Being a recce, as Fourie describes, sounds easy – a matter of lying shaded from the sun on a river bank and watching the artillery men do their work.
In fact, it is one of the toughest and most thankless of tasks. A recce spends lots of time alone, dirty, hungry, thirsty and very, very frightened.
‘Any man who says he has never been scared on our type of operations is a liar,’ said Fourie. ‘Sometimes we would be sitting within visual distance of the enemy for two whole days. It takes a lot out of a man to be so close to the enemy during daytime. You can’t describe it to anyone who has not been scared in those circumstances. It’s genuinely bad. You feel totally wrecked because of the pressure on your nerves: you want to shit yourself. You keep seeing things and the whole time you’re telling yourself: they’ve picked me up.’
Then there were the flies.
‘Worse than the heat when you’re hiding near the enemy are the flies. Swarms of little black mopane flies drive you almost mad. And when you pull down the fly net in front of your face they start packing on to it until you can see nothing and you can hear nothing. It’s a terrible noise. And they go into your eyes if you lift the net and they go into your hair. And if you squash some of them they give off a smell which pulls in thousands of others. They’re worse than the enemy. You feel like suicide, you want to shoot yourself.’
And then there were the SADF’s allies.
‘I had to work closely with UNITA recces. Those guys really frightened me. They scared me more than the enemy did. They were reckless. When the sun went down it was party time. It was fires and noise and conversation around the mealie-pap pot. They thought that when night fell the war was over for the day; but that’s when the SADF’s type of war actually begins.
‘There were some very good UNITA guys, but a lot of their recce officers I worked with would tell you they were going to do one thing and then would do another. If you’d ask them what time we were leaving towards an objective they’d say 8 pm, and eight hours later you had still not moved.
‘And they scared me by walking on clear trails all the time, trails that were sure to be known to the enemy. If you’re in an area a long time there’s an obvious temptation to get slack and stick to the trails. But it’s necessary to get off them, because anyone in our kind of work on the enemy side goes for a trail and ambushes it.
‘I used to keep my sanity by walking right at the back of a column. That’s the safest place to be because in most ambushes the attackers shoot at the biggest group in the middle. I figured that if I was at the back I could turn round and run from any ambush. I used to repeat a motto to myself: Make war today and run away tomorrow, and then you’ll be back again. But if you want to try and be a hero today, you won’t be back tomorrow.’
Sergeant ‘Frenchie’s’ frustrations were sometimes more with the SADF than with UNITA.
‘My recce team would come back from a dangerous mission, having walked up to 40 km a day for five days following an enemy brigade, and there would be no food at the logistics base. Often there had been a delivery of fresh meat but the resident guys had eaten it all. We had nothing and we had to beg for ratpacs. It was really demoralising.’
Mac da Trinidada found the main problem with his five-man recce team, all black Angolans like himself, was the sudden collapse of morale in early October after nearly three months of ceaseless work in the war zone.
‘There had been constant contacts with the enemy, lots of hitting and running,’ he said. ‘Then we ran into a big ambush by 21 Brigade, and my guys were so exhausted and their nerves so shot to pieces that they performed very badly and we were lucky to come out alive. I contacted HQ by radio and said my team had to be given a rest outside the war zone. Senior commanders take it very seriously when a recce sergeant reports that his men are shattered.
‘We were told that we would be given seven days leave back at Buffalo base in Namibia, but first we had to go to the Cuito River to investigate whether there was any possible place to bridge it south of Cuito Cuanavale. On our way to the Cuito we met men from 1 Reconnaissance Commando who were on their way back for home leave even though they had arrived in Angola later than us. My guys were really stirred up by that and I had to contact HQ again to warn them that spirits were dangerously low.
‘Afterwards we were sent to Mavinga and flown to Rundu, where the bar was waiting open for us at midnight. The next morning we went by truck to Buffalo and stayed at home there for seven days. My mum, three sisters and two brothers didn’t see much of me. I spent a lot of time drinking with my friends before we did the return journey to the front.’