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.