19 With a Bullet Read Online Free PDF Page B

me for a minute. “Now turn around.”
    I turned around 180 degrees, slowly.
    “What’s all that shit on your neck and arms?” the fierce blond-haired lieutenant asked in brisk Afrikaans.
    “It’s for my sunburn on my neck, lieutenant,” I answered quickly and confidently.
    He stared at me for a moment with fiery green eyes. “Why do you want to join the Parachute Battalion, and why should we let you try?” he demanded, still leaning against the wooden desk.
    “I want to see action, lieutenant. I also want to learn how to jump from a plane,” I replied quickly.
    He stared at me for a long second, as if trying to look into my mind, then bent and mumbled something into the ear of the redhaired lieutenant sitting next to him. It seemed that he was in charge, even though he was the lowerranking lieutenant of the two. It was cold as I stood in my underwear and bare feet on the cold tile floor. As he broke his stare I looked quickly at his name patch. Lieutenant Taylor wrote something brief on a notepad in front of him and dismissed me.
    About 40 of us waited outside the offices while everybody was interviewed. We were told that the Parabats would only take nine volunteers out of the 40 so of us from the Engineers’ camp. The make-up covering my tattoo was beginning to melt in the midday sun, and I was thinking about making an excuse to go back to the bungalow and get some more when the two paratrooper lieutenants came out the office, brought us to attention and quickly started to read out a list of names.
    I got a cold feeling in my gut when, by the time he got to the sixth or seventh name, mine still hadn’t been called. Then, on the ninth and last name, he paused for a second, unable to pronounce the next name. With the usual difficulty he coughed out my name: “Korff.” I quickly went to stand with the other—chosen—eight. They were only taking nine of us from the whole camp, and technically I shouldn’t have been there. I smiled. I smiled, but I didn’t feel bad; I knew I was supposed to be there. By hook or by crook or good luck.
    Two of the guys they had chosen were from my bungalow. Hans Kunz was a tall, strong, good-looking German Afrikaner with intense blue eyes and a strong square jaw, and looked like a fine example of the ‘master race’. The other guy was Anders, who was one of the toughest-looking blokes I had ever seen. He was short, with curly black hair, olive-brown skin and eyes with an almost unreal white and blue brightness to them, like a Husky dog. He had veins that bulged on the front of his short, thick forearms, and I don’t think he had trained with a weight in his life.
    We were to klaar out immediately and start handing some of our kit back to the stores. I had to take my routing form to my platoon lieutenant to be signed and released. He looked at me with his pock-scarred face and the same look of bored hatred, and gave absolutely no indication or acknowledgment of the incident on the parade ground when he had shoved me in among the chosen, with a passing time. He signed my papers and thrust them at me as though I was a piece of shit.
    ‘Signing out’ took the rest of the day, running around the camp—but it was a great feeling. I was getting out of this dump and going to a real fighting unit.
    The truck took us to Bethlehem station, where we were met by the redhaired lieutenant. He turned out to be a pleasant fellow and he told us what to expect when we reached 1 Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein, a few hundred kilometres away. There we—together with hundreds of troops selected from dozens of other units—would undergo basic training. Only after basic training would we move on to the notorious PT-based paratrooper selection course, designed to “fuck you up”, as he put it, and to weed out most of the original 700 candidates and leave about 200 troops for paratroop training. The troops who didn’t make it would be RTU’d—the dreaded ‘returned to unit’.
    I had