SADF VII

A decision was taken that we (the 10 Sappers) had to have some form of leadership who could interact with the leadership of the camp, and so I was appointed as Lance Corporal. This was great, except it lasted all of 4 days. Even before I received the stripe to sew onto my shirt sleeves, I lost the rank, and another guy got the commission. We were travelling back from a sweep, and the driver of one of the trucks wanted to chill a bit, so I offered to drive.

At some point a cow ran into the road, and I swerved, a bit too violently, and managed to roll the damn thing! Anyway, I got a sever reprimand, a slap on the wrist, and my “stripes” taken away! It was crappy, as the Lance Corporal came with a salary increase, and heaven knows that I could have done with one!!

While I was there I started a cactus garden! It was something I didn't plan on, but often when out in the bush I would find different cactus plants I had never seen before. My Mom always had a lovely garden, and kept a large selection of cacti, but many of these I didn't know. So as I found samples I would dig them out, put it into my pack, and when I got back to camp, plant it into the “garden”.

We decided that as we were going to be stuck here for so long, we may as well be comfortable. So, on a weekend when things were “slow”, we booked out some chainsaws, and drove out of camp about 5 kilometres. We found a couple of big palm trees and cut them down. Then we shaped 10 “King chairs” and a massive table out of them. We had some infantry truck drivers go out to collect them, and set them up behind our tent. I must say they were a great success, and attraction to the others in the camp!

Once, we had been on a marathon sweep of the “Kaplyn” (no mans land) area. We had been there for a week, and had covered a vast piece of the country side, clearing land mines, including some very difficult to find anti personnel mines. We had also set up booby traps in some areas known to be common terrorist crossing points. We had used claymores and trip wires in this instance, and not the “pipe bomb” as previously described.

Our final overnight stop was in view of the old border control posts. Here we could see members of the Angolan forces who were guarding their side of the border. The funny part was we would tolerate each other, with the full knowledge that at some time they would come across the border and plant mines or worse. And they knew we could / would cross over to get them. But as long as we could see each other, across this no mans land strip, nothing happened.

On this day however, there had been some firing of mortars, seemingly not in our direction, but the message was clear. They were armed, and wanting to play games. And the fact that they dind't have a good control of the direction their bombs went in didn't make us feel too happy!
That night there was some serious decision making taking place, and at about 3 am 4 of us moved out, carrying claymores and tripwire, detonators, and side arms. R1’s would be too cumbersome, and whilst we swept roads we normally carried side arms anyway.

We crossed over the border under cover of darkness, quite as possible. The rest of the team, with the infantry, would get our backs if required. We managed to get up to the guard house, which served at the sleeping quarters of the opposition guards. Here we planted a claymore directly in front of the door, facing the building. Two more were strategically placed facing the two windows in the building. Trip wires were connected to the door handle, and just off the window sills. Then another two were placed at the foot of the guard lookout tower, with a trip wire across the last step. Four blocks were linked to this setup and placed one on each leg of the tower. There were two guys up on the tower manning a radio and a search light. This had a powerful beam, used to scan the no man’s land area for up to about 300 meters! There were at least 8 guys in the guard house, 6 if 2 were doing rounds up and down the wire, which that night they were not, or they might have run into us, our spoor.

We set off back towards our side of the fence. At some point, probably about 20 meters from safe ground, one of the sleeping guards came out of the hut, probably to take a pee. He stopped in the doorway and shouted at the two in the tower, who shouted back and then laughed. And the guy in the doorway took a step, and disappeared!

The tower suddenly came to life, the search light came on and started to sweep the immediate area around their site, quickly moving out towards where we leopard crawled for safety. Someone came out of the window, and somehow both the other two claymore went off. There must have been a faulty cross over with the trip wires. That blew both windows and a large part of the walls away. One of the guys from the tower then started to scream. They had spotted us moving at lightning speed to get to cover. One shouted something which probably meant “Shoot the bastards” but the other one started off down the stairs. That didn't work, whatever he was planning to do, and I think it involved getting to their mortars or “Bren” style Russian machine gun.

The claymore and the 4 blocks of plastic went off simultaneously. The guard on the bottom stair just disintegrated. The one on top screamed as the tower first seemed to lean over slowly, and then crashed down to the ground, killing both the soldier, and the search light. And then silence.

Salagatle!