SADF V

One of my buddies turned 21 up there. Shit place to celebrate your 21st. We slaughtered 3 goats, and drank about 10 dozen beers, between 10 of us! He might not want to, but he'll never forget it. We even had the mortar guys put 2 off their 1000m flares for him! Wonder what happened to him?

One of the downers whilst on the border was the "Dear Johnny's", you know those letters that the guys get when they are away from home for a long time, and the girlfriend has found some other Romeo? Well, we made a point of watching each other whenever any mail came in. If the reaction on the readers face was not good, a point was made to keep an eye on him. There were many stories of guys who went off the deep end because of a "Dear Johnny" letter.

There was also a radio station that broadcast up to there for us, and I think it was every Sunday they ran a special program where they would play songs for the “troop on the border” based on requests they received from their listeners, who were either family or friends of the troops.

Every Xmas the Red Cross would hand out Xmas parcels to the troops, normally a bag containing a pen, writing paper, some envelopes, nail clippers, a “Thank you” card, and even a wooden shield / trophy with the SWA map embossed on it and the words “Border Duty – Christmas 19XX” (or something like that. They were always welcome though, probably because getting free envelopes and stuff meant we had more money for beer. That’s another thing. Access to beer was restricted. Only two per person per night (or something like that) ((I know I write that a lot, but time has deleted a lot of these little details)). However, there were ways and means. A little backhand could secure you a six pack, and then some of the guys didn't drink alcohol, so paying for their cokes would get you their beer!

Sometimes we would run out of cigarettes, and then the guys would smoke anything they could crush and roll into a paper. Sometimes we’d raid the local “kukka shop”, that’s what they called the informal shops where adds and ends were sold by the locals to the locals, and there we would get cigarettes, pipe tobacco, even beers (bad beer beats no beer).

Once we raided a known terrorist supporter kukka shop. In the false ceiling (is that right?) we found piles of those cardboard wine bottle sleeves packed with South African bank notes. Needless to say that was the last time he saw any of it. We didn't run short of funds for a while. Spoils of war, we called it.

Close to the actual border line was a missionary station, run by a bunch of Catholic nuns. It was well known that they would offer assistance to anyone who needed it. It was also suspected (and no doubt proven at some time) that they offered sanctuary, food and medical assistance to the terrorists. We couldn't touch them, or even get them to move, but the area around their station became almost a no go zone. Nights there would be infantry patrols and ambushes nearby, and by day, trackers would go around to see if they could pick up spoor.

Once we had information that some terrorists would be coming through there within the next week. We got a 6 meter section of PVC piping; 150mm diameter (used for water piping and sewerage piping) filled it with broken glass, bolts, rocks, and PE4! Man I loved that stuff. What we could do with half a kilo of plastic was incredible. What we did with 2 kilos in this pipe was scary. Anyway, we buried it across a well used usual pathway, where it passed between two tall palm trees which were about 10 meters apart. We rigged it up with a trip wire, linked to a couple of claymore set back about 10 meters, further into the bush.

Two days later it went off. We got there maybe 35 minutes after detonation. The devastation was incredible. There was a massive hole in the ground, Both the palm trees were blown out of the ground, and a mess to show that someone / something had been hurt real bad. There were marks to show that someone had dragged bodies away, and there were no guns and stuff left behind. Seems like it could have been a large group and not all had been hit, and so the survivors had taken away the dead / hurt, and taken them to the mission station. We were not allowed to enter their site, but we hung around for 5 days, not allowing anyone to leave either, except a nun who went to get food rations. Whoever was inside needing help either got it from the nuns, or they died.

More later

Salagatle!