Gunship Over Angola

I remember at the time not being aware, or even conscious, of the sequence of events that had transpired over the previous hour or two. My brain seemed numb, as if a local anaesthetic had somehow been applied to everything around me. I felt like I was watching myself from a distance of a few metres away, going through the motions of flying the chopper as a robot might.

We completed the flight back to Ondangwa without further incident and landed just before sundown. I headed immediately for the pub, ate a tasteless supper and consumed an unprecedented quantity of gin and tonic, without its having any effect on me whatsoever. Much later, in the witching hours of that night, I lay awake, wide-eyed in the cocooned refuge that was my mosquito-net-enclosed, cold-steel, military-issue bed in the darkened, prefabricated ‘terrapin’ billet at Ondangwa. There, I was finally invisible to the sharp eyes of my more experienced colleagues, who might otherwise have spotted all the newfound doubt and fear that had suddenly become my unwelcome companion. I felt suddenly stripped bare of my self-belief. Only then did the mechanism in my brain that controls these things begin to review, in graphic detail, frame by frame, the full sequence of our most fortunate escape.

As the full-colour scenes rolled by across the movie screen of my visual cortex, the tendrils of fear of what might have been and the resultant tremors of shock from the attack, for which I had obviously been neither accustomed to nor in the least prepared for, threatened to overwhelm me and reduce me to a shivering, whimpering and terrified little child. I bit down hard and gritted my teeth to stop them chattering and squeezed my eyes closed so tightly that my temples hurt, hoping that the nightmare images would magically just disappear. But they kept on playing, for how long I really don’t know. I wanted so badly for them to stop.

Then, suddenly, just when it seemed certain that I would start to blubber uncontrollably and cry out aloud into the Ovamboland night, a wondrous thing happened. Like a light being extinguished, the horror movie and all the anguish just stopped. One moment I was panicking and in a world of anguish and the next I felt the panic subside and the blessed relief of all emotion draining from me, leaving me feeling nothing… absolutely nothing at all.

I found out years later, from a psychologist friend particularly skilled in this area of human behaviour, that it was my ‘sensory overload switch’ activating for the first time. It would do so countless times in the years that followed. When the switch was activated, all the conflicting and frightening emotions that I was feeling were immediately cut off. This proved to be a priceless blessing in the circumstances prevailing at the time – and for the next few years.

*

Lurking at the periphery of all I did, learnt and experienced during my military years was a paranoid terror of accidentally violating the Official Secrets Act, to which all SADF soldiers were subject. Such was my fear that I would not even participate in any informal discussions with colleagues on subjects like politics, the war itself and its likely outcome, anything to do with apartheid, the influence of the church or questions related to the strategies and objectives followed by our military leaders. Not that these kinds of discussions were commonplace. On the contrary, I think most of us involved, at least at junior officer level, felt enormously discouraged from questioning the status quo.

Consequently, little photographic evidence of any phase of activity in the operational area was recorded, and media reports on events that took place were rare. Access to day-to-day developments in the Border War was limited to a few authorised personnel. Those of us who participated in the fighting were under threat of severe prison terms, or worse, should it come to light that we had discussed our experiences with anyone – friend, family or even professional counsellor.

^{The only photo of me (that I know of) with the Alouette III.}

So, as far as family, friends and even the majority of young men who spent time in the operational area south of the Yati Strip, also known as ‘the cutline’ (the 100-metre-wide, 440-kilometre-long zone that formed the border between South West Africa and Angola between Ruacana and Katwitwi in the Caprivi Strip), were concerned, we spent our days drinking copious quantities of cheap booze (five cents a tot for Beefeater gin, for example), puffing away at Camel Filters (20 cents for a packet of 20) and acquiring a deep bronze tan, using a mixture of brake fluid and used cooking oil as suntan lotion. We also busied ourselves with finding innovative ways of disposing of the compulsory stocks of anti-malarial Daramal, because we believed that Daramal caused our hard-earned tans to fade too soon.