Gunship Over Angola

Lieutenant Bain, in the rear seat, realising that something was terribly wrong, said, ‘I’ve got it’ and immediately took over control of the Impala and stopped the headlong descent. I can vaguely recall a lot of radio chatter between him and the control tower, and then a slight improvement in the ‘head pressure’ situation as he initiated a gentle climb, under advice from a specialist aviation doctor who’d been summoned to the control tower. It seemed to me that it took a lifetime for the aircraft to slowly descend and land, and I only really began to regain my faculties when the ground crew opened the cockpit, the medical staff eased me out of the bang seat, and the doc took me to the Langebaanweg sickbay for further treatment and evaluation.

Surprisingly, once they’d cleaned the gore and other detritus from my facial cavities and given me a strong pain tablet or two, I was able to stand without falling over. Under strict written orders (my hearing was rather impaired, as you can imagine) to return to the sickbay the following morning for tests – with further tests planned at 2 Military Hospital in Cape Town – I self-propelled myself back to my room in the officers’ mess a short distance away.

Comrades-in-arms are a special breed of men, and it is well beyond my command of the English language to try to describe the strength of the bonds that evolve between chaps who have endured or experienced the life-changing camaraderie of a Pupe’s Course. The fellows on Pupil Pilot’s Course 1/77 were the very best of the best.

When I look back on that horrible day in January 1978, I remember sitting dejectedly on the edge of my bed for hours, contemplating my prospects. I was thoroughly confused by what had happened and so absorbed in my own misery that I can only vaguely recall the visits to my door of my course mates, each quietly offering their sympathies, or so I surmise.

Thinking about it now, I don’t know why their utterings were so subdued.

After all, I was deaf.

Finally, I curled up in a little ball on my bed, turned away from the door and closed my eyes, hoping that I’d soon wake up and it would have all been a nightmare.

At some point that evening, as I wallowed in my misery, tossing and turning and regularly changing the blood-soaked towels with which I’d covered my pillow, a course mate roused me and told me that there was someone on the telephone for me in the hallway near to my room. Obviously, this was long before cellphones, and we had to make do with public telephones (tickey boxes).

By then my hearing had improved sufficiently for me to make my way gingerly to the phone and say ‘Hello’ into the mouthpiece.

Seemingly from a long, long way away and down an extraordinarily long tunnel I heard my mother say, ‘Son, what’s wrong?’ and my eyes suddenly became misty.

I had always had a special relationship with my mom. She knew instinctively when I needed her close and, conversely, when to let me bang my own head into the walls I so often created (and still do). I would normally go for months without talking to her, particularly when I was away from home base in Pretoria, but she always, and I mean always, knew when to call and when I desperately needed her quiet guidance and her maternal embrace.

I could hardly hear anything she said that night, but the sheer comfort of knowing she was connected to me, albeit by a telephone line, remains one of my most treasured memories of her.

*

The days that followed were a jumble of tests, prods and probes with little worthwhile outcome other than the expert deductions of the specialists diagnosing the causes of the ‘16 000 AGL (above ground level) incident’, as it became known. They were of the considered opinion that an unknown impediment had prevented the sinus cavities in both my forehead and my cheekbones from equalising their internal air pressures during the rapid descent. Furthermore, it appeared that my Eustachian tubes, which connect the middle ear to the throat, had also been blocked, causing a similar pressure differential between the inner and outer ears and causing both eardrums to rupture.

Either way, I was forthwith grounded and would be sent to 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria for further tests. I left for Pretoria the next day. I cannot recall the name of the ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist who examined me at 1 Mil but he was definitely not chosen for his sparkling bedside manner nor, it turned out, for his diagnostic or surgical skills.

In the ‘discovery’ part of his examination, I had told him that, six months or so before, I had had my nose broken while playing soccer, and also how my dental work had been totally messed up during an ill-fated cricket match, during which I had been struck in the face.