During that night, every member of the chopper crews who’d been at New Etale the previous day came down with a severe case of ‘gyppo guts’ (gastroenteritis). Through the night and into the early morning, one by one, we all ended up being carried into the Ondangwa sickbay and hooked up to drips. My engineer and I were the last to succumb, and the doctors put this down to our later arrival at New Etale.
An investigation into the cause of this sudden illness revealed that a local inhabitant of Ovamboland had managed to make his way through the flimsy security fence surrounding New Etale’s 15-metre-deep well, dug specifically to supply the base with potable drinking water, and had fallen into the well and drowned. Over a few days, or possibly even a few weeks, his body had begun to decompose and contaminate the water in the process.
In the aftermath of that macabre news, it was difficult to consume any water, so we stuck to canned carbonated drinks during the day and gin and tonic in the evening.
A few days after the operation against the PLAN base, all aircrews were invited to attend a briefing by the ops intelligence people in the Ondangwa briefing room. Billy Fourie, normally a highly vocal character and an experienced Impala instructor at FTS Langebaanweg, was married with children. He had only recently finished his conversion to Alo IIIs and was on his first bush tour. Since the events of a few days before, Billy had said almost nothing to anyone, which was most unusual for him, but, because everyone responds differently to combat conditions, this didn’t even raise a comment.
In the ops intelligence briefings at Ondangs, we’d normally receive feedback on odd things that we’d reported during missions, new developments and assessments would be discussed, and information that could affect our mission success was divulged. I was not paying close attention to the presentation until I heard the intelligence officer mention the tendrils of white smoke that we’d reported. Almost nonchalantly he said, ‘Those white smoke spirals that you gunship crews reported appearing in the sky around you near Chiede a few days ago were from SAM-7s (surface-to-air missiles), chaps. The terrs have upgraded their weaponry again.’
Nothing more. Just that.
I was still wrapping my head around what he’d said, and whether there was anything more to be discussed about this scary new threat, when Billy Fourie stood up and said vehemently, ‘Fuck this. Fuck this war. I am not prepared to die here. I have a wife and kids. You can shove your fucking war!’ and then stomped noisily out of the room, away from Ondangs and ultimately out of the SAAF.
At the time, like most of the other pilots there, I was stunned that a fellow pilot could just walk out like that, abandoning his mates and his career. However, as it didn’t affect me directly, I moved on unperturbed, as, it seemed, did everyone else. While it wasn’t exactly a taboo subject, we spoke little about it in the days, weeks and months that followed.
A short while later, an Impala pilot, whose name eludes me, did the same thing.
It was only years later, long after I’d left the SAAF and when my own cans of worms had mostly been opened and neatly processed under the expert guidance of a professional psychologist, that I realised what enormous strength and courage it took for Billy Fourie, and for the other guy, to turn away from convention and face the punishing consequences of their decisions.
A week or so before the end of my tour, I was flying one of two gunships tasked with providing top cover to a gaggle of Pumas doing a troop drop close to Vila Roçadas, where the near-disaster caused by the outdated hand-drawn map had occurred just a few months before.
This time, using better navigation skills and improved cartography, the drop went smoothly and all the aircraft involved departed the scene and headed southwards for the border. The groundspeed of the Alo III being far slower than that of the Puma meant that the two gunships were left a long way behind, and we followed our own route back to Ruacana, where we were due to refuel.
For no more reason than a change of scenery, we opted to follow the south-westerly course of the Kunene River, flying at low level just above the water. A few minutes later we observed a dust cloud, obviously caused by a vehicle travelling down the broad roadway along the eastern bank of the river. The roadway, running roughly north–south directly towards the border, consisted of a braid of countless paths cut through the deep riverine sand and thick bush by vehicles over many years and was, in places, up to 300 metres wide. Our curiosity immediately overtook caution and we manoeuvred the gunships into a position where we could ‘peep’ over the bank at the source of the dust cloud.
