Thursday 29 March 2007

THE PAPER CHASE

Did you hear the one about the conscript who chased bits of paper?

He was obsessive. He couldn’t walk past a piece of paper without picking it up. He would look at it briefly and then throw it away again.

Once he was doing drills on the parade ground when a wind got up and began to blow bits of litter and fragments of paper all over the place. He broke ranks and ran around the parade ground until he had collected every one. He examined each in turn and threw them back into the swirling breeze.

He was arrested and sent to DB for two weeks. Detention Barracks, where they made you do pole PT until you vomited. Where they made you polish the concrete floor until the corporals could shave in its reflection.

But he kept on chasing paper, in DB itself, and afterwards when they reluctantly let him go back to his unit.

Eventually they took him to hospital and had him examined by a panel of doctors and psychiatrists. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him but decided they had no choice other than to let him go.

When they gave him his discharge paper he looked through it carefully and said, “Thanks. This is the one I’ve been looking for.”

HEROES WANTED

I could tell you anything I liked about the moment I made that decision.

I am the blogger; you are the bloggee. So you are obliged to accept my version of the truth.

I could tell you it was a political epiphany – that I realised at that very instant that I was nothing more than a tool of the apartheid military machine, that I was suddenly overwhelmed by an unbearable shame, that I resolved immediately to forswear obedience to the evil racist empire, to heed the examples of Mao and Che and Gandhi and Mandela and to commit myself henceforth to the struggle against oppression in the world in general and in South Africa in particular.

I could tell you that I decided then and there to become a conscientious objector, that I stood up and limped to HQ, demanded an interview with the Commanding Officer, declared my opposition to conscription, proffered my hands for the obligatory cuffs, and resigned myself to two years of abuse in prison. Object to this, kaffirboetie!

But that was never on the cards. My two older brothers had done their military service, admittedly in the navy, at Simonstown and Saldahna Bay. They’d come out of it okay - better off, even, if you believed my father. He had had the time of his life fighting Rommel in North Africa and sweeping the last of the Germans out of Italy, all the way from Sicily to Naples. On VE Day he commandeered an American jeep and took an Italian girlfriend to Lake Como for two months. He missed the only boat they could find to take troops back to South Africa that summer and ended up spending a year at Helwan camp outside of Cairo waiting for another one. But he said it was worth it.

So the family view was very straightforward. You did your military service and you got on with your life. Politics didn’t enter into it. My brothers told me the meaning of vasbyt and min dae. They weren’t there when I got on the train to Pretoria. We didn’t make a fuss about those kinds of things. My girlfriend cried and gave me a copy of the Penguin edition of W.H. Auden’s “Selected Poems”. A subscription to Scope would have been more useful, as things turned out.

And there was another thing. We knew that military service was the price we paid for the privilege of being white. The umfaans we grew up with on the farm didn’t have to do it. They didn’t even have to go to school. Somehow, in the back of our minds, we accepted it as a reasonable trade-off: a year of pain for a lifetime of special rights, like voting, and living wherever we liked, and getting good jobs that would pay for nice cars and houses and swimming pools. So we went obediently, like pigs to the bacon factory, as penance, or expiation.

I could tell you another version, the one that worked for Howard B.

The madness strategy.

Wednesday 28 March 2007

O, UNICORN AMONG THE CEDARS

You're not going to like this story. It has plenty of villains and victims but it's short on heroes.

But the final chapter hasn't happened yet. There's still time for a hero to step forward.

You're out there, aren't you?

You're waiting to see where this goes.

You're holding your breath in the shadows of the blogosphere.

You were there, weren't you?

And you know where he is.

Don't you?

Monday 26 March 2007

ARIADNE'S THREAD

When they discovered that I could walk they sent me back to Voortrekkerhoogte.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Three of four people who hadn’t been on the shooting trip, or who had survived the accident unscathed, were washing their clothes in fire-buckets outside the front the barracks. Forces’ Favourites trickled from a distant radio.

It was dark inside, and strangely quiet. I sat on the edge of my bed.

We are led to believe by movies and books, and especially by biographies of famous people, that our lives have a shape to them, that if we look hard enough we’ll discover an arc of destiny running through them, like a river or a rainbow, or a path through the bush that leads to a glade of unicorns.

We think that if we can find the end of Ariadne’s thread it will reveal the pattern of the maze that is impossible to discern when we’re lost inside our shapeless days: that it will translate our vague desires into precise ambitions, obscure accidents into recognisable acts of will, that it will guide us from these dank and claustrophobic passages stinking of Minotaur sweat and our own irresolution into the crisp air of certainty, etched in the sky over Crete or Heidelberg or Boschhoek or Lohatla or Riemsvasmaak for all the world to see, coherent, considered and complete.

Zyn Dry, this is your life.

But for most of us, I suspect, the shape remains elusive and obscure. The hero doesn’t get the girl. The phone doesn’t ring at the critical moment. The bad guy disappears into the crowd. We understand, much too late to matter, that most co-incidences simply never happen.

Perhaps, after all, only the elite can be redeemed like that, while the lives of the preterite are written in dust or water.

I have a feeling that Ariadne’s thread slipped through my fingers as I sat on the edge of my bed that Sunday afternoon. Or perhaps, still addled by pain-killers and the confusion of the accident, I let go of the end that led out of the catacombs towards the bright blue sky, the sun shimmering on the sea, a flotilla of triremes heading towards Troy, and clutched instead the end that led back down towards Grendel, the Beast and Odyas Mallow.

It’s just a metaphor. Don’t leave me now. I will tell you what happened in plain Ingles.

I made a terrible mistake. I decided I didn’t want to be in the army anymore.

Saturday 24 March 2007

KEYSER SOZE

While I was lying in bed in the casualty section of 1 Mil wondering whether my hip-bone was connected to my thigh-bone, Dr Aubrey Levin was hard at work in another section of the hospital putting the finishing touches to his master-plan for saving the nation from homosexuality, drugs and Simon & Garfunkel.

Dr Aubrey Levin, a.k.a. Dr Aubrey Levine. Sometimes he adds the “e”, perhaps as an affectation, or possibly in the hope of covering his tracks. But Google isn’t that easily confused.

If you’ve got ten minutes to spare, look him up. It makes for some interesting reading.

Tuesday 20 March 2007

MAMA, TAKE THIS BADGE OFF OF ME

It was about twenty k’s outside Pretoria, where the veld begins to turn into Magaliesberg scrub.

On the way back the driver decided to treat us to one of those famous joyrides designed to scare the shit out of green roofies like us. They had a special name in Afrikaans, but I can’t remember what it was.

We ended up hitting a concrete barrier on the side of a sloot and somersaulting into the middle of the R107. Those of us who weren’t pinned under the truck managed to crawl out through the torn canvas into the afternoon sunlight. There was a weird smell that included petrol, battery acid, piss, blood and, yes, shit.

That’s how I got to One Military Hospital. But it isn’t how I got to Ward 11.

Monday 19 March 2007

UIT DIE BLOU VAN ONSE HEMEL

Most wars are political. This one was personal.

Sometime towards the end of basic training, which rushed by in a blur of parade ground abuse, PT, midnight inspections and the other predictable stuff, we were woken up even earlier than usual for a special roll call that included all the Service School companies, perhaps eight or nine hundred of us, yawning into the Highveld dawn, shivering in the February rain.

A small wooden desk, manned by a captain, a couple of lieutenants and several NCOs, had been set up in a corner of the acre of beaten earth where we did our daily drills. One by one we presented ourselves at the desk. Name, rank and number, then stripped to the waist and examined for something on the torso, the arms and the hands, palm up and palm down. Tattoos, someone whispered behind me.

After that, some people left for Middelberg in two or three trucks. SAI4. Infantry.

Unlucky.

I was put on a course to learn map reading, filing and typing. I was going to be a G-clerk. The abuse and the PT subsided to bearable levels. Only ten more months.

Cool.

One day we were taken to the shooting range.

Sunday 18 March 2007

COME YE MASTERS OF WAR

The invasion of Angola in support of CIA-backed UNITA mercenaries was still three years away. The Soweto uprising was five years away. The murder of Steve Biko was six years away. But the war in South Africa had already begun.

It wasn’t the war we expected, and it wasn’t against the traditional enemy. As far as the South African government was concerned that was already over. Mandela was on Robben Island, the ANC was in disarray, the PAC was in exile, and the Communists had long been routed. These were the golden years of apartheid. The Afrikaner oligarchy, sustained by lucrative precious metal exports, nourished by the spiritual support of the Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk, and guided by the Machiavellian strategies of the notorious Broederbond, was at the height of its pure white powers. Now they had the time, the money and the inclination to turn on that other enemy of the slegs blankes state – a disaffected white youth suckled on the poisonous tits of rock & roll, dagga and sexual deviance.

It was the cancer within, the snake in apartheid’s Garden of Eden, the more pernicious for living among you, eating at your tables, sleeping in your bedrooms, attending your schools and universities. And the more hateful for disgracing the god of Calvin, the Afrikaner Covenant and, worst of all, the white skin they were born with.

There wasn’t much you could do about them at school or at home. You could force them to sing Die Stem every morning, you could lecture them from noon till night on the righteousness of the apartheid cause, you could rewrite the history books to prove they were chosen to do God’s work in Africa. You could berate them or beat them into mute obedience. You could prevent the filth of television from perverting their hearts and minds by keeping it away from South Africa’s sunny shores. You could ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Das Kapital and pictures of naked women. Segregated beaches and segregated schools and segregated suburbs would keep them from communing with the Sons of Ham.

You couldn’t stop them from listening to Lourenco Marques radio or from reading books or from playing the guitar or from asking questions of one another behind closed doors, or behind the cricket hut on the far side of the field at break, smoking Texans and swapping stories about the erections of nipples and the smell of gwat.

But wait until the year of their eighteenth birthdays and they were yours, wholly, unconditionally and completely - property of the state, slaves of the system, vassals of the victors, to do with as you saw fit. To number them, name them, shear them, train them, dress them, feed them, shame them, shape them. The weed out the weak, the weird and the unwilling. To make them fit. And to make them fit.

So here they are then, bedraggled from the night on the train, still in civvies, shorts and slops, smiling, talking, joking, waiting. The youth of today, scruffy and scrawny, soutpiel and rockspider, from the Cape and the Free State, from E.P. and Natal, sons of farmers and sons of bankers, sons of dentists and boiler-makers, outside the gates of Voortrekkerhoogte, on the third of January 1971.

“Aandag!”

Thursday 15 March 2007

JUST ANOTHER NAAIPLAAS


Someone retrieved the dead caracal and threw it out of
the Bedford,
narrowly missing the sergeant who was
closing the wire gate in the
darkness behind us. He
stopped in his tracks. The brakelights
glinted an
aposematic red in his piggy little eyes.


"Julle gaan lekker kak," he said. Then he turned and
latched
the gate.

The Bedford drove on another two or three hundred
yards. As the
engine choked to a stop with that familiar
diesel shudder we were
enveloped by as silence as
profound as the surrounding night. We sat
there
breathless, expectant, uncertain.


That's when the shouting started, the shouting that
still hasn't stopped.


We sank to our ankles in dust. There was a light ahead
of us, a small
building, the sound of rushing water.
In the shadows to our right
stood a ghostly assembly
of young men in pale overalls.


For the first and only time at Greefswald, the
Psychopaths looked at
us in fear. It took me a few
moment to realise that it was the blood.


It took me another few moments to register
that I knew their faces.


Ward 11.


Tuesday 13 March 2007

BUNCH OF ANIMALS


The sergeant who appeared to live in the small prefabricated box at the gate was actually a staff sergeant, the rank they gave you in the Permanent Force of the SADF when you had been there long enough to prove you were useless at absolutely everything. He was lanky and clumsy and grizzled by too much sun. His face was a Martian surface of craters and broken veins.

He hated soutpiele, moffies and kaffirs, but not always in that order. Since he wasn’t technically allowed to shoot any of them, he shot everything else, gemsbokke, blesbokke, springbokke, impala, eland, warthogs, baboons, leopards, kudus, klipspringers, dassies, ratels, bushbabies, fish-eagles, cormorants, leguans, mongooses, jackals, hyenas, vultures, crocodiles and caracals.

If you want to know why there was so much game around Greefswald in 1971 you only have to open Google Earth and go to 22 degrees 12’55 South and 29 degrees 21’35 East. The thing that looks like a black mamba is the Limpopo River, running from west to east. That whitish scar coming down from the north is the Shashi River that separates Botswana from Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia in those days. Greefswald is on the southern side of the Limpopo exactly below the point of confluence.

Most of the year the Limpopo is more of a beach than a river. And the Shashi, as you can see, is just a very wide beach with a thin trickle down the middle. Farms are evident on the South African side, but they weren’t there in 1971. A new dam has been built about ten miles to the east.

But look at the vast uncultivated tracts of bush and scrub north of the Limpopo, on both sides of the Shashi. This was paradise for all those animals that hadn’t been corralled into the game parks in the east and the west, and maybe it still is. And for water they would come down to the banks of the Limpopo, less than a rifle shot from Greefswald.

Every now and then, during the course of that year, the big brass would come from Pretoria in jeeps and black Mercedes Benz limousines. They would shoot buck with machine guns and party around a massive braai until the early hours of the morning. We could smell the charcoal and burning kudu steaks from the top of Greefswald koppie. A few days later, after they had gone, we had to go down to the river and clean up everything that hadn’t been eaten by the vultures.

I’ve look very hard at the image on Google Earth but I can’t make out any signs of the camp. The resolution is desperately poor, like my memory.

Who will help me describe it?

Monday 12 March 2007

THE LYNX

It’s known as the African Lynx but strictly speaking it’s a caracal, from the genus felis caracal. They can grow up to 45 cm high at the shoulder, and the males can weigh as much as 17 kg.

Most of its abdomen and lower body had been blown away by a single shot from the sergeant’s 9-mm Star pistol, which accounted for the extraordinary volume of blood that drenched us when he hurled it by the tail into the back of the Bedford. The head and the hide were intact, the distinctive black-tipped points of the ears, the golden coat, the eyes glazing over.

Someone came back for it a few weeks later, retrieving it from the pile of broken Klipdrif bottles, Lucky Strike stompies, and the rotting remnants of T-bones and lamb chops that lay strewn on the fenced-off earth behind the gatehouse. He dried it in the sun on top of the corrugated iron roof above his bed, held down by a large flat rock against scavengers and the prying eyes of the PF’s. When the brain rotted and began to stink the place out he reluctantly cut off its head. He kept the pelt in a secret place, which wasn’t such a good idea as things turned out.

*

Roll away the stone, there’s voice from the other side. It’s John D in Durban who walks among the dead. Be cool, John. The G.O.B. will set you free.

Sunday 11 March 2007

TALKING TO THE DEAD 2

The name Greefswald meant nothing in April 1971. It appears to mean nothing now. But from December 1971 until the last of the survivors disappeared into the void, that is, until they grew old enough or mad enough not to care anymore, it struck fear into the heart of every conscript in the SADF, roofs and oumanne alike.

It's probably only four or five hundred kilometres from Middelburg to Greefswald. In the Bedford it felt like four thousand. I can't remember when we left 4SAI, the infantry base. I know we got to Alldays at dusk because we stopped to fill up with petrol. The first lieutenant and the two-stripe corporal let us get out to stretch our legs. The was no toilet at the Mobil garage so we went into the veld. If we had known where we were going we wouldn't have come back. But I think we were all happy to be leaving 4SAI.

It was dark when we got to Greefswald. A bare bulb shone in the small duty box at the gate. A sergeant emerged and spoke in Afrikaans to the corporal. There was a sudden shout followed by much laughter. We stuck our heads under the canvas to see what was going on. The sergeant was holding something. He walked around to the back of the Bedford. It was a dead lynx, still warm and bloody. Some of us screamed and some of us laughed.

"Welkom in Greefswald," he said.

Friday 9 March 2007

TALKING TO THE DEAD

"Wys my jou hand," said one of them.

I gave him my hand, palm upward. He turned it over.

"Ander een," he said.

I gave him the other one. He looked at me curiously for a second or two. Then he showed me his hand.

On the fleshy amphibian fold between the thumb and the index finger of his right hand were three black dots in the shape of a triangle tattoed into the skin. The seven or eight others who were huddled together with me at the back of the Bedford showed me their hands in turn. All of them had the same triangle of black dots in the same place.

They could see I that I didn't have a clue.

*

Sometimes, when the venlafaxine takes longer than usual to kick in, I watch Ysabella Brave singing "Mack the Knife" on YouTube. She helps to push back the darkness.

Thursday 8 March 2007

THE CLASS OF '71

When was it? March? April? I can't remember.

I remember the trip in the back of the Bedford. Someone said to me, "What did they bust you for?" I said I hadn't been bust for anything. They all laughed. I said I was a clerk. I was being posted to a new base on the border.

I had a bad feeling.

Where are you now Zyn Dry?

Janks?

Foxy Norton?

Answer me dammit.

Wednesday 7 March 2007

NOW RECRUITING MEMBERS

If you were at Greefswald (and can prove it by answering a few simple questions) I'd like to hear from you.