The 250 rounds of ammunition for the gun were packed in an ammo pan fixed to the floor in the front of the aircraft and belt-fed to the gun’s firing mechanism. (Later, the ammo pan was moved out of the cockpit and into the left rear luggage compartment.) Engineers normally loaded the ammo in the ratio of three solid or ball rounds to one high-explosive (HE) round. The HE rounds were, in effect, high-velocity fragmentation grenades.
Simultaneous two-to-three-shot bursts from the two gunships hit the tanker. Fluid emerged, staining the areas around the holes where the projectiles had penetrated.
‘Hit it again,’ I said, and my engineer squeezed the trigger again.
Whatever was in that tank I do not know, but there was a blinding flash as the contents exploded. The inspection hatch on the top of the 30 000-litre tank parted company from the main body and disappeared, hundreds of metres into the sky.
Instantaneously, the path that the hatch cover followed was tracked by an eye-scorchingly bright pale-blue column of flame that just climbed higher and higher and higher. It was still burning with high intensity about ten minutes later when I looked back on the scene while we streaked away (high speed is possible in an Alo III during those shit-yourself episodes), like bandits departing a bank robbery.
To be honest, we headed westwards in a naive attempt to avoid being linked to the destruction of the tanker, which, we figured, was unlikely to have been an authorised target or to have contributed much to the war effort. By giving Calueque and surrounds a wide berth, and approaching Ruacana from the direction of the Kaokoveld, to the west, we reckoned that if blame were to be apportioned, it would not be to us.
Very low on fuel, thanks to the detour we’d taken, we landed at Ruacana airfield about 45 minutes later. We observed that the entire staff complement of the base, and many of the townsfolk, had gathered at every elevated point, many with binoculars, all looking northwards, across the border and into Angola, where a thick column of smoke still spiralled tellingly into the sky.
‘What are you looking at?’ we asked, nonchalantly.
‘There was an almighty explosion about an hour ago over there where that smoke stack is,’ said a young officer pointing at the distant object. ‘Didn’t you guys see it from the air? It lit everything up!’
‘Nah, we were at low level out there,’ we said, probably too quickly, pointing vaguely to the distant Kaokoland mountains.
Chuffed with our brilliant ingenuity and spur-of-the-moment innovation under great pressure, we thought we’d escape unscathed, and the four of us agreed to keep the details of the incident under our bush hats. So, imagine our surprise when, at the next intelligence briefing, the intelligence officer turned to us and congratulated us on a job well done.
It seems that our actions in spontaneously taking out the tanker had significantly curtailed FAPLA activity in the Calueque area (we weren’t told what mysterious substance the tanker was carrying), even though the attack was a violation of Angolan sovereignty, according to the United Nations, as officially we were not at war with Angola.
‘How did you know it was us who klapped (hit) the truck?’ we asked.
‘Intelligence!’ replied the officer proudly.
I got back home to Pretoria in early April and, for the first time since joining 17 Squadron, settled in, albeit briefly, to life as a squadron pilot. I caught up on training, doing short trips around the Pretoria area for any number of reasons, and also doing the odd one-to-four-night stop away from base.
Being at home base also allowed me to catch up with the social life I’d missed, for a number of months, enjoying drinks with friends in Pretoria’s many fine pubs, catching the latest movies, attending live theatre and generally reconnecting with ‘normal’ life. I even managed to establish an exclusive relationship with a very fine lady called Desiree, who, less than a year later, would become my wife.
I had never been keen on, or comfortable with, the idea of living in the officers’ mess, so I opted to rent a cottage in the garden of a Queen Street home, in the leafy Pretoria suburb of Irene, from a wonderfully kind widow, Mrs Merle Bradley. She flatly refused to take any rent from me while I was away ‘doing your thing for the country’, as she put it. She was also wise beyond words, and our late-night conversations around her kitchen table (she was an insomniac), after I’d returned from my nocturnal activities, arguably offered real solutions to more global problems than the United Nations General Assembly ever could.
One day in April 1980 I was sitting in the crew room at 17 Squadron when the ops clerk walked in and handed me a tasking signal with instructions from SAAF HQ to take an Alo III to Schmidtsdrift Weapons Testing Range that coming Sunday. For the duration of the following week, I was supposed to provide air support to a team of Armscor (the state-owned arms manufacturing company) and army boffins testing a new weapons system there.
Thinking that I had a rare weekend off, I had already made arrangements to have Sunday lunch with my parents and grandmother on the family farm, ostensibly to introduce them to Desiree. By tradition, Joubert family lunches at the farm were noteworthy culinary events and were difficult to turn down.
Close scrutiny of the tasking signal offered a possible solution. I saw that I was only expected to be in Schmidtsdrift, which is about 90 kilometres west of Kimberley, by sundown on Sunday, in order to start work on the project first thing on Monday morning. I calculated that if an early meal at the farm could be arranged and I got airborne from AFB Swartkop by 14h30, I could still make it to Schmidtsdrift, on time, by sunset on Sunday evening.
My mom and dad had gone through a rough few years in the period prior to that April lunch, being torn hither and thither by a whole host of conflicts. Even though they had both tried to hide the friction from me, I was not the only one, as shallow as my sensitivity meter was set, to fear that they might even split up. But when I arrived at the farm that day, I sensed a whole new atmosphere. I realised quickly that, being the astounding and irrepressibly resilient couple that they were, and having overcome so much hardship between them, they had found each other again. I was overjoyed and watched their exchange of intimate looks with a sense of great delight.
The meal, attended by just the five of us – Mom, Dad, Gran, Desiree and me – was filled with joyous banter, laughter and warmth. At 13h30 I reluctantly excused myself and dashed for the airport.
I landed at Schmidtsdrift after a relatively uneventful three-hour flight and walked straight into a shitstorm. It seems that wires had somehow been crossed between the weapons project leader at Schmidtsdrift, an army brigadier and SAAF HQ, and that my presence had been required a lot earlier that Sunday.
The brigadier met me as I got out of my seat in the Alo.
‘The fact that you have only just arrived,’ the fellow (clearly a few sheets to the wind) informed me, while prodding his finger into my chest, ‘has unduly delayed the project and I’ll be taking punitive action against you, you fucking blue-job bicycle.’
After such a wonderful day, I really wasn’t in the mood to be dictated to by a person under the influence, no matter what his rank, but I still bit down hard on my lip and said, with as much restraint as I could muster, ‘Brigadier, here’s the tasking signal that I got. If you read it you will see that it requires me to be here by this evening. If you don’t like what it orders me to do, please take it up with SAAF HQ,’ and I turned smartly away to help the flight engineer put the Alo to bed.