After some time Xivatcha, who was running ahead of me, tilted his head and looked at me, his face lighting up: “Aeroplane…” he smiled. “Boer aeroplane.”
I quickly switched on the UHF radio,[5] and straight away the reassuring voice of the pilot came across: “Kilo Sierra, this is Cheetah. Do you read me?”
“Cheetah, this is Kilo Sierra. Angels from heaven,” I managed to get out. “You come as if you were sent!”
“We have indeed been sent. Thought you were in trouble. Where’s the enemy?” the pilot asked.
The next moment two Impala jets thundered overhead, and we almost jumped with joy. I directed the pilots towards the area where the enemy had been, but either they had cleared out or were hiding their vehicles, because the Impalas could not pick up anything, and the pilots had to be content with delivering some speculative fire into the bush.
During the debriefing back at Katima, it transpired that Major Oelschig had dispatched the fighters directly after speaking to me on the radio, without waiting for my update thirty minutes later. He declared that he couldn’t afford to have South Africans killed on the opposite side of the river, as “South Africa was not at war with Zambia”. To the team it was reassuring to know that our ops commander was someone with vision and a gut feel.
On a practical level, I would learn many things during my years at Omega, not only about surviving in the bush but also about my brothers-in-arms. Our Bushman buddies were indispensable in most operations, but there was one thing you couldn’t ask of them: to do a tactical river crossing.
I discovered this during a mission when we had to cross the Cuando River to reach our target. The Cuando flows from the central highlands of Angola in a southerly direction, forming the border between Zambia and Angola and eventually cutting through the Caprivi (where it is called the Kwando) to its marshy end in the Linyanti Swamp in Botswana. A fighting patrol from the recce wing was tasked to harass a major SWAPO supply line – a road stretching along the eastern shore of the Kwando River to SWAPO bases along the Caprivi border.
To ensure that the team reached the road undetected, it was decided to cross the Luiana and Kwando rivers on foot, a task that soon proved to be nearly impossible. Firstly, it transpired that few of the Bushmen in the team could swim. Therefore we had to take inflatable mattresses and ensure that every non-swimmer was assisted by a guy who could swim. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Kwando River was no less than five kilometres wide at our point of crossing.
Fast-flowing streams rushed past marshes covered in thick reeds. The many small islands meant the team could take breaks, even though we had to battle swarms of mosquitoes that vigorously attacked us throughout the crossing. We made the rucksacks float by wrapping them in groundsheets, after which the webbing and weapons were tied on top.
Around a bend in a particularly broad stretch of river, I came across Joao Antonio, a Bushman who carried the team’s RPG-7. He looked at me with a guilt-ridden face that said it alclass="underline" his equipment had capsized and the RPG launcher was at the bottom of the river, along with a set of three booster charges that formed part of the rocket. We dived after it and managed to retrieve the whole lot. After the crossing we let the boosters dry in the sun, hoping that they would do their job when we needed them.
The entire team finally made it across the river after 36 hours of painstaking work, and we reached the eastern shore exhausted but relieved. Approximately two kilometres from the intended ambush position we split the team in two; the team leader led the ambush party to the road and I stayed behind with a small reserve team, manning the radio.
Events at the ambush site turned out to be quite interesting, as I learned later. On the second day a SWAPO resupply truck came rushing down the road. Joao, the man with the previously submerged RPG-7 launcher, positioned himself squarely in the centre of the road, crouching down for a better shot. His first attempt was met by a disheartening “click” as the weapon failed to respond. No luck the second time either. The situation demanded desperate action. At this point Joao, fiercely aggressive and determined to stop the massive machine thundering down the narrow road, drew his alternative weapon, a 9 mm pistol, and started emptying it into the truck, which by this time was virtually on top of him.
Fortunately, the rest of the ambush party did not wait for Joao to bring the truck to a standstill and also opened up with every weapon they had. Joao cleared the road just in time before the truck crashed into the bush. Our team leader then made a sweep of the killing ground, took photos of the truck and the victims, and led his team back to our position. That same day, we were lifted by helicopter and flown back to Omega.
4
First Small Team Ventures
AT THIS TIME, although subconsciously, a new and more refined concept of tactical reconnaissance missions started taking shape in my mind. Conventional military doctrine dictating reconnaissance operations had proven itself flawed and ill-adapted for the kind of enemy, population and terrain that we encountered on a daily basis. Of course, there wasn’t a blueprint for recce missions. It was something that had to be learned and developed slowly through trial and error.
The one aspect of doctrine that had not been decided on conclusively was the size of the team. Conventional wisdom prescribed that a team doing a recce at a tactical distance in front of a fighting force had to be strong enough to fend for itself in a punch-up. Also, in order to cover a larger area, more feet on the ground were required. Thus, a recce team consisting of six or eight members was not uncommon. In fact, having such numbers was often a saving grace since recce teams invariably had to switch to fighting mode.
The downside of this modus operandi was that once you were on an independent mission without any immediate backup, you were fairly exposed as a big group. The more feet on the ground, the more footprints you’d leave and the more noise you’d make. In areas with soft sand and sparse undergrowth, it would be impossible to hide a team of eight. Once you were on the run from a large enemy force, control over eight team members would also become challenging.
This was illustrated clearly by an incident when Sector 20 at Rundu requested a team to do a recce of a FAPLA[6] brigade HQ at Mpupa in southeastern Angola. It was to be a clandestine mission, and the aim was to locate the base and do a detailed close-in recce, with the eventual purpose of passing the information on to UNITA for a large-scale base attack. However, this information was never disclosed to us, probably because the planners thought we would be a security risk.
I picked an eight-man team, four whites and four Bushmen, to rehearse for the job, as I thought that such a large target would require more feet on the ground. The intention was to leave a two-man element outside the base, and let three two-man teams cover the three main target areas within the base. We were also told that, as the South Africans were not officially operating in the area and were supposedly not supporting UNITA at the time, the operation could not be compromised at any cost, hence the use of helicopters for insertion or extraction would not even be considered. All equipment needed to be non-traceable, and no sign whatsoever could be left to suggest that South Africans had been in the area.
This was the last point-target reconnaissance I would ever do with a recce team bigger than three. The operation almost turned into a major disaster, and was in many respects a turning point for me, mainly because of the lessons we learned from our mistakes.
5
Ultra-high frequency (UHF) was generally used for communications with jet fighters, while VHF was used with choppers and slower fixed wings.
6
FAPLA, or People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola, originally the armed wing of the MPLA, was the Angolan regular army.