Gunship Over Angola

After 15 minutes, they told me to piss off and try again in 12 months.

*

In the aftermath of the 1976 Pilot Selection Board’s decision, I went through the full range of emotions. Disbelief was followed by anger, devastation and even embarrassment. I felt that I’d failed in what I’d set out to do and a deep depression set in.

At some point, late in the Basic Training phase at the Air Force Gymnasium, a few of my bungalow friends, including the Boytjie from Benoni, applied to become radar operators and so I listlessly went along with them. When Basic Training finished, we transferred to the Air Defence School at AFB Waterkloof for the basic radar operator’s course before being posted to Devon, where the central control of the country’s Northern Air Defence Sector was housed. We received more advanced training in the nuclear-bomb-proof ‘gat’ (hole), an underground warren of nooks and crannies filled with a range of expensive radar equipment, all programmed to utter ‘wrong number, twit,’ in a metallic voice whenever a student made an input error. We delighted in coaxing this robotic response at every available opportunity.

When the course ended, a few weeks later, it was time for our operational deployment and I ended up being sent to 2 Satellite Radar Station in Ellisras, 350 kilometres northwest of Pretoria. Now, in those days Ellisras (today Lephalale) was not the thriving metropolis that it is today. You reached it in three to four hours by travelling northwards on the Great North Road to Warmbaths (today Bela-Bela), then on to Nylstroom (today Modimolle), where you branched off to the left, through Vaalwater and on to Bulge River. If you reached the end of the tar road you had gone too far and needed to turn back before you fell off the edge of the world!

Coming into Ellisras from the Bulge River side, the first building you encountered was the Ellisras Hotel on the left. That was followed by 200 metres of thick bush on both sides before the Post Office appeared on the left, more thick bush and the padkamp (road workers’ camp) on the right, more bush, a café and butchery on the left, more bush, then the high school on the left, the Air Force Base on the right. Just beyond that, the tar ended.

We arrived just as the previous intake of radar operators was preparing to depart. Our predecessors’ greatest claim was that they had impregnated a number of girls from Ellisras High/Hoër School – the only coed boarding school for a radius of 200 kilometres. Consequently, the good name of the SAAF had become somewhat sullied and was not held in great esteem by the Ellisras townspeople, nor by the residents of the surrounding areas.

The first line of the briefing we received from the regimental sergeant major (RSM), one Flight Sergeant Snyman, was: ‘The Ellisras Hotel are out-of-bounds to all South African Air Force peoples!’

So, we went there for a drink that evening. And every evening after that, until the farmers came in for their monthly co-op meeting a couple of weeks later…

That particular evening, we had arranged to meet in the hotel’s main bar as usual after work. The first two to arrive were Klerksdorp Chris and a chap from Durban. I arrived with three others about an hour later, and as we walked in, Klerksdorp Chris flew across the pub, closely followed by his mate, as if they were darts being thrown.

About 20 local farmers were having great fun using our colleagues as projectiles. I immediately volunteered to leave the bar and fetch reinforcements but didn’t get the chance to do so as I was scragged by a man-mountain quite used to throwing Brahman bulls over three-metre-high fences. He lifted all 75 kilograms of me up like a little lamb and hung me by my belt from a coat hook on the back of the door.

It is incredible how helpless and hopeless you feel when kept in suspense in this way.

I got off lightly, however, because the rest of our SAAF contingent were stripped to their undies by the farmers, then placed up on the bar counter and made to sing ‘Die Stem’. We were rescued from further embarrassment by the arrival of RSM Snyman, who had been alerted by a vigilant barman and who burst into the pub with a team of dog handlers and their faithful hounds.

As we were leaving, Klerksdorp Chris, true to his nature (I think he was a terrier of some sort in a past life), threatened to come back and teach the farmers a lesson when they next came to town. I don’t think he ever succeeded in his quest or managed to find the degree of support that such a mission would have required.

So, the Ellisras Hotel was out of bounds, and no one in his right mind would go near the school for fear of being shot or castrated, or both. That meant there wasn’t much nightlife. What to do?