hovers as some vague threat, a source of subliminal disquiet.
Every now and then reality is forced home when we admit a soldier direct from the front lines. They all look alike: heavily suntanned, bleached hair, lean, tense and bemused to be back home, clothes and kit covered in a fine sand. Their dishevelled look is the counterpoint to our smartly pressed linens, perfectly creased trousers and boots so shiny a man can look up his nose when he peers at his toes. Psychotic conscripts are quickly discharged – their parents are summoned, or they are put on a train with a one-way ticket. Add an escort if voices are telling the boy to follow the moon. But those traumatised by war remain. We are, after all, a military unit.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, combat fatigue, shell shock, call it what you will – this is our bailiwick. Here we aim for a cure, but it is not easy. The histories we obtain from these men bring home the pain of a distant war. Their emotional wounds run deep. One such a patient is John, a rookie signalman with a month’s operational service behind him.
One morning a patrol sets out from Ondjiva, a South African base inside Angola. A couple of armoured cars are protecting lorries carrying supplies and John is in the front vehicle. It is a dangerous road and a few kilometres into the journey his vehicle drives over a landmine. The ground thunders and up rears his transport like a wild steed. Men are thrown through the air and fall into the minefield. The second armoured car and a lorry suffer the same fate.
Two men land on mines. One of them is killed outright, the other is left severely wounded. He is lying a few feet from John, who has been badly winded. John also has a loud ringing noise in his head, but to his relief he notes he is relatively unscathed. A few cuts and bruises, that is all. At first he wants to run to safety, but just as he is about to spring up it dawns on him that he is lying in a minefield. There are no sappers in the small convoy and no one can move until they arrive to clear the landmines. So John must wait.
The chimes in his head grow softer. Now he can hear the man next to him moaning. He peers through the smoke to take a closer look. Dear God, what a mess. The man has been eviscerated. Bowel spills out like a string of giant sausages. A leg is broken too, the bone sticking up through the skin, a white shard in a sea of blood and guts. John’s first instinct is to crawl over and offer some help. But he cannot move. What if he crawls over a mine? Another look at the mess alongside him confirms his fate if he miscalculates.
It is more than he can endure. He shuts his eyes. He wishes he could shut his ears too, anything to block out the sound of the wounded man’s whimpering.
The rear of the convoy has deployed around the shattered vehicles. An attack often follows a landmine blast. Is that what will happen now? If so, I am done for, John reasons. He is scared and thirsty. He searches for his water bottle, but the blast must have dislodged it from his belt because he cannot find it. The sun beats down. When he next opens his eyes and cranes his neck, he sees that other men litter the area, paralysed like he is. He does not feel so alone now, but none are closer to the badly wounded man.
He takes another peek. Flies are swarming over the shiny, gooey mess that extrudes from the man’s belly. Their buzzing mingles with the groans. To his horror, John sees the man open his eyes. It cannot be – he is conscious! They look at one another.
The wounded man is trying to say something? What is it? … Water. The man is asking for water. John wants to tell him he has none, but he cannot get the words out. Hard as he tries, he cannot speak. His voice has deserted him. He brings a hand up to his throat to feel for an injury. There is none.
He starts to feel panicky. He wants to scream out: Help! Help this man beside me, who has been turned inside out.
But he cannot make a sound. His voice has deserted him. Not so the wounded man, who pleads softly for water, his eyes boring into John’s. ‘Water, water,’ he rasps. To which John can only respond with silence.
John is not sure how long he lies there. He has to close his eyes again. But now he covers his ears too, desperate to shut out the entreaties of a dying man. This is how the sappers find him. They peel John’s hands from his ears. He starts at their touch and opens his eyes wide in terror. The man alongside him is dead and the sappers are shooing away the flies, but he can see it is a hopeless task for the swarm is too dense. John wishes he had died too. There is no joy in surviving this. Guilt has stolen his moment of salvation.
And still he cannot speak.
John is flown down to the psychiatric hospital in Pretoria. The referral note is curt: ‘Eighteen-year-old male. Mute, physically well.’ And that is all we are told.
My first impressions of the man are favourable. He has pleasant features, is of slight build and has a quiet, deferential manner tinged with melancholy. No crushing grief here or florid displays of distress. He communicates by writing and that is how I learn of what transpired on the road from Ondjiva.
The challenge is to get him to phonate before he can speak, but we are unsuccessful in this. Colonel de Jager takes over from me. We need a more experienced hand here, he explains. These are deep waters. I could not agree more, but experience comes up short too. Not a decibel escapes John’s lips. The weeks turn into months.
Meanwhile, Commandant Yang returns from another Iron Man course. His arm is in a cast and he is in a lot of pain, Iron Man quantities of pain. Lucky he has the constitution to soak it up, he tells us, never mind the absent certificate of proof.
‘What is a stupid certificate anyway?’ he asks angrily. ‘Just a fucking piece of paper, that’s what.’ With that out the way, he turns his ire on John, proclaiming to smell ‘something fishy’. The commandant always smells something fishy. Or else he smells a rat. Either way, life reeks. As far as he is concerned, how do we know John is not faking it? Stands to reason, opines big-hearted Yang, this could be his passport out of the war. If he starts talking again, we send him back. So he clams up.
The Commandant’s treatment envisages all sorts of punitive tasks for John. ‘Stop wrapping him in cotton wool,’ he exhorts. ‘Give him the shithouses to clean. With a toothbrush. Put him on parades. Send him on long runs. Up steep hills. I mean his legs work, don’t they? So rough him up a bit. Put a pea under his mattress, for fuck’s sake. That should make things uncomfortable for the little prince. No pain, no gain.’ Here Commandant Yang pauses. A smile darts across his face and is just as quickly gone. You can see the cogs working upstairs. Just let me get my hands on this shirker, you can see him thinking.
But the Colonel has heard enough. ‘We will do just the opposite,’ he instructs. ‘Let us acknowledge that our theraphy has not worked. Perhaps time with family will give the boy his voice back.’ John’s parents live on the coast in Port Elizabeth, nine hundred kilometres away. I am instructed to take him home.
I do not relish this task. John is an only child and his parents have been told very little of what has transpired. They know he is in Pretoria receiving treatment, but for what ailment? Psychological mutism is a difficult concept to convey over the telephone, so the diagnosis has been kept from them. They have, however, been reassured he is not in any medical danger, which is partly comforting but cannot assuage their worry.
We fly to Port Elizabeth in an army Dakota, an old jalopy, draughty and noisy. We are the only two passengers. There are no windows and the interior is gloomy. From time to time the pilot leans back and shouts out the name of a town we are passing over, marking our progress south-east.
John sits opposite me. He is glad to be going home and has written me a note of thanks. He looks at me and smiles weakly. I smile back. It is a long flight and the smiling peters out. We touch down around midday and taxi to a stop. I am the first to step out the plane.
At
