John and I walked over to the instructor who was sitting in the Jeep, smoking. They called him ‘Bones’. He was thin and dark-skinned with penetrating brown eyes. He glared at us and took a deep drag of his cigarette, holding the smoke in for a while. He rested his right arm, which had been disfigured by AK-47 rounds in some cocked-up reconnaissance operation, on the steering wheel of the Jeep. His forearm seemed to jut out at an angle just before the wrist, giving it a broken look, and the scars looked like thin plastic, hollow and concave. They did not look very old.
He exhaled smoke into our faces.
“Bullshit. You can’t get off the course on this phase; it’s not allowed. You have to complete it. Fill your canteens. Tonight you do 30 clicks. You guys are paratroopers—I thought you were supposed to be tough.”
We walked most of the night and the next day. Now that I had no will to carry on, every step was pure hell and we dragged behind the rest of the stick.
I felt I had betrayed myself to have gone through six weeks of hell only to give up now. This self-condemnation only made it worse. I comforted myself by saying that I had not really wanted to be a Recce in the first place. All I had wanted was to be a paratrooper. I contemplated just sitting down and sleeping, but the constant presence of the hyenas not far behind spurred me on. We walked for a few more days before they mercifully took John and me and about 12 other dropouts from other teams and left us at a large tree until the course ended. When that would be, nobody knew.
We sat and rested under that big tree for five more days before the course came to an end. We dug a two-metre-deep waterhole with branches; some had even used their rifles as spades, not caring a damn. We got enough water out of it to wet our clothes in a crude wash. Instructors picked us up in a Buffel and we drove for about 50 kilometres until we finally came to Fort Doppies, the Recce bush base in the operational area.
The showers felt glorious after so long. We laughed at how much weight we had lost. We looked like the prisoners of war in photos I had seen in history books. Hans’s once-muscular 1.94-metre body was now skin and bone. He had lost at least 12 kilograms, and had lost all his buttock cheeks. His ever-intense stare, with bulging eyes in his thin face, made him look like a mad man
After the showers we had peanut butter and honey sandwiches on fresh bread with lots of butter. For many years afterward, I could still taste that sandwich every time I thought of it. There was an air of relief as we lay around the camp, all cleaned up and in torn —but washed—clothes, smoking and drinking ice-cold Cokes. The following day the instructors shot a huge buffalo and we had a braai, a barbecue, with buffalo steaks bigger than even our bellies could think of eating.
Out of the 200 hopefuls, only 17 troops had made the course to become Reconnaissance operators and who would get to wear the springbok head on the maroon beret; to do HALO oxygen jumps hundreds of miles inside Angola. Hans was one of them. John and I were told we should not have quit because we had been really close to the end of the course and had come in 27th out of the two hundred. So about 170 had quit before us. Some consolation!
“At least one paratrooper made it,” I said, patting Hans on his oncemuscular shoulder. John and I hadn’t done that badly. Most of the 200, we found out, had long since been RTU’d, dropping out in the first couple of weeks.
“I suppose it’s back to 1 Para for us,” I said, staring at Hans, who seemed to have changed and didn’t have much to say. Perhaps the last week was the one that really killed you, I thought. We had got to rest under the big tree for five days and we were already feeling better.
NOW WHAT?
It was the first time I had thought in terms of going back to 1 Parachute Battalion since I had started the Recce course, and it caught me by surprise. Now we were probably going to be shipped back—ignominiously RTU’d.
In my fatigued and depleted state it made me sick to think of going back to the battalion and being a roofie again—to run all over the base singing bullshit songs, hair shaven in #4 style, corporals and stupid fucking lieutenants shouting at the tops of their voices. Since we had been on the Reconnaissance course we had been walking side by side with majors, lieutenants and captains. We had slept and suffered together and all been treated as equals and as men—not as raw green recruits, which is what we were going back to at 1 Para. Nothing worse than being a a roofie, a scab
The thought was not a good one. John and I asked around if anyone knew where we would be sent and they told us that we would perhaps be sent to 32 Battalion reconnaissance that was also based on the border and with a good reputation as a fighting unit. We were relieved that we might not have to return to 1 Para and saw ourselves staying in the bush. We hung around the base for a couple of days getting our meagre kit together and listening to the Recce instructors’ war stories.
The reason they were instructors on the selection course was that they were all no longer fit for operational duty, and they all eagerly showed us the bullet wounds they had received on Recce missions-gone-wrong in Angola. I came across an acquaintance I knew from back home; he too had a pretty recent AK-47 bullet hole in him. He enthusiastically told me to come back on the next course; he said a lot of guys made it the second time around because they knew what they were going to be dealing with. I agreed with him and said that I would, but inside I felt mentally numb and had no inclination to do it all again. Actually I had no inclination for anything much and just wanted to rest. I was deep in thought when John came walking across the small grassway.
“Bones just told me we’re all going back to the Bluff tomorrow and you and I are going back to 1 Para.”
We packed our kit onto the C-130 cargo plane and took off, leaving the Caprivi Strip and its endless vistas of bush and its idiotic laughing hyenas. I looked out of the window at the vastness of the terrain we had walked across, and at how the bush stretched featureless and ended in a white haze far on the horizon. I wondered why the sky was white—not blue like at home, but just a white haze every day. It was strange. Was it the reflection of the white sand? I pondered this for a while, then quickly fell asleep like everyone else. I still felt drained and detached from the rest of the world, like my mind was working in slow motion. I had had enough of this soldier bullshit. My desire to be a fighting soldier was gone. I didn’t care anymore. I had got my wings at 1 Para and that was going to have to be good enough.
I spent the rest of the trip scheming how I could get transferred to a service unit close to home, where the guys got to go home every weekend. I would be close to Taina and there’d be no more walking, heavy kit, shouting instructors or sleeping in the dirt. I would drive a food truck or work as an office clerk and maybe even get to go home during the week. My dad was quite a big knob in the Reserves and could possibly pull some strings.
We landed at Durban just in time to see the sun slip away and darkness envelop the high-rise holiday city. We were quickly piled into Bedford trucks and peered out as we drove through the city with its flashing neon lights, rushing cars and busy sidewalks. At the Bluff we dragged our kit upstairs to the empty two-storey barracks overlooking the sea and wolfed down the sandwiches and strong hot coffee that were waiting for us in the kitchen. The Recce camp seemed deserted. We were casually told that we were free to go to town if we felt like it. Eagerly we pulled our borrowed, wrinkled civvy clothes that we had arrived in from the bottom of the kit we had left at the Bluff. John, Hans and I wasted no time scooting out the base and catching the ferry that took us across the bay to the twinkling lights of downtown Durban. It was the eve of my 20th birthday, so there was added cause for celebration.