We had to guard this ammunition dump outside Potchefstroom, and a big deal was made of the fact that you weren’t supposed to sleep on guard duty. We put a trip wire across the road a few kilometres away from where we were, in case the captain drove up to check on us. If he did, his car would trip the wire, which had cans attached to it, and the guy who was manning the wire would alert us and we’d be awake and paraat by the time he reached us. So we all had a good sleep while on duty. The big thing was to gyppo. Everything was about that. How do you get out of things? What can you do to get out of things? How can you make things easier for yourself?
I looked at all the sports that were available during Basics and I joined the long-distance running team. I worked out that the long-distance circuit was about five kilometres, so I ran it once and worked out my time, and then for the rest of Basics I ran out with the others and then ducked off. We ran from Ladysmith base down to the river, where I would duck off and go and sleep. I calculated the time I was expected back, set my alarm for the right time to wake up, and promptly fell asleep. It got me out of a lot of running and effort and nonsense.
– Martin, age 23
I fell asleep while we were doing camouflage training. They just never found me. I must have woken up in the bush two hours later. I got away with it by saying it wasn’t my fault that they couldn’t find me – I’d listened and applied what they told me. I had slapped on my Black Beauty, this thick horrible cammo paint that came in communal tubs, or, if you were lucky, you got your own tube. I’d made the stripes run from top left to bottom right, because that’s the way that people tend to look for things. If you are looking for something in the bush, you must look right to left because that’s an abnormal movement. Anyway, I was in my browns, I’d picked straw, leaves and grass, and stuck them in my hat and web belt. They walked and drove around but couldn’t find me in the long grass. Thank God they didn’t drive one of those Samils over me.
– Paul, age 18
I was the Sports Officer and my duties for the entire week could be done in three quarters of an hour. All I had to do was type up a Sports Order and give it to the Captain of the Sports Office. It told him who was playing what. That was it, the sum total of my job. I think I had the best second year in the army of any man alive. No work (well, less than an hour a week), playing sports, doing what I loved and getting paid for it! But being Sports Officer still meant that I was a National Serviceman, and when we went away on a sports tour a PF guy always had to accompany us. This was an official standing order: any touring side had to have a PF member in charge. National Servicemen weren’t permitted to escort other National Servicemen out and off base. They didn’t trust them out on their own, and rightly so. We were about to leave for a cricket trip to Cape Town when the PF captain who was to supervise us had to pull out at the last minute because his wife was ill. Amazingly, the captain put me and another lieutie in charge of the group, and off we went to Youngsfield Air Force Base for seven days to play the three or four games against Stellenbosch, Boland and whomever else he had organised. Fifteen guys in a big army bus and we hit Cape Town. We had our own driver and own army bus. It was great. That bus was parked at Clifton beach for four of those seven days! It was also waiting outside nightclubs in the early hours of the morning. We had such a good time and played exactly two games. There was a little bit of trouble, though. One guy, a mad Natal farm boy, came out of a club in Rondebosch, very pissed, and walked up to a policeman and pointed at his SAP badge and told him it stood for Soek Altyd Poes [Always looking for poes] and Poes Altyd Skaars [Poes always scarce]. The policeman grabbed him and locked him up for the night in the cells for drunk and disorderly behaviour. Fortunately, it didn’t get back to base. I would have been in huge shit.
– Stof, age 24
The State President’s Guard’s uniforms were fantastic. For guard duty at the President’s house, the opening of Parliament and ceremonies, et cetera, we would wear a grey formal uniform with gold and brass trims, and a special helmet. The weapon was an old .303 which could only fire blanks. Some of us were selected to perform in a special drill squad. In this squad we wore a green and gold uniform with a hackle, a black ostrich plume on the peak. This squad went through serious drilling and training, sometimes standing in the rain all night and not being allowed to move, in order to perform shows in front of visiting dignitaries and at various state functions. We probably looked like a drum majorette squad, only with rifles and bayonets. This one night we were in green and gold at the Pretoria Show, and instead of getting back on the bus, two of us sneaked off. I was with a chaplain’s son, and he was really the wild one! We met these two girls and went on all the rides. There we were, in full State President’s Guard uniform, going on the roller coaster. At that time it was against the law to wear this particular military uniform on civvy street. If you wore a combination of browns, cammo, or any military uniform, you could be arrested. But what the hell? We went off to Jacqueline’s, an absolute classic nightclub in Pretoria. I still had my cap on, with the big ostrich plume. We got into several fights with the guys there. All the fights were about girls. We thought we were heroes. We caught a lift out of town to the base, and then we had to try to sneak into Voortrekkerhoogte; there’s electrical fencing, lots of guards, everything. We found a place where there was a bit of a gap under the fence. So we took off our uniforms to keep them clean, and, dressed only in our underpants, we dug a hole under the fence big enough for us to get through. We still had to get past the guards. There was none of that ‘stop, who goes there?’ stuff then, only trigger-happy roofies on guard duty. It was very exciting, but also very frightening.
– Brett, age 18
It was always about manipulating the system – how to gyppo. Everyone did it. What varied was the degree of success. Some guys managed to gyppo and score an afternoon nap or extra food or avoid guard duty, something small like that. I outsmarted the system and scored a four-month-long beach holiday. I was at Port Elizabeth Air Force Base on behalf of Uniform, the army’s in-house newspaper, and was actually walking to the Flossie that would take me back to HQ in Pretoria when a guy asked me if I was there to cover the story on the paddle-skiers. Interested in anything that would keep me out of the office, I said I was. But when I went to speak to the guy about the story, he thought I was there for the job of accompanying and reporting on the paddle-skiers’ trip around South Africa’s coast. How could I turn that down? I was one of five people who acted as the support group to the two paddle-skiers. They had sold their idea of paddling South Africa’s entire coastline from Alexander Bay to Kosi Bay to the army under the pretence of breaking the open-water paddling record. I doubt such a record even existed. Their stated intention was that it would be good press, promote a healthy lifestyle and bring glowing commendations to the military. Their hidden intention was to spend their National Service doing something they loved. The army bought it, and we spent four months driving along the coastline to meet up with the paddle-skiers on hundreds of different beaches.
We were allowed into areas that were off-limits to the general public: missile-testing sites with pristine beaches littered with massive cowrie shells, beaches that no one ever visited. It was paradise on earth. We dived, snorkelled, fished, swam and gorged on freshly caught crayfish. We grew our hair. We were tanned and fit and having a helluva lot of fun. We pooled our S&T and bought booze. I was filing stories to the newspapers and radio stations every day, and as our trip progressed and became more widely known, the reception committees grew larger. At Lambert’s Bay there was a mayoral reception and they were so proud to serve us crayfish. We’d been eating crayfish for days, and what we really wanted was red meat. That’s how spoilt we were. I remember that we could also eat free at the Spur, as they were one of the sponsors. I knew their menu backwards. Our trip had no hard and fast deadline; as long as they kept paddling and I kept filing stories, we were legitimately beating the system. We stayed on in Knysna for days. There was no set schedule. I remember filing a story about whales surfacing next to the paddle-skiers near the Storms River mouth, and it made the front page of the Sunday Star. I was putting my journalism degree to good use.
Once we stopped at a very secluded, densely wooded beach and put up the orange flags so the paddle-skiers could see us. When they pulled in, we hauled their double ski out of the sea and propped it, along with the spare ski, against a tree where we thought they wouldn’t be found, and headed back to where we were staying. The next day was very windy and the guys said it was pointless trying to paddle, so we took a drive and heard on an East Coast Radio news bulletin that the two paddle-skiers were missing. Someone had found the paddle-skis and reported the paddlers missing. It was very weird hearing that on the radio. How could anyone think they were missing if they found the skis ashore? Idiots. We had to call the media and tell them that the paddle-skiers were fine. The army was not amused, and the Officer Commanding who was in charge of us got into serious shit.
I’ll never forget the one hot morning we were lying in the shallows, with the warm waves lapping against us, and behind us lay a beautiful forest. It was paradise. There was no one around for miles, and I felt like I was in a Mainstay commercial. I looked at my watch. It was 10 a.m. I knew that back at HQ the troeps were on the hot, dusty parade ground being yelled at by a corporal, and there I was, lying in the warm sea. The funny thing was that if someone had come to me at that moment and told me I could leave the army but I had to go right then, I would have gone in an instant. I just hated being in the army so much. I would leave, even though I had the opportunity of months of doing nothing other than visiting pristine beaches, drinking and eating crayfish and touring around the coastline.
By the time we reached Port Elizabeth, the paddle-skiers’ home town, there was a flotilla of small craft to welcome us. It was unbelievable; thousands of people were there. At first we thought it was just fortuitous that our arrival coincided with some large event, but we discovered that they were all there to welcome our paddle-skiers!
The end was a bit of an anti-climax. The finish was not far from the Mozambique border, and for security reasons they didn’t want to let any of the support crew in. I said that as the journalist I had to be there. They escorted me in with 4x4s, and we were in a small inlet as the two guys paddled in. They pulled their paddle-ski up, looked around, and one of them said, ‘Okay, let’s go home.’
There is not a beach in South Africa that I haven’t been to, courtesy of the Defence Force, and I’m sure my four-month-long gyppo was one of the longest. It sure beat merely gyppoing an afternoon nap.
– David, age 22
We had this surprise evaluation on our medical equipment and gear. This guy looks inside our ambulance. There are four bunks. On one bunk I had a surfboard and on another a dive kit. He was not impressed and gave me ten minutes to sort it out. I carried a dive kit with me ’cause my sergeant major was a diver and he could organise dives in the prohibited military area at Saldanha. They were very strict about who could dive and what you could bring out of the sea, but we managed to get permission to dive and bring out some crayfish. We wanted them for the dinner we were hosting for the evaluators that evening. We were hoping to impress them with a little crayfish cocktail. I pulled out a crayfish almost the length of a man’s torso, so they got their crayfish and we passed our evaluation.
– Dave, age 19
We didn’t grow dagga on the Border, but we used to sell it. You had to be careful. What we’d do was open up the bottom flap of a cardboard box of Omo – you know the side that is glued down – so that it didn’t show. You then poured out the soap powder and filled it with dagga which had been mulled so fine – all the pips removed and so on – so that if they X-rayed it, nothing would show up. Then you carefully glued the bottom closed again. That’s how we took kilos of dagga back up to the Border. Up there, you could sell a matchbox full for R10. That was a lot of money in the early eighties. We sold mainly to the SACC.
– Anthony, age 18
I swear if someone went and dug around the gardens in Voortrekkerhoogte they would still find all the literature we buried there. We were not allowed any literature apart from the Bible. So we used to sneak our Bible study books, magazines and The Watchtower in. We buried stuff all over the place for our Bible study meetings. We always knew when there was going to be a search; it’s amazing how quickly information travels in a prison. We used to double-wrap our literature in two plastic bags, tie it tightly and then submerge it in our washing. We had buckets to wash our clothes in and a plunger – you know those toilet plungers? And we simply dropped the plastic bags into the soapy water. When the guards came in, there we were, just plunging away, doing our washing as they searched our cells. They never once found the stuff! All of us agreed that although it was skeef to smuggle literature in, it was justifiable. Smuggling out letters was different; that was a grey area. Some thought it was crossing the line. We were only allowed to write one letter per week, and the Military Police searched us for letters going out to our loved ones. There was this one guy, Jan, who just knew how to work the system. He was a skeef guy, Jan. That meant he went against the rules. Jan was a big guy, and he had this huge sombrero. No problem to him, he would joke and talk with the guards while they searched him, and all the time he had letters lying on top, on the rim of his sombrero!
– Alan, age 17
I had a military licence to drive a Unimog, a Land Rover and a Bedford, but no civvy licence for a car. A friend of mine was taking his old bombed-out Fiat to the testing station to get his licence. I said I’d go with him for moral support, but I had no intention whatsoever of getting my civilian driving licence. This woman, one of the testers at the grounds who looked old enough to be my mother, but who was probably under 30, comes up and says, ‘Jirra, julle lyk pragtig in julle uniforms’ [Jesus, you look beautiful in your uniforms]. We did look good in our maroon berets, but maybe it was because her husband was in the military and she was obviously fond of people in uniform. My friend got his licence and we said cheers and started to leave when she asked me if I wasn’t going to get mine as well. I told her I didn’t have a learner’s licence and she said it wasn’t a problem; she could sort it all out for me and I could do my tests all in one day. I sat and answered these questions, with her guiding me through them. Then she says, ‘Het jy ’n kar hierso?’ [Do you have a car here?] She said I would have been able to use hers, except that it had gone in for a service. I asked my friend if I could use his Fiat, which I was not familiar with at all. I knew there was a clutch and where the gears were and such, but not a great deal else. So there she is sitting next to me as I manage to pull off carefully in first and cross some railway lines. I’d only had my learner’s for a few minutes, and before I can even change out of first gear, she says, ‘C’mon! Send it! Second gear! Let’s go!’ I got my learner’s and driver’s in less than an hour. I’ll never forget it.
– John, age 18
Roofs worked long hours. When they were manning equipment, we didn’t want to have to sit and supervise them the whole time. However, we were supposed to be watching them and making sure they didn’t fall asleep. So, we wound yellow telex tape around their heads, stapled it tight, ran it to the next guy’s head, did the same, and so on. If one guy fell asleep, his head would fall forward or backward and the tape would snap. We could then go off and relax – go to the bar or play table tennis or whatever. We looked for horrible things to do to roofs. It’s what you did, because everyone was horrible to you.
– Andy, age 18