Gunship Over Angola

I opened the door. Both women stood there, tears coursing down their cheeks.

At 05h15 that Thursday morning the embolism had moved into Mom’s brain and doused the last flickering vestiges of her life.

She was only 45.

*

Throughout those indescribably sad days that followed, first notifying friends and family, then making the funeral arrangements, and finally the awful bruising trauma of Mom’s cremation service at the Rebecca Street Chapel, the emotional paralysis in me held firm. It allowed me to function, albeit like an automaton.

I have no detailed memories of that time other than of the tsunami of shock and grief that drenched everyone. The depth of sadness at her passing stunned friends, family and associates. It was born of her unbridled joy for life, of her smile, which could soften even the hardest of hearts, and of her selflessness, which noticeably affected everyone she ever encountered.

I was around 16 when I’d found a diary entry that she’d written on her 16th birthday, the day she had rebelled against the selfish summons of her own mother to leave school to come back to Brakpan and work. I cannot recall the exact wording, but I do recall her making a promise to herself to the effect that ‘I will never treat my own children like this, NEVER. I will love and support them with all my heart so that they never have to experience the feelings of pain, rejection and sorrow that I feel right now.’

She was unwavering in living out that promise, to the day she died.

As her funeral ended, the minister who’d performed the service approached our family – my dad, my gran, my brother, my sister and me. He offered words of comfort to each of us in turn. As he did so, I watched myself go through the motions of a grieving son, from a short distance away, just like I did when things got hairy in the bush.

^{My mom, Inez Ursula Joubert (née Wilson), 18 July 1934 – 24 April 1980}

I remember thinking that I should be crying, but, frustratingly, I couldn’t find the button that would open the floodgates to my tears. When the minister reached me, he looked into my dry eyes, leant forward and embraced me. As he did so he whispered, ‘Let go, Stephen. Just let go. You must not hold back the feelings inside. If you do so, you will hurt yourself and all of those around you. Let go, Stephen. Please let go.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

Ten years later, I was still occasionally picking up the phone to call my mom.

8 Escalation and intensification

In the weeks and months that followed, I did the only logical thing that I knew and buried myself in my work, spending more time in the bush than I did at home.

At Ondangwa, I’d make sure that I was in the vanguard of helicopter operations and thus spent considerable time away from the relative comforts of the base, at one stage even spending a few nights in a hole dug into the barren soil somewhere in southern Angola.

My recall of events during this time is not very sharp and some notable incidents are lumped together in my memory, adversely affecting chronological accuracy. However, I do remember that in June 1980, I went to Windhoek for a short tour of two weeks. I had barely unpacked my bags when a call came through for me to pack a small overnight bag and wait to be taken to Eros airport to catch a flight to an undisclosed destination.

On arrival at the airport, my flight engineer, Douw Kuhn, and I were bundled aboard a Beechcraft Queen Air and flown to AFB Ondangwa, which I’d left two weeks previously. When we arrived there later that night, I was told that an Alo III gunship had been shot down that afternoon about 70 kilometres inside Angola, and that the crew were missing and presumed killed. The flight engineer and I were to replace them on the operation that was already well under way.

The crew of the ill-fated Alo gunship, Captain Thinus van Rensburg and flight engineer Sergeant Koos Cilliers, were colleagues from 17 Squadron at AFB Swartkop. Koos lost his life in the incident, while Thinus, despite fracturing his spine, managed to evade capture and walked about 30 kilometres to safety during that night, presenting himself to South African forces entrenched near Cuamato, in southern Angola, the following morning.

The suggestion that I pack an overnight bag was somewhat optimistic, and it was a full seven to ten days later that the operation ended. The chopper crews returned to Ondangwa, and Douw and I were urged to try to scrounge a lift on any transport aircraft going in the direction of Windhoek. Rather than wait for a ‘commando’ (civilian volunteer) aircraft to be organised to get us back to Windhoek, Douw and I, still in our fragrant ‘overnight’ flying overalls, managed to hitch a ride on a 44 Squadron Dakota going that way.