Van Staden, Marthinus Johannes (M J)

He was the platoon seargant for platoon 6 Foxtrot Co 6SAI. Killed during late night ambush during Ops Carnation. The contact lasted about 2 hours and is said to have involved Cubans and Easr Germans.

We did a small ops Carnation I think it was, and about 140 of us walked into Angola from Eenhana to rev a Terr base, we had a Cmdt with us from Eenhana don't recall his name though. We where going to do a First Light attack on the base and the night before the attack just before the company was due to go down for the night a group of Terr's walked between our Rekkies and the box formation, we could not catch them and so we back tracked a few kay's and went down for the night. The moon was quite bright that night and just after it went down at about 1.00am we were heavily Mortered by the Terr's, most of the HQ guys in the centre of the TB had not dug in and Cpl Van Staden was amongst them, unfortunatly an 81mm went off right in front of him and he picked up a really bad head injury I was the closest Medic to him and myself and a guy Gavin tried to keep him alive untill morning when we could get comms and a Puma in to casevac the injured. Sadly after a few hours of CPR etc. he passed away. We lost a few others and had quite a few injuries, one was an RFN Blom if I remember correctly and someone from 701 BTN. When we looked in the morning it looked as though there were about 50 Terr's that had sneaked in and set themselves up, there were signs that some had been injured when we returned fire but no bodies left behind. Attack was called off and we walked back to Eenhana. If I remember correctly it had taken us about 4 days to walk into the area where the Terr base was. I was with Platoon 3 with LT James Hay. We were usually based at Elundu doing patrols in the area. We Will Remember Them.