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.