You were a troep, you were fokall. Jy’s niks. Corporal used to say to us, ‘Jy’s nie my donnerse ma nie, jy’s nie my donnerse pa nie, jy’s net ’n fokkin’ troep’ [You’re not my bloody mother, you’re not my bloody father, you’re nothing but a fuckin’ troop]. The first two weeks is just a constant breakdown. You’re nothing. You’re nobody. You’re useless. Even if it was just water for shaving. Warm water? No ways. Ha! Try no water! Everyone had to shave dry, and if there was the slightest bit of stubble – opfok. I understood why they did it, but it didn’t make it any easier. Sleep deprivation was one of the quickest ways to get to you. They would send us to bed around 10 p.m., saying we’d done a good day’s work and to get a good night’s sleep. Next thing we’d be woken at 11 p.m. and be up for the rest of the night. We had no normal sleep patterns; they broke those completely. Also, the waking up was never a gentle ‘Wakey wakey, it’s the corporal here, it’s time to get up.’ It was always abrupt, some loud noise or banging. We were constantly sleep deprived, and I’m sure medical opinion now would say what they did then was illegal. The military was a law unto itself.
– Paul, age 18
During training we had class competition between platoons. Things like bridge-or obstacle-building. We had this 20-kilometre run with a gum pole tree. It wasn’t just a pole, it was an entire tree. Our platoon was the last one to reach the place where we had to pick it up and it was the only tree left, so of course it was the largest one. Even our platoon commander joined in and helped us stagger back with this thing, but we still came in about four hours after the others. It took us an entire bloody day. There was a braai afterwards, but it was pretty much finished by the time we got back. That night, one of the big Afrikaans guys broke down and cried, and then attacked that pole with an axe.
– Paul, age 17
I have never seen such dramatic weight loss. These two strapping guys from Charlie Company were on Corporal’s Course, and each was given a rooi doibie and they went from being big guys to skin and bone in less than two weeks. Their major was an English guy, but a complete dick. The two had bunked from something, a meal or a lecture or something, and hidden under their beds. They got caught, and for punishment had to wear the doibies. Their CB punishment was brutal. They had to op die looppas, which meant they had to jog everywhere and all the time. They weren’t allowed to walk. They weren’t allowed to eat sitting down; they had to jog on the spot. Every hour on the hour they had to report to the hoofhek in full battle uniform. Even throughout the night, every hour on the hour, they had to go to the gate and get the lieutenant to sign that they had reported in, so they were not getting enough sleep. At any time, anywhere, any officer or NCO could stop them and tell them to drop and do 30 push-ups or whatever. It was inhumane. I got stuffed up in the army occasionally. I got a bossie, or a bosbus. That’s when the major or colonel drives in a Ratel or Land Rover or something and you have to run and try to keep up with the vehicle while he shouts and tells you what to do and where to go. He might tell you to run up and back down a hill and all the while he’s driving and you have to keep up. It absolutely killed you. He just kept driving and you would have to keep up. As tough as a bossie was, it still didn’t affect us the way it did those two guys. I’ve never seen physical exertion affect anyone like that. They looked like scarecrows. The worse thing was, at the end of it all, they were chucked off the course, so the whole punishment was for nothing.
– Stof, age 24
Many of us came out of different homes, different circumstances and different upbringings. We felt differently about the war. Many of the troops didn’t even want to hold a rifle, but I was very fortunate. I was very patriotic and, being in the State President’s Unit, I was very lucky because being an instructor there meant I worked with guys with strength of character. They were fighters. They could go the whole night without sleeping, or go without food. I didn’t have a problem like some of the other instructors did, with guys not wanting to fire a rifle. My troops wanted to. They wanted to protect the President. They wanted to do whatever it took to perform those duties. But there were stressful and difficult times. We had one guy who hanged himself in the shower and another who shot himself with his R4 while on guard duty. But I would rather tell you about the good times ’cause I prefer to remember those.
– Brett, age 18
It was primarily graduates who worked at Personnel Services. We were grouped together, and army life was made more bearable working alongside people who were intelligent and had some qualification or other. Unfortunately, not the same could be said of the corporals and lieutenants. We quickly learnt that if we stuck together as a group and did things together, they couldn’t do much to us. So, if we were told to run to a fence and back in less than two minutes, we ran as a group, constantly reminding each other to stick together. We’d get back in two minutes and five seconds and be told to run again. This time we ran it in two minutes and ten seconds. Do it again. We took longer each time. Do it again. And so on, until we were all running it in three minutes. What could they do? We acted as a single unit. However, I recall this one time that even sticking together didn’t help. While we were north of Pretoria doing bush exercises near Hammanskraal, there was a rail strike, so they couldn’t get food to us. We were given what they had, tinned pickled fish, which after a while got a bit much. One afternoon we were told to report to the parade ground immediately. We decided that we weren’t going to comply without having decent food for dinner first. So we sent our Bungalow Bill, who was pretty brave to do this, to tell the corporal that we weren’t moving until we got some proper food. Next thing, the captain comes stomping down the path, yelling, ‘This is not a fucking trade union movement! This is the army!’ It was at this point that we realised that we had probably pushed matters a little too far, and that the captain and his staff really had the power, and could effectively do anything with us. Result: we got up smartly and marched to the parade ground. Later we had to put on a show as part of a competition, and our platoon won, even though we made some fun of the captain. I think he secretly admired how we stuck together.
– Michael, age 21
Because our tent was so far away from everyone else in the camp, and because we were hung-over, we didn’t hear the Sunday morning reveille and missed church parade. The RSM came into our tent and screamed at us because we were late. As punishment he made us rake the parade ground. Not with a normal rake, but with a small one. It was so hot raking this bloody parade ground under the blazing sun and with a hangover. But we still managed to have fun and play around. We feng-shuied parts of that damn parade ground. I doubt any general had a little feng shui thingy on his desk, so I don’t think that’s where the little rake came from. We managed to enjoy ourselves. We played a lot, in a lot of places. They did try to break our spirit, but I think because we didn’t have the seriousness of war to deal with and no running or push-ups and such, they could only mess us around with inspection and stuff like raking the parade ground. But we stayed strong for each other. The Sisterhood survived for the entire two years and some years after. It was an incredible bond. I can easily say that I have never experienced such strong friendships like the ones I had in the army.
– Rick, age 18
If you ask any guy who played rugby in the army, they’ll tell you they were well looked after. If you played rugby, you were a god. Our colonel was rugby-befok. The very first day I arrived at the base, he said he wasn’t interested in soldiers, he was only interested in rugby players, and if you were a rugby player, you were a natural leader. Rugby was life and death, the be-all and end-all of everything. They put all the rugby players in the same bungalow. We lived in rooms, five guys to a room, in a long bungalow with a room at the head for someone with rank. A corporal or someone had to sleep there every night to make sure we behaved ourselves. There was a standard command when someone with rank entered the bungalow and wanted everyone’s attention, to issue orders, to report something or before we were marched somewhere. He would shout, ‘Almal in die gang!’ [Everyone in the passage!] Because of the pronunciation of almal, it sounded just like they were calling my surname, Hummel. So we all had this thing going, when they shouted, ‘Almal in die gang!’ Instead of everyone coming out of their room, only I would go out, and I’d say ‘Hummel hier.’ Everyone else just remained in their rooms, doing whatever they were doing. It really pissed them off! I think they were a bit nervous of us ’cause we were all rugby players, all big guys and all older than the usual 18-year-old recruit.
It really annoyed this one 17-year-old corporal, who hated me, probably because of that little trick, but also because I was English. I was one of only three guys out of 50 who were English. He would mess me around and instruct me to run up hills with the biggest rock and so on. We had this big rugby match coming up, and a few days before it, he told me to pick up this huge rock and run around with it. I picked it up and threw it down at his feet and told him that if I went to the colonel and told him he had fucked me up just before Saturday’s big game, who did he think would be in the shit? I took a chance, but he did back off after that.
So on the one hand they did take care of you, but there was this one time our rugby-obsessed colonel took us to Potch to play in the SADF Rugby Week. It was a huge rugby event at the Olen Park Stadium, and every unit in the country sent a team. There must have been about 500 rugby players in the tournament. It was a knockout competition. We got through to the semi-finals and were up against Free State Command. We blew our first-half lead as André Joubert slotted six penalties in the last few minutes of the second half to beat us. It was hard, especially after we had been in control of the game till then. Now our colonel’s life’s dream was to win this SADF Rugby Week, and he wanted his little boys in Oudtshoorn to take out the big guns and beat units from Northern Transvaal, Free State Command and whatever. I thought we had done very well to get that far in the tournament, but we were out now. After our loss, we went back to the change rooms and the colonel comes in. He was apoplectic and going berserk; he was screaming and going absolutely mad. At the end of the ranting and raving, he locked us in the change room. We had left the field at about five o’clock, and only at about ten that night did someone realise that 21 guys were missing and they came looking for us. We had sat there for five hours with nothing to eat or drink. In those days there were no cellphones or anything, so we had to just sit until someone from the function realised where we were. Our colonel would have left us there the whole night. It shows how passionate he was about rugby.
– Stof, age 24
I was kla-ed on for KFC. We were at Maselspoort, a training ground about 20 kays from base, and four of us asked the OC for permission to run back rather than go with everyone else, as we were in training for the Comrades Marathon. We ran back in full kit, and when we got back the mess hall had closed and we were a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y starving. There was nowhere to get food on the base, but there was a KFC outlet not far away. We were not supposed to leave the base, because there was a curfew, but a few of us decided to scale the wall and go and buy Kentucky Fried Chicken. We did that, ate it, and afterwards we went back to our respective bungalows. Next thing the commandant came in and shouted, ‘Walland, you cunt! Don’t lie to me. Where have you been?’ I knew that no one had seen us scale the wall, but what had happened was that one of the guys had split on me and told the commandant that I was involved. All I was trying to do was get food for us hungry guys. There was no sympathy, because we had decided to run back off our own bat. They removed the belt from my trousers and the shoelaces from my boots, and they locked me in the kas. I’d never been in a cell before. It is not somewhere you wanna be. There was one tiny barred window too high up to see out of. It was so bleak and I spent a horrible night. I was told I had committed a serious offence and I was being kla-ed aan and would be sent to DB in Pretoria after a trial in the morning. I was absolutely devastated. My OC, who despite having a very English name couldn’t and wouldn’t speak a word of English, liked me for some reason, and he pleaded my case before we were tried. He suggested hard labour rather than DB. I was stripped of rank, but at least I didn’t get a record. All for scaling a wall to get Kentucky Fried Chicken.
– John, age 18
As religious objectors in prison, we were never really ill-treated as such. There were times when it was tough, but the hardship was mainly emotional, mental. They used to bolt our doors closed in the evenings, and all we had for a toilet was this little potty. There were three of us, all big guys, over six foot two. And Steve had the longest arms I’ve ever seen. He could reach through the bars above the door and slide open the bolt. Around two in the morning he would open our cell door. Then we would let everybody else out and all go to the toilet. One night, before I could get back to my cell, the guard came round with his Rottweilers. I flattened myself against the bathroom wall in terror. I think the only reason the dogs didn’t smell me was because the guard was smoking.
– Alan, age 17