Chapter 2 : The First Month (continued...)

Later that day we were issued with our very own R4 assault rifles. The R4 is the locally made version of the Israeli Galil rifle, which is based on the Finnish Valmet rifle, itself a clone of the basic 1947 design by sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov. It therefore followed logically that the weapon should be presented to us as tangible proof of South African innovation and engineering prowess. Ah, guns, lies and politics!

It is a badly kept secret of 1980's realpolitik that the South African and Israeli governments of the day were working closely together to develop and manufacture military hardware. And not just small stuff like assault rifles. The list included mobile artillery, armored vehicles and aircraft weapons systems, to name but a few. Both countries were, and I guess still are, very adept at 'reverse engineering' equipment from countries like the US and France and making these designs their own. They also did an excellent job retrofitting aging aircraft and extending their useful lifespan far beyond what any of the wealthier warring nations would ever attempt. I point you towards the 35 year old French Mirage fighter aircraft and Super Frelon helicopters still in service in both countries and rest my case. It is also no coincidence that these two countries developed their first tactical nuclear weapons more or less simultaneously. South Africa has since given up it's nukes, thank God, but as we all know, downtown Tehran may yet be turned into a glass-topped parking lot without assistance from George Bush and company.

We received instruction on the functioning and cleaning of the weapon. Note that I refer to it as a weapon, not a rifle, gun or any such nomenclature. Calling your R4 anything but a Weapon let to immediate punishment and retribution. I am baffled to this day about why that was so important, but such are the small things on which military discipline sometimes hinges. True to army tradition, the weapon had to be taken apart and reassembled what felt like a thousand times. By the way some guys handled their weapons, it was clear that they had never handled a firearm before. Some were fascinated by the little hole at the business end of the barrel, others used their rifles to point at whatever they were looking at or whomever they were talking to, and some managed to have a handful of spare parts left every time they reassembled their weapons. I shuddered at the thought of their getting ammunition as well.

* * *

''You drill to learn discipline. Discipline can save your life one day." Our corporal was trying to justify marching us up and down across the dusty parade ground in the hot midday sun. No one believed him.

"Bloody marching will kill me before discipline can do me any good.'' This grumbling came from a sweat soaked figure in an oversized overall somewhere in the squad. It could have been any one of us in the platoon that day, and on 300 other days like that one.

I'm still not buying that bullshit about military drill saving lives, or being good for anything other than torture for that matter. How does marching up and down in the dust and heat prepare the modern soldier to fight a bush war or urban terrorism? We spent 20 hours on drill for every hour of weapons training and shooting practise! I kid you not. The running and physical training I can understand—you have to be able to get the hell out of wherever you are quickly when the shit starts flying, but it's not very likely that everyone is going to fall in and march off in orderly fashion, smartly executing a series of silly moves invented by sexually frustrated English and French perverts in the early 1700's. Even if you don't plan, or need, to retreat quickly, attacking is best done on the double and not in a neat squad formation. What do I care if the guy next to me can march in perfect step in a straight line with straight shoulders if he can't shoot straight?

We ran our first 2.4 kilometer fitness test that afternoon. This 1.5 mile endurance test is the brainchild of yet another military pervert. The distance is too short to settle into a rhythm, as you would on a longer run, and too long to sprint. For some reason this was deemed the perfect test for general physical fitness. If you ask me, the original 2.4 was the distance between a general's tent and the pit toilet during a typhoid epidemic on some forgotten campaign.

Dressed in PT shorts, T-shirts and running shoes, we lined up at the start. I decided not to exhaust myself unnecessarily. I finished in about 16 minutes—you were supposed to do it in 12 minutes. That left me plenty of room for improvement at a later stage. Some guys provided even more room for improvement. The second slowest time was 22 minutes. The slowest time was five days. Someone had skipped the fence at the halfway turning point. The police returned him five days later.

We had our first session of punishment PT that night. Our rotten inspection and barbaric behavior on the parade ground served as reasons, not that they actually needed a reason. With his usual sensitivity, Lieutenant Kotze timed our session for immediately after dinner. Within an hour we were rolling and crawling in our own vomit. It was like being sick when you're really drunk, and you can't breathe and someone is kicking you in the gut at the same time, only much worse. Again the logic and rationale escaped me. The only good explanation is that some people, when they find themselves with the kind of power to do unto others as they please, will do exactly that. Seeing others suffer at their command must be gratifying to them, and part of their psyche is either boosted or suppressed, as the case may be. I was growing up while I was throwing up, and beginning to understand that there really were bad people on this planet. That Nazi's and Fascists weren't just awkward movie extras with bad German accents; they were real people who really did cruel and unspeakable things to those in their power. I also learned that strong people aren't the ones to worry about; weaklings are the scary ones.

At nine o'clock we were released, more dead than alive. All I wanted was a shower and my bed. That was not to be. We shared our barracks with another platoon. A low wall divided the building. As things go sometimes, quarrels arose. Our neighbors chose that night to settle the score. I was still in the shower when the fight broke out. They attacked us, yielding duffel bags stuffed with boots. Now that wasn't too bad. It's not all that dangerous. Then one stupid asshole in our platoon decided to put his four pound flat-iron in his kit bag. When he hit the first intruder the fight was over. It was also our last fight with the neighbors.
I was unbelievably tired that night.

"Don't worry," said one optimist, who had yet to learn when to keep his fucking trap shut, "Things can only get worse."

Nobody bothered to answer him. I fell asleep, hating the thought of tomorrow.

* * *

The day was old when I realized it was Saturday. Whatever happened to the weekend feeling?
"It's alive and well and living on civvy street," the platoon philosopher said. I decided to write my MP and demand a forty hour week.

The morning was spent (wasted?) marching, sweating, farting and running around all the various landmarks our corporal pointed out. We had the afternoon free. That is, we were free to clean our living quarters, polish boots and weed the lawn. In those intervals of relative freedom all the cropped-up humour came to the surface. Hardship may bring out the worst, and occasionally the best, in some people, but it certainly brings out their funny sides as well. I can fill the pages of a very thick book with all the jokes that circulated in our platoon. If only I can remember them.

We were blessed with the presence of quite a few master storytellers. A chap by the name of Cronje was particularly versatile. He quoted Shakespeare and Monty Python with equal ease. He also offered some controversial theories on life and the universe. A willing listener was confronted with such realities as the 'Butter Crisis in Biafra', or a lecture on the earth being a sausage.

"I used to be a member of the Flat Earth Society," he once told me, "but I resigned when I became convinced that the earth is in fact a sausage." He was very serious.

Everybody was not as sophisticated as Cronje. Many were downright crude. One guy I recall, specialized in gruesome dead-baby jokes. His favorite was something about a baby in a microwave oven. He must have told it five hundred times, and not always to new listeners.

Even crude jokes proved to be above the intellectual abilities of one idiot, whose name and face thank God escape me now. He would walk up to his victim, grab him by the arm and fart as loud as he could. Then he'd walk away, laughing hysterically for several minutes.

That Saturday night was extremely peaceful. I ran into a corporal who was an old school friend. He was duly sent into town for takeout food of the non-military kind. Piet and I skipped supper and indulged in hamburgers, Coke and memories of our varsity days. And we had Sunday to look forward to.

Sundays started with rusks and coffee at seven. Rusks are essentially blue collar biscottis, without the chocolate dip and $2.50 price tag, and has been a South African staple since the Great Trek in the mid-1800's. You can buy a two pound box of rusks for about what a single Starbucks biscotti will set you back. In case you wanted to know.

On Sundays breakfast and lunch were combined into one meal served at eleven, the often confusing, and seldom successful, 'brunch'. Granted, there may be perfectly decent brunches to be had in parts of the world, and I may have been near one or two in my day, but there is no way a brunch could have worked at the Fourth South African Infantry Battalion in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty two. For several reasons.

The chefs, as we sometimes managed to call them without laughing hysterically, not fully grasping the concept of brunch, simply combined all the breakfast and lunch dishes and served them at the same time. Which, while bad enough, is not the end of the world and at this point brunch could still have been saved. But this is where things started to derail badly. Brunch was prepared as two meals, by different crews. The breakfast crew started their preparations later than they would on weekdays; the lunch crew started their shift earlier. Yet another point in time where total disaster could have been averted with a little coordination. But that was not to be. What ended up happening was this: The breakfast crew started too early, and the lunch crew didn't start early enough. Their failure to understand time as a dimension resulted in the 'Br' part of brunch being overcooked to death and beyond, even by army standards; and in the 'unch' part being undercooked, raw, frozen or alive (pick one), even by army standards. I have never before or since seen fried eggs with quite the same plastic consistency and green hue, and I have chewed on tastier plastic toys as an infant. One day I plan to duplicate those eggs in a laboratory, but I'm not confident that I will succeed. Even if I manage to exactly recreate the color and the impermeable plastic skin, I'm not sure they will float in cold, hydrogenated vegetable oil in quite the same way, nor will I be able to reproduce that very peculiar rubbery sound the eggs made when bounced off a concrete floor.

Sunday church parade took place on the rugby field. It was hell to stay awake. The hot sun, the padre's droning voice and our tired bodies were a deadly combination. Many a head was nodding on a rubbery neck. The company sergeant-major couldn't tolerate such lack of discipline. Halfway through the service he jumped to his feet. "Wake up!" he shouted. In a softer voice: "Sorry Padre." He sat down, trying his best to look like an elder in the front bench. The stunned preacher lost complete track of his sermon. Only after two hymns and a prayer did he continue. We stayed awake though.

I wrote a few letters that afternoon.
"Dear Anita. Please send me a nude photograph of yourself."
"Dear Natasha. Please send me your body. Express mail."
The effects of the blue tea were wearing off.
"Dear Sandy......," I hope I don't go blind.

Corporal Roberts strolled into the barracks. "Writing to your girlfriend, hey. You're wasting your bloody time. She's sweating in another man's arms. Wha-ha-ha-haaaa!" He was so damn funny.
"Dear Mother. I am really very happy here. It is not as bad as I expected it to be." Yeah, right.

I settled down with Henri Charriere's Papillion—the only way I could escape on that depressing day.

* * *

''Suddenly I look into your sleepy eyes......"

I was doing pushups to the rhythm of the the music in my head. Vivid visions of sleepy blue eyes and flowing blond hair on a pillow eased the pain of early morning PT. I was quickly mastering the art of transporting my thoughts to more pleasant circumstances. I still got bloody tired though.

Monday was selection day for the leadership course at Infantry School. That was the where the army turned human beings into infantry officers. I was told that the food was much better there. What's more, it was served an proper white plates, of the non-plastic variety. I decided to try my luck.

Selection started with all the applicants running another 2.4 kilometer fitness test. I failed to understand what that had to do with leadership qualities. There were several idiots who could cover the distance in under eight minutes, because they were too stupid to get tired. Anyway, I made it, barely squeezing in under 12 minutes. An interview with a fat captain from the School followed.

"Why do you want to do the leadership course?" Because I want to get out of this shit hole, I thought. Aloud, I said:

"I have to do two years of National Service, Captain. I want to make the most of it and serve my country to the best of my abilities." That bowled him over. Duly impressed, he added my name to the list of the chosen few. All the platoons were reorganized. Only the men destined for Oudtshoorn remained behind in our company. The others were posted to other companies and some to other units. Most of my new acquaintances were selected as well. A new military force was on the march.

''So, you think you're smart now. You haven't reached Oudtshoorn yet and already you act like you run the bloody army." Corporal Roberts had reached one of his phenomenal conclusions. We were treated to another punishment session. This time it was a sort of steeplechase, spiced with star jumps, sit ups, squats and other unnatural body movements.

''He's just trying to crack us," someone panted. That didn't worry me. I was afraid he was trying to kill me. I pushed myself beyond the limits of endurance. The bloody corporal pushed me even further.

I dragged my dead body to the showers. My reflection in the mirror horrified me. I had lost at least 10 pounds of weight in less than a week. Weight Watchers, eat your heart out. Anna-Nicole, don't read this.

The night brought no relief. We were introduced to the delicate art of night camouflage. That meant covering your face, neck and arms with a sticky, polish-like black cream invented by yet another pervert—the military seems to have its fair share of them. A route march followed. That ended in chaos. The platoon got separated in a black wattle forest. Half the guys were lost and the other half stumbled through the undergrowth trying to find them. When we were eventually reunited, two men were still missing. They showed up after midnight. Apparently they had reached the main road in their search for the rest of the platoon. They then followed the road to the nearest Wimpy Bar. After a good meal, they hitched a lift and returned safely to the base. Sensible fellows.

At one in the morning I was more or less free from the dreaded black stuff. It had taken almost half an hour of intensive scrubbing. My skin was as pink as a newborn baby's bum. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. You're not likely to suffer from insomnia in the Army.

At last! Our boots had arrived. Everyone received two pairs. And then the agony started. A fakir's nail bed is arguably the most uncomfortable thing in the world. If so, army boots come second by a very small margin. They don't change shape to fit your feet. Your feet get moulded until they fit the boots. Everybody offered foolproof ideas on how to make your boots soft and pliable. One suggested stuffing them with wet paper. Another swore by rubbing methylated spirits into the leather. "No,'' said a young farmer from Vryheid, "Dubbin is the only thing that works." Others soaked their boots in hot water, some trampled them and one genius even urinated in his boots. For weeks he was a very lonely young man. Almost everybody had blisters and sore feet in the end. Inventive genius proved no match for army boots. The boots caused more problems than blisters and misformed feet. The extra weight on my feet was too much for my delicate young knees. I was in agony for a week.

At last I decided to suffer the humiliation of reporting sick. I told the doctor about my suffering. He patted my knees. "You've got sore knees," he said. How on earth could he tell? He gave me some tablets. He didn't even put me on light duty. Bastard.

The week progressed true to army tradition. PT and drill were interrupted only by inspections, weapons training and lectures on field craft. We racked up a lot of mileage that week. All the lectures took place in the veld surrounding the camp. Being infantry men, we went everywhere on the double. Our corporal was a fanatical non-smoker. To him smoke breaks meant more time for running around trees, miscellaneous non-tree landmarks, and up and down any hills this side of the horizon. I was down to five cigarettes a day.

On Friday we had a nice break. We spent the whole day writing aptitude tests. Somebody stole
my bush hat.

"No, you can't get a new one." I had to wear my damn steel helmet all the time. More than two weeks were to pass before I received a new hat. I learned to keep a close eye on my kit.

Saturday was Open Day. Parents, wives and girlfriends could visit their loved ones on the base. We had to stay in the barracks until our visitors had arrived. A corporal called your name and only then were you allowed to go out into the 'picnic' area. I have seen prisons with more lenient visitor rules.

Nobody came to visit me. I spent the whole fucking day in the barracks. I experienced an intense feeling of being dead to the outside world. Maybe corporal Roberts was right after all.
Piet brought me a fat slice of chocolate cake. Good old Piet. Yes, it was great seeing his girlfriend again. "Only problem is, we had nothing much to talk about." She married someone else before Piet was back on civvy street.

The word was out! We were to go on pass the following weekend. Sex was written an every face. Rosy-cheeked young men were dreaming of losing their innocence in a passion filled weekend of doing unto others and having other do things to them. The more experienced ones had that special faraway look in their eyes.

I organized a lift with someone from my home town. His father came to fetch us. I got home late Friday night. Mother opened the door.

"What have you done to your hair?" Hello Mother. It's good to see you too. Was I hungry? I was.

I stuffed myself with chicken and salad, followed by five slices of bread plastered with butter and homemade apricot jam. After ice cream, coffee and more ice cream I went to bed. I spent half the night bent over the toilet bowl. My digestive system said 'No' to rich food. Bloody traitor. It was already adjusted to army food.

First thing in the morning, I looked up an old girlfriend. What have I done to my hair? Thank you. You look lovely too. Would I like some coffee? No, I'd rather have you. She had a new boyfriend. Would I like to see his photograph? I spent the morning in the pub.

I tried in vain to get a date for the night. Everybody had something on.
"Oh I'd love to, but......''

I fell asleep in front of the TV.

Church, lunch and a lift back to camp. That was Sunday's program. Some bloody weekend.
I reached the base in a state of black depression. The whole place seemed to close in on me. The two years ahead looked like a long, endless road.

* * *

My last week in Middelburg was an orgy of handing in some of our kit, drawing more kit and completing hordes of documentation. A bit of haphazard training was thrown in just for the hell of it. The army was safe in its cocoon of red tape. We had a barbecue on Saturday night. We were allowed two beers each. Believe it or not, we had a few teetotallers in our midst. I duly swapped my meat for two more beers. Man cannot live on meat alone.

I saw more than one guy getting pissed on two beers that night. The healthy life of lean food and around-the-clock exercise was no way to get drinking fit. The night was lost in drunken laughter and crude songs, and a good time was had by some. Army life didn't look too grim after a few beers.

* * *

We boarded the train on a Tuesday, destination Oudtshoorn. It immediately became a pub on wheels, not an up-scale neighborhood kind of a pub; more like the type of dump that smells of piss and cigarette butts where worn-out alcoholics go to get drunk on the cheap. I don't know where on earth all the alcohol came from. I have a strong suspicion that some of the officers made a lot of pocket money on that trip. Anyway, we didn't complain.

I shared the compartment with Piet and four other guys. One didn't drink and one complained about our smoking all the time. The other two were stoned out of their minds for the whole trip.

The behavior of a bunch of drunken soldiers is a study of humanity at its lowest—and funniest. Some became loud and boisterous, others became aggressive. A few just sat quietly, staring from blank eyes. Many ended up puking out the windows or on the floor if they weren't quick enough.

The train stopped at De Aar station for three hours. It is a very desolate spot in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the Great Karroo desert, and we were stranded there in the middle of summer. People in that part of the world always walk around in groups of two or more in summer, because, as they put it: ''If this fucking sun catches you alone it will burn you alive.”

A dare-devil called De Klerk decided to break the monotony. He stripped off his clothes and dashed across the platform, shouting "fuck the army!" at the top of his lungs. That was followed by flashing a brown-eye to the shocked civilian spectators. He must have been very drunk. It took five MP's to bring him down. I have often wondered what happened to him.

We reached Oudtshoorn very early on Thursday morning, February 11th, 1982. Hordes of mean-looking, shouting NCOs marched us to waiting vehicles, their colorful phrases filling the morning air, amusing no one but themselves. I was strongly reminded of a German concentration camp. Years later I stood next to the railroad tracks at Birkenau and couldn't understand why the scene looked so familiar to me.

It was raining. Dark clouds covered the surrounding mountains. My immediate future looked even darker.

Chapter 2 : The First Month

“Get up sleeping beauties! Stop sniffing your own farts!”

I opened one eye. It was dark outside. I opened my other eye. It was still dark. The voice drew nearer. More voices, whistles, shouting, everywhere around me, inside my head.
“You have exactly five minutes to fall in outside. Your beds will be made by then.”

I had great difficulty leaving the cosy world of my bed. It was just an army bed, but is was the best thing I had going at that exact point in my life. It took more willpower than I thought I possessed, but somehow I managed to haul my weary body out of bed. I made my bed to the sound of 30 budding soldiers cursing and farting. It was the first time in my life that I had to make a bed. Needless to say that my efforts weren’t very successful. I tried to copy what the others around me were doing, but they seemed to be equally challenged and flustered. In the end I just sort of arranged the blanket over the bed and patted down the most prominent bulges. By that time everybody else had left the barracks and were lining up outside. My bladder was bursting and I was dying for a cigarette, but there was no time for indulgences like smoking and urinating.

Outside the barracks a young corporal was trying frantically to get us to fall into a platoon formation. It wasn’t going well. A proper platoon consists of three rows of ten troops each, with each row arranged from the tallest to the shortest individual. There were too many variables for us and the corporal to cope with. By the time we had settled into a passable squad, Corporal Roberts—he had told us his name by then—was exhausted and flustered. He was tall, very thin and didn’t look old enough to be out of high school. From some angles he appeared to exist only in two dimensions. I always expected him to fall over when the wind picked up a little. It later turned out that he and I had actually attended the same high school at some point, and he treated me quite decently, all things considered.

Just when he thought he had the platoon under control, and when he had regained some of his composure, somebody farted. That triggered a wave of laughter and cursing. Then he noticed somebody puffing away on a cigarette. Corporal Roberts nearely suffered a miscarriage. He unleashed a flood of verbal abuse on the poor addict that took even the most ungodly among us by surprise. That brought on more laughter. And so it went, until eventually some military discipline was restored with the help of two other corporals and a semi-histerical sergeant.

We marched off to the mess for breakfast. The mess building was a low-slung affair, constructed from pre-fabricated steel and asbestos panels, aircraft hangar style. It was big enough to house several Baptist revivals at the same time. Instead of chairs and collection bowls, every square inch of interior space was crammed with steel tables and benches. There was hardly any room to maneuver. The air was filled with that strange blend of odours that forms when unwashed bodies and bad food share the same airspace. The din was deafening: steel scraping on concrete, tables and benches being knocked over, several hundred nervous recruits talking at the same time, corporals shouting at the recruits and sergeants swearing at the corporals. Massive steel sliding doors at the far end led to what I presumed was the kitchen.

Breakfast was a meagre affair. It consisted of oats, two slices of bread and a greasy fried egg, all slapped onto the same steel tray. We first had to line up outside the mess where food trays and steel mugs were issued. Then we had to line up again by the kitchen where food was dished out by a row of scruffy kitchen hands. With all the lining up and being shunted back and forth, there was hardly any time left to eat. I gobbled up the tasteless mess and washed it down with cold blue tea. I had decided that I might as well drink the tea. There were no women around and I wasn’t flexible enough in my sexual orientation to benefit from the close proximity of a several hundred healthy young men. I still don’t know if there ever was any truth in the rumour that army tea was laced with blue vitriol to suppress our youthful urges. It is true that the tea always had a strange translucent blue colour, but chances are that it simply was the result of the cheap milk powder and the awful instant tea mix the army chefs used.

After breakfast we were allowed 30 minutes in our barracks to ‘shit,’ ‘shave’ and ‘shampoo.’ The barracks at 4 SAI were long rectangular buildings that accommodated two platoons each. A low brick wall that ran down the length of the building separated the two platoons. At one end of the building were the washrooms. There were eight toilets, eight sinks and a large open shower area with ten or so showerheads for every platoon of 30. It was sheer mayhem when we assaulted that porcelain paradise. Tempers were flaring up outside the toilet stalls. There was more shoving than shaving happening at the sinks and trying to shower was just plain dangerous. Somehow we managed to get cleaned up and answer the most urgent calls of nature.

The rest of the morning was spent in a confusion of completing and signing paperwork, drawing kit, running from one drab building to the next, and standing around waiting. Mostly, we were just waiting. You wait a lot in the Army. I was a soldier for less than a day and I was already getting used to waiting. My, what adaptable creatures we are!

They didn’t have enough boots for all of us. I was one of the lucky ones who got to wear my running shoes for another week.
“We are part of an experiment. The army is phasing out boots.” The fellow who took me into his confidence was dead serious. It was the first of many rumours I was to hear over the next two years. In time I learned that, contrary to traditional military wisdom, an army does not run on food; it is fueled by rumours. A single rumour can boost or destroy morale in a very short time. It is the ultimate self-fullfilling prophecy. And it didn’t seem to matter that most rumours turned out to be untrue. Every new rumour was passed on with the same enthusiasm as the last, and with the same naïve faith that it was true. It is truly a weird and wonderful social phenomenem, somewhat akin to the force that drives lemmings to commit mass suicide.

At some point we were rounded up for lunch. No surprises there. It was “tea and fucking jam sandwhiches,” to quote one of the milder comments I overheard in the line-up.

After lunch we went for a medical examination. In the South African Army system you were called up and had to report for duty before being given a medical. You were presumed healthy until you could prove otherwise. Being the optimist I was then, I looked upon the medival as one last chance to get out of the whole mess. Perhaps an observant doctor will find a serious physical disorder that disqualifies me for service. My mind was racing with visions of some deadly disease saving my life. I did my best to look unwell as I approached the front of the line.

I stood in front of the doctor wearing nothing but clean underwear. He was looking down at an impressive form that seemed to list all known diseases and disorders that can afflict man or beast. Please God, let me suffer from at least one of those.

“Are you sick troop?” His question came without warning and caught me completely off guard.
“No Sir,” I replied, thinking he was referring to a cold, the flu or some trivial illness.
“Right, you may go.” He signed my medical forms and with the stroke of a pen declared me fit to die for my country.
“Aren’t you going to give me a physical?” I asked. He paid me no heed.
“Next,” was all he said, calling his next victim. That’s it, I thought, I am now truly and properly screwed. I felt like I had lost a final appeal against a very long prison sentence. Two years is a long time when you are 19 years old.

After the ‘medical’ we were weighed and measured, for God knows what. Then the real fun began. It was time for vaccinations! And a merry time was had by all being stabbed and injected and punctured and pricked with miscellaneous instruments of medical torture. The process involved young men in underpants being assaulted by nurses and medics from all angles with the tools of their trade, until there was no known disease left against which we were not inoculated. Some of the newly immune fainted, others bled profusely and all of us felt like crap for days afterward. More than two decades later I still shudder at the memory of the same needle plunging into dozens of arms, until it became too blunt to pierce the skin, and only then was a new syringe pressed into service. It is a miracle that we didn’t all die from hepatitis or septicemia. Thank God Aids wasn’t part of our reality in those days.

Our transformation from useless ‘civies’ into fierce soldiers began with our first army haircut. I suggest ‘hairshave’ as a more appropriate word. I was lucky to escape with my scalp intact. A month later I still looked like a skinhead having a bad hair day. One pervert in our platoon (there were several) couldn’t stop stroking his head. “I miss my girlfriend,” he explained as the stubble on his head slowly stripped more skin from his palm.

The sun was setting over my first full day in the army, my first day at 4 SAI, and my first day as an infantry soldier. It was all the time I needed to realize that I wasn’t cut out to be great soldier. I wasn’t cut out to be any kind of soldier.

We were issued with most of our army kit on that first day, except for the boots, of course. After dinner that night, corporal Roberts introduced us to one of the true joys of military life: preparing for an inspection. It turned out that most of the clothes and equipment the army issued us with served no useful purpose. They were merely there to give you more things to clean and shine and polish and fold and arrange so that some twit officer can come and yell at you in a high-pitched voice at five thirty in the bloody morning. It was in this way that I learned that my new ‘browns,’ as our combat fatiques were known at the time, were going to stay new, since I was going to be wearing coveralls for the next month. The army couldn’t trust new troops with clothes designed to withstand the rigours of battle in the African bush. So we were given flimsy coveralls instead, which offered us no protection against the rigours of basic training. Go figure!

Corporal Roberts made a valiant effort to teach us the proper techniques and tricks of the trade for preparing our gear for inspections. I can’t remember any detail about that part of army life, except that everything had to be sqaure, in a certain order, ironed, shined and otherwise spotless. The army has several phonebook-sized manuals on the topic, I’m sure. But I think I’ve captured the gist of army housekeeping. I didn’t take to this facet of my new life any better than I did to the running, drilling, discipline, lack of freedom or marching. I did the bare minimum I thought I could get away with, and somehow I always passed inspection without a problem. Maybe I was just lucky, but I suspect that the officers never really scrutinized anything during an inspection. I think they just randomly picked on a few individuals to intimidate the rest of the platoon. Sometimes they singled out troops they didn’t like. That worked for me too, because it wasn’t me they picked on.

I slept like a baby that night — a very tired, emotionally disturbed baby. I dreamt of white beaches and brightly-coloured women.
My dream shattered, the colours disappeared and I was back in the drab sepia tint reality of army life. Goddamn that whistle and the corporal that gives it life! Damn his vocal cords, damn his lungs!

I hate getting up early in the morning, and I detest doing physical training in a regimented group setting. My second day of military service started with early-morning PT for the whole company. Half past four in the morning saw us doing pushups, situps, star jumps and other streneous exercises, intended not so much to strengthen the body, as to inflict maximum pain and discomfort.

The PT instructor had to shout to be heard above all the groaning, cursing and early-morning coughing. Most of us were only 18 or 19 at the time, yet some were coughing like they had smoked for twenty years. Perhaps a few had smoked for that long, if you count the time in the womb.

You could spot a heavy smoker by the way he coughs: He bends forward, hands on his knees. Then his body starts shaking. No noise as yet. A rumbling starts somewhere deep in his stomach. All of a sudden he straightens up! A thundering cough tears from his lungs, and all the unfortunate bastards in front of him are showered with spit, mucus and bits of decaying lung. And yet many of us still smoked. When you’re 19 you think nothing can kill you, not even cigarettes.

Breakfast turned out to be the same dismal affair as the previous day. Little did I know that it was to remain unchanged for the next month. Well, not exactly unchanged. The eggs varied in colour. I saw eggs in all shades of blue and green, but never a yellow one.

Lunch and dinner were no better. On that second day lunch consisted of mashed potatoes, made from dehydrated potatoes, and a colourful ground beef dish. It was green — a sickening gangrene gray-green. And it tasted the way it looked. At that point, or very shortly thereafter, I started blocking out all thoughts and memories related to the swill we were served at 4 SAI. I ate because my body needed whatever nourishment was left in the food after the chefs were through with it. I tried not to look at whatever was splattered onto my plate, ate as fast as I could without choking and thought about sex.

The 4 SAI chefs, as the cooks and kitchen hands like to be called, defied all comprehension. I have never come across another group of people who were so utterly disinterested in their work, or so unsuited to the task at hand as these miserable bastards were. They possessed an uncanny ability to take the choicest cut of meat, and “turn it into shit,” as one of my platoon buddies succinctly put it. They were also the most consistently filthy group I crossed paths with the during my two year stint. I often wondered if it was against their religion to wash and change clothes. Later I found out that many of the cooks were Jehova’s Witnesses. The law made no provision for conscientious objectors. You did your two years of military service, or you went to jail for six years. Or, if you had wealthy parents, you skipped the country. Not surprisingly, very few young Witnesses opted for the six years in jail. Most reported for service, but with the tacit understanding that they won’t be expected to perform combat duties. Thus many wound up in the kitchen, poisoning their own side. I still haven’t figured out their lack of hygiene, though. Surely they of all people had to understand the relationship between cleanliness and godliness. Maybe they were part of a conspiracy to speed up the second coming of Christ. We’ll never know.

Washing our dishes after meals was another harrowing enterprise. We were still using the steel trays and mugs we had been issued on the first morning. The tray was called a ’varkpan’ in the Afrikaans vernacular. This roughly translates into ‘pig’s trough’ in English. It was an appropriate term, given the swill we were fed. The mugs were referred to as ‘fire buckets.’ I don’t know why.

There were no sinks provided for washing dishes. The entire facility consisted of two troughs, made from a 40 gallon drum split in half, propped up on wooden frames about two feet above the ground. To ‘wash’ our dishes, we were supposed to dip them in the first drum, filled with absolutely disgustingly filthy water, and then ‘rinse’ them in the second drum, filled with equally filthy water. I had watched other people do dishes many times before in my life, and this didn’t seem to be the right way of doing it.

“Don’t worry, there’s a lot of Savlon in the water.” Corporal Roberts might have calmed some people’s fears, but I didn’t buy his reassuring words. I went straight to the barracks and washed my dishes in the shower. The army being the army, it followed naturally that washing dishes in the barracks would be prohibited. I learned two things that day: orders often make no more sense than rumours, and it’s not always wise to follow orders. So I continued washing my dishes in the shower, and I never came down with diarrhea, or ‘gippo guts’ as we called it. Those poor fellows who put their faith in army orders and Savlon, ended up driving the porcelain bus more often than they cared for. I probably didn’t fully grasp it at the time, but common sense was fast becoming my biggest ally.

We gathered for our first formal lecture that afternoon. The 180 or so souls that made up Alpha company were sitting in neat rows on the rugby field. A typical company in the South African army consisted of six platoons. Platoons were made up of 30 men, divided into three sections. A section is the smallest fighting unit. You could argue that the individual soldier is the smallest fighting unit, but the army doesn’t work that way. A soldier is not a unit, he’s just a number.

So there we were, tired, sweaty, slowly baking to a crisp brown in the African sun. January is high summer in the southern hemisphere, and even before the days of global warming and holes in the ozone layer, it could get very, very hot. It is the perfect climate for swimming naked and drinking beer; it’s not ideal for running around in heavy coveralls and a steel helmet all day long.

A pint-sized staff sergeant with a boombox voice was instructing us on the intricacies of military ranks. He started off with a brilliant summary. At least I thought it was.

“Now, you do not salute NCOs. They are the good people with stripes and shit on their upper arms. Anyone or anything with stars, castles or swords on his shoulder, you salute.”

It would have been a high point in military instruction if he had stopped right there. He didn’t, of course, and as he rambled on he succeeded to confuse everybody with the detail, including himself. My thoughts quickly drifted off to a world of tall drinks and fair maidens.

That night we had to prepare for our first officer’s inspection the following morning. Our barracks were more chaotic than a Pompei whorehouse immediately after Vesuvius had blown. I stood in awe of my fellow man’s willingness to submit so totally to petty authority. They were willing to scrub, polish, iron, clean and fret deep into the night, because a 19 year old 2nd Lieutenant was going to walk through the place the next morning. What really scared me was that some had surrendered so completely that they were actually enjoying themselves. Erich Fromm was right: most people are afraid of freedom. They had nothing to fear in the army.
Staying true to my new philosophy, I did the absolute minimum, then settled down to play chess with a new friend, Piet Bruwer. His story was another shining example of a military snafu. He was an engineering student at one of the top universities. He only had a year to go to qualify as an electronic engineer. Fulltime students usually had their service deferred until after they had completed their studies. His was a classic case of bureaucratic bungling.

“One day I was still attending lectures,” he said, “the next I was brought here by two MPs.”

What a waste of talent. Had the military not screwed up things so badly, they could have had the services of a fully qualified engineer for more or less the same price. I was happy to have him around. He played a mean game of chess and he was a great conversationalist.

Our first inspection did not go well. The platoon commander, 2nd Lieutenant Kotze, strutted into the barracks with corporal Roberts in tow. Kotze was an arrogant asshole. He was also not smart enough to realize that he had no reason to be so arrogant. It turned out he had no sense of humour either.

We stood perfectly still next to our beds. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. Then somebody let rip with the mother of all farts. It was an earth-shattering masterpiece. Our laughter was even louder. And we couldn’t stop laughing. The harder Kotze and corporal Roberts tried to restore order, the more we laughed. So our good lieutenant did what all little people do when their authority is challenged. He resorted to violence. He couldn’t hit any of us, although I’m sure he would have liked nothing better. Instead he took out his anger on our humble abode. He overturned our beds, emptied our trunks on the floor, and kicked and toppled everything within his reach. By and large a very impressive performance, if that kind of behaviour impresses you. Part of me felt pity for the poor bastards who had worked most of the night. A much larger part of me was gloating because I wasn’t stupid enough to do the same.

It turned out to be a trying day for those in positions of authority. Our first attempt at a company parade later that morning was a disaster. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Not surprisingly, the terrible food and lack of proper dishwashing facilities were making many of the lads a little more regular than normal. With too few toilets around, some had to resort to seeking relief out in the open. One geographically challenged idiot had picked the parade ground for his toilet. He didn’t even dig a cat-hole, or attempt to cover it up. There it was, a shiny heap of shit, smack-bang in the middle of the parade ground, roughly midway between the flag pole and where we were lined up. The company sergeant-major was standing by the flag pole, facing us. He couldn’t miss the offending display, nor could we. The sergeant-major was not happy.

He summoned a corporal from one of the platoons.

“Corporal,”he roared, “Cor-po-ral! Somebody shat on my parade ground! On my parade ground, Corporal.”
“Maybe it was a dog, Sergeant-major.” The poor corporal was beyond nervous. I almost felt sorry for him.
The sergeant-major wasn’t taking the corporal’s reply well. In fact, his anger seemed to cause him intense physical pain.
“Corporal,” he said in a tortured voice, “tell me one thing, Corporal. Since when does a fucking dog use shit paper?”

That did it. No force on earth could stop the laughter. Any semblance of military order and discipline disappeared in wave after wave of laughter. There is something inheritantly beautiful about 180 people laughing together in the face of authority.

Chapter 1 : Getting There

January 7th, 1982.

The day started like most other days. I had a cup of cold coffee, courtesy of a mother who insisted on serving coffee at five in the morning. The fact that I didn’t get up before seven had somehow never registered with her. I was fifteen before I realized that coffee is a hot beverage. I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, sipped my cold coffee and enjoyed the fresh morning air drifting in through the open window. I promptly destroyed the moment by lighting a cigarette. As the nicotine started working its magic on my fuzzy brain, a nagging feeling of discomfort began to form somewhere in the back of my head. I thought at first it was the beginnings of a headache, but I had already pinpointed that to a throbbing area above my left temple.

It hit me in the shower, slammed into me with the force of several speeding trains, and really spoiled my day. The complete and unabridged truth, the clear and cruel reality splashed across my brain in full and frightening technicolour. Today was the big day! It was the beginning of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would burst every patriotic young man’s heart with pride and fill his soul with visions of grandeur—the chance to serve your country for two whole years, wear its uniform with pride, fight the dark forces of the total onslaught and ensure that the white flame of civilization will burn for all eternity in South Africa. There was glory even in death. Those who made the ultimate sacrifice were buried with full military and heroic splendour, their names carved in granite and in a grateful nation’s memory.

I was horrified. I don’t lean towards heroism and I was somewhat less than wildly enthusiastic about the patriotism thing at the time. My delusions were not of grandeur, but rather of healthy and happy mediocrity. Conventional wisdom and the prevailing mood in the country at the time dictated that every able-bodied young man should jump at this opportunity eagerly and with a warm feeling in his heart. I looked for a place to hide.

At breakfast, Mother beamed at me over burned toast and watery eggs. “Today is your big day. I’m so proud of you!”
“Thank you, Mother,” I replied. Oh shit, I thought.

The friendly minister at our local church took me to the assembly point at the old Milner Park showgrounds in Johannesburg. We made the trip in his vibrating green Volkswagen Beetle. It was Mother’s idea. She thought it would be appropriate for a Man of God to deliver me to serve God and Country. She had many strange ideas.

He was a rather harmless old soul, but the social and spiritual divide between us proved to be wider than the distance between the Beetle’s front seats. Our conversation that day can best be described as polite, yet sporadic. We were both relieved when we arrived at the showgrounds. He seemed eager to leave, and I was quite happy the see his green VW disappear into the afternoon traffic.

I soon regretted letting him go so quickly. I stood waiting for three hours in the blazing summer sun, watching the original crowd of several thousand recruits dwindle to a few dozen stragglers. No one came for me or called my name. Finally, I could take no more. I dragged my weary body and my heavy blue suitcase to a small square school desk, behind which a sergeant with a small square head was sitting. He was smoking a cigarette and trying hard to look important. I handed him my call-up papers. He scrutinized the document carefully for what seemed to be an unnecessary long time. After all, he only needed to find my name and Army serial number. He placed the letter on the table, and without once looking up at me or saying a single word, started flipping through a thick pile of computer printouts on the table. After a while he seemed to overcome his unique approach to the alphabet and managed to find the correct page. He moved his index finger down the columns of names and serial numbers with the uncertain, jerky movements of a toddler learning to write. Once in a while he would glance at my call-up papers, where my number (I?) was securely pinned under his middle finger. A vertical frown formed between his eyebrows, cutting deeper into his forehead as his finger progressed down the list.
When he had reached the end of the page he looked up at me for the first time. “You’re not here,” he said. “Oh, but I am,” I replied, looking down at my legs to doublecheck. “What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that you’re not on the fucking list.” I detected a faint note of irritation in his voice.

I waited. He consulted another list. I waited.

When he looked up again his expression was that of a man about to say “eureka!” or, more likely in his case, something like “aha!”.
“You’re two days early,” he said, his tone and manner that of a hanging judge who has just found someone guilty of murder in the first degree. “You must report here on the ninth of January, nineteen hundred and eighty two.”
I tried to point out to him that my call-up instructions clearly stated the seventh as the date to report for duty. When he spoke again, the irritation in his voice was no longer faint or subtle. “Look here, you little shit. According to my list, you will report here in two days’ time. Sharp!” There’s no arguing with a man who believes in his list as he believes in his bible.

That’s when I really regretted letting the minister and his green VW go earlier. I had to walk three miles to the next railway station, lugging the next two years of my life in a heavy blue suitcase. I got home five hours, two different trains and a short bus trip later.

“You’re early,” Mother said.
“They gave me time off for good conduct.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll have better luck next time.” Mother was such an optimist.

‘Next time’ came two days later.
“You’re two days late! The MPs are looking for you.” It was the same sergeant with the small square head. I tried to explain.
“Don’t speak unless I give you permission to. I can lock you up for this!” He was getting excited. “Would you like that, hey?”
“No Sir!” I said in my best military manner.
“I am not your fucking Sir! A sir is a thing that floats in the toilet if you forget to pull the bloody chain. Understand?”
“Yes Sir.” He changed colour. A few times. He turned around and stormed away in disgust. I never saw him again.

We were rounded up, quite fittingly, in the main arena of the showgrounds where, on gentler days, proud and overweight farmers parade their proud and overweight cattle. Somehow military order prevailed over the chaos. We were herded into line-ups, then into squads, and then back into line-ups again. Mostly we just stood waiting in the scorching African sun, with the faint smell of grass and the not-so-faint smell of cattle shit in our nostrils. We seemed to be entirely surrounded by shouting, swearing and sweating sergeants and corporals. The few officers present stood in the background and generally tried to stay out of the way.

When everything and everyone had settled into a kind of semi-stationary equilibrium, a horde of military policemen descended on us to search our kit. I learned on that day that my childhood was a very protected one indeed. The search produced enough liquor, marijuana, hashish, cocaine, a rainbow collection of tablets and capsules, knives and miscellaneous chemicals to keep an extended crime family employed for a year. So this is what chemical warfare is all about.

A few feet away from me a very nervous and very thin young lad was trying desperately to hide a 750 ml bottle of Count Pushkin vodka on his person. The fact that he was only slightly meatier than a skeleton and dressed in a T-shirt and torn jeans, didn’t help his efforts much. (I should mention that pre-torn jeans weren’t available then). He became increasingly frantic. His limbs and head appeared to be spinning away from his upper body and I expected him to explode, implode or fly off into space at any moment. Instead, he quite unexpectedly, and somewhat disappointingly I might add, became very calm. A slow smile spread across his face—the kind of smile you see when people know they have nothing to loose. The smile became a giggle, which quickly turned into histerical laughter. He broke the seal on the bottle, threw the cap over his shoulder, and parked his mouth against the bottle. He gulped down the pure vodka like so much water, his adam’s apple pumping up and down with superhuman speed. He was still laughing like a wind-up toy when two medics and a military policeman dragged him off to an ambulance. That’s one way to beat system. I wished him well.

We were given lunch. We knew it was lunch because we were told that t was. The time at which it was served (three in the afternoon) and the menu (stale jam sandwhiches and blue tea) certainly didn’t give us any clues as to what it was suppose to be. “They put the blue stuff in the tea to keep us from getting the horn,” a whizzkid in the next line whispered. I passed on the tea.
After more waiting, standing in line, falling into and out of squads, standing to and standing down, a train pulled into the siding at the north side of the fairgrounds. I half expected a cattle train, Nazi style, but for once my surprise was a pleasant one; the rolling stock consisted of old passenger cars. As soon as the train had come to a stop, a dozen sergeants started shouting instructions at a swarm of corporals, who in turn started herding us into the train cars. We were packed into the third class passenger cars like so many sardines. When all the cars were bulging with the sweating and slowly suffocating pride of white South Africa’s young manhood, more than fifty recruits were left standing next to the tracks. The Army had ordered their train one car short. I learned my first military acronym, snafu: situation normal, all fucked up.

It didn’t stay the Army’s problem for long, though. It became our problem. We were ordered to make room for the remaining fify odd recruits. The fact that doing so required defying several of the basic laws of physics was immaterial. A forty-something sergeant, veteran of many bars and brothels, had no doubt that it could be done. “This train is like an ugly hooker’s heart—there’s always room for one more.” I had to fight the urge to prostrate myself at his feet and chant “Oh, wise One!” repeatedly.

Somehow we managed to squeeze everybody in, or at least I assumed we did, for the train started moving about 40 minutes later. It was hell inside that train. As if the stifling heat and overcrowding weren’t enough, we were ordered to keep the window shutters down. “We don’t want enemy spies to know about our troop movements,” a young corporal explained. Of course, nobody would have noticed us standing around outside in the middle of Johannesburg for the last four hours.

I very nearly suffocated and the fact that I’m prone to claustrophobia didn’t help much either. It was at least 50° Celsius inside the carriage, and the air was steaming with sweat and cigarette smoke. You could smell what everyone had to drink at his farewell piss-up and what more than a few had to eat. What an unglamorous way to die, I thought. And this before I even had the chance to play soldier. There is no glory in dying from heat exhaustion and inhaling stale farts. I lit another Camel and felt very sorry for myself.

We arrived at Middelburg station a few hours later after a most trying and unpleasant journey. I can’t even recall what I was thinking about or who I spoke to during that dreadful train trip. I guess my brain was just to fried and oxygen-starved to register anything. It’s a pity, for it was an important day in my life. It was the first day of the last few weeks of my youth.

Before the train had even come to a full stop, a horde of NCO’s were shouting and swearing at us to get the hell out of there. I tried to hide under the seat. Alas, they found me.

“Come to Mother!” An ugly red-faced asshole with freckless and corporal stripes was inviting me in no uncertain terms to join the party.
“But it’s not my station,” I protested. All in vain. I was bundled onto an idling Samil truck, my heavy blue suitcase nearly ripping my arm out of its socket as I tried to hang on to it.
The sun was setting over the Highveld when our convoy of trucks rolled through the gates of the Fourth South African Infantry Battallion, also known as 4 SAI (four-sye). This was to be my home for the next month. Home sweet bloody home.

It was past midnight by the time we had been divided into platoons. It was much later before we had a place to sleep. By then even the most compulsive jokers were quiet.