands of Angola and South West Africa.

I found it hard to handle any authority and to keep a steady job at the bottom of the ladder in my new country and many a loudmouthed boss was put up against the wall. The spirits of spilled blood manifested themselves in the strangest and most perverse ways, robbing me once again of my most precious memories and happiest moments.

It would always take me by surprise. Making love to my wife I would see her as a terrorist we had left dead in the sand. In a moment of tender thought of a loved one or family member, I would see that loved one in my mind’s eye shattered, broken, shot to pieces like the men we had killed. Any good and precious memory would be ambushed and drowned in the blood of headless men and mothers cut in half, still holding their dead children. These flashbacks came from nowhere. To mentally see my loved ones like this was so traumatizing that I would lose my breath and have to pull the car over to the side of the road in the busy Los Angeles traffic.

I was quiet but became quieter. The quieter I became the stronger the anger grew—many’s the owner of a disrespectful or sloppy Los Angeles attitude who was given an instant re-education with cruel boots and a fast, heavy fist.

For many years I couldn’t handle or even watch Hollywood make-believe movies with senseless violence. I would invariably get up and leave the theatre in the middle of the film.

I was ashamed, and didn’t dare tell anyone. I couldn’t bring myself to even utter the words, repeat or admit the horrifying visions that took my breath away.

South Africa became a faraway place as the years went by. I had not spoken to a Parachute Battalion buddy since I had left the army in 1981. I started to doubt the stories that I told of my war in Angola. I stopped talking about it and closed the doors to it until, after many years, it felt like a dream and perhaps it hadn’t even happened that way at all—maybe I’m mixed up, maybe a tank didn’t come out the bush at us? Was that SWAPO ambush in the chilly dawn real or was I imagining it? All my army friends—John Delaney, Doogy, John the Fox, Kurt, Stan the Man and others who, at one time had been as close as brothers, felt like long-dead ghosts in another, faraway land.

I read about the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola as a security guard one night, sitting next to an Ethiopian who claimed that he was a communist. He was the nicest person you could ever meet.

I read about Nelson Mandela being released after 27 years in prison and being elected president of the ‘new South Africa’. I wrote him a letter of congratulation and to my surprise I received a letter from him enclosing a signed photo, wishing me all the best. I read how SWAPO whom we had hunted down in the Angolan bush as the sworn and hated enemy, who were the real ‘red danger’, had won free and fair elections in South West Africa and that not a peep had been heard out of them since. I pondered what it had all been about. Who was right and who was wrong? Were we the good guys or were we the bad guys?

I read cloak-and-dagger ‘tell-tale’ books on the old South African regime and realized that we might have been the ones sucked into one big lie and brainwashed for the sake of Volk and Vaderland .

In 1990, nine long years after Angola, I said ‘enough’ and visited a Vietnam veteran counselling centre in Los Angeles where I sat down and spoke to a counsellor. For the first time I told a living soul of my anger, torment and my debilitating visions. The moment the words left my mouth and travelled to another human being’s ear, I felt the spirits’ grip weaken. I walked out over the grass lawn later, elated.

It was difficult at first but I told another person, then another and each time the grip got weaker. My terrible secret was out.

I decided to write about my experiences in Angola. It took months of deep thinking, slowly bringing back the points of memory about my small war. Invited and called back, the memories all came flooding in like chickens coming home to roost but this time I was ready for them and wrote them down on paper for all to see.

The real healing had begun.

The first time I returned to South Africa to visit was in 1997, 12 years after I had left in 1985. On the second visit a few years later, I was determined to to track down some of my old 1 Parachute Battalion mates who were once my brothers.

They were difficult to find as they had bombshelled in many different directions around the world, leaving a very faint spoor to follow. Of the handful of friends I was able to find, their lives had all been affected by the bush war and changed forever.

John Delaney : one of the first to get a kill in our company, had attended a seminary and become a missionary minister, going back into Angola. He ministered at the Town of Death, Ongiva, to preach and spread the word of God. John has travelled to almost every country in Africa to minister, as well as going in to give aid among Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. He is married, has three children, lives in England, is a published author and still does ministry work.

Anthony Stander : hardnosed, cold-as-ice ‘Stan the Man’, who was raised in an orphanage and reform school and who was caught with a huge amount of money after he had robbed five banks soon after leaving 1 Parachute Battalion, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In prison Stan was reached by a Christian counsellor. He spent seven years in prison but is a saved man. Stan was, as he puts it, released after seven years on a ‘miracle pardon’. He too is married, with three children and lives in Cape Town. He is today, and has been for many years, very active in Christian outreach and is a minister in the church. He is as hard a man for God as he was a soldier in the bush.

Aaron Green : Doogy’s war still goes on. At the time of writing he has been a security contractor for an British security outfit for four years. He still sees regular action in Iraq, Algeria and Afghanistan and a year ago was the only survivor in an ambush on his motorcade in Algeria. Doogy has lived in the UK for many years, has led an interesting life owning a number of businesses—including a small factory manufacturing Mercedes gull-wing sports cars under licence. He is divorced from his second wife, has a young daughter, and when in the UK he lives on his yacht.

Michael Roberts : Mike was paralyzed from the waist down in a motorbike accident soon after leaving the army in 1981. His army mate, Anthony Stander, has stuck with him through many years and they run a roofing business together in Cape Town. Michael also stuck by Stan while in prison.

John Glover : ‘The Fox’, the Englishman who didn’t have to do military service, and whose sharp eyes saved me from going on that never-ending patrol in the sky, is living on a farm in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, happily surrounded by fat cattle. He runs a construction company, is married and has three children. John tells me that his temper caused him big problems for many years, which he ascribes directly to those years when killing was something he did without the blink of an eye.