The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  True to character, Heloïse immediately took over the arrangements. ‘You’ll stay with us. And I’ll bring Mom to visit, and André would love to see you too, I know that.’

  Caprivi Strip

  June 1985 24

  ‘Jesus, you smell bad!’ the driver exclaimed as the petrol tanker gathered speed.

  De Villiers and !Xau were crammed into the single passenger seat in the cab of the Shell tanker. They had been lucky to be given a lift on the Katima Mulilo–Rundu road. It was used almost exclusively by military vehicles and their drivers were forbidden to pick up hitchhikers. But the driver admitted to having been swayed by the unusual sight of a Bushman in traditional loincloth in the company of a soldier in bush uniform. The Bushman carried a bow and a quiver made of bone slung across his shoulders, but the soldier had no weapons.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pierre de Villiers apologised. ‘We’ve been in the bush for a long time.’

  ‘Don’t worry, man. I’ll drop you at Rundu in about two hours and I’m sure they’ll give you a hot bath. But what about the Bushman? Don’t they ever wash?’ the driver had asked.

  De Villiers shook his head. He couldn’t recall ever seeing !Xau make an effort to clean himself when they had access to water, but he remembered all too well how !Xau regularly rubbed fat into his skin when they had meat. Beside him, half in his lap, !Xau laughed. He understood Afrikaans very well and provided an answer of sorts. ‘Water is for drinking.’

  ‘How far are you going?’ De Villiers asked.

  ‘I reload at Grootfontein, then it’s all the way back to Katima Mulilo.’

  ‘I need to ask for a favour,’ De Villiers said. ‘I need to get a letter to my wife.’

  ‘No problem, buddy, just give it to me,’ the driver said, keeping his eyes on the road as a military convoy thundered past in the opposite direction.

  ‘I don’t have paper or an envelope or a stamp,’ De Villiers admitted.

  ‘No problem, buddy. There’s paper in the cubby hole and maybe even a Shell envelope or two. And I’m sure they won’t even notice at the depot at Grootfontein if a couple of stamps go missing.’

  De Villiers’s fingers struggled with the now unfamiliar act of writing. While maintaining the confidentiality of his mission, he explained to his wife that he was well and that he was on his way to the army base at Rundu. He asked her to get in touch with his commanding officer at 4 Recce if she should by any chance not have heard from him directly by the time she received his letter.

  Expect some trouble.

  Don’t give up.

  If they won’t tell you where I am, go to your brother.

  It had taken De Villiers and !Xau sixty-six days from the day of the events on the banks of the Cuito River after Verster’s death to get through the two game parks, the Coutada Pública do Luengué and the Coutada Pública do Mucusso. There had been many a day when they were forced to hide and made no progress at all. Now, on the way to the military base at Rundu, De Villiers was apprehensive of the reception they would receive. They had been hunted by their own, and it was thanks only to !Xau’s bush craft that they had been able to survive and to evade their pursuers at the same time.

  When the petrol tanker stopped outside the main entrance to the base at Rundu, De Villiers was immediately surrounded by R4 toting soldiers who demanded that he identify himself. A soldier without a rifle is always cause for suspicion. De Villiers spoke Afrikaans to them and they backed off a little when he reminded them that he was a captain in the Special Forces and demanded to see the base commander. There things got worse.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, waltzing in here like this?’ the commanding officer shouted. ‘And you’re wearing UNITA rags. You’ve been AWOL and now you pretend to have been lost.’

  ‘I wasn’t lost, Sir. I had been on a mission and the exfiltration had been problematic.’

  The CO studied De Villiers from head to toe. De Villiers’s hair and beard had grown considerably during the six weeks’ trek with !Xau and lengths of blond showed under the dyed ends. Barefoot, dirty, dishevelled, De Villiers looked like a wild man.

  ‘Don’t try to bullshit me, man! There’s no record of a Recce mission in these parts and there’s no record of any missing soldiers. You’re not in uniform and you have no dog tags. Do you think I’m a baboon? And what about the Bushman? He doesn’t understand a word of Afrikaans and jabbers away like a monkey when we speak to him. Where did you pick him up?’

  So !Xau had chosen to play ignorant. With one attempt to kill him already, and the chase down the flood plain towards the Okavango, !Xau’s subterfuge appeared to be wise. De Villiers decided to follow suit. He concluded that his mission might have been so secret that the base at Rundu had received no official word of it. Come to think of it, he reasoned, when Verster had been shot I should have realised that no one would believe me. He called for contact with his commander at 4 Recce, but the response was to have him and !Xau locked in the CO’s office.

  There was no further discussion. A band of military policemen marched into the office and made De Villiers and !Xau strip. The MPS threw stiff brown overalls at De Villiers and !Xau and they were made to put them on. Their clothes and weapons were left on the base commander’s desk: De Villiers’s UNITA bush uniform and belt, his Leatherman still in its canvas scabbard, !Xau’s loincloth, his bow with its unusual quiver and arrows and his Best.

  De Villiers and !Xau became military prisoners and were kept in the detention barracks.

  They came for them well after midnight, in that darkest hour of the night when the whole world goes quiet, the ghost watch as the naval instructors at Donkergat called it. De Villiers and !Xau had curled up and slept as they had done many times during their flight. De Villiers first sensed that something was afoot when he heard a diesel motor rumbling nearby. He could swear that he had been woken by shuffling feet at the door. Before he could rise the door burst open and dark shapes stormed into the room and pinned him to the floor, face down. He felt a knee in the small of his back. From the grunts behind him he assumed that !Xau was being subjected to the same treatment. Within minutes he found himself trussed up like a chicken, his arms and legs tied with rope and a dirty rag stuffed into his mouth. Several pairs of hands lifted and carried him towards the idling diesel, which he recognised in the dim light as a Buffel. The soldiers carrying him swung him to and fro to build up momentum and then slung him into the back of the Buffel as if he were a sack of potatoes. !Xau landed on top of him. A soldier tied a dirty sock over De Villiers’s eyes.

  The journey in the back of the Buffel lasted about three hours by De Villiers’s estimation, enough time to get to Grootfontein in the west or halfway to Katima Mulilo in the east. No one spoke. Every time De Villiers tried to sit up, a soldier would press him down with his foot, none too gently.

  It had to be near first light when they entered a military camp through a checkpoint manned by soldiers who demanded a pass for entry. The Buffel trundled on and came to a stop a short distance away.

  De Villiers felt a number of hands on him. He felt himself being lifted and thrown out of the back of the Buffel. He landed several feet below in the dirt. He could feel bare feet prodding him, turning him over so that he lay face up. His blindfold was ripped off unceremoniously, leaving him blinking in the harsh light of the early morning sun.

  It took some minutes for him to regain his composure and to start taking proper notice of their surroundings.

  They were in a bush camp covered, for the most part, by camouflage netting. The soldiers – De Villiers had no doubt that they were soldiers – were barefoot to a man, dressed only in rugby shorts. They looked tanned and mean, yet relaxed. While some of them were white, the majority appeared to be black or of mixed race. De Villiers was sure he heard someone in the background speaking Portuguese.

  Without a word, two of the soldiers grabbed De Villiers by his upper arms and lifted him to his feet. Two others did the same with !Xau. The soldiers frogm
arched them to the nearest building, a mud hut under a thatched cone. In the seconds before they entered the hut, De Villiers saw rows of mud houses under thatch or iron roofs and rows of army tents.

  Camp Buffalo, De Villiers thought to himself, headquarters of the infamous 32 Battalion, a unit consisting of guerrilla-style soldiers, many of them Angolan-Portuguese of mixed blood.

  The officer in the makeshift office was indistinguishable from his troops, barefoot and in blue rugby shorts. There were no caps and no insignia. One of the soldiers threw De Villiers’s Leatherman on top of the maps on a table. A second did likewise with !Xau’s bow and quiver. The Best was laid next to the Leatherman.

  ‘Ah,’ the officer rasped, ‘the soldier who said no, and that to a general.’

  De Villiers had to hold his tongue, the rag still in his mouth. He felt like throwing up, but knew he would drown in his own vomit if he did. He did his best to slow his breathing. How does he know about my orders? And that they were issued by a general? he asked himself.

  ‘And you,’ the officer shouted at !Xau. ‘You wouldn’t obey my orders.’

  !Xau made a gagging sound, a denial or a plea. It was impossible to determine which. The officer knocked him over with a backhanded slap that resounded like a pistol shot in the confines of the hut.

  De Villiers stiffened involuntarily and the soldiers holding him tightened their grip on his arms. From the corner of his eye De Villiers could see the officer’s foot on !Xau’s throat.

  ‘Take the Bushman away!’ the voice behind De Villiers ordered and !Xau was dragged away immediately.

  The speaker came and stood in front of De Villiers, a stocky man with a narrow military moustache, the captain whose voice De Villiers had heard twice before. He slowly walked around De Villiers, looking him up and down as if he were conducting a parade inspection.

  De Villiers looked the captain in the eye, the man he was certain had killed Jacques Verster, the man who had strung !Xau up in the tree, the man who had led the troops on their spoor for days.

  The captain’s face was centimetres away from De Villiers’s. Much shorter than De Villiers, he had to look up at him. ‘Who do you think you are?’

  De Villiers tried to speak, but the rag in his mouth stopped the words from coming out.

  What he wanted to say was, ‘I’m Captain Pierre de Villiers of 4 Recce. I demand to speak to my commanding officer.’

  ‘Take him away,’ the captain said. ‘Put him in a tent as far away from the others as possible. He’s to be hogtied twenty-four seven and to be muzzled.’

  The soldiers acknowledged the orders.

  ‘I want a twenty-four-hour guard on him, three shifts of two each, with no talking. No one talks to him and he talks to no one, understand?’

  It was a full month before Pretoria came for De Villiers. He was fetched and made to wait in the hut serving as an office. He was handcuffed, but alone. !Xau’s bow and quiver were displayed like a trophy on the wall. His Best lay on the table next to the Leatherman.

  The colonel, who claimed to be in Military Intelligence, listened with barely masked impatience when De Villiers asked to speak to General van den Bergh in MI. He said, ‘There’s no General van den Bergh in Military Intelligence or any other branch of the SADF.

  ‘Weren’t you on a mission to Cabinda?’ the colonel asked. ‘We know of that.’

  De Villiers immediately protested. ‘I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Do you know where you are now?’ the colonel teased. ‘Have you any idea where you are?’

  ‘No,’ De Villiers admitted, ‘but it looks like the bush headquarters of 32 Battalion.’

  ‘Listen, Captain,’ the colonel said in a low whisper, ‘we’ve taken a lot of flak for the Cabinda operation. The fact is, I pray to God that you were on that operation, although, God knows, I don’t know how you ever got clearance for something as stupid as that. We screwed up there, but we are taking our medicine.’

  ‘I can’t do a report on an operation I did not do,’ De Villiers said. ‘I was sent by General van den Bergh to shoot Mugabe.’

  ‘No, we’re going round in circles here,’ the colonel said. ‘I told you there’s no such general. And if you think Cabinda was stupid, sending troops to shoot Mugabe would be off the scale of insanity.’

  ‘I had orders, Sir, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, but whose orders? I wouldn’t be here if you had valid orders.’

  De Villiers felt trapped.

  ‘There’s going to be hell to pay in Pretoria if we find that you’ve been on an unauthorised operation,’ the colonel said. ‘Heads are going to roll, and you are standing right in the front of the line at the guillotine.’

  ‘What about my wife?’ De Villiers asked suddenly. ‘Does she know I’m here? That I’m alive?’

  The colonel fidgeted with his cap. Wives and family are the soft underbelly of all armed forces and the SADF did its best to keep them content and informed, in that order, but content rather than informed, if necessary. Where information might cause enquiries, protest or unhappiness, the SADF lied. When soldiers had problems at home, they deserted, exactly as they have done in all wars.

  ‘All she knows is that you went on a top secret operation and that you’re MIA. She’s probably concluded that you were on the Cabinda mission with Wynand du Toit and that you’ve gone missing there.’

  Du Toit had been in 4 Recce. De Villiers had done many training courses with him and they had been on other operations together.

  But not this one, De Villiers said to himself. Not this one. He had known that Du Toit and a number of other members of 4 Recce were being trained for a special mission, but the standard operating procedure of the unit had always been that only those going on the mission should know its details.

  ‘We know nothing of this operation you’re talking about,’ the colonel said.

  De Villiers was equally adamant. ‘There’s nothing more I can tell you,’ he said. ‘I was never part of that Cabinda operation.’

  The colonel stood up. At the door he turned to speak to De Villiers.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll send for you soon.’

  The colonel started for the door.

  ‘What’s happened to the Bushman?’ De Villiers asked.

  ‘What Bushman?’ the colonel countered.

  De Villiers looked up at the wall where !Xau’s bow and quiver were hanging on a peg. They must think I’m stupid, he said to himself. Or mad. And this man has threatened me. It wasn’t even subtle.

  The colonel slammed the door behind him. De Villiers stood up quickly and turned his back to the desk. He had to climb up onto the desk in reverse in order to reach !Xau’s Best with his handcuffed hands. He took the Best and slipped it into his back pocket.

  The Leatherman lay on the table, still in its scabbard. It was too bulky to fit into a pocket.

  Two days after the colonel’s departure, MPS from Pretoria arrived with their military van. They made him undress and strip-searched him. They rolled his dirty overalls into a ball and gave him one of theirs to put on. It marked him as a prisoner with the letters DB in white on the chest and on the back. They made him sign a register and threw him into the back of their van. When they had locked him in, De Villiers looked out through the wire mesh of his cage.

  There was no sign of !Xau.

  THE CHASE

  Voortrekkerhoogte

  1985 25

  They finally broke him in DB at Voortrekkerhoogte, but it had taken a month and they had had to break his body because his mind had refused to surrender to their cruelty.

  ‘I have orders to report to General van den Bergh,’ he continued to maintain.

  ‘There’s no such general,’ the officer in charge of the detention barracks claimed.

  ‘He’s in Military Intelligence,’ De Villiers asserted. ‘He told me so himself.’

  ‘They’ve never heard of him there,’ the officer retorted.

 
; ‘Then I’ve got no one to report to, have I?’

  ‘We’ll show you what we have in store for clever dicks like you. You went on an illegal operation and we’ll make you talk.’

  So the torture they termed interrogation continued: push-ups with a fully laden backpack on his shoulders, which he refused to do; running with full kit, which he reduced to a shuffle, cooperating only far enough to be able to get outside into the sunlight. Eventually they gave up on the physical exercises and threw him back into his six-bysix cell after beating him black and blue with their batons. Once they had him prostrate in his cell, they put a metre-high parade ground loudspeaker at his cell grille and played Wagner at one hundred-andtwenty decibels. Two hours later the camp commandant’s wife, a kilometre away at the Senior Staff Living Quarters, could no longer take the Hitler music, as she called it, and complained. Her husband ordered the speaker removed.

  They reported to their seniors that each time they had tried the methods that had been guaranteed to work on previous captives – many of whom were enemy soldiers brought back from the bush in order to extract information of planned offensives and FAPLA and Cuban movements – De Villiers would shuffle around in his tiny cell, chanting in a low hum that seemed to come from the centre of his torso, deep inside. He would fall down on his side in an apparently unconscious state and not even a bucket of cold water would rouse him.

  ‘He’s bossies, Lieutenant, heeltemal bosbefok,’ the DB sergeant reported.

  ‘No,’ the young lieutenant insisted, ‘he’s fucking with us. We need to break through his resistance. Now get on with it.’

  A month after entering the detention barracks in manacles and chains but on his own steam, De Villiers was carried out on a stretcher, unconscious and foaming at the mouth. When he started convulsing in the back of the military ambulance, they turned the sirens on for the rest of the journey to 1 Military Hospital, still within the confines of the Voortrekkerhoogte Army Base.