Read 19 With a Bullet for Free Online

already fucked up once. By luck or fate I had got this far, and vowed to myself right there and then that I would not be among those returned to unit.
    The Bedford truck lurched as it drove over the speed bump at the big wroughtiron gates of 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein. Smartly dressed guards with maroon berets and full webbing stood solemnly on each side of the big black gates. Behind them stood the yellow-brick guardhouse with old ivy covering the walls, while on the other side was a busy-looking duty office with sliding glass doors. As we drove up to the parade ground, a huge brown and white fish eagle in a ten-metre-high dome cage whooped loudly at the passing trucks.
    “This looks like the real thing,” said Hans Kunz in his thick Afrikaans accent with a touch of German. “This is where we belong … this is good.”
    He was even more excited to be there than I was.
    “Yeah, this is it … Airborne … Parabats. Let’s go,” I answered with a bravado I didn’t altogether feel at that moment. Hans spoke of the nine of us as a team; we had already established a kinship, coming from the same shithole Engineers’ camp. James Anders had said perhaps ten words in the last two days; he just surveyed the scene quietly as we pulled onto the parade ground, his hands gripping his kit tightly. The camp lay along the side of a long hill. A couple of tar roads led up the hill between rows of long white bungalows with red tin roofs. At the top of the hill was a huge, three-storey parachute hangar. From behind it poked out tall aircraft ‘mockups’ and the ‘ape cage’, from which we were told we would jump if we passed the dreaded twoweek PT course.

1 PARACHUTE BATTALION
    Welcome, my son. Welcome to the machine—Pink Floyd
    There was a huge modern mess hall and recreational area, not like those at the corrugated tin dump we had just come from. There were small flowerbeds around the long, low-roofed administration buildings and all the tarred streets were named after legendary paratrooper battles in Angola, such as ‘Vietnam’, Moscow’ and ‘Cassinga’, where the Bats had done a dawn drop, landed right next to the SWAPO base and fought a hard battle, successfully taking the base by midday. The whole camp radiated a feeling of energy and professionalism and a sense that one was lucky just to be allowed through the gates. Wherever I looked troops were being led, drilled or chased at doublequick time by gimlet-eyed instructors wearing maroon berets and sporting huge handlebar moustaches.
    Any illusions of glamour soon disappeared, however, and we realized that we were in hell. We were sorted into platoons and chased mercilessly from 04:30 till 17:00. Everywhere we went, we had to run. Pulling equipment from stores on the run. To the chow hall on the run. To the shitter on the run. And, of course, around the infamous pakhuis —the parachute hangar— where all the parachutes were prepared, packed and stored. It was a high building set back from the barracks next to the jump-training hangar, about a 400-metre sprint up the tar road, along a dusty, rocky, well-trodden path, around the huge hangar and back to the front steps outside the bungalow. It had to be done in 70 seconds by the whole platoon or company, or we had to do it again. We ran it hundreds of times, as did every paratrooper who passed through 1 Parachute Battalion. And we hadn’t even started the basic training yet.
    Basic training—no sleep, inspections, running 35 kilometres to the shooting range, and sleeping overnight with icecold winter winds blowing down the huge, flat, stony shooting range. We were instructed on rifles, LMGs (light machine guns), radio procedure, patrol formation and—of course— drill. We drilled for a couple of hours daily, until we moved like a well-oiled machine—fast, tight and moving as one. I sat on the bungalow steps at night and smoked a cigarette with Hans. My feet were starting to give me trouble and were