My wingman and I had spent the previous night at Nkongo, 120 kilometres east of New Etale, and we only arrived well after the commencement of the operation and as the second or third wave of troop-carrying Puma helicopters headed across the cutline and towards the landing zone inside enemy territory.
Two gunships flown, respectively, by Chris Stroebel and his wingman Billy Fourie, were already circling the drop zone to prevent any surprise attack from the enemy as the vulnerable Pumas came into land and disgorged the troops they were carrying. I had just made myself comfortable against some sandbags in the ops room when the VHF radio on the table next to me crackled into life and the faint voice of another Puma co-pilot, Steve Erasmus, said, ‘We have contact! There are lots of them. We are being looied (lashed)!’
Dead silence followed and immediately all ears tuned to the radio.
The radio crackled again and the same co-pilot came on: ‘My commander has been hit. We are turning back and going to Oshakati.’
His words were barely out and we were running for our gunships.
Fifteen minutes later we reached the point of contact, where Chris and Billy were already engaged with a sizeable force on the ground and were taking heavy fire.
The arrival of two more gunships must have tipped the balance and the enemy soldiers quickly melted into the thick bush and disappeared, probably into a network of tunnels. As we circled the area we noticed tendrils of white smoke regularly spiralling up into the sky around us, but didn’t think much more about them other than to report their appearance in the post-ops debriefing when we got back to Ondangwa later that evening.
During that night, every member of the chopper crews who’d been at New Etale the previous day came down with a severe case of ‘gyppo guts’ (gastroenteritis). Through the night and into the early morning, one by one, we all ended up being carried into the Ondangwa sickbay and hooked up to drips. My engineer and I were the last to succumb, and the doctors put this down to our later arrival at New Etale.
An investigation into the cause of this sudden illness revealed that a local inhabitant of Ovamboland had managed to make his way through the flimsy security fence surrounding New Etale’s 15-metre-deep well, dug specifically to supply the base with potable drinking water, and had fallen into the well and drowned. Over a few days, or possibly even a few weeks, his body had begun to decompose and contaminate the water in the process.
In the aftermath of that macabre news, it was difficult to consume any water, so we stuck to canned carbonated drinks during the day and gin and tonic in the evening.
A few days after the operation against the PLAN base, all aircrews were invited to attend a briefing by the ops intelligence people in the Ondangwa briefing room. Billy Fourie, normally a highly vocal character and an experienced Impala instructor at FTS Langebaanweg, was married with children. He had only recently finished his conversion to Alo IIIs and was on his first bush tour. Since the events of a few days before, Billy had said almost nothing to anyone, which was most unusual for him, but, because everyone responds differently to combat conditions, this didn’t even raise a comment.
In the ops intelligence briefings at Ondangs, we’d normally receive feedback on odd things that we’d reported during missions, new developments and assessments would be discussed, and information that could affect our mission success was divulged. I was not paying close attention to the presentation until I heard the intelligence officer mention the tendrils of white smoke that we’d reported. Almost nonchalantly he said, ‘Those white smoke spirals that you gunship crews reported appearing in the sky around you near Chiede a few days ago were from SAM-7s (surface-to-air missiles), chaps. The terrs have upgraded their weaponry again.’
Nothing more. Just that.
I was still wrapping my head around what he’d said, and whether there was anything more to be discussed about this scary new threat, when Billy Fourie stood up and said vehemently, ‘Fuck this. Fuck this war. I am not prepared to die here. I have a wife and kids. You can shove your fucking war!’ and then stomped noisily out of the room, away from Ondangs and ultimately out of the SAAF.
At the time, like most of the other pilots there, I was stunned that a fellow pilot could just walk out like that, abandoning his mates and his career. However, as it didn’t affect me directly, I moved on unperturbed, as, it seemed, did everyone else. While it wasn’t exactly a taboo subject, we spoke little about it in the days, weeks and months that followed.
A short while later, an Impala pilot, whose name eludes me, did the same thing.
It was only years later, long after I’d left the SAAF and when my own cans of worms had mostly been opened and neatly processed under the expert guidance of a professional psychologist, that I realised what enormous strength and courage it took for Billy Fourie, and for the other guy, to turn away from convention and face the punishing consequences of their decisions.
A week or so before the end of my tour, I was flying one of two gunships tasked with providing top cover to a gaggle of Pumas doing a troop drop close to Vila Roçadas, where the near-disaster caused by the outdated hand-drawn map had occurred just a few months before.
This time, using better navigation skills and improved cartography, the drop went smoothly and all the aircraft involved departed the scene and headed southwards for the border. The groundspeed of the Alo III being far slower than that of the Puma meant that the two gunships were left a long way behind, and we followed our own route back to Ruacana, where we were due to refuel.
For no more reason than a change of scenery, we opted to follow the south-westerly course of the Kunene River, flying at low level just above the water. A few minutes later we observed a dust cloud, obviously caused by a vehicle travelling down the broad roadway along the eastern bank of the river. The roadway, running roughly north–south directly towards the border, consisted of a braid of countless paths cut through the deep riverine sand and thick bush by vehicles over many years and was, in places, up to 300 metres wide. Our curiosity immediately overtook caution and we manoeuvred the gunships into a position where we could ‘peep’ over the bank at the source of the dust cloud.
It turned out to be a tanker truck painted a uniform forest-green colour. Closer inspection revealed that there was only one occupant, the driver, who, despite wrestling fiercely with the steering wheel, was clearly having difficulty with the directional force imposed by the deep ruts in the sand. Upon leaving Vila Roçadas he had probably hoped to set the hand throttle for a constant speed, let out the clutch to get the vehicle moving, remove his hands and feet from the controls and curl up for a nap until he reached his destination 60 kilometres away at Calueque. Fifty kilometres later, he was trying manfully to exercise some degree of control over the bucking tanker, but to no avail.
Some movement or sound must have got his attention. His head snapped to the right and he saw our two gunships, less than 100 metres way. Without hesitating for even a second, the driver opened the door and hurled himself out into space. He had barely touched the ground in a puff of dust before he shot off into the bush faster than my eyes could follow.
The tanker lumbered on down the road.
Unable to resist the temptation, our two gunships pulled back to a range of around 200 metres from the vehicle and I instructed my engineer to open fire with the 20 mm side-firing cannon, mounted where the Alo III’s port sliding door would normally be.
The Oerlikon or Hispano 20 mm cannons mounted in our aircraft could fire 600 rounds of thumb-sized projectiles per minute, but good flight engineers would only fire two- to three-round bursts. Longer bursts affected the pilot’s ability to control the aircraft, as the cannons had a fierce recoil, and the Alo III had really not been designed as a gunship.