I reported that two guys had laid their hands on some alcohol and got terribly drunk over the weekend. The two culprits were serial offenders, and everyone in the boarding house was aware of their antics.
Later he called me in and confronted me in the presence of the two perpetrators. He said that if I declared there and then that the two pupils had been drunk, he would expel them immediately. The catch was that I knew both boys’ parents were personal friends of the teacher, and that there was no way this kind of harsh action would be taken against them based only on my word.
I left the office biting my lip, after the teacher had forced me to admit that I had made it all up. After that, a number of guys had it in for me, and the teacher – who taught agriculture – was watching me for anything that went faintly wrong at the hostel. On top of that, some hostel kids started calling me “Dropper”, for “dropping” the two innocent drinkers in their time of trouble.
By the end of my third year at boarding school my dad accepted a call to become a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa, the black arm of our denomination in Upington. Although we lived in a white suburb, my father’s church was in Paballelo, the mainly black township outside town, from where he would serve both the black and coloured congregations. I was rather relieved to leave boarding school and move back in with my folks.
I took every opportunity to accompany my dad to church services and meetings, and so got to know the coloured and black communities around town rather well. At the time the political situation in South Africa was highly volatile and any kind of mixing between the different race groups was unthinkable. This kind of exposure to people of other races was uncommon for most children my age.
It was expected that I would pay the same respects to the moruti, the African minister and my father’s colleague at the church, as to any white minister who visited our home. The principal of Paballelo High School, a Mr Xaba, was an elder in the church and a personal friend of my father’s. The black people I met as a teenager, those I learned to love and respect, were no less intelligent, human or sincere than any white person. In retrospect, I realise that this experience played a major role in shaping my outlook, and especially my attitude when dealing with individuals and colleagues from other races, later in my life.
At school the teachers must have realised early on that I was not a rocket scientist in the making. Neither was I a superhero on the sports field. Since I had less ball sense than a farm gate in the Kalahari, I was no good at cricket or rugby (although there were a few flashes of brilliance on the rugby field, provided I did not have to touch the ball). But in due course I discovered my forte. On the longer distances I could outrun anyone in the district. At the age of seventeen I did the 80-km Karoo marathon in 7 hours 19 minutes and 48 seconds, a record time for my age group, and it made me a hero at school.
It was in a school classroom that I would learn about the Recces for the first time. I guess it was a matter of fate that I found myself standing in the agriculture class one morning early in 1976. Agriculture was not one of my subjects, and it was also taught by my least favourite teacher – the one who was a resident at the hostel and had it in for me. I had gone to fetch a book from one of my mates, who was in the class, and came upon a group of boys listening intently as Piet Paxton, a fellow pupil, told them about the Recces, the elite of the country’s armed forces. Piet explained how they were selected and then trained to operate on land, from the air and at sea. I was transfixed. I often wonder whether, subconsciously, I did not already make up my mind that day to become a Recce.
In the mid-1970s the military conscription period in South Africa was increased from one to two years, mostly as a result of the intensifying Border War and the subsequent demand for troops in the operational area. Every white male would be called up for service and I was no exception.
On 2 January 1978 I boarded the troop train at Upington station and bade my family goodbye. My destination was the 4th South African Infantry Battalion (4 SAI) at Middelburg. A new adventure had begun.
In those days a standard joke was that the boys from Upington joined the Army to sport long hair and boots. For me, basic training was a complete culture shock. I could never have imagined having so many English-speaking guys in my platoon. The swearing and cursing were unbearable and I could scarcely believe the explicit pictures and graffiti behind the toilet doors. Drinking was totally foreign to me.
But boy, was I fit! And I could shoot. Out in the veld I turned out to be a natural. Soon I could not bear the insubordination of some of the conscripts or their lack of commitment to our training. Deep inside me this thing started growing – the urge to rise above the normal ill-discipline, no-care attitude and incompetence of the average conscript.
The prospect of becoming an officer was tempting. One weekend during my basics at Middelburg, I had to clean the officers’ mess of the unit as part of extra duties. I was astonished; people merely a year older than me had all this luxury! They were served by waiters and treated like kings! In those years, junior leaders were selected during their first year of national service to do the junior leader’s course at the Infantry School and became corporals or lieutenants; they would then be sent to infantry units as platoon and section leaders during their second year of service.
In March 1978 I was transferred to the Infantry School in the town of Oudtshoorn. I was a shy and somewhat bewildered nineteen-year-old. The Infantry School was not easy, but I thoroughly enjoyed the training, especially when our platoon lived out in the veld and the instructors seemed to soften their approach slightly. The crisp, ice-cold mornings in winter, with the snow thick on the Swartberg, brought out the best in everyone, and our platoon soon shaped up to be a close-knit bunch.
During that year at Oudtshoorn I learned a lot about myself, especially about my own strengths and weaknesses. I realised that, compared with most of the young servicemen around me, I started functioning well once the pressure was on and the going got really tough. I learned to keep my mouth shut and laugh inwardly at the way the instructors created artificial pressure to test us.
Towards the end of the year, the time came for the dreaded Vasbyt 5, a route march and series of tests through the Swartberg mountain range over a five-day period. It was designed to test our endurance and was quite tough. The second evening of the exercise, the whole company got together and established a temporary base (TB) in a pine forest, the purpose of which was to show us a new recruiting film for the Recces, entitled Durf en Daad (Courage and Action). I was hooked. That night it became my ultimate, and this time expressed, goal to be a Recce.
On the evening of day three, as we topped a rise high up in the mountains, it started snowing. The instructors panicked, because we did not have the gear for surviving subzero temperatures at night, so they called all the platoons together and moved us by truck down into Die Hel, a remote and secluded valley in the Swartberg range.
Everyone was fairly drained on the last day of the march. No one wanted to carry the Bren (machine gun) and the high-frequency (HF) radio any more. At one of the rest breaks that last evening, the guy who had been carrying the Bren just left it lying, not bothering to hand it over to anyone. A strapping farm boy in my section just looked at me, picked up the radio he had been carrying, and said, “Tough shit, Jakes, jy wil mos Recces toe gaan [Tough shit, Jakes, you’re the one wanting to join the Recces],” and started slogging on.
Between the two of us we carried the Bren and the radio throughout that night to the final destination, a farmhouse in a beautiful valley deep in the mountains. Late in the night, as we walked in the darkness under a lane of trees, the smell of fresh oranges suddenly filled the air. As I reached up, my fingers touched the fruit. Without even taking our kit off, we picked some of the oranges, which turned out to be ripe, and ate them – peel and all – as we continued on our way. The fruit invigorated us and we finished the last few kilometres refreshed and in good spirits. A few years later, under vastly different circumstances, I would have a similar experience
