An Unpopular War by JH Thompson

Author:JH Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok
ISBN: 9781770201217
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2011-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Ballas Bak

I was on an island in the south of the Caprivi doing some monitoring work with five other guys, watching for infiltration of people. It was a beautiful island, like being in the Okavango Delta. Work was great, life was easy, although we didn’t get replenished often, so we lived off the land 90 percent of the time. We didn’t have cigarettes, so we smoked wild tobacco, and the only paper we had was the Bible. I smoked from Genesis to Revelations.

– Ric, age 18

Ja, there were times of pure terror, but there were also times of extreme boredom. To relieve the boredom we graded flies. There was the small, the medium and the large. The small was this fruit fly type of thing, irritating as hell. They loved moisture, so they would sit in the corner of your eye or crawl up your nose. They were very persistent. You couldn’t just flap them away – you literally had to scratch or squash them, which was not a good idea, ’cause then it burnt like hell. The medium was the standard persistent little shit, the normal common fly. Then there were the large, the serious horseflies. We would watch the flies, grade the flies, talk about the flies. If we could catch them, we’d pull their wings off, just to get our own back. But I think they must have got blown up, ’cause they seemed to get fewer and fewer with time.

– Greg, age 25

We were bored, and killed time by making ornaments out of shell casings. We made wine glasses, dinner bells, sugar scoops and other rudimentary things out of the brass. One day the guys showed me something they were working on, and I wondered where they had got the casing from, as we hadn’t shot for a while. I asked them where they’d got it from, and they told me they had cut the live head off with a hacksaw. The head can be triggered by heat, and there they were, sawing a 40-millimetre round apart!

– Dave, age 19

There was a lull on the Border when the seasons changed. This was tanning time. During wet season we couldn’t really undertake major operations into Angola, because the heavy equipment would get bogged down, so we didn’t do much with regard to ground forces, as it wasn’t conducive to conventional attacks. This was the time the terrs crossed in from Angola, heading for the farming community and such, to carry out attacks. We moved north in the dry season and they infiltrated south in the wet season. Kinda like tides. In the gap between the changing of the seasons, things were generally quieter and we could do some tanning. We’d put on our red joggers, which were hideous. They were these shiny red fabric shorts displaying the unit logo, edged with white piping and a slit up the side. Terrible, but, I suppose, quite fashionable at the time. Then we’d slap on brake fluid or ATF, that red liquid you use for power steering and such.

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