The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  After drinking to the point of bursting, they continued east. From time to time they heard gunfire, not in bursts as one would hear in a battle, but single shots, probably fired by poachers.

  And so their flight continued day after day. At dawn each day they went into hiding, to sleep through the heat of the day. Eventually they were far enough from the river’s course to turn due south. For the first time, their main activity was not flight, but the search for food and water. While De Villiers had some skills in surviving in the bush, in this semidesert he was a beginner compared to !Xau.

  They were hungry for meat and !Xau had assured him that they would have meat for breakfast. De Villiers watched with the intensity of a student as !Xau set the thura trap.

  ‘It is called thura,’ !Xau explained as he constructed it in the footpath made by the feet or claws of small animals. First he stuck a strong but flexible sapling about two metres long into the ground next to the footpath. Then he pegged a noose into the ground, the noose held open by a small circle of sticks. !Xau bent the sapling over and tied the end of the cord to the top of the sapling. De Villiers studied the trigger mechanism carefully as !Xau set it. When !Xau slowly released the tension in the sapling, the noose held and was ready for its prey. !Xau finished by scattering small twigs and leaves over the trap to conceal the string and placed a few seeds in the eye of the noose.

  !Xau selected the spots for two more thura traps. At the third, he allowed De Villiers to try his hand at setting the trap. It was more difficult than it had appeared when !Xau was doing it, and twice the sapling whipped up past De Villiers’s nose when the trigger failed to hold, but he eventually succeeded. !Xau rubbed his hands in obvious delight.

  ‘We’ll eat kgaka tomorrow,’ he promised. Guinea fowl, De Villiers knew from his childhood, when one of his classmates had proudly carried the nickname Kgaka-tarentaal.

  They had stopped running on the seventh day, or seventh night, to be more accurate. The tactics of survival had changed. The enemy was now far behind them, or so they thought. They now had to face their immediate environment, the savannah. And it was winter. It was cold at night and hot during the day.

  The veld was harsh, but it was also kind. It was vast and because of its vastness provided them with a hiding place and the opportunity to escape. It also provided food and water, but made them work very hard for every edible bite, every drop of water fit to drink.

  But there was food and water, if you knew where to find it and were patient enough not to exhaust and dehydrate yourself so that you did not have the energy to look for it.

  Water was easier to find than food, even in the dry season. !Xau was able to find tsama melons nearly everywhere, at will it seemed to De Villiers, and tubers. The most innocuous plants surrendered watery roots to !Xau’s digging, and the tsamas – gemsbok melons !Xau called them – provided a meal in a drink. De Villiers had eaten tsamas before. They were part of the survival training regime. !Xau showed De Villiers how to make a small hole in the melon and stir its contents with a stick until it yielded a mushy pulp. !Xau was adamant that the black pips be spat out. They would eventually provide fresh plants, he said, and they could be used to trap guinea fowl.

  They saw lightning but there was no rain. They ate raisin berries – !Xau insisting that the rough fibre be spat out. Otherwise it would block your intestines, he claimed. De Villiers complied, not willing to take the risk.

  They saw many tiny spoor of partridges and pheasants, but very few belonging to mammals. There were no roads or fences and they had to navigate by instinct, as !Xau preferred to do, or by the map, as De Villiers did.

  !Xau taught De Villiers not to fight the bush but to go along with it, to listen to its sounds and to smell its air, to wait and to adapt to its rhythms. It took more than a week of walking and running behind !Xau and listening to his whispered advice before Pierre de Villiers felt in tune with the bush, confident of perhaps surviving for a day or two on his own. In that period he lost weight, about seven kilograms by his estimate according to the number of holes he had to tighten his belt. He was always hungry, every waking moment. When they weren’t moving, he dreamt of food, hot meals with lots of meat and gravy and potatoes.

  Every now and then !Xau would burrow under a shrub and cut off parts of its roots. ‘This is not for eating,’ he warned. ‘It’s for the poison on the arrows.’

  For two weeks !Xau had kept him alive by feeding him small morsels of food he found in the most incongruous places. De Villiers learnt to eat things he would never have looked at, and would never eat again, he vowed, if he survived this ordeal. !Xau regularly found supplies of large white grubs of the long-horn beetle in the dead wood of the umbrella thorn tree. He called them by their Setswana name, mabungu grubs, and ate them with relish, smacking his lips with delight. De Villiers had quickly learnt to eat harvester termites, but his stomach would always rebel at the taste of the grubs and caterpillars !Xau kept dishing up. Some caterpillars even tasted like kippers. De Villiers ate very little, just enough to survive, but when he was forced by his hunger to eat the grubs !Xau produced, he swallowed the fare quickly.

  The fruits and roots and tubers were easier to ingest, even the different varieties of monkey apple, the sour monkey apple and the butter monkey apple, which were common in winter but not very filling. While his taste buds cried out for meat, he had to climb into the monkey apple tree to shake the upper branches to dislodge the ripe fruit.

  In time De Villiers learned that !Xau spoke three languages: !Xun, his mother tongue, Afrikaans and Setswana. !Xun he had learnt at his mother’s breast, or as he put it, on his mother’s hip. Setswana he had learnt at a young age when his wandering band had come into contact with the other inhabitants of the Kalahari, the Batswana. And Afrikaans he had also learnt at a young age because everyone in South West Africa, including the Bushmen, spoke Afrikaans. From the way !Xau explained, at times with the use of expansive gestures, the !Xun tribe had always followed the game across the international boundaries of South West Africa, Angola and Botswana in an area De Villiers estimated to have a radius of about five hundred kilometres with its centre at or near the town of Tsumkwe, stretching as far west as Grootfontein in SWA, in the south to Ghanzi in Botswana, and in the north across the Caprivi Strip into the Mucusso and Luengué reserves in Angola.

  That’s where they were now, making their way along a route parallel to the Cuito River, but about fifty kilometres east of it. They had left the Luengué Reserve a day earlier, according to De Villiers’s reckoning, and were in the Mucusso.

  Even the map in De Villiers’s hand recognised !Xau’s birthright.

  Bosquimanes the map said in Angola.

  Boesmanland in South West Africa.

  And Bushmanland in Botswana.

  De Villiers looked sideways at his companion. This was !Xau’s world. His lands were clearly marked on maps which showed the international boundaries that had been drawn in the boardrooms of colonial Europe centuries ago. !Xau sat on his haunches, almost naked, apparently content and unconcerned about the journey ahead. De Villiers was a captain in an elite fighting unit, but out here he knew that he was a novice. He had to wonder if he could match !Xau’s resilience and stamina, his stoic acceptance of each day as it came, his unshakable belief that every new day would take care of itself. De Villiers knew that no part of his training had prepared him for survival on his own for this length of time. He knew from experience that he could last for a week, perhaps two, even with the enemy on his spoor, but this was different. It would take at least two months to get home and the hunters on his spoor were his own people.

  In this place, De Villiers concluded as he folded the map, he could have but one guide. Here !Xau was the captain and he, De Villiers, was but a corporal, despite his special training in tracking and navigation by the stars or the sun.

  After they had covered the first two hundred kilometres from their point of departure, they had deemed it safe enough to make a fire and to s
tart travelling during the day. They had not heard any gunfire for days and the last time the helicopters had buzzed overhead had been more than a week earlier. At their overnight camp, in reality no more than a collection of dead branches, twigs and grass, !Xau had disappeared into the bush and returned with a short stick and a dry piece of wood. He sat in the sand and held the piece of wood between his feet. He turned the stick between his palms until he had gouged a hole into the wood. When a small column of smoke appeared from beneath his hands, he smiled.

  ‘He-he-he. We have fire.’ Still seated with his feet cradling the piece of wood, !Xau reached for a few tufts of very fine grass and placed them around the hole before he redoubled his efforts. He quickly had a small fire going with some dry sticks.

  ‘Now all we need is meat,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ !Xau predicted confidently. Then he set about shaping the sapling he had cut for a bow over the fire, heating and bending it until it curved evenly towards the tapered ends.

  Afterward they slept some distance away from where they had made the fire.

  In the morning they rushed to the traps. The first two were untouched, but the third held a guinea fowl firmly by the neck. The bird’s frantic struggle must have hastened its death.

  !Xau carefully stripped the long but delicate sinews running the length of the guinea fowl’s legs before he roasted their breakfast over the fire. De Villiers put some wing feathers in his shirt pocket to use for fletching when he made his own arrows.

  That was also the day they came upon the sun-bleached bones of a young giraffe, probably the prey of a pride of lions long before. Scavengers had stripped the carcass of everything softer than bone and not even a piece of skin remained. But what the other scavengers had left as being of no use to them, !Xau cherished. He treated the thigh bone he found almost with reverence. The giraffe bone was sealed at the joint ends. !Xau pointed at the middle of the shaft of the bone. ‘I must cut it here.’

  De Villiers produced his Leatherman from the sheath on his ankle. Like boys admiring a new toy, the two of them stood face to face as he opened each of the tools and explained its functions. Knife blade. Needle-nose pliers. Regular pliers. Wire cutters, two types. Screwdrivers, four types. Steel file. Bottle opener. Can opener. 20cm ruler. Awl.

  It took !Xau but a few minutes to cut through the thigh bone with the saw-toothed edge of the steel file. When he had finished, he slipped the handful of reeds he had gathered for arrow shafts into the thigh bone and showed De Villiers how he had turned it into a quiver. He cut a piece of corkwood to seal it.

  Without fences there was no iron or steel to be harvested, and !Xau had to revert to the practices of his forefathers for the construction of his arrowheads. He smashed the remaining piece of thigh bone until he had a handful of slivers.

  They had to keep moving and left the rest of the carcass untouched.

  Afterwards, !Xau had use only for the steel file. Night after night he sat on his haunches and filed away at the slivers of giraffe bone. Each arrowhead took time, but !Xau appeared to be in no hurry.

  When he had finished, he had five finely carved arrowheads. He assembled his arrows one by one and secured them in the quiver. !Xau wove a strap for his quiver from the thin grasses he picked as they walked, his fingers guided by feel as his eyes scanned the ground ahead for spoor.

  They kept up their guard and restricted their daylight activities to the minimum to conserve energy and to reduce the risk of detection and capture.

  The air was dry and dusty and the daytime sky a clear blue this time of the year. Such clouds as they saw melted away without shedding water. The sandy soil was warm but there were several types of thorn. Those on the ground were mostly seeds, intended to be carried far from the mother plant by the feet or hooves of their victims and to sprout there in accordance with nature’s primary law, to survive and reproduce.

  !Xau appeared immune to these irritants, but De Villiers had to stop often to extract thorns from his feet or exposed skin.

  Several times they saw tiny human spoor, but !Xau insisted that they were more than a week old. There were other Bushmen roaming on the flood plain.

  Auckland

  January 2008 18

  Detective Inspector Henderson went to his office early. He turned his computer on and waited for the programmes to load. Five mugs of coffee later, he had the outline of a history for his principal suspect. The rest would be the kind of slogging work that was a detective’s bread and butter, eliminating irrelevant facts, finding confirmation for every fact, tying the witnesses down with written statements.

  The internet was a wonderful tool that enabled one to trace almost anyone. Government files could be penetrated from a continent away. Anyone on a pension or medical scheme could be traced, the finest details of their service and medical condition there for the world to see. He tracked Pierre de Villiers quickly and expertly through the records after finding his name on the roll of soldiers who had served in the war in Angola. Even the Special Forces now had websites, and although 4 Reconnaissance Unit had long since been disbanded, there was a lot of activity on the websites with special commemorative events and correspondence between members.

  Henderson printed batch after batch of documents as he surfed from website to website. His handwritten notes told only half the story.

  • BSc Hons Stellenbosch University – class of 1981 – military scholarship

  • Joined Special Forces after passing selection

  • General training as a parachutist – qualified for HALO and LALO – high altitude, low opening and low altitude, low opening

  • Experienced in waterborne operations behind enemy lines

  It appeared that De Villiers had also received training in map-reading, weapons, the theory of small arms fire, urban terrorism tactics, counterinsurgency, hand-to-hand combat, survival, basic explosives and mines. And he had a badge for sharpshooting.

  De Villiers had been trained as a sniper. The website listed the weapons an assassin could use, ranging from an assortment of rifles and silenced pistols to items such as knives and garrottes made of guitar strings.

  Special training in assassination methods Henderson added to his list.

  Survival tactics Henderson added when he found interesting information in the section dealing with food and water.

  You may have to improvise and create a silent weapon or set a trap for small animals to eat. Remember, fat and proteins are essential to long-term survival. Craft a bow and arrow; set a trap. Your life may depend on your ability to kill or trap birds, rabbits, even rats and frogs, using silent weapons.

  There was a detailed manual on how to manufacture a bow and arrows. He learnt the difference between a self bow and a combination bow, and how a combination bow could be broken down to its individual components. He pressed Control P on the keyboard and the printer hummed into action.

  He found De Villiers’s name on a list of recipients of the Honoris Crux. A few clicks of the mouse revealed it to be a military honour, but the citation was said to be classified.

  After 1990 the trail went cold for a time.

  There was an article about a dispute involving a ship under arrest in Durban in late 1991. After that, the records showed that De Villiers had been discharged from the Special Forces at his own request in 1992, but that he was receiving a full pension and was to remain on the army’s medical scheme for life. Henderson made a note.

  He decided to check De Villiers’s medical record. The records of the medical scheme showed that the most recent payments had been to an Auckland doctor, Dr Annette de Bruyn of Howick, and to Brightside Hospital, and that the costs had been debited to the South African National Defence Force medical scheme.

  Henderson smelled a rat. Why would a man entitled to free medical treatment by virtue of his job as a policeman claim his medical expenses from the SANDF?

  Henderson next traced De Villiers to the UK, where he had trained as a policeman for a short peri
od before walking the beat in London. There was nothing remarkable there, except that he had married Emma in a Registry in London. Both had British passports. This much Henderson had known.

  The local Immigration records showed that De Villiers had arrived in Auckland in 1999 and had joined the New Zealand Police the next year. His personal file gave no hint of his past, save that he had undergone military training in South Africa and had been a policeman in the UK. It was the record of a soldier.

  To Henderson’s eye, the record was somehow impersonal and incomplete. Acting on a hunch, he opened Google and searched De Villiers’s name in the South African pages. The website of the Pretoria News came up. He struck oil immediately in a report from mid-July 1992.

  THREE SHOT DEAD – BOTCHED HIJACKING? A family of four became the victims of armed hijackers in Garsfontein last night. Captain Pierre de Villiers is the only survivor of the attack, which took place in the driveway of their home in Garsfontein. Mrs Annelise de Villiers and the couple’s two children, Marcel(7) and Jeandré (6), were shot dead in their car as they arrived home after visiting relatives in Hatfield.

  Captain de Villiers is in a coma under guard in 1 Military Hospital. According to unconfirmed reports he has been shot two or three times and is not expected to survive.

  He was awarded the Honoris Crux for action in Angola during the war.

  The shell casings found at the scene match those of an AK47 assault rifle. The hijackers took neither the car nor any of the family’s possessions.

  Henderson caught himself staring into the distance, and returned to his task. He printed every one of the follow-up reports on the subject until he reached the verdict and sentence of the court. The newspaper cutting was dated two years after the murders.

  HIJACK MURDERERS SENTENCED

  The murderers of three members of the De Villiers family were sentenced to life imprisonment in Court C of the Palace of Justice yesterday. None of the men gave evidence at the trial but through their lawyer claimed that they had acted on orders of the ANC in Lusaka.