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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.