Can you imagine being a soldier at war?
In 1989, I thought 17-year-old me was going to be on the run from call-up to the Apartheid Army, head into Zululand, and become an underground activist.
Some readers have been soldiers, and some have gone to war, but, most are uneducated, like me…
I battle with the stupidity of young adults believing war is manly, or as exciting as a video game. Obscene families, churches, schools, media, corporations and governments share responsibility for breeding them that way. But nobody escapes personal responsibility.
NO EXCUSE
There’s no pride in not knowing why your country has you killing strangers. No salary or university tuition is worth making widows. No social media video showing a soldier on leave surprising his son or daughter at school compensates for the children he’s killed, or the orphans he’s made. There’s no joy in being dead, crippled, drugged or homeless. There’s nothing sexy about a killer in uniform.
As casually evil are civilians uncaring that their government is waging death, in their name, and with their money, in a place they barely know exists; or don’t care about expect as a hate flag to wave against another hate flag in their own political system.
WHEN I WAS A BOY…
In my Matric year of 1989, I thought 17-year-old me was going to be on the run from call-up to the Apartheid Army. I planned to head into Zululand, and become an underground activist.
I possessed those poorly conceived notions after watching a white racist taunting a dying black man, and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s letter congratulating me on my forthcoming school project - I was going to be the first (white) child to write a long history essay on Apartheid (which was probably untrue, but sad if the education department were only referring to my province of Natal).
A year later, I delayed my fugitive status by studying. Mandela got released, I met Terror Lekota, and, suddenly, we were in a world of hope.
For several reasons, I dropped out after only three months, and volunteered for what was considered compulsory national service. I maneuvered myself into the air force, thinking I was going to be part of a new country.
I hated it more than anyone I knew, a severe struggle with authority, especially bullies and depression. Bad poetry became an outlet.
The alternate reality is that I had interesting experiences before doing easy time - mostly in an office, sometimes as the only non-permanent force member allowed in the bar, or doing a weekly run for movies for the base - never in a guard box, or desperately trying to dig a hole into undiggable sand because Russian jets had arrived.
Occasionally, the township of Umlazi, located on the hill next to our base, would fire shots, but I was unaware of anyone being hit. Outside of a run-in with crooked Intelligence, my biggest concern was the scourge of mosquitoes.
I was the only conscript on my base with staff (absurd), an 18-year-old replacing a middle-aged Flight Sergeant; my R198 stipend a big saving to the taxpayer; but a white boy with 5 African staff (doubly absurd). Nevertheless, I hope they remember me kindly.
I did favours for the trainee pilots who were all officers, such as organising new sheets if a girlfriend had been smuggled in. In their austere company, the guards waved us through on the way to their favourite club in town. However, I would occasionally risk trouble by climbing the fence at night, going AWOL just to be one of the suffering lads who I couldn’t fully relate to. Plus I had no love for L.A., the officer destination, but always lusted for a beer in a dingy rock bar called Monk’s Inn - it had steak, egg and strippers specials during the day, and at night we would sing along with Rob Evans, an exceptional one-man band, to ‘Party Girl’, ‘I Dig the Black Girls’, ‘A Forest’, How Soon is Now'?’ and more.
Other's were singing a different tune...
In my boys-only school, our first preparation to becoming “good South African soldiers”, I heard that a classmate's older brother had gone nuts because his "friend's head exploded like a watermelon". Thus, it’s understandable that stories of the war in Angola and South-West Africa (now Namibia) were rare. The irony is that more male children would willingly stand on Pink Floyd’s conveyor belt to the meatgrinder, as if it were a rite of manly passage.
In early training, there were suicides when we were told we were going to be sent to Hoedspruit (‘Hoednam’), and one guy tripped and broke his neck whilst we were running and jumping over a large gutter that edged the parade field - everyone kept running and jumping.
When a passenger airline flew over, a bar acquaintance dropped to the city pavement - he was a byproduct of the war I'd just missed. Outside of that, all I knew is that he was a good guy for giving me music tapes that he reviewed.
I forget their names, but the anecdotes are thorns in my head.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SURVIVE A WAR?
In Russia, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Mynanmar, Mozambique, the Congo and more, it's about the soldiers that survive, and how that will affect their families.
The mental condition may remain as long as severed limbs, not only for the amputees but for those, for example, watching 100,000 legless ‘pedestrians’ on the blue and yellow streets of Ukraine.
Nationalism kills. Those that know how to abuse nationalism for profit kill the most.
So many wars have been led or instigated by the USA. Their biggest cheerleaders are European; especially from Germany, France, Poland, the Baltic States, and the UK.
Most white people in my South Africa support them too - our childhood books taught us that the CIA and FBI are good, and Hollywood movies are doing the same for the new generation.
Isn’t it as funny as a flamethrower that the voters supporting the warmongers have comfortable lives, unable to imagine what it’s like to be impoverished and bombed, or a soldier with dead friends and fetanyl for company?
This post was prompted by a comment to me by Constantine Markides whose writing about his younger self joining the Greek army on Cyprus. You’ll enjoy his funny and educational series about a lesser known part of our world:
I do note from your list of war regions, that you left out Angola, which I take it was accidental.
I am one of those who served in the Angolan war, and although hesitant, having a job back home, that was paying me and the future prospect of a bursary to study engineering when I had completed my South African military conscription service, I went to do, what I felt at the time, was my duty.
Ending up in a infantry training base at Ladysmith 5 SAI, and despite looking for cushy options, my platoon commander had other ideas and saw to it that I wrote the Psycometric Assessment exam for the junior leadership program ( jnr offers and nco training ) at the Infantry School in Oudtshoorn, and was one of the forty odd selected from the over three hundred who actually wrote the exam, out of approximately 600 odd trainee's.
Initially I hated the Infantry School so much that I didn't care if I was RTU'd, which happens throughout the training program, which runs for approx. Nine months after basic infantry training and wittled down the approximately three hundred junior leaders in training in my company, from infantry training units across country, the to a hundred and forty odd of us who qualified as either officers or NCO's.
However once you pass the halfway mark and having eaten up so much s@#& at the Infantry School, you will do anything to survive the rest of the course, to ensure that your efforts so far had not been wasted, with 7 chaps being RTU'd without rank in the week of practice for our passing out parade because they went AWOL to have a drink at a pub, and got caught.
When you are finally allowed to wear that pip on your shoulder and you think about the rigours o the course and that you are one of a very small number who made it, from the thousands that started out, in basic training, there is definitely reason for a sense of achievement and pride.
Just when you think it's all over the selection begins again with the easy route being to accept a post at a training unit somewhere in South Africa where you will see little action, except for the odd patrol somewhere on the SWA/ Namibian border or as officer on duty at one of the many small or large out bases in SWA/ Namibia.
For those of us who had had enpugh of a blowing whistle and did not intend blowing a whistle for others or petty parades and inspections, there were selections and panels which decided whether you were good enough to join 32 Battalion, special forces units etc.. Parabats had already been selected at a earlier stage and done their jump training.
Me, I went in boots and all for 32 Bn and made it, spending another two weeks of more rigourous special training before finally being allowed to where the hallowed cammo beret, only to be in the unit for a further couple of weeks before they were temprarily withdrawn from operations due to the Joint Monitoring Commission agreement between South Africa, and Angola, which later fell apart.
So at that point it was back to inspections and parades with troops who were professional soldiers, not into inspections and parades and the nightmare that that brought to us junior officers and nco's.
In the nick of time SWATF came knocking at 32 Bn, looking for volunteers from the officer and nco ranks to join the newly established Special Services Reaction Force Companies known as the Romeo Mikes, and I again volunteered and was one of those who was selected, much to the chagrin of Col. Eddie Viljoen, who considered us traitors for "deserting" his coveted unit.
I could write a book on my motivations and experiences as a Team Commander at Romeo Mikes, where I served out my time, and about whom little is written except that they became more feared and notorius than 32 Bn, and in the mere nine years of their existance, had only one less medal recipient than 32 Bn in its twenty something year history.
I am proud to have served as the very first Team Commander of Romeo Mike 12, and value the Esprit de Corps and battle hardened troops of my team, whom I trusted with my life, who were all black SWA/ Namibians or Angolans all of whom had their own motivations for going to war, and do not deserve to be judged in any negative manner.
When you are young and recognise your your path of achievement it is easy to understand the desire for even greater challenges even in war, if you at that stage of your life believe in the cause.
Over time my views have dramatically changed in regard to the approach used by the South African government of the time, however having 20/20 hindsight doesn't solve that problem, but I would have thought that Israel had observed the consequences of Apartheid from South Africa's experiences and learned something from it.
My experience commanding a team in a Specialised Counter Insurgency Unit, rated at the time by both the US and Israel as the best in the world, helped open my eyes to many things later in life of which I will mention but a few ;
1. That I was hopelessly untrained and unprepoared by the Infantry School to lead a team in intensive combat, and had to learn very quickly on the fly, maybe that's why an IQ test section was included in the Pschometric evaluation which we underwent, prior to being trained.
2. That terrorism does not initiate in a vacuum and most definitely has a cause, and that to avoid terrorism requires determining the Root Cause and finding a way to remove the cause which gave rise to it, and so solving the problem, or else the killing will never end.
3. That killing "terrorists" is like trying to kill a Hydra, it is dedicated and will just rear another head, because you have failed to find a solution to the Root Cause driving it.
4. That despite the Psychometric evaluation we were put through, that in many cases people went off the rails, resulting in broken marriages, domestic violence, liquor abuse, drug abuse and in some the insatiable desire for the challenge of literally dodging a bullet, or to keep killing.
5. That the return to civilian life for those of us who had the experiences we had, was a difficult one, to the point that keeping ourselves under control, possibly has made us too passive in some instances. ( for me the movie "Nobody" made a lot of sense )
6. That the need for war does arise, when others fail to heed years of warning and requests to stop provoking, and there remains no alternative, as in the case of Russia in the Ukraine conflict, where Russia has actually become an Offensive Defender, against Western Hegemony which is using the Ukraine as a proxy.
7. That many of our fellow South Africans still Conflate modern day Russia, with the Soviet Union, and were so effectively brainwashed, that they are unable to see that the US is the cause of Global strife, and Not Russia or China, thus still seeing the US as good, contrary to Fact, and Russia and China as bad, again contrary to Fact. These people with these inverted/ perverted beliefs, have a very low level of perception, are one dimensional thinkers and lack the ability to perform a rudimentary Root Cause Analysis, and many still believe that "white" South Africa should have kept the fight in Angola, Namibia and South Africa going after 1989.
All war is class war. I'm sorry to see anyone have to experience this brutality. War is not a good way of solving problems, and it's usually about domination anyways.