Gunship Over Angola

Just recently, I had a meal with a close friend who was an ops medic from the same era. We have been friends for more than ten years and he has never once before talked about his experience. We were discussing my book when he suddenly began telling me of an incident involving a nine-year-old Ovambo girl who’d been caught in the crossfire during a contact between SADF and PLAN forces and had sustained multiple mortal wounds over her entire little body. She’d been airlifted by chopper, unconscious, from the battlefield to the surgical unit in which my friend and 15 other medical personnel were working. He recalled the terror in her eyes as she woke up in an alien environment, surrounded by masked medicos in blood-stained scrubs with shiny instruments in their hands, noisy machines in the background and the theatre lights glaring down on the operating table.

Forty years after the event my friend kept choking with emotion as he related the details of the tireless round-the-clock effort of those medicos as they frantically battled, with every bit of skill and each piece of modern science available, to save her.

But, despite their actions, on the morning of the fourth day she lost her final fight. These were men exposed daily to death and destruction and blood and guts and screaming and agony, but this particular incident profoundly affected them.

When she died, without being asked, each of the medicos from the unit chose to help to wash and clean the lifeless body of the girl. Then they dressed her in a pretty green frock that they bought from a local dressmaker.

My friend’s final recollection is of the tiny bow tied at her midriff, fluttering in the wind, as her grandfather carried her off to bury her.

Until the day he told me this story, the trauma had remained hidden in a dark recess somewhere in my friend’s mind. It seems to me that he, and so many like him, struggle to see that ridding themselves of the demons of the past is possible only by exposing those memories to the light.

My choice, made roughly five years after I left the SAAF, was to throw caution to the wind and see a skilled and experienced clinical psychologist. I never did confirm whether he diagnosed me with PTSD or not, but his intervention placed me firmly on a path to honestly confronting the dark stuff, and the resulting healing process re-awoke my inherent but dormant compassion and empathy.

Are all the ghosts of this period of my life buried? I’d like to think that they no longer dominate my life as they once did. It’s become a lot easier to talk freely about most of those memories without my heart pounding too much and my chest tightening, but I also know that they will never fade completely.

A major contributing factor in my ‘normalisation’ is that, later, I also married my very best friend, Diane, and she has never shied away when I felt the need to talk.

This book is a continuation of that healing process. My story is but one of hundreds of thousands of stories in the minds of the southern African men of my generation, on all sides of the conflict.

I urge anyone who reads this book please to tell his or her own story, if only to someone who cares enough to listen.

It is never too late.

Acknowledgements

To attempt to name all of those who need to be acknowledged for their contributions to this book would be mightily unfair to those whose names I’ve neglected to include. I just trust that you know who you are and the roles that you played in moulding me.

Being surrounded by a loving family and good, solid friends while growing up is an extraordinary privilege, and the value of their support and guidance to me is simply inestimable.

The band of brothers (and occasional sisters) who had my back and afforded me protection and care during the operational years did so selflessly and without reward or personal regard.

I benefited enormously from those who taught me and I learnt so very, very much from those who fought at my side.

My thanks, too, to my publisher and the team at Delta Books, for making this book a reality.

Diane’s patience with me while I wrote, and her often brutal honesty in critiquing my work, need a special mention and bottomless wells of my gratitude.

Mere words cannot adequately express my appreciation for the combined efforts.

Thank you one and all.

Summary

Growing up in suburban Pretoria, Steve Joubert dreamed of a career as a pilot. After undergoing SAAF pilot training, a freak injury put an end to his hopes of flying fighter jets. Instead he learned to fly the versatile Alouette helicopter.

He had barely qualified as a chopper pilot when he was sent to the Border, where he flew missions over Namibia and southern Angola to supply air cover to troops on the ground. As a gunship pilot, Steve saw some of the worst scenes of the war, often arriving first on the scene after a contact or landmine attack.