LZ Hot!: Flying South Africa's Border War by Nick Lithgow

Author:Nick Lithgow [Lithgow, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Modern / General
ISBN: 9781908916761
Publisher: Helion and Company
Published: 2012-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Lion and the Elephant

“Don’t go too close dear, them things bite”

Dulcie Savage

Brute was a deceptive name for one of my best friends in the Air Force. He was an immediately likeable person, quiet and mild mannered with a spontaneous sense of humour. I flew many hours as his copilot on Pumas and enjoyed his patient style. He was quick to praise and firm when correcting mistakes, never raising his voice and always explaining and demonstrating what he required. He always treated me as an equal.

We did a bush tour in a place called Mpacha, which was the main airfield of the Eastern Caprivi. The Caprivi Strip forms the northern boundary of the Chobe Delta, a huge network of swamps and rivers that feeds into the Zambezi River and flows over the Victoria Falls, a hundred or so kilometres downstream. Due to the war, poachers and hunters kept well clear of the area and as a result, the game flourished to the point where it was acknowledged as having the highest game count in Africa. As a pristine African reserve it’s got the works: no fences and power lines, very few roads and dense bush made up of African hardwoods, surrounded by meandering savannah filled with elephant grass, higher than your head that is almost impossible to walk through. The rivers and swamps are crystal clear, filtered by millions of acres of papyrus reeds and in more recent times, they have been used by scuba diving film crews making wildlife documentaries, presumably because they can film crocs and hippos at a safe distance in near perfect conditions. Every species of African animal thrives, including rare species such as the Red Lechwe – a rare swamp antelope.

One day Brute, Bones our engineer and myself were briefed to take an evaluation team to Fort Doppies, a recce training camp deep in the bush that no-one was supposed to know about. We took off after breakfast and headed west for about thirty minutes to a camp that was quite close to where I did my border tour during National Service. As we skimmed over the treetops, my thoughts went back to the time I had spent at Sifuma and because we did foot patrols for three days at a time, I got to know the bush quite well. I could go on for many pages recounting the experiences we had with wild animals, such as finding elephant tracks in our temporary camp one morning. To this day I wonder if an elephant did not walk through the camp while we were sleeping. Hyenas surrounded us at night and we shot into the bush to scare them off and one day we even came across a pride of lions that showed absolutely no interest in us. On one occasion we watched fish eagles glide gracefully over the river and pluck fish out of the water. We heard stories of soldiers who had disappeared silently without a trace near the river, taken by a crocodile;

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