6
1-Mil
25th June 1981,
1 Military Hospital, Pretoria, South Africa
When he opens his eyes he sees her for the first time.
Someone he could have loved, maybe, in some different world where people were free to indulge in such things. Someone he will think about, now and again, for the rest of his life.
This may hurt a little, she says, pulling away the bandages on his forearm. Her voice is gentle. He imagines her speaking to her children this way. If she has any. There is a ring on her finger.
How was that, she asks. Gentle, he says. You’re gentle. She smiles, likes this, he thinks. It feels good that she likes it.
It looks a lot worse than it is. She tells him that he is very lucky. The fragment missed the ulnar artery. He is luckier than Cooper. The same rocket took off his legs. He died crying for his mother in a pool of blood so big Clay couldn’t believe it had all come from one man.
He asks where this is. He remembers being stretchered onto a C-130 at Ondangwa, the medic slipping him a dose of morphine. Number 1 Military Hospital, Pretoria, she says. They brought you in yesterday. We operated right away.
He looks down at the scar running lengthwise along his forearm, then back up at her face. She has a delicate face, fair, with sun freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her nose is small, slightly upturned. You have beautiful eyes, he tells her. She does.
She seems not to react. There is no flutter of eyes, no reddening across her prominent cheekbones. She hears this all the time, he supposes. She checks his IV.
Like a Cedarburg river bed, he says. He will always remember saying that, thinking immediately after that he sounds like a twenty-year-old in love with his attractive nurse.
She stops and looks into his eyes, showing him inside hers. He sees sun-dappled currents, muscled water shifting clear and cold over smooth river stones. It jolts him. Chemicals jostle. He feels weak. Something inside him hollows out.
After a moment she tells him that they will keep him here for two weeks. He can report back to his unit after that. He tells her he’d rather just go back right away. He says it because he wants her to think him brave. And because he means it.
She picks up his chart, flips pages. It says here that you are engaged to be married, she says, looking up over the edge of the clipboard. You are entitled to receive visitors, you know. He knows. We can arrange some privacy for you. He knows, has heard the stories of conjugal visits. He repeats that he would rather just get back to his unit. She appears not to understand. His fiancée is in Bloemfontein. She lives with her parents. A twelve-hour train journey away. For what? What would he say to her? That he’d killed at least two human beings since he’d last seen her; that he’d seen women raped and men burned alive, friends die waiting for the casevac, the sand soaking up their blood like so much rain? Despite the promise of sex, he doesn’t want to see her. He feels strange, confused. He doesn’t say any of it.
She tells him he cannot be released sooner. He must heal. They must observe him. I’ll ask the doctor, he says. She crosses her arms across her chest. I am the doctor, she says. She is also a Captain. He splutters some apology, swears as if he were still out in the bush, apologises again. He repeats that he would rather just go back as soon as possible. He says please, addresses her as Doctor for the first time. She is very pretty for an officer, he thinks, in that older-woman kind of way. He guesses she is thirty. Thereabouts.
She looks down at him for a long time. You want to go back, she says. Yes. Why? she asks. Why what? He feels stupid. Why do you want to go back there? He stares down at his arm a moment, so carefully cleaned and stitched, then back up at her face. I just do, he tells her. She looks angry. Her tone changes. That’s not an answer, soldier. He considers this. He feels threatened in some vague way he can’t place. He asks her is this an official medical question, ma’am.
She smooths her hair, looks away. No, she whispers. He can barely hear her. She looks around the ward, at all the other wounded soldiers in their beds, back at Clay. The anger is gone, replaced by something else. I don’t understand, she says. I want to understand. He thinks he sees pain in her expression, some kind of bewilderment. He is not sure. She seems easy to read, but she is not.
He tries to explain. It is difficult. He cannot look into himself in a way that makes anything clear enough for words, let alone sentences. That’s where I belong, he finally comes up with. She stands a while, some sort of calculus spinning in her brain. He will never forget what she says then and what comes after.
This war is not what you think it is.
What do I think it is? he replies immediately, without thinking.
The rool gevdar, she answers. That’s what you think it’s about. He can tell from the way she says it that she is not a native Afrikaans speaker.
So tell me, he says. It’s a race war. Plain and simple. She whispers this, glances over her shoulder. He remembers Eben saying this same thing, that night in the UNITA bunker. He tells her they have black soldiers fighting with them. He thinks of Brigade. They are volunteers. Ask them.
You’re all being duped, she says, whispering still. She waves her arm towards the other beds. All of this suffering, for a lie. She stresses the last word like this. A lie.
Something inside him goes cold. As if a part of him has been cut out and what replaces it is not at body temperature. He thinks of how Kruger felt as they lifted him onto the poncho, so heavy. Why are you telling me this, he asks her. She is an officer. What she is saying is treason. People are being shot for less.
I am telling you because you love this war, she says. Maybe you don’t know it now, and you’re too young to articulate it, but you do. You love it. And I hate it. There are many who feel this way. And then she turns on the balls of her feet, like a dancer, and strides away between the rows of beds. The soldiers who are awake watch her go, and some of them – the ones who can – smile at each other.
Next afternoon she comes and helps him into a wheelchair, although he says he can walk, and she pushes him along the corridor and out into the big garden at the back of the hospital and parks him in the shade of a big pine tree. She says she is on her break. She brings him paper and a pen and sits in the grass beside him, reading some book in French while he tries to write a letter to Sara.
He writes By the time you get this letter I will be back on the Border. I was here in Pretoria at 1-Mil just for a small thing no time at all and please don’t worry. And that was it. Two lines. A line for each day they’d spent together during his leave a month ago. He folds it and puts it in an envelope and writes Sara’s name and her father’s address on the front and gives it to the doctor. She takes it and puts it in the pocket of her dress.
What are you reading, he asks her. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she tells him. Les Confessions. She says it in French, with an accent. I don’t know this writer, he tells her, and she asks him do you like reading and which authors do you like? I have a friend who reads all the time, he says, carries books with him even on operations. He is a philosopher, and a writer, too. One day he will get something he’s written published, maybe after the war.
What about you? she asks, sitting there on the lawn bent over her book with her knees up and her dress hiked up above her knees so he can see her calves, slender and smooth and white. The sight of them sends a quiver through him that catches in his throat, and when he speaks his voice is lower and he wonders, can she hear his arousal? I like to read, he says, sure. She smiles at him and it only makes it worse and he realises he is hard, aching hard, and if there weren’t rules about such things he’d tell her and maybe she’d do something with him, knowing how close he’d just come to dying and that he could be dead in a few days. Such are the ways a twenty-year-old thinks, he would realise years later. Thinking that people other than your parents actually give a shit about you and what might become of you, and sometimes not even them.
I’ll bring you something, then, she says after
a while, standing and smoothing the front of her white doctor’s dress and wheeling him back to the ward.
That night a parallel life complete opens to him. Perhaps it is the drugs, the morphine and the antibiotics and whatever else they are putting into him. Maybe it’s just that his brain has had some time to process what he’s done and seen and felt and heard and smelled these past months. Whatever the cause, it’s a life he never wanted. And over the years, he will come to fear it to the extent that escaping its nightly inevitability will become an obsession.
That night, it is a simple one. Vivid and so real he swears he is there. He checks himself to see if it is a dream. He thinks this: It is not a dream. It is happening. He is standing in the bush, his R4 pointed at a FAPLA soldier. The man is unarmed, bewildered, close enough to spit on. He holds his hands out, palms up, pleads with him in Portuguese. Clay pulls the trigger. The rifle does not fire. He tries again. The man turns away, tries to make himself small, draws his arms up around his face as if that might somehow protect him. But it is as if a piece of hard rubber has been lodged behind the trigger and is preventing its depression. He squeezes as hard as he can, but the trigger depresses only slightly, not enough to trip the firing pin. Still the man stands there, whimpering, pleading. He does not run. Why doesn’t he run? Clay puts his left index finger inside the trigger guard, on top of the other finger, pulls as hard as he can. His arms quiver with the effort. Still he cannot get the trigger to move that last half-millimetre. The man stares at him with wide, pained eyes washed in terror.
Clay wakes with a start, his heart hammering in his chest, his face and arms and torso covered in sweat. The bedsheets are soaked. In the darkness he hears one of the other soldiers shift in his bed, call out something he cannot decipher, the others breathing in their own parallel places. He runs his good hand down along his chest to his abdomen, the muscles lean and hard after weeks in the bush, the sweat slick on his skin, until his hand reaches his penis. It throbs in his hand. He pushes away the dream and any thought that it may have been associated with his arousal. He lies as quietly as he can in the sleeping ward and he thinks of the doctor. She comes to him in the night, takes off her clothes, whispers to him that it’s okay and just be quiet I’ll do everything, but before she can do anything he comes; it shoots thick and hot and heavy all over his chest and he can feel it running down his sides and he wipes the sweat and the cum from his body with the bedsheets and lies there in the darkness not wanting to sleep and feeling like there is nothing inside him and he is a shell.
He dreams again, vivid, real, as if his eyes are open. The fat, balding man with the suit – the one who was inspecting the tusks at the chana; the one the UNITA Colonel called Botha – is there in the hospital. He walks the ward, dressed in a doctor’s coat, inspecting the wounded men, checking them off in his notebook. He is wearing a face mask, like the doctors do when they operate, but Clay knows it’s him by his dark, expressionless eyes.
The next afternoon she takes him out to the garden again, parks him under the same tree. She hands him a book. Something you might like, she says. A paperback edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, battered, faded. He riffles the pages, smells the book. It reminds him of his father, now dead. That was a war worth fighting, she says. He asks her the question with his eyes. The Spanish Civil War, she says, 1935. Robert Jordan, the hero, is fighting against tyranny. You are fighting for it.
He looks at her for a long time. She looks back. She is deadly serious.
The next day, out in the garden, he tells her he is halfway through the novel. It’s good, he says. She smiles, goes back to her book. She is reading something else today, doesn’t tell him what. For some reason that he will not understand until much later, he tells her about the UNITA Colonel and his men loading the tusks and the wood and diamonds onto the unmarked Hercules, about the fat, ugly man in the suit inspecting the cargo, and how strange it was seeing him there, so obviously out of place. He tells her about seeing him again in his dreams, walking the corridors of the hospital, about Cobra leaving them there with the FAPLA tanks bearing down on them. He tells her about the woman prisoner, what they’d done to her and what she’d said about the drugs, how Koevoet had finally decided to let her go during the retreat to the border. She listens, says nothing. She looks pale, as if his words have stolen the blood from under her skin. She takes him back to the ward. Something has changed.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: And the diamonds, Mister Straker. What did you do with them?
Witness: When I was wounded, I gave them to Eben. Eben Barstow, my friend. I told him to keep them safe for me.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: What did he do with them?
Witness: He buried them in a hole under the floorboards of our tent at the airbase, Ondangwa.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: And were you aware of their value?
Witness: No, sir. Not at the time.
Commissioner Ksole: And later?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Ksole: And can you share that with us, please: What was their value?
Witness: Something like half a million US dollars, at the time. A lot more now.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: That is a lot of money. What did you do with them?
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: What did you do with the diamonds, Mister Straker?
Witness: This is not what I came here to talk about.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: You acquired those diamonds illegally, Mister Straker, of your own admission. At gunpoint. Are you a thief, Mister Straker? Is that why you do not want to tell us?
Witness: Yes.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Yes, what?
Witness: Yes, I am a thief. And I am a murderer.
Commissioner Ksole: A murderer?
Witness: Yes.
Commissioner Lacy: You were a soldier. Soldiers have to kill.
Witness: Not … Not like I did.
Commissioner Ksole: We will get to that. Did you have any visitors in hospital?
Witness: Yes, sir. Captain Wade, our company commander came to see me.
Commissioner Barbour: Were you surprised?
Witness: A little, I guess. I mean, I was just an enlisted man. He was a good officer.
Commissioner Ksole: What did you talk about?
Witness: He asked me about the operation. He knew about the prisoner, the woman. He wanted to know what I’d seen.
Commissioner Ksole: And did you tell him?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Ksole: Everything?
Witness: No, sir. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about the diamonds. Or about Crowbar – Liutenant Van Boxmeer, I mean – shooting the UNITA soldier.
Commissioner Lacy: Did you tell him about the rape?
Witness: Yes, ma’am. I did.
Commissioner Barbour: And this young woman, the, ah, the doctor. Can you tell the commission her name, please?
Witness: There weren’t many lady doctors around back then. It shouldn’t be hard to find out.
Commissioner Ksole: You don’t have to tell us. We know. This is for confirmation, Mister Straker. I am sure you understand.
Witness: I’m not here to speak on her behalf.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Do you not wish to proceed with your testimony, Mister Straker?
Witness: Why do you think I’m here?
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Frankly, Mister Straker, I don’t know.
Commissioner Barbour: Please, gentlemen.
Commissioner Ksole: Coming back to the doctor. There was something in the book she gave you, was there not?
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Ksole: Mister Straker?
Witness: How do you know that?
Commissioner Ksole: Answer the question, please.
Witness: Yes. Yes, there was.
7
Life Set to Music
It was a story they’d tell many times over the coming months. The time Crowbar
– already holder of the Honoris Crux, the SADF’s highest award for valour, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the American Medal of Honour – led three platoons of parabats, low on ammo, food and water, out of Angola. They were fewer than a hundred men and were pursued by an entire communist battalion, at least a thousand strong and backed up by a dozen T55s (the number grew with the telling). It was a story that became legend on the border, but that too soon no one would want to hear; a heroic act for a bankrupt cause in a war that few had heard of, and everyone who had, wanted to forget. It was Eben who told the story that night, staring into the fire, Pink Floyd cranked on his tape deck, one of the rare times they were allowed beer in camp, the other Valk and some of the aircrew there, too.
Low on ammunition, the tanks threatening to break through and cut them in two, the UNITA dofs having run away, Koevoet works out a plan. They collapse the flanks, Coetzee’s Valk 3 folding in behind Valk 5, de Vries’s Valk 2 in the rear. They are deep in Angolan territory, 185 kilometres from the border. Evac by air is ruled out. The enemy is too close. The parabats will have to fight their way out.
So begins a three-day fighting retreat. They meet the advancing FAPLA troops with disciplined, concentrated fire, then fall back, hour after hour. Night falls, and they keep moving. By daybreak, they’ve put ten kilometres between themselves and the communists. Crowbar calls in airstrikes, Mirage jets pounding FAPLA. The 250-pound bombs shake the teeth in their heads a mile away. The vlammies report two tanks knocked out.
By now Eben was pacing around the fire in some kind of bushman’s war dance, beer bottle in one hand, the other timing the jet’s swooping bomb runs to the beat of the music. The troops roared with delight as each tank went up, their faces bathed in firelight, eyes blazing raw youth, the joy of being alive and able to tell such stories. Life set to music.
Crowbar finally manages to get a casevac in to take out the wounded and deliver badly needed supplies. Later that day, FAPLA catches them again, rushing troops forwards in Russian-built BTR armoured vehicles. Valk 3 reports contact with a Cuban unit, their first such encounter. They are well trained, disciplined. Liutenant Coetzee and his radioman are killed when a Cuban rocket hits their position.
Reconciliation for the Dead Page 7