I realised firstly that I had to be completely at peace with the bush. While being alone in the veld had long ago become second nature to me, the added dimension of danger required an altogether different mindset. Danger came in all sorts of forms, whether from the wild game that frequented most of our areas of operation, or from the ever-present threat of a real and dangerous enemy. Even the threat of being detected by a member of the local population while lying up in a position close to the enemy would get the adrenaline pumping. So we trained at every opportunity. Whenever I had the chance, I would sleep in the veld – alone. During holidays in South Africa, I used to go hiking or camping by myself. And I kept myself fit, going on long, tiring runs to clear my mind.
The second technique was to plan operations in the finest detail, making a plan of action for every possible scenario that could go wrong, and then rehearsing each in the same minute detail. Thirdly, since I had developed a love of classical music, especially opera, during my formative years, I used to listen to music as a means of easing the tension and relaxing the nerves.
While a smaller team could move with stealth and hide away easily, it was limited in firepower and would only really act defensively. Marius Hibbers was a big-framed and stouthearted product of rural South Africa who had joined the recce wing at about the same time as I had. Together we had forged a solid four-man team along with two of the newly trained Vasquela Bushmen. The four of us did a series of recce missions into southwestern Zambia.
One pitch-dark night we were approaching a target area close to Kalabolelwa along the Zambezi River. SWAPO detachments had allegedly sent elements further south to set up early-warning posts along the Zambezi River. Our task was to confirm the existence of these forward posts and locate their exact position – a similar job to the one I had done with Frannie du Toit in the same area the previous year.
At the time there were large herds of elephant roaming southwestern Zambia between the Kwando and Zambezi rivers. The bush was lush and green. The team had been doing good time during the infiltration and bedded down at about 22:00 that night to get a good night’s rest before closing in the following day. Although it was unwise to move closer to the river in daytime, as the shore was densely populated, we needed daylight to locate signs of enemy presence.
Around midnight I woke up with a start. Hibbers had one hand on my wrist, the other on my mouth. “Elephants,” he whispered, pointing in the darkness towards where I could hear the snapping of branches and the grumbling of their stomachs.
“It’s okay,” I said, “it’s only elephant,” stating the obvious. Then I realised that he was already out of his sleeping bag, sitting at the ready with his weapon. Even the two Bushmen, who would normally not be in the least bothered by the giants of the bush, were sitting up.
“They’re too close,” Hibbers said and pointed upwards. It was only then that I realised that one of the elephants was virtually looming over us. The black hole in the sky above me turned out to be the hulk of the animal’s body. It was clearly time for a withdrawal.
Without thinking, I did something that almost led to disaster. I had often heard that the rhythmic beating of a stick against a tree, or even tapping the magazine of a rifle, would scare the beasts away (it presumably resembled the pounding of drums – supposedly ingrained in an elephant’s mind as a sign of danger, since it indicated human presence). So I started hitting my magazine with a stick I managed to find in the dark.
But clearly this elephant had not read the manual on “rhythmic pounding of drums in the African bush”, since it gave a frightened snort… and charged.
Fortunately, by this time I was out of my sleeping bag and ready for a hasty retreat. Our saving grace was the trunk of the large tree under which we had bedded down. Both Hibbers and I slipped behind the trunk and ran for a mopane silhouetted in the dark. The two Bushmen charged off into the night, followed by the angry elephant. I went up the mopane, with Hibbers following suit.
Once order had returned to the night around us, we found ourselves clutching the branches of a sapling, barely five feet above the ground. The elephant could have picked us off like ripe fruit.
After I had gathered everyone – and some of my lost dignity – we packed up and moved out onto our bearing, since the new day had already started to dawn.
That afternoon, we reached our target area in the vicinity of Kalabolelwa. Information indicated that the SWAPO elements would be on the eastern side of the road leading down to Sesheke, in the populated area between the road and the Zambezi. As we approached the road, we realised that the bush was too open to lie up in during the day, so we waited for last light.
The exact location of the enemy post was unknown to us, and to try to locate it in the dark would have been suicidal. We decided to establish a listening post close to the road for the night, knowing that we would have to move away from the inhabited area along the river before first light.
At about 22:00 automatic gunfire erupted to our east, followed by the fierce trumpeting of elephants. It seemed that SWAPO were facing a similar ordeal to ours the night before and were now obviously trying to scare the animals away.
Before long, we heard vehicles approaching on the road from the north, followed by the noise of some equipment being loaded onto a vehicle, accompanied by much talking and laughter. It then dawned on us why the cadres were so blasé about their position: they had clearly been expecting the vehicles and were preparing to move out of there.
Hibbers suddenly stood up next to me, pack on his back and rifle at the ready.
“Let’s go!” he said.
“Go where?” I demanded.
“Attack them. They don’t know we’re here. Now’s our chance.”
The big man was serious, which presented me with a different kind of challenge, as he was adamant that we should launch an attack on the unsuspecting enemy. No matter how much I tried to explain this was not part of our mission and that we couldn’t blindly attack an unknown number of enemy in the pitch dark, particularly since we were only four, Hibbers remained fiercely convinced that this was a golden opportunity. He was actually at the point of leaving us behind and charging in there by himself.
After some time, however, we could hear the vehicles departing to the south, and the bush around us became quiet again.
We spent a short while at first light investigating where the enemy had their temporary base close to the road, and where they had embarked on the vehicles. There was no sign of any further presence, and we concluded that the SWAPO element had been moved closer to the border. Over the next three days we made good our exfiltration by patrolling back to the cutline, and were picked up at the border by our own Tac HQ elements.
My first two-man team deployment brought home some of the most valuable lessons I ever learned. Tinus van der Merwe and I were tasked to do a recce of the ZNDF installations around Sesheke to determine if there were any SWAPO elements among them. The targets were all on the northern side of the tar road stretching east–west along the Zambezi River, which at this point forms the border between Zambia and the Caprivi.
The two of us, being new to the game of small team reconnaissance, rehearsed our actions extensively. We crawled around Omega and the surrounding bases in the Caprivi in the small hours of the night. We practised our emergency procedures and RV drills over and over. When we were ready, we reported to the Sector HQ at Katima Mulilo and presented our plan. One dark night we were taken across the Zambezi by an engineer section, after carefully watching the opposite shore for two days.