19 With a Bullet: A South African Paratrooper in Angola

A fast-moving, action-packed account of Granger Korffs two years service during 1980/81 with 1 Parachute Battalion at the height of the South African bush war inSouth West Africa (Namibia) and Angola. Apart from the standard counter-insurgency activities of Fireforce operations, ambushing and patrols, to contact and destroySWAPO guerrillas, he was involved in several massive South African Defence Force (SADF) conventional cross-border operations, such as Protea, Daisy and Carnation,into Angola to take on FAPLA (Angolan MPLA troops) and their Cuban and Soviet allies. Having grown up as an East Rand rebel street-fighter, Korffs military career is marred with controversy. He is always in troublegoing AWOL on the eve of battle in order to get to the front; facing a court martial for beating up, and reducing to tears, a sergeant-major in front of the troops; fist-fighting with Drug Squad agents; arrested at gunpoint after the gruelling seven-week, 700km Recce selection endurance marchare but some of the colourful anecdotes that lace this account of service in the SADF. Granger Korff. 1960Cassius Clay won Olympic gold in Rome; the Beatles made their debut in Germany; apartheid was booming in South Africa; and Granger Korff was born on the East Rand near Johannesburg to a realtor father and budding-actress mother. The apartheid system was sewn tight as a Zulu drum and the country moved to a slow beat, he says of the times. He grew up in the mining town of Benoni, a quiet child initially, before enjoying a colourful school career as a musician and quickfisted rebel, attending a string of different schools for a string of different reasons. He graduated in 1979alone from the public library. In 1985, plagued by his demons from the bush war, he travelled to the USA on a four-month boxing/vacation walkabout where he haunted the mean streets of Los Angeles, scrapping and boxing to survive. Ike Turner and Mickey Rourke were his drinking buddies and he almost became Jake LaMottas (The Raging Bull) son-in-law. Twenty-four years later, Granger still lives in LA, where he runs a small plumbing business.