The Apocalypse looms
My formative teenage years were characterised by a civil war that threatened to erupt beneath our feet with the blacks demanding political freedom, and the ever-present danger of our neighbouring countries swarming over our borders to support them. Our neighbours (Angola, Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique) had by then achieved independence from their colonial masters, and all having embraced communism (except for Botswana) posed an ever-increasing threat to South Africa, with the backing of the USSR and China. To add to this, we were pretty much a pariah country with the West as they considered the political system of Apartheid unpalatable, with the only thing in our favour being that we were vehemently anti-communist. Aligning ourselves to the West meant that South Africa had a positive role to play in the Cold War. As a regional powerhouse, Apartheid South Africa maintained a balance for the West against the communist threat posed by the Russian and Chinese support of our neighbours. It was this trump card that kept us from complete political isolation.
The future we faced as young South Africans was one of uncertainty and one that promised racial conflict, violence and bloodshed. The simmering civil war in South Africa and the escalating Border Wars were like sinister, dark clouds building menacingly on the horizon. As youngsters at the time, we could see no way out. The way we saw it, whichever way South Africa turned, it spelt doom; maintaining Apartheid meant war; true democracy with one-manone vote meant communism, nationalisation, economic chaos and persecution by the blacks … it was a looming apocalypse from which we could see no hope of escape.
So it was that by the end of the 1970s, white youngsters where beginning to be called up for compulsory National Military Service in ever increasing numbers. And there I was, surprise, surprise … drafted into the army for two years. In 1979, I arrived as an eighteen-year old conscript at the Army’s Corps of Signals. I had set my sights on becoming a platoon commander in the infantry and was not particularly enamoured with my posting as a Signaller. Nevertheless, I decided to make the most of it and by the end of my first year, I graduated from the Army Gymnasium in Heidelberg as a Signals Officer. However, this wasn’t without its challenges.
Surprise, surprise… we all began receiving our call up papers for compulsory Military Service.
As an English-speaking, white South African, the product of exclusive schools which were the equivalent of English public schools such as Rugby and Eton, I could hardly understand a word of Afrikaans. The South African Defence Force (SADF) was a military environment dominated by Afrikaans-speaking whites who understandably took exception to this as both English and Afrikaans were our official languages. And they certainly hadn’t forgotten their defeat by the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902, and in particular the unfortunate privations and deaths of their Boer woman and children in the concentration camps. The brainchild of Lord Kitchener, the camps were his attempt at bringing the Boer Commandos to heel by depriving them of their source of succour and resupply. Good thinking from a military perspective but unforgivable given the deaths that ensued from maladministration and overcrowding. So even with the unshakeable pride I have of my English heritage, I – along with the Afrikaners – also have an axe to grind with Kitchener, and certainly no less for the blot he has left on the copybook of British fair play.
Basic training - bayonet and camouflage training.
Basic training - learning to shoot the R1 rifle.
And so it was that while we were treated fairly, the Basic Army Training we were put through was made even more difficult for the handful of us Engelsmanne (Englishman) in our platoon. Added to this, our grasp of Afrikaans was so poor that we couldn’t understand the commands being shouted at us … all of which our Afrikaans speaking instructor conveniently mistook for insolence. So we were forever running twice the distance, doing twice the push-ups and carrying twice the weight on our backs. The silver lining of this was that we were soon amongst the fittest in the platoon.
There was many a time in the following year when involved in the real thing, that I looked back at the Basic Training our instructor put us through with gratitude. Not that we saw it that way at the time. He took us on as a bunch of unfit, ragtag civvies from all walks of life and welded us into a platoon of motivated and well-trained soldiers. It was a process that has been developed over millennia, through which countless army recruits had been through before. Our instructor, Corporal Manns, applied himself with alacrity to the age-old task. He was a tall, lean Afrikaans guy whose legs were so long his ‘army browns’ combat trousers didn’t reach the top of his boots. He hammered us day and night for three long months, and as much as we muttered dark words under our breaths, we had a grudging respect for him as he was very tough, but also very fair. More often than not, when other platoons were back in barracks at the end of the day, he would put us through the muddy obstacle course one more time, or send us over the hill … again. He taught us that we either all came back together at the same time, or not at all. He would trash our bungalow again and again when we were desperately trying to get ready for inspection before sunrise. We learned to work as a team, to be innovative and perhaps most importantly, to be resilient. To never give up … no matter what he threw at us.
Take the pain … being made to roll over rocks in the grass with full combat gear.
After this initial three months of Basic Training, those of us selected for the junior leadership course were despatched to Bivak (pronounced Beefuk), a tented camp five kilometres outside the main base. The harsh, dry, bitterly cold winter on the Highveld had the water in our army tent fire-buckets freeze over and the wind incessantly blew fine sand into our food. And every day we ran the five kilometres into the main army base for our lectures and then five kilometres back in the afternoon. However, that didn’t count as ‘exercise’ as we still did the rest of the stuff; pole PT, the 2.4 km run with full webbing, rifle and helmet, fieldcraft exercises across the veld and the like. So we became even more fit … and we also learned to ‘jippo’ …
Some of us soon realised that they seldom did a head count when it came to some of the trips into the main army base. So when the shout came to form up in squads that had everyone boiling out of the tents, we would slip round the back and slide into the long brown veld grass. Befitting their design, our ‘nutria brown’ combat fatigues blended in perfectly and we would disappear into the long grass as we leopard-crawled a couple of hundred metres up the hill. Here we would loiter in the shade of some rocks, watching the squads running at the double along the road to the main base. On their return in the late afternoon, we would appear like magic amongst everyone making for the tents. That was a long five months, where we received a combination of infantry, military communications (Signals) and leadership skills training.
It was surreal making it from the junior leadership course onto the officers’ course and being billeted in the officers’ mess. Here we had the whole nine yards, with luxury that only stopped short of our own personal batman. We each had our own room with a desk and a cupboard, had our clothes washed and ironed for us, and ate our meals in the fancy officers’ mess. We found this sudden change very awkward at first, but it wasn’t long before we fitted right in … ‘to the manor born’ as it were! And the best of it was that we could now take a leisurely walk to our lectures without having to run everywhere at the double or be harassed by screaming NCOs. We noticed with amusement that there was a subtle shift in the attitude of the NCO instructors, as they realised that if we got through the officers’ training course and successfully received our commissions, they might just end up reporting to us. Ninety of us made it through the intensive two-month course, graduating as signals officers with the gazetted rank of Second Lieutenant.
Bivak (pronounced ‘Beefuk’) tented camp with vehicle park and parade ground on the left.
Signals training in the field.
Hardly had my pampered life as an officer begun than it came to an end. I volunteered for duty in the combat zone on the ‘border’, that of Angola and Namibia (then South West Africa). Against the wishes of the United Nations and its Resolution 235, granting independence to South West Africa, South Africa had taken upon itself to extend indefinitely the role of administering the country. This administrative ‘responsibility’ had been implemented after World War II and, as a result, South Africa had become drawn into fighting a guerrilla war. These guerrillas or ‘terrorists’, were the Angolan-based SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation), insurgents that were trying to free South West Africa from the ‘colonial’ rule of South Africa. Just over a dozen Signals Officers were required for duty on the border, with the rest getting comfortable postings to army bases in South Africa. Those of us who stepped forward for border duty fell far short of the numbers required, and so they had to ‘volunteer’ additional Signals Officers to achieve the manning levels required. The irony for me was that whilst most of my fellow officers were jostling to get posted to bases in South Africa … I dreaded the prospect. The thought of spending the next fourteen months stuck in a regular army unit, with all its spit and polish and the ‘Yes SAH … no SAH!’ discipline that went with it filled me with dismay. Even though in quiet moments I found the prospect of being sent to the Operational Area daunting, I longed for the adventure, the challenge, the open spaces and wild African bushveld. I suppose I had also quietly made up my mind that I would rather fight the external threat with its communist backing, than risk having to police the evolving civil war that was gaining momentum through unrest and riots in the black South African townships.
After two weeks of glorious home leave, having completed the Officers’ course, at the end of 1979 we reported to the air force base at Waterkloof in Pretoria. Here we were to catch the three-hour flight up to the border in the Air Force’s big camouflaged Hercules C130 (known affectionately as ‘flossies’) and Transall C160 aircraft. Sitting on our kit in the hot sun alongside the runway, we had time to reflect on the fourteen months that lay ahead. Being Signals Officers it was unlikely that we would be exposed directly to combat, but we were well aware of the fact that this was a very real war, and we carried quite a responsibility as junior officers to ensure that there was adequate communications for the front line units to which we were to be assigned.
Signalmen Taylor and Saul at the RV waiting for the pickup.
Officers’ course – wargames.
Officers’ course - CO Wareham shaving … to be an “An Officer and a Gentleman”
At that stage we had no idea where we would be posted once we got to the border. I had heard some intriguing things about a guy I was at school with, who had been part of an army battalion based in the Caprivi Strip, which very few people knew much about. The story was that he had been sent on a reconnaissance mission into Angola which had gone horribly wrong and that the promised hot extraction helicopters had not materialised. Vastly outnumbered, the ensuing escape and evasion experience had so traumatised him that he lost his nerve and was repatriated back to a regular army unit in South Africa. He had lasted about three months with the battalion. The unit he had been part of was the mysterious 32 Battalion, led by white South African officers and NCOs, it was made up of black Portuguese-speaking Angolans who had been extricated from the Angolan Civil war in 1975. Their activities appeared to be obscure missions into Angola, whose border neighboured South West Africa and with whom we were officially not at war.
While the unknown element of the Battalion both intrigued and intimidated me, my intuition told me that the unconventional nature of the unit was where my destiny lay. In addition, my father and grandfather had both been fighter pilots in the two respective World Wars, so I wanted to ‘do my bit’ as it were and experience a similar challenge.
There was also something about the mystique around the Battalion that drew me irresistibly to it and I set my sights firmly on getting posted to ‘Three-Two’.