kagablog

Recollections from a whitey in the border war, 1982 to 1984, Angola, Namibia.

We’re sitting on the back of a buffel armoured vehicle. 10 boy-men strapped in, in case we hit a landmine. One guy is fucking around with an AK-47. He drops it and the entire magazine empties into the roofless metal cage. 30 bullets or so, flying and bouncing off the steel, among ten bodies. No-one even gets a scratch. The guy with the smoking gun looks around nervously, grinning. Fucker!

Captain Pelser is doing an inspection. We stand next to our beds, with our sparkling clean guns and carefully folded blankets and sheets. He comes to stand right in front of me. I look directly into his eyes and smile. He freaks. I have undermined everything he stands for, his authority, the meaning of all this crap: we fighting to protect our women from rapists and communists, etc. I can’t remember my punishment.

We stop for coffee while on patrol. We get hit by fire. The bullets make a cracking sound as they go past, faster than the speed of sound. I prepare to fire a mortar round at the direction of the firing. My buddy looks up just before he drops the mortar into the pipe. A tree blocks the way of the round. We tilt the pipe back and fire, until all the bombs are gone. We fire so close to our own troops that everyone else thinks the bombs come from the enemy. Everyone empties their magazines. We hit nothing. We have to be restocked with ammo by helicopter.

I’m standing guard over a suspected terr. He is shivering, so scared he pisses in his pants. Skinny legs, ragged shorts. I give him a smoke. He smokes. We hand him over to the Koevoets, merciless killers. I never found out what happened to him.

Lootenant Light pulls out the pin of a grenade and drops it among the 30 of us. We are standing on a shooting range, with a wall of earth a few yards from us. We freeze for a second, then run for the wall and dive over it. The grenade explodes. He tells us this is to sharpen our reactions, to make us alert.
Light was about seven foot tall. His height was increased when he wore his huge rucksack, which stuck up another foot above his head. He was a mercenary from England. His trademark was to wear a white shirt and direct our fire at him during shooting practice. Closer! Why is no-one firing here?
Unlike the rest of us, he loves looking for action. He makes us walk extra kilometers if he thinks we can find those elusive guys called terrorists. You learn to go past the barrier where you think you can’t walk anymore. Then the next one. I never hit the third.
One day we find action. We walk into an area where terrorists had been seen. I can feel their eyes on us as dusk approaches. But we never see any live terrs, only dead ones. We don’t belong here. We know nothing about the bush.
We camp down for the night. Next morning some of the units go out looking for the terrs. Suddenly there are bullets everywhere. We had found the terrs at the same time as another group of soldiers. They are shooting at us. A mate looks at me while we lie behind our rucksacks. I smile. He looks away.
Light stands up in the fire-fight and walks toward the other group. They stop firing. He wasn’t even wearing his white shirt.
We find the bodies of two dead terrs, which our units found. Where the high velocity bullets hit them, their bodies are torn like pieces of cardboard. Stress lines from the bullet-holes across their bodies. We puzzle and pore and grope over the dead bodies. There is fascination about seeing a black man’s dead penis. One guy had died pulling a zap sign with his fingers. Fuck you, fascists.

We are on patrol, sleeping in the bush. When my guard shift is finished, I go over to wake the next guy. The two buddies are busy jerking each other off. They freeze when they hear me. I tell them it is time for guard duty and move off.
The heat here makes you incredibly horny. But you are never alone. Sometimes I wank on the communal long-drops, above the stinking shit and clouds of blue-green flies. You never know if you will be disturbed. Sometimes you don’t care.

We are due to collect water from a kraal. There is nothing for miles across flat Ovamboland, except scrubby trees. Then you find a kraal, and a well. An earlier patrol had seen some young men with dreadlocks. But our looty sent us to get water anyway.
I’m busy chopping up a watermelon with my bowie knife. Then the air is full of the sounds of gunfire and explosions. I fall down, throw off my rucksack. Start firing. My gun jams. I put on another magazine, clear the breech, fire into a kraal wall of thorns. The firing continues, then stops.
One of us is screaming. We gather round. A corporal has had the back of his calf blown off. He writhes and screams. The medic puts a drip in his arm, shoots him full of morphine. The looty snags the drip-line on his way to the radio. He calls in the heavies. Choppers come to fetch our wounded and pursue the enemy. We hear later they found and killed one of our mysterious enemies.
We lie on our rucksacks, and talk at the top of our voices, as fast as we can. Telling our tales. Smoking. Making sense of the madness.

We walk through kilometers of shallow water. My socks are stinking things, my feet are wrinkled like an elephant’s. I trip and fall over. My rucksack is so heavy I can’t stand up by myself. Two guys pull me up. When we rest, we lean against trees, then help each other up. We walk between 20 and 40 kilometers a day, carrying between 30 and 40 kilograms of food, water, weapons and ammunition. We look for tracks and never find any. We are chasing ghosts. I really want to kill someone, for putting me through this. When we rest, I read Sartre, Kierkegaard and Hemingway, and dream of running with the bulls at Pamplona.

I’m sitting on a trap-line on the border between Angola and what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). There are claymores set between the groups of boymen. The line goes on for kilometers. We run out of smokes. We spend the next week digging up our stompies and smoking those. Then we smoke leaves. Then nothing.
In the early hours of morning, while I am on guard, I hear two shots. Next day we hear one of our own was killed by a pal. He went for a piss and failed to respond when his buddy called out to him. When we get back to base, a church service is held for the dead guy. He did his duty, etc. I hear later his buddy went mad with guilt.
Claymores are plastic explosive with ball-bearings embedded in them. You hit a tripwire and it takes off your legs. A wounded enemy is better than a dead one – his mates have to carry him. When we drive down the border there are cows with their legs blown off. Their bellies are swollen and the stumps of their legs stick out at right angles. Kilometres of dead cows and donkeys.

When you get off the plane in ‘Nam’ the heat hits you, like you’ve walked into a wall. Your uniform and boots fill with sweat immediately. When you go on leave, you get in the Flossie and fly back to another world. But you don’t belong there either. I spend my leave sitting in bars, perving at women, stoned and pissed off my tits. What do you say to a woman? That you have been carrying a mortar pipe for the last six months? Sometimes it’s more terrifying at home than on the border. But it’s the only time I ever really relate to my dad. He fought in the bush war in Rhodesia. He thought it was a good idea for me to go to the army. We swap war stories and bond. We never bonded like that again.

We’re driving into Angola. We leave the road and drive next to it. Never leave the road. The car in front of us hits a landmine. The explosion lifts the heavy armoured vehicle at least five or six metres into the air, in slow lazy somersaults. Everyone is strapped in, and there are no injuries, except for a captain whose hand was on the side of the vehicle when they hit the mine. He loses a finger.

The water here is so siff that if you aren’t used to it, you can die. My stomach is so immune to poison that once, before going out for patrol, I drink about five litres of washing up water, with salt. Three hundred people have washed their steel varkpans in that water. But I can’t puke. I go to the looty and tell him I am sick and he laughs. I walk patrol with a full stomach of soapy water and salt.

Some guys collect water from a stinking well. When the lads filling our bottles return, my bottle is missing. It has a dagga leaf carved into the plastic lid. The corporal says, find another bottle. I refuse. I defy him. I threaten to fight with him. He is humiliated in front of his troops. I get the bottle back. When we get back to base he puts a sandbag on my neck and I am forced to leopard-crawl around the base for hours in the blazing sun. Until I puke. But I have to carry on. His name was corporal Human. What an animal.

We arrive at a kraal in our vehicles, smashing through the sapling thorn walls without concern. We raid the kraals, kill the chickens, as usual. There are never any people at the kraals, except really old men and women, and tiny children. The rest have been taken away to be used as soldiers, by one side or the other. The young women are easy pickings. You don’t see them, ever.
We find a young boy, probably five years old. We put him on top of a pole, which is held up by two poles, a gate to the kraal. He is ten to fifteen foot off the ground. Balancing, shitting himself. We push at him from the top of our tall vehicle, with rifles. Where is Swapo? Where are our enemies? Why can we never find the fuckers? He cries and thirty boy-men laugh at his fear. He knows nothing. If he told us anything about Swapo, they would come back and kill him anyway. We just do it because we are bored.

When I get to Rhodes University after my two-year stint, the first person who greets me is a guy called Lloyd from the special branch. He wants me to spy on the student left organizations. I will get a car, free university, no more army camps. I find out who these organizations are, from him. I go to their meetings. I never call him back. I stand with the other lefties and raise my fist for Swapo. Amandla! The guys I was trying to kill a few months ago. I became a lefty. Thanks, Lloyd.
A few years later I watch Pik Botha on TV, telling the world how our country was backed by the CIA to go into Angola. Fucking sickening. I was fighting for the fucking Americans.
I never went to Pamplona to run with the bulls. With my ‘danger pay’ I buy a bass guitar and an amplifier and start a band called Nirvana.

I spend the next five years studying at Rhodes, trying to escape my guilt and army camps. Every year I get a call-up and I write back to say I’m studying. When I run out of things to study I see a Human Rights lawyer. I tell him I’m an alcoholic and I take acid every weekend. He asks me where he can get some. He refers me to SANCA, who diagnose me as an alcoholic and give me pills which make you sick if you drink. The lawyer writes a letter, saying I am unfit for active duty. The pills run out and I continue binging. I never hear from the army again. Mandela walks free.

“Anyone interested in contributing their personal experiences towards a book and/or documentary on the Namibian/Angolan conflict, please write to psychaderek@yahoo.co.in . Confidentiality guaranteed, if desired so.”