Across the Border: Surviving the Secret War in Angola

By Norman McFarlane

Norman McFarlane was just out of high school when he was conscripted for national service and sent to Angola. Like so many other ordinary troopies, he was thrown into the horror, deprivation and banality of war. He recounts his loss of innocence in Angola, the subsequent ‘camps’ and his journey towards confronting his post-traumatic stress disorder. Told with disarming honesty and humour, he gives voice to a generation of white South African men forced into a grisly, life-defining experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780624093053

Norman McFarlane

Norman McFarlane worked in the retail motor industry and ran a software company before becoming a journalist in 2007. He has written for a number of publications over the years, including Wine Magazine, Classic Wine and Farmer’s Weekly. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2008 Sanlam Business News Award. He lives in Somerset West.

Book preview

Across the Border

Surviving the Secret War in Angola

Norman McFarlane

For all the Forgotten Soldiers

who fought in the Secret War.

You shall be remembered.

Foreword

In writing Across the Border, Norman McFarlane set out to ensure that his and other protagonists’ experiences in the Angolan conflict would be remembered rather than forgotten.

Norman spent two periods in the field: the first from October 1975 to January 1976 as a nineteen-year-old conscript in Operation Savannah, the second in the form of a three-month so-called camp, from January to April 1979.

The imperative to stay alive and in one piece displaced thoughts as to the logic of being engaged in Pretoria’s secret war. He was exhilarated, scarred, terrified, casevaced. The process left him with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

His book is testament to his acknowledgement of the condition, and his strength in dealing with it.

The Angolan War of Independence raged from the early 1960s when the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took up arms in the north and centre; the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) entered the conflict in 1966, with actions in the centre and south. Across the border, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) clashed with the South African Police (SAP); a year later, Pretoria committed to a police action in Rhodesia.

Following the Carnation Revolution of 1974, Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique moved toward independence. In Angola, the FNLA, MPLA and Unita jostled for power, aided and abetted by neighbouring and foreign states. South Africa (SA), Cuba, China, the United States (US) and the Soviet Union committed resources and advisors.

According to CIA Angola Task Force chief John Stockwell, Washington merely sought to delay the inevitable MPLA victory. With the encouragement of Washington, Pretoria invaded Angola with the intent of ensuring a Unita victory. Instead, the MPLA held Luanda and then engaged in a civil war with the FNLA and Unita that lasted until 2002.

Hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed. The country was devastated. None of this can or should be forgotten.

Back in the 1970s, young white boys were conscripted for military service, and conscientious objection was largely unheard of. My close friends, pupils in a boys-only state school, regarded apartheid as a folly that was bound to fail under the weight of its lunacy. We applied for study deferment from the 1966 call-up, and then waited to see who would be balloted. None of us contemplated refusal.

All received postcard notifications rejecting deferment. The next day, I received a second postcard informing me that I had not been balloted and was free to get on with my life. My mates did their service and there was a parting of ways.

I settled into student life and embraced the anti-apartheid protest movement, later joining the ANC in Botswana. Friends and comrades were killed in the succeeding years of struggle. The death squads passed us by, and so we could enjoy the first Freedom Day, and we all live with the scars of being in, or very close to, violence.

Being scarred is one thing. Recognising the consequences, another. Reckless behaviour and substance abuse beckon. ‘Oh, you just move on,’ is nonsensical, and reminds me of the operator in a thunderous power station telling me that ‘you get used to the noise’. He could not hear my shouted reply as he was partially deaf. And PTSD is far more common than we dare admit.

I saw no service in the field; did not huddle in a trench as Katyusha rockets whistled above. The little I do know is that battle, logistics and intelligence are messy and foggy. Commanders make decisions; foot soldiers and civilians pay the price. The soldiers may even be memorialised, as in the Freedom Park archives, but civilian losses remain oft ignored.

Norman takes us into his spaces, his emotions, his worries. He recognises the way that leaders on all sides shape their constituencies; they bear culpability. It is rare for them so to confess, let alone atone.

So, a difficult book to write, and not an easy foreword to craft.

Prof Michael Kahn

Cape Town

Author’s note

One of the greatest difficulties I encountered when I started to write this book in 2014 was the disjuncture between the vividness of my recollections of military service and the great gulfs of nothingness that yawn in my memory.

I know the opening sentence of the Prologue is word-perfect, as I’m sure Benny Havenga, whom I quote, will attest if he gets to read this book. Why? Because that is one of the many vivid recollections that have stayed with me over the decades. But in other passages, what I put in quotation marks is best described as edited memory – a recollection of what was said and how it was said, rather than the precise words, for example the harsh instructions and blunt invective of the sergeant herding us onto the train at Durban station when our national service odyssey commenced.

A dear friend once told me that one of the reasons memory is imperfect is because we edit it. I’ve no doubt that this is true because there was a time when I pushed the delete key on most of what I did, saw and experienced during the Bush War, as a means, no doubt, of preserving my sanity. But if that is the case, can what I’ve set out here be trusted as an accurate account of what happened to 42 Field Battery on the Border, and to Battle Group X-Ray/Boxer during Operation Savannah?

Memory is inevitably tied to the pursuit of truth, and in my third career – as a journalist – I’ve made a point of pursuing the truth, so when I eventually committed to writing this account, I resolved to fill in as many of the self-imposed blanks as I possibly could.

Once the initial rush of memory ended up on the page, I realised I could not write this story in a vacuum, so I embarked upon the research that I know, as a journalist, is a prerequisite for a story that can be trusted.

I read voraciously whatever I could find about Operation Savannah, which helped me build the picture that resulted in my explanation of how events, politically and historically, unfolded. I was surprised to see, in both anecdotal and formal accounts of the Bush War, that Battle Group X-Ray warranted barely a mention, save for an account by then Captain Jacobus Laubscher, a Permanent Force (PF) artillery officer, who commanded India Troop during our time in Angola.¹ It is a day-by-day diary of our time up there, up to the time Battle Group X-Ray became Battle Group Boxer and headed west towards Luanda. Capt. Laubscher attained the rank of general before retiring to live in the Western Cape. I turned to the diary account of comrade-in-arms Gavin Taylor, who was with the 81 mm mortar contingent of Battle Group X-Ray, for a day-by-day account of our time as Battle Group Boxer. Capt. Laubscher’s authoritative account aside, the paucity of acknowledgement of Battle Group X-Ray’s part in the conflict provided the initial impetus to write this story, but as the narrative unfolded, the act of writing became cathartic.

Without these two narratives, recorded each day during the conflict, I’d never have been able to construct the chronology of events in Angola as accurately as I believe I have.

Reading Capt. Laubscher’s account and Gavin’s diary opened the floodgates of memory, and although it was deeply painful at times, it gave me the chronological thread of the story I needed to dredge up what happened there, the good and the bad.

Inevitably, there are incidents in these two accounts of which I have no recollection. By like token, I have vivid recollections of a number of events about which these accounts are silent. In most such instances, I acknowledge this in the text.

I also made contact with my comrades from that time, most of whom, for reasons that will become apparent in the narrative, I’d not spoken to for more than three and a half decades. It came as something of a shock to discover that, with few exceptions, most of us had excised from memory a great deal of what had happened up there. But as we shared our respective recollections, we were able to piece together what I believe is a more or less contiguous, and largely accurate, account of our experiences.

Having said that, there will inevitably be names, dates, places and events that I have got wrong or omitted, and for that I apologise, while accepting full responsibility. Incidentally, many places have subsequently been renamed: I use the names as they were at the time I’m writing about.

Since this is a personal account of my military experiences, the narrative reflects events, people and places through my eyes. My reflections about the people who play a part in the story are, in some instances, less than complimentary, so it is inevitable that offence will be taken, either by particular individuals I have written about or by people who knew them, or know them.

Faced with the choice of sanitising the narrative for fear of causing offence, I chose not to, for to have done so would have been hypocritical. My observations emerge from my lived experience during that time, and I stand by what I have written.

An enduring contradiction with which I grapple to this day is the acknowledgement that war is an abomination, juxtaposed with a constant yearning to be back in that time and place of conflict. I contemplate this in Chapter 60, ‘Rock bottom’, where I recount my realisation that I needed professional help, which dawned on me after I’d written about my experiences for the first time. In hindsight, I now see how easily my wanting to go back there could be misconstrued as a desire to fight again the apartheid regime’s illegal war in Angola.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Whereas I came back a changed person who constantly seeks the adrenaline rush of risky pursuits, before I reported for national service I was a veritable sissy, afraid of my own shadow.

Melodramatic as it sounds, the desire to go back is simply a desire for the thrill of facing death and surviving, for that is when life is at its sweetest.

The sentiment is perhaps best expressed in these words:

Legacy of War²

We have ridden the wave of destruction

Known combat’s wild, free power,

Fed on the drug of life renewed

Amid the smoke and the flame.

Now that War’s End approaches

How many

Will be unable, or unwilling

To be shackled again to cutting the lawn

And visiting Auntie on Sunday?

– Chas Lotter

Somerset West, 5 October 2021

Glossary

Prologue

Sucked into the maw of the South African Defence Force

‘We’re gonna kotch in Potch! Ja, we’re gonna kotch in Potch!’ With these words, Bennie Havenga – I learned his name only once we’d arrived in Potchefstroom and settled into our barracks at 42 Field Battery – predicted what we’d do frequently in the next twelve odd months. And kotch we did. We kotched because our instructors had run us backwards and forwards to the point of exhaustion over a 2.4 km course in full kit with rifle, or because we’d drunk too many beers on an empty stomach after being without booze for the first six weeks of basic training, or because we were sick to the stomach by the stench of rotting corpses on some remote battlefield in Angola, or because we had to wash the blood of our wounded comrades out of the back of the Land Rover that had been used to ferry them, bleeding and dying, from the chopper landing zone (LZ) to the waiting medics after being casevaced from a brutal firefight in southern Angola. But that all came later.

We’re sitting in an SAR&H railway coach, swaying to and fro as the steam engine far ahead draws us ever further from our families, girlfriends, friends, homes, familiar places and comforts, and closer to the uncertainty and anxiety of compulsory military service. It is 5 January 1975 and most of us have recently finished school and enjoyed our last holiday in civvies. Despite the show of bravado, we all know, in the pit of our stomachs, that from being the big cheese in our last year at school we are about to sink to the bottom of the pecking order, and then some.

That became all too obvious when we assembled on the platform at Durban station, as directed by our orders received by mail a few weeks before, replete with instructions on how we were to be dressed, and what we may and may not bring with us. I had something of a heads-up: my elder brother, Dallas, was a serving PF officer at the time, a lieutenant in the SA Defence Force (SADF). About eighteen months after completing his national service he’d elected to sign up again so he could be trained as a chef in the army Services School. At his suggestion I had the regulation short-back-and-sides haircut before reporting for duty. ‘It will give the right impression from the outset,’ he explained. ‘You don’t want to rock the boat.’ Even if I’d pitched up with my wispy, mousy, shoulder-length locks, I doubt that I’d have been any better received or treated than I or any of my comrades were.

At the time, if you were doing national service, your obligatory conscription year, chances are you were going to end up on the Border – or the operational area, as it was known, the northern border area between Angola and the then South West Africa (Namibia), stretching from the Atlantic coast to the eastern tip of the Caprivi Strip – so reporting for your call-up was momentous not only for the young, insecure, pseudo-brave (and generally reluctant) conscripts but also for their families and friends who had come down to the station to see them off.

The instructors who must shepherd this unruly mob of raw recruits to the waiting maw of the SADF basic training machine can barely contain themselves while trying to muster us into something vaguely resembling a military formation, so they can take what we will experience daily and sometimes more often in the coming months: roll call. The epithets with which their speech is normally peppered – the most common being ‘fuck’, or in Afrikaans, fok – are largely contained because of the proximity of worried mothers, sisters and girlfriends.

A steely-eyed sergeant stands before us, clipboard in hand, barking a name and listening briefly for a response before making a tick or a cross on his list and then, in response to a ‘Yes, Sergeant’, barking a coach number. Unbelievably – at that stage, anyway – names are called out to which there is no response. Clearly, there are some conscripts who are braver than those of us standing on the platform, facing an uncertain future, who have chosen to not report for duty.

One in particular I recall was eventually tracked down and arrested in early June, and delivered to our battery commander, Capt. Carel ‘Calla’ Theron, after which he was whisked off to detention barracks (DB) to serve the requisite prison sentence for being AWOL for such a terribly long time. He was something of a hero to some of us because he’d managed to evade arrest for as long as he did, but when the Military Police (MPs) handed him over, he was just another scared, confused conscript, and he was facing a significant gaol term as well.

I listen carefully for my name, but miraculously I don’t hear it! Could this be a mistake? Have they somehow left me off the list? Perhaps I’ve slipped through a crack in the floorboards of the conscription system and I won’t have to do military service after all.

‘Almal wat teenwoordig is, klim in die spoorwa wat ek genoem het! Toe! Toe! Moenie net daar f- staan nie!’ The fokken is bitten off – mothers, daughters, sisters still present. Those who understand Afrikaans – some, not all, this is a Natal contingent, and being the Last Outpost of the British Empire, we’re largely English-speaking and proud of it – pick up their bags and move toward their allocated coaches.

Those who don’t understand, or those of us whose names have not been called out, mill about uncertainly. The sergeant’s face darkens with anger. ‘I forgot you is a lot of blerry souties, so I must speak English for you!’ he yells, clearly affronted. ‘All of you wot are here, and whose names wot I called out, climb onto the train in the coach number I said for you!’ Most move towards their allotted coaches, save me and one or two others. ‘Wat de fok is jou naam, kont?’ ³ grunts the sergeant angrily. ‘McFarlane!’ I pipe up nervously. ‘Spell that!’ he barks. ‘M-c-F-a-r-l-a-n-e’ I enunciate carefully. The sergeant’s face darkens even more. ‘I already called out your fokken name! Climb on coach number 6345. ‘Is jy fokken doof, of wat?’ ⁴ The niceties of language in deference to the by now agog female members of the audience are clearly flung to the winds as his anger trumps his caution.

I pick up my bag and scuttle in the direction of the carriage assigned to me, my hopes of having fallen into conscription obscurity dashed.

We’re sitting in our compartments, having been marched to the dining car and back in batches by seemingly perpetually angry non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to collect our ‘dinner’, a polystyrene cup of lukewarm soup of indeterminate provenance, a stale bread roll and an orange, which, when I peel and halve it, is quite rotten. Coming from a home where my mother kept a good table, this does not bode well for the coming year, I think to myself bleakly. I drink half the soup, and dispiritedly discard the orange.

We tentatively introduce ourselves – we’re in a six-berth compartment – with no idea whether we’ll even be in the same unit once we arrive in Potchefstroom. And perhaps that’s the reason for the reserve. The chatter and banter ebbs and flows as we begin to get acquainted. I’m reminded of the single year I spent in boarding school, at the age of seven. Getting to know strangers seems no easier now than it did then.

Eventually, we tire of the stilted conversation and retire to sleep, after unrolling our SAR&H bedding sets, which inevitably reek of stale cigarette smoke. There is a half-hearted verbal tussle over who gets the coveted bottom bunks, and inevitably those who are larger and pushier have their way. I end up on a top bunk.

An NCO strides briskly down the corridor yelling ‘Lights out!’ as he goes, and we each descend into our private miseries, haunted by uncertainty about what the future holds, as the train rattles and sways into the night. Eventually, the rhythmic clickety-clack of steel-shod wheels on shining rails lulls me to sleep, despite my anxiety.

When I think back to that time now, I often wonder how I felt about the big questions of the day as I embarked on an adventure that would colour my life for the rest of my days.

Did I want to be there? Definitely not. With notable exceptions, conscripts reported for national service because they feared the prosecution, charging, trial, conviction and sentencing that would inevitably follow not reporting for duty. There were those who refused to do national service on religious or ideological grounds, who went through this very legal process, and who ended up in DB for the duration of their national service.

Although I have no personal experience of DB, I understand it was no picnic, even by comparison with doing national service. The only advantage was the certainty that you’d not end up being maimed or killed in action. But aside from the inconvenience of serving time, there was the embarrassment for your family of your refusing to do your duty.

We had one conscript in 42 Field Battery who, when he reported for duty, made it clear that he refused to bear arms. He was deeply religious and had the annoying habit of proselytising at every opportunity. He spent the year engaged in clerical and similar duties and was frequently the butt of jokes at the hands of his fellow conscripts and the command structure of the battery. I suppose he was a conscientious objector of sorts, although a pretty lukewarm one at that, but even his relatively low level of objection drew opprobrium.

In 1975, SA was embattled on all sides as the world brought as much pressure to bear as it could to hasten the end of apartheid. We were all products of Christian National Education, an educational philosophy that was alarmingly like that to which the Hitler Youth was subjected, which emphasised the eminence of being white, Christian and fervently nationalistic. The slightest suspicion that you were disinclined to do your duty would result in derision and vilification from a significant segment of white society. It was considered your patriotic duty to do your national service, and to contribute to keeping the Rooi Gevaar (Red Peril) and the Swart Gevaar (Black Peril) at bay, at all costs.

The real war was being fought inside the country, of course, but either because we chose not to see it or because the information was kept from the public, most of white society continued blissfully unaware of the growing unrest, largely being fomented by the internal enemy: the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), and their respective armed wings, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the Spear of the Nation) and Poqo (later the Azanian People’s Liberation Army).

The townships were already aflame, and resistance to the increasingly draconian apartheid-inspired security legislation was on the rise. For a white to venture into a black township was virtually unheard of, and for good reason. We’d been convinced that we’d be murdered on the spot. Besides, it wasn’t allowed – more to prevent the sin (and crime) of miscegenation than for any other reason, I suspect. Love across the colour line attracted both social and legal retribution in those days.

That the average black person lived in abject poverty was either not known (unlikely) or uncomfortably ignored (more likely). And I was as guilty as the rest of white society.

What better way to draw attention away from our internal conflict than to engage an enemy militarily on the northern border of a country that SA had administered as a mandated territory since 1919? South West Africa was little other than a fifth province, one the apartheid regime was most reluctant to give up because it constituted a significant geographic buffer zone against African countries to the north, and the perceived threat of annihilation.

It started in 1966 as a policing action on the northern border of South West Africa, but by the time we reported for national service in January 1975, the SAP had recently been supplanted by the SADF in the operational area, fighting a guerrilla war against Swapo insurgents. In the eyes of the apartheid regime, Swapo, the SACP, ANC and PAC were cosy bedfellows, so it made sense for us to be fighting this particular war.

But I came to this war conflicted, because of the circumstances of my upbringing, the people with whom I’d come into contact and my life experiences to that point, which made me somewhat different from the average nineteen-year-old white South African male.

PART 1

An itinerant young life

1

Born in Transkei

My uncle warned me to stay away from the ‘boys’ room’ at the back of his Transkei trading store, not to eat their food and above all not to drink their coffee. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he predicted direly.

I ignored his warning and, one morning, took a long swig of coffee from a battered enamel mug belonging to one of my friends. Hardly a breath later, I ran to the front of the shop howling, my mouth on fire and tears streaming down my face. Unbeknown to me, the men were in the habit of periodically adding some extra ‘heat’ to their coffee.

It was 1961 and I was six years old. I had been shipped off to stay with relatives for three months while my mother was recovering from an illness. Dad was at home in Port Elizabeth, working, and my brother, Dallas, four years my senior, was at boarding school.

My Transkei cousins were also boarders, so when I wasn’t playing with the black children on the farm, I attached myself to the men who worked in the shop and loved joining them in their room – for the delight of eating umbona owojiweyo (freshly roasted green mealies) or a portion of ithumbu (sheep’s innards) and sharing their coffee, piping hot, strong and usually powerfully sweet. It was my love of eating roasted green mealies that