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

most of the others in the senior company; he had no trouble sitting in our bungalow and talking to us, and I knew he wasn’t bullshitting.
    “We were crawling on our bellies with anti-aircraft guns shooting two metres over our heads, with branches falling on us. You can’t believe the sound of an anti-aircraft shell going a couple of feet over your head. You shit yourself.” He looked around, deadpan, at the rest of my platoon standing bunched around him, listening eagerly, trying to not miss a word.
    “We shat ourselves when SWAPO took out the two Ratels. The fuckers killed 12 infantry … I thought we were going to get it right there. Then the Mirages came in again and they abandoned their guns. We had to flush out each bunker with machine-gun fire and white phosphorus grenades,” he said, shaking his head.
    I spoke to an infantry troop later who was involved in the operation, and he told me how one second his section was advancing slowly through the scrub, and the next it was obliterated by 23-millimetre anti-aircraft fire. His section leader’s head was blown off and the guy next to him cut in half. He dropped everything and crawled away, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, and flagged down an armoured Ratel troop-carrier that stopped to pick him up; but then the Ratel too was taken out by the anti-aircraft guns. He was blinded in one eye but survived to tell the tale and drank a beer with me full of goose bumps as he told me his story. Oh, yes—he told me that he also had to do a cutaway on his first solo skydive as his main parachute had malfunctioned. He had a lot of bad luck.
    The South African fighting group ended up spending a few more weeks in Angola when more bases were found from new intelligence gathered during sweeps of the area. These smaller bases were easier targets than the first and were quickly overrun by the South African fighting group, which got a lot of kills. A lot of these kills apparently came when SWAPO troops ran wildly into the Bats’ stopper groups hidden in the bush a mile or so behind the small bases. The Bats even wound up having a punch-up with the Angolan army, FAPLA, when they tried to intervene to help SWAPO and the South Africans killed about 90 of them. A South African Impala jet was shot down, as well as an Alouette gunship, killing the flight engineer. Overall, some 380 terrorists had been killed, with a total loss of 17 South African troops.
    “That’s what it’s all about, broer !” exclaimed John Delaney after we came back from the full military funeral in Bloemfontein of the paratrooper who had been killed in Operation Sceptic . We had hurriedly practised the slow funeral march on the parade ground until late at night with legendary Parabat RSM ‘Sakkie’ roaring at us until we got it right, shooting our legs out stiffly in unison like a slow mini-goose-step.
    “That’s what it takes to get SWAPO. Sometimes you lose men. It could happen to any one of us when we get up there—it could happen to you or me, my broer , but someone has to kill them, and it’s going to be us.”
    “Hey—we’re always going to go in first, I can tell you that.” John stared at us with his blue John Travolta eyes as if he was shocked. He always looked as though he was startled and lost for words. “That’s why we’re here; trained to kill and wreak havoc,” he said, taking off his step-out trousers and putting on his shorts.
    “They’re communists, and they want to take over South West Africa— the next step will be South Africa. Until they run into us, the Bats,” Hans laughed, emphasizing his point by pounding on his locker so hard with his fist that the doors fell off.
    Because of my fucked-up feet I had waited a month and done the jump course with H Company, not my own D Company. I still had a week to go to finish the jump course. I had already made five jumps and had four to go before getting my wings and maroon beret like Hans, Johnny and the others. Perhaps after I got my