world the night passed in revelry. The departing medical corps, their tour of duty over, threw a huge party and everyone got plastered.
I am given an office in the sickbay. Here I will give therapy to the emotionally wounded. It is a bleak room. Shoved up against a wall is a metal desk with one drawer missing, the other locked and no key to open its secrets. The surface of the desk is badly scratched – florid scatology, phalluses and pudenda are everywhere. This is the desk they have given to the army psychiatrist, a Rosetta Stone of obscene messages, frustrated desires and perverse cravings. Between patients I scrutinise its detail, marvelling at the outpouring of smut and unbridled lust uncontaminated by a clean thought.
Two chairs that could have been borrowed from a brothel go with the desk – they too are metal, with shiny red-plastic seats. And that is it. There’s no bookcase, couch, wall hanging or filing cabinet. Just an offensive desk and a pair of sluttish chairs. It’s the most depressing room I have ever seen. Ten minutes in this atmosphere and you might want to put the muzzle of your R1 into your mouth and splatter your brains on the wall behind. The foil to good cheer and high spirits, that’s my office – the Shrink’s Chamber of Melancholy.
Luckily I am not busy in my first week. Psychopathology is on vacation and there is time enough to read my desk and wonder about the poor sods like myself who had nothing better to do than commune with a tired piece of chipped furniture. My studies of the desk are interrupted: Could I please join my colleagues in the sickbay? There are many patients to see and if the psychiatrist is not occupied, perhaps he could change caps and become an internist for a while? Reluctantly I disengage from a story of bestiality and amble off to do my bit.
In the apartheid army the law dictates that black and white do not mix, except in the sickbay. To my surprise, many of my patients are black, and it is my first exposure to these soldiers fighting on the ‘white’ side of apartheid. The majority are with 32 Battalion. Most speak no English and just a smattering of Afrikaans, so communication is more often than not impossible. Separate development, even up here at the tip of apartheid’s far-flung arm, ensures we live very separate lives.
In keeping with the politics, disease segregates too. From what I can discern, social order in this community has collapsed. How else to account for the fact that nearly all these soldiers have venereal disease? The medical corps struggles daily with swampy groins full of ooze – the gonococcus has found a home here in Owamboland, the chaos of war offering the perfect environment. It is a putrid business. The soldiers walk in, or rather, the more advanced cases hobble. Taking a history is unnecessary – most of them just point to their groins when you ask what the problem is. Some simply drop their pants and keep smiling in embarrassment while you reach for the penicillin injection. But look beyond those brilliantly white, toothy grins and you see a deeper malaise, one that penicillin cannot address. Moreover, treating the men without the women ensures this is one battle the apartheid army cannot win.
Given that illness follows the racial divide, what then ails the white man? Here the answer is more complex. The boss, the capo di tutti capi, is the career soldier, a few of whom are hardcore hypochondriacs. Like moths to a flame, they are attracted to the sickbay. They may be a minority, but what they lack in number they make up for in groans and moans. Their groins may be spotlessly clean, but their complaints are equally monotonous and for the most part trivial – catarrh, dandruff, boils, snotty noses and boozers’ bad breath.
The conscripts, on the other hand, present a different picture. They have been sent to Oshakati by the thousands, boys barely out of school. They will spend twelve months on the border with nothing to look forward to except going home. Not surprisingly, they are in great shape, arriving fresh faced and supremely fit after months in an infantry or artillery base. These lads do not clog the sickbay with phantom ills. But they cut themselves and their wounds must be sutured, and they fall and break bones that need setting.
When they are stretchered in with eyes screwed shut to hold back the tears we take note, because there is no entitlement here. It startles and unsettles us when we see these young men in distress struggle to respond to the lieutenant doctors with the same respect and obedience they show their officers in the infantry corps, some even trying to salute as they stand gingerly on their one good leg. You see, there is no such formality in the sickbay. Illness and disease dilute rank, introducing an easy camaraderie between the conscript doctors and their orderlies. But no matter how you try and put the infantryman at ease it is seldom any good. He has been drilled into submission by all those months in Upington – by the time he is shipped off to Oshakati his reactions to the doctor’s epaulettes are Pavlovian.
Every now and then you connect with one of these soldiers and it goes beyond the usual doctor-patient relationship. There exists a silent bond between conscripts – doctor and patient alike – who are not here by choice and whose only aim is to get out of this jam alive. So we patch up these lacerated and fractured bodies, and we do so with a sense of mission. For these boys are just like us, except less fortunate. We do whatever we can to make it a little easier for them, from writing notes ordering a few days’ extra sick leave or light duties for a while, to something as small as slipping them an iced Coke from our large fridges. We count it a small victory against a system that holds us all captive.
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