19 With a Bullet by Granger Korff Read Free Book Online Page A

The open trucks were piled high with brown kit bags. Wild-eyed troops with long hair bleached blond from the sun and uniforms faded almost to white leaped out from the backs of the closed trucks.
    They were all tanned a deep brown, while well-used R4 rifles hung loosely from their shoulders and long bush knives hung from their web belts. Some had monkeys sitting on their shoulders or clutched under their arms as they passed bulging kit bags down from the trucks. They all jabbered excitedly to one another, hardly taking notice of us and giving the distinct impression of a group of men that had been very close for a very long time. They were one of the senior operational paratrooper companies, just arrived from the hot, dry South West African/Angolan border, which was a four-hour flight from the northwest in a C-130.
    It was the first time that we had seen a proper operational paratrooper company who had been doing the real thing—fighting in Angola—and not just running around the base camp singing and shitting off.
    The following morning there was a parade with everybody present, where the battalion commander, Archie Moore, warmly welcomed the seniors home and congratulated them on a successful Operation Sceptic in Angola, and on one apparently particularly successful ambush . The seniors stood at ease in their faded uniforms, long hair and maroon berets at rakish angles on their heads. It was a breath of fresh air for me and a light at the end of the tunnel. The excitement that had faded in the face of all that cruel PT came back to me as I looked at them and I saw what we were was going to be. Fighting soldiers! After lengthy congratulations and a patriotic welcome home, Moore, beaming from ear to ear, waved the company off on a twoweek pass, like a happy father seeing off his favourite children.
    The seniors came back to camp two weeks later, this time all sporting short, new, regulation haircuts. After a couple days of harassing us, making us drop for 50 push-ups and stealing our kit and cigarettes, they sat down and told us about Operation Septic . They had attacked a SWAPO base, codenamed ‘Smokeshell’, deep in Angola. The base was difficult to hit, because it consisted of 13 smaller bases spread over an area of about three by 15 kilometres, surrounded by thick sand and dense bush with deep, well-concealed trenches and bunkers. They told us how 18 Mirage jets had attacked the base first at around 08:00, dropping like arrows from high in the sky and throwing 250-pound bombs to try and take out the anti-aircraft guns that were filling the sky with white cottonwool bursts of flak. After the Mirages had left there was apparently some sort of fuck-up and a two-hour delay before the paratroopers moved in with armoured troop-carrier support, fighting from trench to trench, but they had a hell of a time of it because the element of surprise was now lost and SWAPO was ready, angry and waiting. Some of the anti-aircraft guns hidden in the brush had been cranked down and were now firing at ground level, wreaking havoc. Early in the battle they took out two Ratel troop-carriers, killing 12 infantry troops inside the big armoured vehicles. The Bats also lost one man on the ground as they advanced through the initial defences; he was shot by a wounded terrorist lying under a bush he happened to be passing. SWAPO fought doggedly, holding their ground, and only after vicious trench-to-trench fighting that lasted the whole day did the fighting finally die down. Seventy-six SWAPO terrorists had been killed and 14 South Africans had lost their lives. It had been a high price to pay.
    “It was fucking heavy,” said Richard Dawson.
    I had known Richard since first grade, and had gone to Sunday school with him as a kid in my home town. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes burning with an emotion that I was yet to feel. His face was serious as he described the operation. Richard did not have a ‘senior-junior’ attitude like