One of the most exciting days of my life was when we were hoping to go home for Christmas. I hadn’t been home since January. Our sergeant wouldn’t tell us if we had pass or not. We were in Oshakati driving southwards in Casspirs, and we didn’t know if we were going home or to Grootfontein, where we could be sent all over the place. There’s a point on the road where you either turn off to Ondangwa, to the air force base where we fly home from, or keep going to Grootfontein. The suspense was unbelievable. The intersection came up, and the driver continued on to the Grootfontein road, then laughed and pulled it back onto the Ondangwa road. This meant my first leave of seven days, and it was to be my only leave in two years. Maybe that’s why they left me alone and I never got called up for camps or anything. I still get goosebumps when I remember the excitement of going home.
– Andy, age 18
You flew up from and back to the States on this white aircraft called the Rum Run, so called because it flew up all the booze. It was also called the Milk Run, because of the colour of the aircraft – or maybe it was only the dominee who called it that. You went up to Ondangwa for three months and got on the Rum Run to fly home only once your release, another aircraft mechanic, arrived. He was your replacement. Usually when he arrived, there was a two-day handover and then off you went. I was missing my wife so much and couldn’t wait to get back. This specific Thursday I was on the tarmac waiting and my release didn’t get off the aircraft. I called and spoke to the sergeant major, and asked where was this guy who was supposed to be relieving me? Why wasn’t he on the plane? He said he wouldn’t be coming, because he had committed suicide. I waited an extra two weeks until the next guy arrived.
– Tallies, age 23
Eenhana was classified as a red base, because it was attacked frequently. It was also the place where my letters and packages from home became legendary. I had a girlfriend who used to write me three letters a day. We hadn’t had mail for six weeks, so you can imagine how much post I got when it finally came in on a Dak. They used to bundle the letters and call your name and toss you the bundle. Lots of guys got nothing – ever. I got 10 or 15 bundles and two huge packages from my mom. Inside she’d packed Marie biscuits, Romany Creams, sweets, cartons and cartons of Camel Plain cigarettes, for my own use and for bartering, and my personal favourite, Southern Comfort. My mom could have worked for MI6. She’d decant the alcohol into old Jik plastic containers. She’d also send Aromat, which was a necessity to improve skrapnel (corned beef and onion in gravy). We cooked our tins of skrapnel on an Esbit stove. This was metal and shaped like a packet of cigarettes. It had two flaps that you pulled up; you put an Esbit, which looked like a big white pill, in the middle, lit it and heated up the tin. The Esbit was also known as a PB Sweet. Legend had it that some crazy Dutchmen used to give the plaaslike bevolking these toxic white tables instead of the orange glucose sweets in our rat packs, which we usually gave to village kids. The glucose sweets were just as gross, as far as I was concerned. So the name, PB Sweet, stuck.
My girlfriend had numbered all the letters, so that I could read them in the order she’d written them, and sprayed some with perfume. That was a big thing to get: perfumed letters. The guys never teased me, ’cause so many of them got nothing, no letters or packages. I would go down into our tent – the tents at Eenhana were actually pitched under the surface of the ground, with only the roof sticking out and lots of sandbags stacked around the edges – and lie on my bed and read them. Guys would come and sit by my bed, desperate for news about anything back home. I read them excerpts from my letters – not the personal stuff, just the general news. Once I was reading about the snow that had fallen over Joburg in September and there was a picture of my girlfriend standing outside the Carlton Centre in the snow. I had mopane flies buzzing around my face and it must have been about 40 degrees, but just reading about how cold it was and looking at that picture made me feel cooler.
– Clint, age 18
It was the saddest day of my life. She was my school girlfriend and we had been going out since I was in Standard 8. She hurt me, man. I will be honest and say she did hurt me. I loved her. She was in matric and I’d been on the Border doing my army for six months. Women are very clever. She knew that a mate of mine, whom she was now seeing, was coming up to the Border and I’d find out, from him or somehow. So just before he got there, she wrote me a Dear John letter. I’ll never forget the way it started; she wrote: ‘This is very hard for me to say …’ and she wrote some little poem, lyrics or some shit from a Lionel Ritchie song. I was devastated, heartbroken. I thought I was going to die. We were all guys up there, so you couldn’t cry. This gay chef came up to me and put his arm around my shoulders and said I should go on my own and cry. But you don’t, you’re too proud. You keep everything in. I got totally drunk. I never picked up a pen and wrote back. I never contacted her again.
– Anthony, age 18
We were resting up in a large temporary base after chasing the terrs for a change. Just near where I was lying there was this little helicopter, an Alouette. Flight Sergeant Soutie was there. I’ll never forget him as long as I live. He had a handlebar moustache that looked like Harley-Davidson handlebars. I was lying in the shade of the helicopter and he said to me, ‘Sargie, are you all right?’ I was exhausted. We had been chasing terrs for days. I hadn’t seen clean water, a bed or a razor for two weeks. But I said to him, ‘Flight, I’m fine, I’m just missing home.’ He said, ‘Ja, I can see that. Wanna talk to your folks?’ Of course I said yes, I would love to talk to them, thinking he was pulling the piss. He said, ‘Come.’ We get into the helicopter. He switches on the radio and gets onto Radiospoor in Walvis Bay. This woman with the sexiest voice I’d ever heard comes on. It was soft. Flight asks for my home telephone number and we get connected. And there, in the middle of the Operational Area, I hear my mom’s voice and I say, ‘Mom.’ I just started to cry. I spoke with my dad too, and I realised nothing else mattered, everything became irrelevant. I was talking to the two most important people in my life. Flight Sergeant Soutie had made that possible for me.
– Ric, age 18
It was very easy to hitch-hike in those days, and especially if you were in uniform. People picked you up very quickly. I think people also stopped if you had a maroon beret because they wanted to talk about your experiences as a Parabat. This one old guy and his wife must have been moving home, ’cause he had everything but the kitchen sink in his car. They stopped for me and somehow I managed to squeeze in. Near Cradock there were always speed traps and, sure enough, this poor guy got caught. Three times. And three times he gave different excuses. His wife was pregnant, I had to get back to camp and so on, but it didn’t work and he got fined three times. I never forgot it because he was not even supposed to be on that road. He had detoured from his intended destination of Cape Town to drop me off in PE. I never saw him again, but I never forgot his kindness.
– John, age 19
I was called up for a three-month Border camp during varsity holidays at the end of 1987. I didn’t want to go. I took my call-up papers to the Dean of the faculty at Wits, and I asked him to write me a letter to say that I had vacation work to do and that I must be exempted from the camp. He looked at me and said that it was not his problem, and that it was my own fault for getting ‘involved in these things’. I thought, what a doos, had he forgotten that this was all compulsory? All I wanted from him was a letter to send to the army so I did not have to go on the camp. A few years later I read in the Citizen that the professor had jumped from the Parktonian Hotel in Braamfontein and had greased himself. My eyes were very dry.
So, on 1 December, there I was flying into Ondangwa. We were doing fire force from there at the time of Operation Modular, Hooper and Packer, which were taking place in Angola around Cuito. I was up there for three months and of course had this serious tan. On the 14th of February 1988, I’m back at Wits and sitting by the Wits pool, and this very gay guy comes up to me and says, ‘You are so tanned! You must have been in Plett.’ I had such a kak houding at the time that I thought I was going to drown him in the fucking pool.
– John, age 22