Steve Joubert - Gunship Over Angola - The Story of a Maverick Pilot

A chap in civilian clothes met us as we landed. Once we’d settled the two aircraft down for the night, making sure they would be safe from being damaged by local livestock, he led the four of us (our engineers included) to a tent with four beds in it. We deposited our overnight bags in the tent and our guide offered to show us to the mess and pub, not necessarily in that order.

I remember finding it slightly odd that all the Ogongo base personnel were dressed in civilian clothes but thought nothing more about it.

Upon entering the pub, I sought out and introduced myself and Richie to the senior rank, whom everyone else referred to as ‘the Major’. Much later, when the pub eventually closed, the Major extended an invitation to the four aircrew to join him in his operations room, where a large stash of liquor resided and where the consumption of alcohol would continue. Obviously, unwilling to offend our host, we complied and soon found ourselves in a large tent containing a couple of fridges filled with soft and hard drinks.

We were joined there by the remaining patrons of the pub. Things got quite raucous, with us leading the singing of ribald rugby songs that reverberated through the camp. A while later I noticed that Richie, notorious throughout southern Africa for his misbehaviour after consuming even small quantities of fermented beverages, was having a spirited conversation with one of the other patrons. Then he suddenly stepped back and roared at the top of his lungs, drowning out all the other sounds of revelry, ‘I HATE THE FUCKING SAP! SHOW ME A COP RII-IGHT NOW AND I’LL KICK HIS FUCKING ARSE!’

Just seconds later, as if they’d been waiting in the shadows for just this eventuality, a string of five or six strapping youngsters filed into the ops tent armed with standard-issue balsakke (canvas kitbags) the contents of which were likely to affect the bodily health of anyone caught in their path if they happened to be violently swung as a weapon in a fight, which suddenly seemed imminent.

But between who and who, I asked myself.

‘The SAAF versus you fuzz motherfuckers!’ Richie roared… and I realised suddenly, to my great dismay, that he was referring to himself, me and our two engineers on the one side, and the rest of the base on the other.

‘Where are you off to, you fucking cowards?’ Richie shouted, not at the would-be assassins standing in front of us (as I would have preferred) but at our two engineers. Knowing hopeless odds when they saw them, the two had made a beeline for a gap between the tent’s roof and its walls and were making good their escape through the hole and into the darkness beyond.

‘It looks like it’s just you and me, Stevie my boy! Let’s give these slopeheads the hiding of their lives!’ Richie roared, with a lot more confidence than I would ever have mustered when facing certain death.

‘There are 600 of my SAP manne (men) in this camp,’ interceded the Major calmly, stepping between the warring factions with his hands held up, like a pointsman directing traffic at a major intersection. ‘Are you sure that you want to beat them all up tonight?’ he asked, the question directed more at me than at Richie, probably because he could see my knees knocking and had noticed the absence of any visible scarring on my youthful face, a sure indicator that I was unaccustomed to having the shit kicked out of me.

‘We will have to discuss it between the two of us,’ I said firmly, hoping to retain some dignity.

I shuffled Richie, holding one hand over his mouth to avoid any further incitement of violence, through a hissing gauntlet of angry South African policemen just itching to add our scalps to their unit totem pole.

‘Be patient,’ I whispered softly to him. ‘Revenge is sweet.’

We retired to our beds without further incident.

At 04h30, our engineers woke us and we made our way to the two helicopters. After a thorough preflight inspection, we started the engines and prepared for flight.

As I lifted my chopper into the air I told Richie over the radio, ‘Follow me’, and we air-taxied, ten or so metres off the ground, to and fro, over the SAP Ogongo camp, using the downwash from the rotor blades to drive great quantities of dust, dirt and plant matter, at very high speed, into every crevice and orifice of the tents and offending SAP members below.

Doesn’t he who laughs last, laugh longest?

The run-in, at just above the tops of the trees, to the target that morning, a well-defended PLAN base about 90 kilometres inside Angola, for some reason or other remains vivid in my mind.

We’d flown in the pitch darkness from Ogongo to Ombalantu where we’d refuelled, gulped a quick cup of coffee and a ‘dog biscuit’ (a square, flavourless, chalky concoction of sawdust and low-grade flour) and donned flak jackets before taking off for the forthcoming battle, behind another six gunships who’d all spent the previous night at Ombalantu, offending no one in particular.

It was just starting to get light in the eastern sky as we crossed the cutline, proceeding roughly east-northeast towards the PLAN camp, which, our intelligence reports told us, contained 800 well-armed troops. We were also likely to encounter 14.5 mm anti-aircraft guns, as well as RPG-7s and SAM-7s, they said.

The flak jacket I wore was particularly uncomfortable and felt as heavy as a small car. In fact, the ‘steel-plates-in-pockets’ type of flak jacket, which we used long before today’s ultra-lightweight Kevlar models, was a relic from the Second World War. They were individually ‘constructed’ by selecting armoured steel panels about ten centimetres square from a large pile provided and sliding them into any number of pockets sewn onto the jacket itself, ostensibly to protect the more vulnerable parts of your torso. I always overdid the number of panels and would invariably end up with blood blisters on my bum wherever the weight of the jacket merged with sweat and interfaced with cotton underwear, Nomex flying overall and canvas seat cover.

The flak jacket also severely restricted movement, and I generally discarded the ruddy thing at the first available opportunity. This usually happened after departing the battle scene for the helicopter administrative area (HAA), which was typically established some distance from the battle site to permit choppers to refuel and rearm and to allow the crews to grab a rare-grilled rump steak and chips (read: dog biscuit and battery acid) without drifting too far from the fight.

The approach to the target that morning took longer than usual, probably a full 30 minutes. This gave me the time to prepare mentally for the coming punch-up, which in my case simply meant three things: making myself as small a target as possible (not easy when you have three tons of metal plates in your shirt; trying (unsuccessfully) to forget that the wraparound Perspex windshield was only two millimetres thick; and considering (briefly) that most folks back home in the States were likely tucking into bacon and eggs or corn flakes at that very moment.

When the gunships were still around ten kilometres out, I could clearly see the Mirages and Impalas striking the target with bombs and rockets, and the anticipated response from the defenders lighting up the early morning sky like a misplaced fireworks display.

Although I had previously observed SAAF jets attacking a target and the response by the enemy’s anti-aircraft weaponry, that morning’s defensive reaction seemed a lot more intense than I’d seen before, and my trepidation increased. Eventually this caused my consciousness to become detached from my body and to locate itself ten or so metres away, so that I could observe myself going through the motions of flying the aircraft into the heat of the battle without concern for my well-being.