Chapter 24: Owamboland
“When you were about seven years old,” I said to Jules, as we drove east out of Etosha, “I was a soldier up here. Certainly not the best soldier, and not even in uniform. In fact, I wore an oil-spattered khaki overall most of the time and did as little as possible.”
She raised an interested eyebrow, so I took her back more than 30 years to the early seventies …
“Just as the rainy season began in Owamboland, the Dakota transport plane dropped us near the German bakery town of Grootfontein. We’ll be there tomorrow.
“I arrived like a scrubbed little altar boy. Within a week I had become Shrek. I didn’t shave, didn’t make my bed, didn’t give a damn. No one really noticed.
“They had tried to make me an army officer. Despite the fact that I hadn’t distinguished myself at high school. Tie that up with ‘poor sportsman’ and the reality that the only war I liked was up there on the movie screen, and you had yourself a National Service loser, for sure.”
“I’ve always thought you were more of a movie fan than a Captain Caprivi,” said Jules.
“Teenage years, who needs ’em?” I replied. “Back then, my ‘Sunshine Corner’ entry would have read: ‘White Anglo-Afrikaans teenager. Plays good pool until the third double. Writes up in his room to escape the world of pimples, maths and Abba. Looking for a girl. Looking for a life. Is there anyone out there?’ Not great officer material for any army.”
“Couldn’t you just refuse?”
“Well, you did have a choice. You could always go to jail for six years instead. But that would have been a bit of a jolt for a privileged white boy like me. So I thought hey, let me go for the lesser of two weevils and lurk in a military store for nine months. Preferably somewhere near the back where they stack the blankets.”
“Why didn’t you just go overseas?”
“Short answer? I didn’t have the confidence,” I replied, as we drove through Owambo country.
“My dad was a decorated member of a bomber corps in World War II. He fought Hitler, he was motivated. He returned a war hero. I didn’t feel much like a war hero. I couldn’t get my head around the Total Onslaught propaganda. What was that? Like, another bad hair day down at Pooh Corner? Rabbit thinks Kanga’s a spy. Piglet’s shadow looks like the Giant Woozel. Lookout, here comes Tigger. Join the army. Fight blacks and Russians. Why?
“In fact, if I were to shoot anyone with an assault rifle, it would probably have been someone white and closer to my everyday life at boarding school. Like that fat bully from the far north who took two years of my high school and turned them into a nightmare, just because he could. I’d have been made Marksman No 1 on the firing range if that bastard’s face had been on the target. Then you would have seen me go. Oh yes, please.”
Intrigued, my wife urged me to tell her more about my army daze up here in northern Namibia.
“We have to backtrack to South Africa for that, to the day my Ma drove me out to the little town of Heidelberg, south of Johannesburg, where a kindly-looking corporal pointed out ‘my flat’ to us, like an estate agent on show day.”
Ma, ever the trusting soul, was delirious with joy that her son would be accommodated in such smart quarters. I did, however, see the fellow smirk behind his hand. I knew something nasty was afoot. The minute she drove off in her V-6, thinking happy thoughts about her boy in browns, the corporal turned to me and said:
“Nice flat, hey? See how much you like it by next week.”
My corporal was hard to love. But not as hard as that flat. At first I called it Luxury. Six weeks later its name had become Hell Hole. You had to keep the place reflector-shining, so you could constantly see your sad little self on the spotless floor. You couldn’t sleep on the bed because it had to be ironed square every night for inspection. You had to put milk cartons into socks to square them off. Was there nothing round in this man’s army?
My privileged white boy status meant little here. Damn, I even had to learn to iron my own clothes.
Every night, we worked into the small hours chasing dirt from our flats. Sometimes it was real dirt, sometimes it was the dirt that lurked purely in the minds of the inspecting officers. But dirt it was. And slowly, our little band of do-nothings began to form. The Sixteen Slackers. The kind of guys you’d probably find in AA meetings, Smokenders gatherings, Weigh-Less conventions and the back-benches of Parliament.
Three months crept by in slow seconds. I learnt to march in step, leopard-crawl up to my dreaded flat, turn corridor floors into mirrors with my ass, carry huge logs about like on-board luggage and grow really intimate with my FN rifle.
I ate up the entire smorgasbord of seventies military service: received a Dear John letter in the first month, trimmed down to nearly nothing, learnt a whole new range of curses, became a whizz at keeping boots shiny and then made the near-fatal mistake of singing Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock at a Delta company braai with an impromptu group called The Cape Town Sonofabitch Boys Blues Band.
Somehow, we were living American lives in South Africa. We fell in with US culture, clothing and music. We listened to what our American counterparts were saying over in Vietnam, where they, too, were “winning the war”. We couldn’t even come up with our own slang. Instead, we called our enemy “gooks” and, just like the Yanks, in the course of running around in the bush we mostly shot ourselves.
My fascination with the events on a farm across the world – where Jimi Hendrix bit his guitar and Joe Cocker was unleashed on the world – brought me the unwelcome attentions of a rotund staff sergeant, who liked to shout a lot. He was like Danny de Vito without the cute bits.
One day under a tree, Staff Doughnut read out some typed-up orders:
“Who wants to fail this course now? Who wants to spend the rest of his army days in a border camp?”
My friends and I, The Slackers, went for it. I punched my hand up into the air, where it became entangled in a thorny branch. Staff Doughnut glared at me, called me kaksleg and sent me “out of the bus”.
And so it was that 16 Army College dropouts were despatched by military airplane to Grootfontein, a greasy smudge of a supply depot in the Big Sand.
They called us Bokkies. That’s because we wore brass Springboks on our green berets, which meant we were owned by the infantry. Body, soul and hair, which they delighted in shaving short.
We stepped off the plane into a mad dance of heatwaves that rose from the ’strip. A skinny little supply driver called Ace arrived to pick us up. He wore a Ban the Bomb T-shirt, aviator shades and his hair curled down over his ears.
Ace honked the horn of his Bedford truck.
“Why are you guys formed up and at attention? There’s no rank here, only me. Hop in, let’s take you home.” Good old Ace. The Schumacher of his day.
We chugged into Fort Grootfontein in the mid-afternoon. Unshaven louts in overalls guarded the gates, glowering down from the watchtowers, their T-shirts tie-dyed and torn. There was a general air of Lost Patrol in this camp. At first, we were frightened. Then we came to love it. It was something like Opuwo for honkies.
The obliging Ace led us to four vacant tents and then fell to the ground laughing when one of us asked about PT schedules.
I shared a stretch of tatty green army issue canvas with three of my crew. Maurice: a loveable Afrikaner lady-killer with a pencil-line moustache and the logic of Daffy Duck. Benny the Deal Man. Jimmy: my mate from Cape Town. And me, still slightly worried about the PT shedules.
I soon learnt, however, that keeping fit in Grootfontein meant a very slow and amiable slouch across the parade strip to the open, multiplex john with one’s buddies every morning. Twenty plastic thrones were laid out, ten on each side, facing each other and surrounded by a wall of flimsy hessian that flapped in the breeze. I was constipated for a week before I gave in, gathered some interested parties and made a sortie to the communal latrine.
At dinnertime, everyone stormed the mess tent and grabbed a tray of army grub and a seat at a fold-up metal table. All tables were full, except for one. That was reserved for Mal Smit, a South Wester who was very scary when you first met him.
Mal Smit (Jacky Hammer to his few friends) was a one-man Wrestlemania team covered in machine grease. Even his lidded eyes were a kind of muddy brown.
This jovial juggernaut had before him two massive plates of beef stew, a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Lemon Twist. His only dinner companion was his jackhammer, which lay on the table like the Hammer of Thor itself, fresh from its display case in Asgard.
But that was where his resemblance to the Norse god of thunder ended. Mal Smit growled at his food, spat gristle on the floor and messed all over the table. As he ate, he uttered grunts of contentment and stroked his jackhammer like a wife. No one joined him, censured him or teased him. Also, no one spoke to him except for Ace, who seemed to have great status among the hard-bitten South West Africans in the camp.
Ace the Accidental Hero. Who could flip a vehicle faster than you could say rinderpest, an ability that earned him Big Kahuna status with the drivers, most of whom had set themselves the goal of destroying their vehicles on the murderous white highway to the northern camps that we supplied each day.
To walk away from the blazing wreck was, to them, a great and anarchistic thing to do. The locals didn’t love us much. But they were all very small potatoes compared to Ace from Cape Town, who had smashed two Bedfords so far and looked very capable of taking out another five before clear-out time at the end of the year. And here’s the kicker: Ace never meant to. He would have loved nothing better than to complete a convoy unscathed. But his destiny was to become an icon to the Gobabis Gang.
We 16 disgraced infantrymen then met our new mentor, Sergeant Major Mole. Mole was a World War II relic, a diminutive man with spectacles so strong they could have shamed the Hubble Telescope. His rheumy old eyes hid like darting pinpricks behind the glasses.
Mole was ancient. He had a raspy voice like a diesel engine. He was an infantryman down to his puttees. He had fought in Tobruk, he had faced Rommel’s Desert Rats in the war theatres of North Africa with his Lee Enfield rifle and his funny tin helmet and now, for his sins, he was the S’ar Major of Camp Loopy.
“My Bokkies are here!” he exulted when he saw my mates and me milling around the mess tent after dinner. “At last! Some real soldiers!”
Oh shame. Little did he know ...
The Major in charge of the camp was deaf as a post. He wore what looked like a set of grapes hanging from his left ear – an old-fashioned hearing aid. We used to do the old street trick of whispering to him, having him turn the hearing aid up and then shouting down his ear.
And then there was Corporal Kat. He hated infantrymen in any form. He was the kingpin of the camp. Sorry for us.
Within days of being there, we had all found ourselves little niches in the camp. Like mice hiding away from Corporal Kat.
Maurice, for instance, slid into the kitchen detail and specialised in fry-ups for a fee. Benny became the storeman, whence he despatched blankets, military equipment and essential supplies with the shrewdness of a Shylock.
Jimmy and I teamed up and convinced the transport lieutenant he needed two infantrymen to run the spare tyre department.
And whenever any of us needed to break out of camp, we were allowed to escort convoys laden with provender to scattered SADF camps up north. After all, that was really why we were there: as security guards for the drivers on the Great White Highway.
On Friday nights at Grootfontein Supply Depot you wrote yourself a weekend pass and a friend in the orderly’s office would stamp it and send you on your merry way.
Jimmy and I found ourselves on the southbound highway to Windhoek in the dead of night with no moon to guide us, only a tiny tape player next to us on the ground, grinding out James Taylor hits.
Presently, a family from Tsumeb would pick us up in a very large, shark-like Chevrolet. Ma would holler from the front seat:
“Stay awake, manne. Keep an eye out for the kudu.”
That’s it. We were nothing but uniformed kudu-spotters. Racoon-eyed, fed to the gills with sweet, strong coffee and biltong, we would stare out at the road, fearing immediate expulsion into the dark night if we nodded off.
The family would play Jim Reeves on the eight-track tape. Jim Reeves, whose voice could put a crazed amphetamine addict to sleep in three bars. A difficult journey for the kudu-lookouts indeed.
When we finally arrived in Windhoek, we checked into Hotel Romeo, the SWA Command tent camp, and wandered about town trying to accost German girls who had far better things to do with their time. After a movie, too much beer in the tent and a few slaps in the face, we found ourselves back in Grootfontein on Sunday night. A totally wasted exercise.
So we started hanging around the Meteor Hotel in Grootfontein, where we found equally grotesque types to party with. And it was better.
Everything we’d learnt in boot camp dissolved in a pond of lager tins and plain old shirking. Every ounce of energy we’d put into running mini-marathons over hills, marching till the sun drooped over the Heidelberg water tower, polishing each item of army kit until it virtually disappeared, now went into an insane competition to see who could expend the least energy each day. This was not a place for heroes.
“I’m bored with this story,” I told my silent and slightly aghast wife as we drove towards the mining town of Tsumeb more than 30 years later. “Let’s go hunt down a beer.”