Gunship Over Angola

Grensvegter began to prod the snake with his bamboo pole and bloudraad hook until, suddenly, the mamba uncoiled. But, instead of going to ground, it must have sensed that its safest and quickest escape route lay in climbing the ‘branch’ leading directly into the upper reaches of the tree!

Like an ultra-slow-motion scene in a movie, we saw Grensvegter’s eyes grow to the size of dustbin lids and his face turn ashen.

‘Fok dit!’ roared our Grensvegter. In a flash, he let go of both the bamboo pole and the branch to which his knees were anchored, passing the mamba in mid-air and landing on his feet, all the while running at full speed.

Like a startled hadeda, Grensvegter ran to the closest armed person, snatched away his pump-action shotgun, returned to the tree and unleashed all 16 rounds at the unfortunate serpent.

Then, and only then, did Grensvegter turn to the admiring crowd and say, ‘Sjoe! But that were a close one!’

After that, life returned to a semblance of normality for a short while until some operations intelligence (Ops Int) guru determined that 2 Satellite Radar Station where we all worked – the Kop, as it was locally known – was likely to be the target of a terrorist attack.

The Kop was situated on an odd, flat-topped hill about 30 kilometres east of Ellisras. We needed to understand, said the Ops Int man to his gullible audience, that the Kop had been chosen as the focal point of the Soviet/Cuban/East German onslaught against South Africa and that we, the motley gaggle of eight radar operators and eight dog handlers, were all that stood between the marauders and continental domination by the forces of communism, or words to that effect. There may or may not have been a drum roll and a clash of cymbals when his inspiring pitch ended.

Our crew included a chap from Virginia in the Orange Free State whom we all called ‘Soapy’. Now, Soapy had a pathological fear of leopards and… the dark. As there were leopards resident in the bush surrounding the radar station, subjecting Soapy to any night-time activity, such as guard duty, was inviting an incident, and he didn’t disappoint us.

Rather than deploy our team of radar operators in the role for which we had been trained, the powers that be decided that we would best counter the expected enemy assault by tramping around the perimeter of the radar station armed with a 7.62 mm R1 semi-automatic assault rifle and 20 rounds of live ammunition. Around and around and around we tramped, about 500 metres apart, three of us per shift interspersed with three dog handlers, hour after hour after hour.

In the northeast corner of the radar station stood the 20-metre-tall radar antenna that was used to determine the altitude of target aircraft and hence was called ‘the height-finder’. It resembled a marabou stork or perhaps a Dickensian undertaker. As with almost every spooky-looking structure or tower on any military base anywhere in the world, rumour had it that a manically depressed young national serviceman had once committed suicide by hanging himself from one of the crossbeams.

To make matters even worse, for Soapy in particular, a number of the security lights on the double barbed-wire perimeter fence adjacent to the antenna were inoperative and there were consequently long shadows along the beat in that section.

At about 03h00 one morning, Soapy was making his way, at double pace, through the shadowy and badly lit height-finder segment when he became aware of something climbing onto the perimeter fence. Immediately he deduced that it was at the least a leopard or a fiendish attacker.

Taught during Basic Training to warn any attacker that they should ‘Halt or I will shoot!’, and to do so three times before firing, Soapy, in a bout of fear and panic, trumpeted, ‘Halt or I will shoot times three!’

He then proceeded to empty all 20 rounds in his magazine into the unfortunate adolescent baboon that was having some fun by ‘riding’ the fence, as baboons have a habit of doing.

*

After seven months, my holding pattern at Ellisras was drawing to a close and the Pilot Selection Board for the Pupil Pilot’s Course 1/77 (known as the Pupe’s Course) was looming on the horizon. I left Ellisras for the last time as a national serviceman on a Friday afternoon, accompanied by a few of my radar-operating mates. The pilot selection process was to commence the following Monday morning.

And so it was, about three weeks later, that I emerged, battered and broken and in acute pain from the shortest Pilot Selection Board in history, the details of which are described in the prologue of this book. After exiting the scene of the disaster, I’d found a wooden post outside and quietly started banging my head against it. I became aware of the SAMS brigadier (the chief psychologist), who, it appeared, had followed me out of the room and was watching my antics quizzically.