5

Retraining

It was a long and bumpy trip back from Dirico to the HQ in Rundu in a Buffel armoured vehicle. I kept a low profile, hoping the OC wasn’t still after my blood. I pulled out all the signals manuals, collected three Signallers together and quietly organised a Buffel to take us west to Omauni, our recce wing base. I had never been there before, but instinctively knew that this was where I would get the training I needed. Our own recce wing was comprised of sixty handpicked men from within the Battalion, of whom about twenty were white officers and NCOs. They were led by Lieutenant Willem Ratte – an ex-Rhodesian SAS member and one of the most capable soldiers I ever worked with. Willem was a tall, lanky guy with thick glasses, curly blond hair and a quiet, unassuming, demeanour. An educated man with a Bachelor of Arts degree in teaching, he was an unlikely looking soldier at first take. I had enormous respect for him due to his measured, professional and balanced approach to the job at hand. The courage he displayed time and time again never ceased to amaze me. Under his leadership, Omauni base had a comfortable homely feel to it, underscored by a quiet professionalism that reflected the bases’ evident combat readiness.

Just two hundred metres by two hundred metres, Omauni was situated alongside a big, hard-surfaced runway with sand embankments three metres high surrounding it. Raised bunkers at each corner and bunkers set into the embankments in between, bristled with .30 calibre (re-bored to 7.62mm) Browning machine-guns and .50 Browning machine-guns, all of which were in immaculate condition, with fresh crates of ammunition positioned readily to hand. In the centre of the base were two 81mm mortar pits. Both of which were fixed on pre-determined fire patterns in the event of an attack. They would automatically hit all the likely areas the enemy were to approach from, until a more accurate combat appraisal could be made.

The base also featured a sunken sand-bagged command bunker, bungalows for the officers, NCOs and troops, ablutions that featured hot showers and flushing toilets (a luxury, as in most forward combat bases as these were usually the dreaded ‘long drop’) and a large corrugated-iron mess hall with bare concrete floors, benches and the ubiquitous tin army tables with folding legs. Added to this was a workshop, sandbag-covered ammo bunkers and an armoury. And of course there was the pub … a bunker converted into this most important feature with a parachute suspended from the roof as the ceiling and a human skull perched on the bar counter.

Omauni Recce Base and one of the .50 Browning machine guns in an anti-aircraft role …. “We were armed to the teeth and willed the enemy to attack”. (Courtesy of Piet Nortje)

With trees scattered around for shade, Omauni also boasted a thatch gazebo in the middle, which was used for tea and coffee. That was my favourite… tea in the gazebo. Every day before sunrise, everyone in the base would move into the bunkers for ‘stand-to’, quietly manning their positions and scanning their defensive arcs of fire as the sun came up … followed by tea, coffee and rusks in the gazebo. We would meet in the gazebo again late in the afternoon before evening ‘stand-to’, watching the sun gently setting to the west. Sunrise and sunset was the most likely time for an attack and hence having to ‘stand-to’. It wasn’t long before I realised how well armed and prepared we were, and began willing the enemy to attack. They never did … they had obviously done their homework and knew to stay away.

Omauni had the usual pets that were treated with a soldier’s typical ‘rough compassion’. The most notable were Milly the cat and a vervet monkey. The cat was put through a military ‘selection course’ and parachuted off the eighteen metre high water tower, suspended beneath the canopy of a parachute flare. She passed the course, had kittens and spent many an evening curled up next to the big HF radios in the command bunker. The monkey was a real character. He loved drinking beer with the boys in the pub and the more inebriated he got, the more he struggled to keep his balance; his tail moving horizontally to a 90 degree position as it sought to balance its owner upright! The monkey was a great show-off as well. When we met for tea in the gazebo he would do a dashing display of leaping from the roof into the trees, using the branches to whip himself back up into the next tree … until the day someone surreptitiously cut the branch just enough to snap as he landed on it. Roars of laughter from the guys in the gazebo only added to his embarrassment … which only made us laugh even more.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Omauni was the family of about twenty-five bushman that lived outside the base. They lived as they had done for thousands of years, wearing only a loincloth. They slept on the sand under the stars, whilst holding their head up with one arm to stop insects crawling into their ears and they hunted in the bush with bows and arrows. They actually made for an excellent early warning system and also served as a source of information on the goings on in the surrounding area. The quid pro quo was that we would provide them with basic medical care and supply them some rations.

I spent the next week reviewing signals theory and refining our standard operating procedures whilst getting some practical tips from the recce guys. We were lucky to be taken under the wing of a young recce officer who was base commander at the time. He was effectively on R & R, having lost his nerve on a prisoner snatch that had gone wrong in Angola a few months earlier. I can’t remember if they got back with any of the Angolan army troops they jumped that night just outside their base in Angola … it seemed one of them screamed blue murder and managed to extricate himself from his attackers, bolting back towards the nearby army base; I think they may have managed to kill him in the process. The guys in the team made it back together, while the young officer got separated. Sometime later he appeared alone from the bush on the other side of the river that marked the Angolan border, dishevelled and with a wild, disconcerted look in his eye. It was heartrending to see him battling with the traumatic stress of whatever had happened. He would suddenly cut off in mid-sentence, get up and walk off a few metres and stare into the middle distance, returning a few minutes later to say “So where were we … ?” I don’t think he ever did come right.

One of the other recce guys training us was Sergeant Piet Nortje. A lean, focused young guy with short cropped hair and fine features, he showed excellent organisational skills even then, given that in the coming years, he would be promoted to be the Regimental Sergeant-Major of Three-Two. No mean feat … as in the process he became the youngest RSM in the history of the SADF.

These experienced professionals gave us basic field craft training officially referred to as ‘minor tactics’ and upped our skill at arms with a variety of platoon weapons, NATO and Russian, such as the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle and the RPD, RPK and PKM machine-guns. They helped me with my battle kit, putting together my ‘first line’ webbing from bits and pieces we scrounged from corners of the supply store. I was very chuffed with this as the frayed and faded canvas made me look like a real veteran; it was simple, practical and was to serve me well in the years to come. It consisted of shoulder straps attached to a web belt onto which I attached my 9mm pistol in a canvas holster; a water bottle, and pouches for one day’s rations and a first aid kit. Over this I strapped my tattered old chest webbing for the four R1 rifle magazines, with pouches on each side for hand grenades. This arrangement dispersed the weight of the equipment and held it firmly against your body, whilst allowing freedom of movement in a firefight.

Our recce instructors began to enjoy this orientation thing as much as we did, and we had almost two weeks of impromptu training from them. This individualized instruction saw me really begin to develop a bond with my brand new R1 assault rifle. I hadn’t had much time to ‘shoot it in’ previously. But now that I was in a forward combat base, I had unrestricted access to a mountain of ammunition, so I would fill all four of my magazines and fire off eighty rounds a day. It was an easy stroll out to the firing range, which was a sand embankment, just a couple of hundred metres from the base.

With the reconnaissance guys giving me pointers, I soon became one with the 7.62mm R1. I learned to place my feet slightly apart, roll onto the balls of my feet and lean slightly into the rifle butt, placing the bead through the peep site fractionally beneath my target. Imperceptivity squeezing the trigger, the recoil would slam back into my shoulder and lift the barrel slightly, only to have it settle naturally back onto the target… and I would squeeze off another round. The weight and balance of the rifle matched its recoil perfectly.

Snap shooting was the order of the day, learning to lead with the first round and kill with the second. I fired mostly at beer cans; placing the bullet in the sand just beneath the tin can and making it jump a metre into the air. As it landed I’d fire the next round beneath it, making it hop into the air again. I followed the tin can as it hopped around on the wall, firing again and again until I had chased it over the bank. Then I would start on the next beer can, until I either ran out of beer cans or ran out of ammunition. The singular action of swinging it up into my shoulder, placing my feet slightly apart, rolling onto the balls of my feet and leaning slightly forward to squeeze off a round became increasingly instinctive. My R1 seemed to become an extension of my arms, and hitting what I was aiming at a reflex action. Carrying the rifle with my fingers curled around the magazine with the barrel pointing to the ground was the most natural, comfortable thing in the world.

I began to cherish these sessions and I stuck to this routine whenever I was in a forward combat base. This discipline was later to save my life. And being cocooned in my earmuffs out on the range firing my rifle was ‘my’ time, my private space to balance life in the base with troops continually around me. I usually went out in the late afternoon, and when done I would amble back to the base to climb up over the embankment, relaxed and introspective. My evenings were usually a hot shower and an early meal in the mess. Climbing into a comfortable enough bed under a mosquito net in a bungalow shared with three others ensured a good night’s sleep, and an early rise at four thirty for stand-to at dawn.

The final stage of our impromptu ‘selection course’ consisted of being loaded into a Buffel, and the four of us being dropped off on the Angolan border one afternoon. Whilst it wasn’t a particularly ‘hot’ area, we were certainly well in the Operational Area with a reasonable chance of running into some gooks.

We were instructed to walk the 25km back to base, which meant we would spend the night in the bush. The Buffel disappeared back towards Oumani and as the silence of the dry brown bush enveloped us, the full responsibility of my predicament settled firmly on me. I was the leader of a four man ‘recce stick’, and as a Signals Officer, short on a lot of the basic infantry and reconnaissance skills I would like to have had. The three signallers with me were even worse off, having had very little field training or experience other than the informal training we had recently received! But there again, that’s why we were there. So it was that after getting a slap on the back and a few pointers as to how to handle the ‘recce’ thing from the instructors, I set off with a show of confidence and bravado I certainly didn’t feel.

We stopped just before dark to make our scheduled radio report and surprisingly couldn’t make comms. I kept calling quietly on the radio, “Zero Alpha this is Bravo One … Zero Alpha, Zero Alpha this is Bravo One, do you read, over …”. Nothing. We sat there perplexed, a little unnerved at not being able to talk to base, each sitting about ten metres apart, looking quietly and intently out into the menacing bush. The sun set and the darkness immersed us. With our radio unserviceable, we had no contact with the outside world and no hope of support in the event of contact with the enemy. With only four of us, we would almost certainly be outnumbered and being very inexperienced, we felt very alone … it was going to be a long, long, night. We then moved forward in the dark about five hundred metres and cut back on a dogleg to lie up on our spoor. We lay under a bush in a star formation with our feet together so that we could quickly kick each other awake should the need arise.

Suffice to say, we didn’t sleep much that night. We stood to at dawn, quietly watching the surrounding vegetation as the sun rose. Emerging from beneath the bush under which we had taken cover, we moved off shortly after sunrise. An hour later we stopped to make another scheduled radio check with Omauni. Again … nothing. We checked everything again and again and still couldn’t get comms. By mid morning we had intercepted a road and found the fork at which we were to turn left towards the base. With two of us walking either side of the two-track sand road, it wasn’t long before we saw very obvious signs of scratching and disturbance in the sand of one of the tracks. We had been told to look out for landmines and informed that should we find one, we would be inevitably ambushed by at least thirty SWAPO guerrillas lying in wait. Everyone spread out and found cover, as I crawled carefully forward to scratch softly in the sand. My finger hit something hard and I scraped the sand away. My blood froze as the olive green corner of a Russian landmine was revealed. I recoiled and slithered backwards, turning outwards to face the imminent enemy attack. A very anxious ten minutes went by … “What the fuck were they waiting for?” I wondered. I then tried to get comms. I crawled over to my Machilla to try and get the big HF radio working yet again. Not daring to lift my head, I lay on my back and threw the wire antenna by its weight into the tree above me. Not surprisingly, nothing again. I tried the short-range VHF radio, thinking we might be in range of the base. Whether they could hear me or not, I blindly relayed our predicament over the air hoping someone would hear me.

We lay on the sand in the fierce heat of the baking sun with very little cover and the tension mounting … four of us against a possible thirty … with a broken radio and unable to call for back up. We waited for the inevitable; it was simply a matter of time before they opened fire and we were overrun. After about half an hour of the guerrillas not springing their ambush, I began to think of making a run for it. It was just then that we heard a vehicle approaching from the direction of the base and to our relief, saw that it was a Buffel grinding its way through the bush along the road. I ran in a crouch as it got closer to warn them of the landmine and impending ambush – then I saw the huge grins! They had taken us rookies hook, line and sinker. Unbeknown to us, they had swopped our HF radio with an unserviceable one and buried the landmine so carelessly that even we amateurs would spot it. I was too relieved to be pissed off. They had taught us an invaluable lesson and one I was never to forget – and that is what it felt like to be a soldier out in the bush without any form of communications, when your life most depended on it. It motivated me to drive myself more and more in the months ahead to ensure that it didn’t happen to any of our guys.

Back in Omauni we spent the next few days wrapping up all that we had learned and the techniques we had worked out. I began refining a process that would minimise the chances of a comms failure such as at Dirico from ever happening again. This entailed my personally testing all the allocated frequencies over a 24 hour period, trying them every 15 minutes to select the ones that worked best at particular times of the day. We would end up typically using an 8 MHz frequency mid-day, dropping to 5 MHz early evening and then down to just over 2 MHz in the early hours of the morning. This was all to do with the earth’s ionosphere (off which the HF radio waves would bounce back to earth) rising and falling as the earth’s temperature increased during the day and fell at night. As the frequency changed, so did the length of the antenna, and so we used a formula to ensure we had a quarter wavelength with each given frequency. The distance you wanted to communicate over also affected the choice of frequency. I began to realise that under these conditions, there was as much an art to radio telephony as there was a science.