Gunship Over Angola

But instead of the peak of my cap being at eye level, it was pointing steeply skywards at a 45-degree angle, like that of a bus driver. The intended salute (touch the tip of your right index finger to the peak, my boy) couldn’t be completed correctly under the present conditions. I compromised, but in doing so only served to make the picture even more ludicrous. My hand hovered in the space between where it should have been and where the peak was, making my attempt at paying respects look like a watered-down Heil Hitler.

I stood there mortified, my mouth slightly agape and changing colour like a chameleon on a box of Smarties.

Inside my chest, feelings of despair were already oozing out. It was the most important day of my young life and I’d blown it… and I hadn’t even opened my mouth yet.

Blinking furiously, I tried to gauge the situation, my desperate gaze seeking a hint of encouragement from any one of the assembled brass, but in vain. In addition to General Rogers, there was at least one more general, perhaps two, a bevy of brigadiers and a collection of colonels.

Their faces stared back, deadpan. No one cracked even the slightest smile, despite the unintentional vaudeville farce being enacted right in front of them. Instead they all looked at me as I imagined they would a blob of sticky dog turd accidentally attached to the toe of their perfectly polished shoes.

After what seemed like an age, General Rogers finally spoke.

‘Have you finished?’ he asked brightly.

He was answered by a voice that sounded vaguely like mine, had I just been punched hard in the larynx.

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Then try to pretend for a moment that you’re not driving a tram, take off your cap and sit down,’ he said.

I sat forlornly in that seat, certain that I’d just tossed out the window the career that I’d dreamt about since I was a small boy.

In anticipation of facing the selection board that day, I’d had my formal uniform dry-cleaned, pressed to a parade-ground crispness, I had polished my shoes to a mirror-like sheen, and shone my brass buttons and cap-mounted eagle so bright that one risked eye damage looking directly at them.

The preceding weeks had been a whirl of medical examinations, with assorted specialists probing and prodding every nook and cranny and psychologists trying to establish if I was psychologically equipped to be a flyboy. I’d seen 90 per cent of the guys who’d started the final selection process with me get eliminated for even the slightest aberration. Some, on hearing the news of their rejection, had stood rooted to the spot, sobbing with frustration and disappointment before being led away by friends and colleagues.

We were told, and I didn’t know if this was fact, that 7 500 young men had applied to become SAAF pilots in the current intake (at the time the SAAF selected pilot trainees twice a year). Only 700 of them had been invited to the medical evaluation process, and there were just 115 of us facing the final stage, the Pilot Selection Board.

All I’d done and all I’d experienced had led up to this moment, and in a matter of a seconds I had misjudged the distance to the chair and set this career-terminating disaster in motion.

In that situation, I reverted to the only defence I knew – I’d make them laugh.

So, when the General asked the first question, ‘How long have you wanted to be a pilot?’, instead of giving the expected answer, ‘Ever since I can remember, General’, I said, ‘Since I stopped wanting to be an ice-cream seller, sir!’

‘An ice-cream seller? Please explain,’ the General said, somewhat taken aback.

‘Well, sir, when I was very little, I thought the greatest job in the world was that of the guy driving the bicycle with the bin of Dairy Maid ice creams through the neighbourhood. Since that dream faded, I wanted to be a pilot.’

‘Not much ambition there,’ he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.

‘On the contrary, sir,’ I said, and his eyebrows arched.

‘Explain?’

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought.

‘Don’t get too comfortable in that chair, sir. I’d like to sit there some day!’

A funereal silence followed.

‘Does anyone have any questions to ask this young man?’ the General asked the other officers in the room, confirming, as if I hadn’t already known, that he was done with me.

From the left, someone asked, ‘How does a jet engine work?’

‘The air comes in the front, gets compressed and heated and shot out the back,’ I offered hopefully, while suspecting that this particular level of brevity was unlikely to win anyone over.

‘Anyone else? No? Thank you. You can go.’ This statement was made without even a hint of hesitation between the words.

I got groggily to my feet, replaced my cap, fashioned a salute, this time more like how I’d been taught to do it, then spun around so quickly that the sole of my shoe under the ball of my left foot struck a raised joint between two planks and stopped turning! There was an audible crack from the area of my ankle.

‘I say, are you all right?’ inquired General Rogers.