Gunship Over Angola

The indelible memory that I have of that two-minute flight is of Major Blaauw, clearly in a state of shock, rubbing the top of his skull where the charred blob of molten goo that had been his hair had adhered. This action caused the blob to break apart into small pieces that floated all around the cockpit. A piece found its way into one of my nostrils and I still shudder and retch when I recall the unbelievably acrid odour.

I spent another night at Ombalantu, during which I swapped the trooper for a gunship from one of the Alo pilots who was going home. Before dawn, our formation of eight gunships returned to Cuamato, all of us absolutely certain that the FAPLA force, or any survivors of the previous afternoon’s sweep, would have left the scene during the night. They’d taken an awful pounding and would likely want to get as far away from the SADF as possible.

We still intended to hit the original PLAN target that morning.

But, just as the Alo formation came in to land at Cuamato, one behind the other, the two lead aircraft peeled off and started to climb up to their operating height of 800 feet (250 metres). They had been instructed to provide top cover for a couple of Pumas that were about to uplift a 20-strong group of our troops who had been lying in ambush throughout the night next to the road leading from the FAPLA camp to Cuamato.

They were no more than a few hundred feet above the ground when the air around them suddenly erupted with hundreds of small explosions originating from Russian-made ZSU 23-4 anti-aircraft guns. From our vantage point in the other six gunships that had just landed, we could clearly see that they were in a lot of trouble. Their chances of surviving the heavy barrage seemed decidedly small.

But both pilots instinctively dived for the cover of the vegetation as the trail of radar-guided anti-aircraft fire followed them right down to the tops of the trees. In fact, the tail boom of one of the two choppers hit the trees while evading the lethal fire, but the pilot still managed to maintain control of his aircraft.

No one argued when, minutes later, all choppers, Alos and Pumas alike, were instructed to get the hell out of Cuamato and head for a patch of land around ten kilometres to the east, which would serve as a temporary HAA until a better course of action could be formulated. At the time, I could not recall any occasion when enemy activity had forced the SADF to leave anywhere it had claimed as its base of operations, and a feeling of great disquiet took root in my belly.

We reached the temporary HAA without further incident and took stock of the situation.

At around lunchtime on the same day, a 32 Battalion patrol radioed that they were holed up, resting through the heat of the day, in a thick patch of bush on the edge of a shona around 15 kilometres northeast of our position, and that they could hear the sounds of a convoy of enemy vehicles coming in their direction, obviously searching for them.

Six gunships were immediately scrambled, with me at the rear as tail-end-Charlie. At the last possible moment before I took off, the OC of 32 Battalion, Commandant Deon ‘Jelly babes’ Ferreira, jumped into my aircraft and sat on the floor in the front left of the Alo, insisting that I allow him to tag along for the anticipated ‘turkey shoot’.

On the approach to the imminent contact I remember being quite excited at the prospect of taking on a convoy of vehicles, given my previous experience of the tanker along the Kunene River. As we closed in on the target, the leader of the 32 Battalion patrol, observing events from his refuge on the ground, whispered on the radio that he could clearly see the vehicles, which were now stopped on the edge of the shona, 200 metres from his position.

With around two kilometres to go to the target, the pilot leading our gunship formation pitched the nose of his chopper upwards and began a right-hand climbing turn. The rest of us strung out behind him to form a left-orbit circle around the target vehicles, which I could clearly see as soon as my gunship cleared the tops of the trees.

I was climbing through around 130 metres above the trees when the leader of the army patrol concealed in the bush alongside the shona suddenly broke radio silence and shouted, the anguish in his voice rising with each word, ‘They’ve taken the tarpaulins off the back of the trucks. Shit. They’ve got missiles. Gunships, get the fuck out of here!’

I had no time to react before the ground-to-air SAM-7 missiles started to streak away from the launchers around the GAZ trucks, and great clouds of white smoke from the ignition of the rocket motors rapidly obscured my view of the vehicles.

For a moment, I was mesmerised by the activity on the ground, and the gravity of the situation had not yet dawned on me when the leader of our formation shouted, ‘Steve, get down on the trees, you dumb idiot, or you will be shot down!’