Gunship Over Angola

I got back home to Pretoria in early April and, for the first time since joining 17 Squadron, settled in, albeit briefly, to life as a squadron pilot. I caught up on training, doing short trips around the Pretoria area for any number of reasons, and also doing the odd one-to-four-night stop away from base.

Being at home base also allowed me to catch up with the social life I’d missed, for a number of months, enjoying drinks with friends in Pretoria’s many fine pubs, catching the latest movies, attending live theatre and generally reconnecting with ‘normal’ life. I even managed to establish an exclusive relationship with a very fine lady called Desiree, who, less than a year later, would become my wife.

I had never been keen on, or comfortable with, the idea of living in the officers’ mess, so I opted to rent a cottage in the garden of a Queen Street home, in the leafy Pretoria suburb of Irene, from a wonderfully kind widow, Mrs Merle Bradley. She flatly refused to take any rent from me while I was away ‘doing your thing for the country’, as she put it. She was also wise beyond words, and our late-night conversations around her kitchen table (she was an insomniac), after I’d returned from my nocturnal activities, arguably offered real solutions to more global problems than the United Nations General Assembly ever could.

*

One day in April 1980 I was sitting in the crew room at 17 Squadron when the ops clerk walked in and handed me a tasking signal with instructions from SAAF HQ to take an Alo III to Schmidtsdrift Weapons Testing Range that coming Sunday. For the duration of the following week, I was supposed to provide air support to a team of Armscor (the state-owned arms manufacturing company) and army boffins testing a new weapons system there.

Thinking that I had a rare weekend off, I had already made arrangements to have Sunday lunch with my parents and grandmother on the family farm, ostensibly to introduce them to Desiree. By tradition, Joubert family lunches at the farm were noteworthy culinary events and were difficult to turn down.

Close scrutiny of the tasking signal offered a possible solution. I saw that I was only expected to be in Schmidtsdrift, which is about 90 kilometres west of Kimberley, by sundown on Sunday, in order to start work on the project first thing on Monday morning. I calculated that if an early meal at the farm could be arranged and I got airborne from AFB Swartkop by 14h30, I could still make it to Schmidtsdrift, on time, by sunset on Sunday evening.

My mom and dad had gone through a rough few years in the period prior to that April lunch, being torn hither and thither by a whole host of conflicts. Even though they had both tried to hide the friction from me, I was not the only one, as shallow as my sensitivity meter was set, to fear that they might even split up. But when I arrived at the farm that day, I sensed a whole new atmosphere. I realised quickly that, being the astounding and irrepressibly resilient couple that they were, and having overcome so much hardship between them, they had found each other again. I was overjoyed and watched their exchange of intimate looks with a sense of great delight.

The meal, attended by just the five of us – Mom, Dad, Gran, Desiree and me – was filled with joyous banter, laughter and warmth. At 13h30 I reluctantly excused myself and dashed for the airport.

I landed at Schmidtsdrift after a relatively uneventful three-hour flight and walked straight into a shitstorm. It seems that wires had somehow been crossed between the weapons project leader at Schmidtsdrift, an army brigadier and SAAF HQ, and that my presence had been required a lot earlier that Sunday.

The brigadier met me as I got out of my seat in the Alo.

‘The fact that you have only just arrived,’ the fellow (clearly a few sheets to the wind) informed me, while prodding his finger into my chest, ‘has unduly delayed the project and I’ll be taking punitive action against you, you fucking blue-job bicycle.’

After such a wonderful day, I really wasn’t in the mood to be dictated to by a person under the influence, no matter what his rank, but I still bit down hard on my lip and said, with as much restraint as I could muster, ‘Brigadier, here’s the tasking signal that I got. If you read it you will see that it requires me to be here by this evening. If you don’t like what it orders me to do, please take it up with SAAF HQ,’ and I turned smartly away to help the flight engineer put the Alo to bed.

The brigadier threw the blue folder containing the tasking signal to the ground, and mumbling a string of profanities, interspersed with ‘fucking’ and ‘bicycle’, stormed off to wherever pissed-off brigs go in Schmidtsdrift.