We called it the Dead Zone. It was a strip of a few kilometres where nothing lived. We killed everything that moved. It was a scorched-earth policy. There was a sense that we could mete out any sort of justice to stop the violence there in South West Africa and ensure it didn’t move south to our country. We were dressed in terrorist camouflage, with no identification on us, painted with Black Is Beautiful and using captured weapons. We dressed like SWAPO and carried terrorist weapons. If our helicopters had to extract us, the only way they would be able to tell us apart from terrorists was if we turned our hats inside out and they saw the bright orange patch inside our cammo bush hats. It showed up clearly, even through dust. We spent days in the bush or waiting at temporary helicopter bases, sleeping in narrow slit trenches, living off rat packs, helping ourselves to the odd cow belonging to the few locals brave enough to try and live in this Dead Zone. The very few villagers who stayed in the Dead Zone, probably because they had nowhere else to go, had the worst of both worlds. We would question them about their support for the terrorists, and if they gave the wrong answer or we thought they needed to be taught a lesson, we would destroy their bush huts and scatter or kill their livestock. Once we had been through, the terrorists – the other baddies – would go through raping and murdering, physically reminding everyone who they were.
– Chris, age 17
While we were still candidate officers we were sent up to the Border. We didn’t have any contact with the enemy, but we did have to go around trying to get information. We had black translators, who were also trackers, with us. When we entered a village, they would ask for information. The people were always too scared to talk. If they didn’t get co-operation, they would set fire to a hut or two. This usually worked. I also saw them hitting villagers with rifle butts. When we moved on, the translators used to take a woman or two with them and some goats. The women had to slaughter and cook the goats for them, and I know they raped the women at night because I could hear those sounds. The moaning and crying. In the mornings we checked around the TB for tracks. There were always tracks, which I’m sure were from the husbands or men looking for their girlfriends. As we moved on, the black translators would let the women go and then do the same at the next village. I only talked about this with my buddy. Your buddy was the guy you ate with, talked with and who watched your back when you had to go to the toilet. We came from an academic background and had never seen this sort of behaviour. But it is funny what you soon accept as normal.
– Werner, age 21
We were in Angola. We entered a village to ask when last SWAPO had been through – don’t know if we would ever have got a truthful answer. We got the medic to treat a small child who had fallen into a fire. We noticed some chickens running around, and after two weeks out we were tired of dry rations. The idea of roast chicken sounded good. We asked for a couple, but the villagers said no. We promptly selected a few chickens and loaded them up. There was a lot of noise from the locals, but they couldn’t do much, could they? All the goodwill generated by the medical treatment destroyed in minutes. I felt entitled then to take what we did.
– Paul, age 17
It was difficult to differentiate between the civilians and the gooks, terrs or whatever we called them. However, if they took off their shirts, you might see if they had been carrying a heavy pack, as there’d be strap marks on their shoulders, or webbing marks across their middles. No calluses on their feet meant they’d been wearing boots. Signs, or rather the absence of signs, like that told you if someone was a civilian or not. Sometimes I had to get information. One time I injected a guy to make him talk, telling him it would eat him from the inside, but I had actually pumped him full of antibiotics. He talked and probably got rid of his VD and anything else. We also used to make out that a helicopter was flying 200 feet in the air, but it was only a foot or so off the ground. We’d throw one guy out and he’d scream, and as he hit the deck we would quickly shut him up. The other guy is sitting with a hood over his head and thinks his mate is dead, so maybe he should say something. Mind games.
– Ric, age 18
In the Caprivi we used some of the local Ovambos to work with us. The one guy was a witchdoctor. I don’t think he was a very good one. He’d pointed out somebody who had stolen a goat, so the police arrested him. There was a trial and it came out that there was no way this guy could’ve stolen the goat. The police had paid the witchdoctor two chickens to sniff out the guilty party, so now they wanted their chickens back. We had to have this hearing, me a one-pip lieutenant, supposedly a responsible person for whom the witchdoctor worked, and a policeman. We sat on chairs, the rest on the floor. They discussed all the evidence and I didn’t understand a word, but it turns out the witchdoctor can’t return the chickens ’cause he’d eaten them. We fixed a price on them, and I guaranteed that we would deduct an amount from his salary over the next two months to reimburse them.
– Paul, age 17
This black gentleman was walking through the Angolan bush in men’s old-fashioned platform shoes. He was wearing a suit that was many sizes too small for him. The pants ended halfway between his ankles and his knees, and the jacket sleeves were also too short and just reached past his elbows. We stopped him, and it was incredible – he spoke Afrikaans! He had learnt it while working on a mine in Tsumeb. I never considered him a terrorist. A lot of the terrorists are barefoot, and you could see he had spent most of his life wearing boots, probably mine boots. He explained that he had been invited to a wedding and he was en route to another wyk, dressed in his best attire.
– Dudley, age 21
I will never forget this because I’m sure it came up in the TRC. We had set claymores in our doodsakker, and if anyone crossed into that and the trip flare was triggered, we were supposed to set them off. This one time the flare goes off and it turns out to be Bushmen. They tell us they are on their way home. Not long after that, these SWA Recces come in and say they are after the Bushies because they are AWOL. During the TRC hearings they talked about Bushmen being hunted, and I wonder. You can’t believe something like that could ever happen, but I did immediately think of that instance.
– Paul, age 17
There was this huge fucking pot-bellied fucking pig of a major. A real fucking Dutchman from Military Intelligence. What he wanted was for us to go to these cuca shops … listen to how dof this is … and ask anyone who could potentially be a SWAPO guerrilla – which meant anyone who was black and between the ages of 18 and 70 – to come with us ’cause we wanted to ask them some questions about the degree and amount of support for SWAPO in the area. So we’d arrive at these cuca shops, armed to the teeth, and of course they wouldn’t want to accompany us! Eventually we’d end up grabbing them at gunpoint, tying their hands behind their backs and blindfolding them before loading them onto a truck. They were screaming. It was a fucking nightmare. We loaded these poor fuckers, about 50 Ovambos, into the truck and started driving. At one stage one Ovambo jumped off the truck and this one PF piece of shit, the Military Intelligence officer, swings his rifle round and tries to shoot him. As he lifted up his rifle, one of my best friends, B, grabs the rifle barrel and depresses it as the round is fired. The shot went into the ground and B took the rifle away from him. We captured the Ovambo again and drove on to Eenhana, one of the fire support bases right near the Border. As we get into the camp, I took my magazine off and cleared my rifle. Now these poor fucking Ovambos on the back of the truck have already heard one shot being fired and they hear me cocking my rifle, clearing it, and the one guy says to me in Afrikaans, ‘Ek het geweet julle sal ons doodskiet’ [I knew you were going to shoot us]. They kept them all night, blind-folded and hands tied. The next morning they faced about a 10-kay walk back to where they had come from.
– John, age 22
We were on patrol in South West and had stopped in a village when these two Casspirs arrived, filled with black and white Koevoet guys. Like us, they were not wearing regular South African uniforms, but were in their own police cammo shorts and T-shirts. They were all fired up ’cause they had just been in a contact and killed 11 terrorists. They’d tied the bodies on the Casspir’s mudguards, and they reminded me of deer carcasses strapped to truck bonnets by hunters. As the troops drove in, the freshly killed corpses bounced up and down and left a trail of blood in the dust. We all stood around and exchanged war stories about killing and also about rugby, all in the same breath. I think they came into the village to show the bodies to the locals, rather than us. The message on one level was, ‘Look, you are safe now, the terrorists are dead,’ and on a second level, ‘Don’t even think about being a terrorist ’cause you see what will happen to you.’ We must have looked terrifying: we had not washed for weeks, were smeared in black camouflage paint, dressed in dirty, torn uniforms, and were bristling with weapons. Some village children were crying, but others were playing in the dust, using sticks to draw lines around the pools of blood gathering under the corpses.
– Chris, age 17
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Koevoet and 101 Battalion troops for a week. The latter wore South West African uniforms with diamonds instead of stars to depict rank. I was one of seven guys in a reaction platoon. We were part of a stopper group assigned to help them with an extradition from Angola and prevent the terrs they were chasing from escaping when they went in after them. They were going into Angola to catch specific terrs that had been identified and targeted. We all crossed the jati into Angola. The jati was an area a few kilometres wide and it ran for a few kays before ending at the Angolan border. It was an area of nothingness – everything had been flattened so that anything moving was visible. The Koevoet and 101 Battalion guys caught the terrs they were after and then gave them what we call a bosbus. They tied the terrs spread-eagled on the bonnet of the Casspirs and drove through the thickest and thorniest bush they could find. I enjoyed talking with the Koevoet guys – they were a law unto themselves. Unless you were with them and part of what was happening, they never talked about their experiences. The 101 guys were very quiet and kept to themselves.
– Clint, age 18
It was usual to bring terr bodies back to base after a contact, and there was a reason for this: to win the hearts and minds of the locals. We were in the base, Nkongo, when a terr was brought in strapped to a Casspir. He was still alive, and the Koevoet guys had given him a bosbus on the way back. The medics treated him for an abdominal gunshot wound. They didn’t use morphine but, rather, Sosenol as a painkiller. He was then taken down into the interrogation tent for a chat. I got to meet him later, because we used to take it in turns to stand guard over prisoners. Guard duty was limited to a half-hour stretch – brass didn’t want any extended contact between us and the prisoner and therefore no bond could form. He spoke English and I got talking to him. We spoke about how we missed home, and I gathered from what he said that SWAPO soldiers were not treated as well or as humanely as we were in day-to-day military life. But he was well trained and didn’t divulge any critical information. Many of the terrorists were very well educated and spoke English. A lot of them had travelled extensively: Cuba, Russia, China and Central African countries. They were often exceptionally well trained and had some of the best equipment in the world. They had good medical equipment, and although the AK-47 may not have been the best rifle in the world, it was incredibly tough: you could throw it in the mud and it still worked, or drive over it with a Samil and it would still fire. This guy was dressed in what we called rice-fleck cammo. The terrs wore cammo that was very distinctive from ours. He only wore trousers, and they were a grey, purple colour with small dark grey flecks that resembled grains of rice. He opened up a little booklet and showed us photos of his girlfriend and letters from his family. He was a human being just like us.
The next morning, he was dead. He had died from his gunshot wound. While we were having breakfast, we saw them drag his body up from the tent and, as was usual with all terr bodies, he was dumped in the middle of the camp to lie in the sun to bloat. Just before last light we were instructed to load him onto the flatbed Unimog that was used for menial tasks and take him to the kakgat area for disposal. Six of us loaded him, six spades and a 44-gallon drum of A1 jet fuel on to the vehicle, and then drove out the gates with a driver and an interpreter. We stopped at the village, which was right outside Ngongo Base, and called everyone over to gather around outside the schoolhouse. About 50 people lived in the village and there were a lot of children around. Who knows what they thought as the interpreter briefly told them to look at the body and, if they supported SWAPO, this is what would happen to them. We then drove on into a dip, which is where the kakgat was. This was an area with holes for various types of rubbish. The villagers could only see the tops of our heads as we moved around, but they knew what was going on. We followed the instructions to dig a shallow grave, only about three feet deep, and were specifically told to place the body face down in the ground. I’ll tell you why later. Then we poured the entire barrel of fuel over him and lit it. Our instructions were clear – we must leave no evidence of the body. It was a relatively clean affair – no weird Afrikaners or Koevoet guys came out with us to set fire to the body. I think your mind suppresses what you are actually doing. You can’t act negatively in front of the others, but you have no bad dreams, no regrets, you don’t feel bad about what you are doing or anything regarding that day. That all comes later, years later.
A few days after this, we were sent on patrol. Patrol was either for seven or 14 days; it wasn’t usual to go out for 21 days, although it was a possibility. You never left through the camp’s main gate; when you went on patrol you went over the wall. So off we go, past the kakgat and out into the bush. We walked about 60 kilometres, and on the third day stopped at last light to set up a TB. The area was hot – we knew there were terrorists there – and we had been criss-crossing, moving from reference point to reference point all day. There were about 25 of us, and we moved in a classic V-formation. The two Bushmen trackers and a guy and his dog from the dog unit – to help sniff out tracks – in front, and then whoever had been causing the most kak in the unit had to walk point with them. The others spread out behind and outwards, and the support guys – the corporal, signaller, 1 and 2 mortars, medic and 2nd lieutenant – in the middle. The last guys at the end of each point of the V were the light machine-gunners and lance corporal. Then there was a back line of guys. When you set up a TB, you sleep in a largish circle and there is only one entry point. Even if you have to go to the toilet, which is not a private affair, ’cause you have to go with your buddy, you exit and enter the TB through the same point. At night, everyone other than the support guys is tied to one another with a light cord so that when you change guard duty you don’t have to make a sound, you just tug on the cord. We copied the Bushmen, who scraped the top layer, about 15 centimetres, off the surface of the packed earth into a rough pillow. Then we propped our webbing against that, climbed into the sleeping bag and tied the drawstring firmly around our neck to keep out the night crawlers. You could sleep fairly comfortably. We buried our water to chill it. The purified water was revolting, but at least tasted better when ice cold.
That night the Bushmen trackers practically dug trenches to sleep in, telling us they were convinced the terrs were going to attack. Sure enough, about 1 a.m. we hear the mortar pipes going off in the distance. They overshoot us completely, ’cause they don’t know exactly where we are. We sit vas and go back to sleep. They know we’re in the area, so they start walking, looking for us. They walk right through the TB. We didn’t hear them and they didn’t see us. Only very early the next morning, when we saw their tracks, did we discover that they’d been right through the middle of the TB. The Bushmen trackers followed the spoor and we ambushed the terrs at first light. It was a very short contact. You don’t see much happen ’cause you fight from a distance. There were only five of them; we neutralised three of them and two got away. We radioed for the Pumas and they came in and extracted us and the bodies of the terrs. We get back to base and the bodies are left in the sun. At the end of the day we are told to take them to the kakgat. No winning of hearts and minds this time – just straight to the kakgat. We used to say some of our guys had no culture, only agriculture, and a bunch of those types came along. We dug three shallow graves and put the bodies in, but this time there was no dignity. The guys were messing around and making fun of the bodies by sticking cigarettes in their ears and noses. Then they placed them face up in the graves, poured fuel on them and lit the bodies. When a body burns, the skin goes black and then white as it burns off. A burning body’s muscles contract and often cause the body to sit up and move, which is why we were told to place bodies face down before lighting them. The one body sat up and a guy swung his spade at the head, decapitating it.
I fired mortars in the army. Just by looking at a terr and the trees near to him and so on, I could almost instantly determine how far away he was. I could land a mortar within a square metre over 1 200 metres; I would fire and a figure would drop to the ground. Death was always distant. But this was different. Burning bodies made death more real to me than anything else I ever saw.
– Van, age 19