by Sarah Lotz
I said yes, and asked her what it was–I assumed it must be another shack fire or trouble from a strike. She told me that from what she could gather, a plane had crashed. Together we hurried into the sitting room and switched on the television. It was all over the news and at first it was difficult for me to understand what I was seeing. Most of the clips just showed people running and screaming, balloons of black smoke billowing around them. But then I heard the words that chilled my heart. The reporter, a young white woman with frightened eyes, said that a church near Sector Five had been completely destroyed when the plane hit the ground.
My daughter Susan’s crèche was in a church in that area.
Of course, my first thought was that I must contact Busi, my sister, but I was out of airtime. The madam let me use her cellphone, but there was no answer; it went straight to voicemail. I was starting to feel sick, even light-headed. Busi always answers her phone. Always.
‘Madam,’ I said, ‘I have to leave. I have to get home.’ I was praying that Busi had decided to collect Susan, my daughter, from crèche early. It was Busi’s day off from the factory, and sometimes she did this so that they could spend the afternoon together. When I left at five that morning to catch the taxi to the Northern suburbs, Busi was still fast asleep, Susan by her side. I tried to keep that image–Busi and Susan safe together–in my mind. That’s what I concentrated on. I only started to pray later on.
The madam (her real name is Mrs Clara van der Spuy, but the boss likes me to call her ‘madam’, which made Busi furious) said straight away that she would take me.
While I collected my bag, I could hear her having a fight with the boss on her cellphone. ‘Johannes doesn’t want me to take you,’ she said to me. ‘But he can go jump. I’d never live with myself if I let you catch a taxi.’
She didn’t stop talking all the way there, only pausing when I had to interrupt to give her directions. My stress levels were now making me feel physically ill; I could feel the pie that I’d eaten for lunch turning into a stone in my stomach. As we made it onto the N2 highway, I could see black smoke drifting into the air in the distance. Within a few kilometres, I could smell it. ‘I’m sure it’s going to be fine, Angela,’ the madam kept saying. ‘Khayelitsha is a big place, isn’t it?’ She turned on the radio; the newscaster was talking about other plane crashes that had occurred elsewhere in the world. ‘Blerrie terrorists,’ the madam swore. As we approached the Baden Powell road exit, the traffic thickened. We were surrounded by hooting taxis full of frightened faces, people, like me, desperate to get home. Ambulances and fire trucks screamed past us. The madam was beginning to look nervous; she was far out of her comfort zone. The police had set up roadblocks to try and prevent more vehicles getting into the area and I knew I would have to join the crowd and make my way to my section on foot.
‘Go home, madam,’ I said, and I could see the relief on her face. I didn’t blame her. It was hell. The air was thick with ash and already the smoke was making my eyes sting.
I jumped out of the car and ran towards the crowds fighting to get through the barricade they had set up across the road. The people around me were shouting and screaming, and I joined my voice to theirs. ‘Intombiyam! My daughter is in there!’ The police were forced to let us through when an ambulance came racing towards us and needed to get out.
I ran. I have never run so fast in my whole life, but I didn’t feel tired–the fear pushed me onwards. People would emerge through the smoke, some of them covered in blood, and I’m ashamed to say I did not stop to help them. I concentrated on moving forward although at times it was difficult to see where I was walking. Sometimes that was almost a blessing as I saw… I saw flags stuck into the ground and blue plastic bags covering shapes–shapes that I knew were body parts. Fires raged everywhere and firefighters in masks were busy cordoning off other areas. People were being physically restrained from going in any further. But I was still too far away from the street where I lived–I needed to get closer. The smoke scorched my lungs, made my eyes stream, and every so often there would be a pop as something exploded. My skin was soon bathed in filth. The scene looked completely wrong, and I wondered if I had wandered into an unfamiliar area. I was looking for the top of the church, but it was not there. The smell–like a spit-braai mixed with burning fuel–made me vomit. I dropped to my knees. I knew I couldn’t go any closer if I wanted to carry on breathing.
It was one of the paramedics who found me. He looked exhausted, his blue overalls soaked with blood. All I could say to him was: ‘My daughter. I need to find my daughter.’
Why he chose to help me, I do not know. There were so many other people who needed help. He led me towards his ambulance and I sat in the front seat while he got on his radio. Within minutes, a Red Cross kombi arrived, and the driver motioned me to squeeze inside. Like me, the people inside it were all filthy, covered in ash; most wore the expressions of the deeply traumatised. A woman at the back stared silently out of the window, a sleeping child in her arms. The old man next to me shook silently; there were tear tracks on his dirty cheeks. ‘Molweni,’ I whispered to him, ‘kuzolunga.’ I was telling him that everything would be all right, but I didn’t believe it myself. All I could do was pray, making deals with God in my head so that Susan and Busi would be spared.
We passed by the tent filled with the dead. I tried not to look at it. I could see people hefting the bodies–more of those shapes covered in blue plastic–inside it. And I prayed even harder that they did not contain the bodies of Busi or Susan.
We were driven to the Mew Way community hall. I was supposed to sign my name at the entrance, but I just pushed past the officials and ran for the doors.
Even from outside, I could hear the sound of crying. It was chaos inside there. The centre was full of people huddled in groups, covered in soot and bandages. Some were crying, others looked deeply shocked, staring ahead sightlessly, like the people in the kombi. I began to push my way through the crowd. How would I ever find Busi and Susan in this mass? I saw Noliswa, one of my neighbours, who sometimes looked after Susan. Her face was thick with blood and black dirt. She was rocking back and forth and when I tried to ask her about Busi and Susan she just looked blank; the light had gone out of her eyes. Later, I found out that two of her grandchildren had been at the crèche when the plane had crashed into it.
And then I heard a voice saying, ‘Angie?’
I turned around slowly. And saw Busi standing with Susan in her arms.
I screamed, ‘Niphilile! You are alive!’ over and over again.
We stood and held each other–Susan wriggling, I was squeezing her too tight–for the longest time. I hadn’t given up hope, but the relief that they were okay… I will never feel anything that powerful again in my lifetime. When we both stopped crying, Busi told me what had happened. She said she had collected Susan from crèche early, and instead of going straight home, had decided to walk to the spaza for sugar. She said the sound of the impact was incredible–they thought at first it must be a bomb. She said she just grabbed Susan and ran as fast as she could away from that sound and away from the explosions. If she had gone home, they would have been killed.
Because our home was gone. Everything we owned had been incinerated.
We stayed in the hall while we waited to be allocated to a shelter. Some of us put up partitions, hanging sheets and blankets from the roof to make makeshift rooms. So many people had lost their homes, but it was the children I felt for the most. The ones who had lost their parents or grandparents. There were so many of them, many of them amagweja [refugee children] who had already suffered during the xenophobic attacks four years ago. They had already seen too much.
One boy sticks in my mind. On that first night, I couldn’t sleep. The adrenaline still hadn’t left my body and I suppose I was still dealing with the after-effects of what I had seen that day. I stood up to stretch and I felt the weight of someone staring at me. On a blanket next to where Busi, Susan and I were lying s
at a boy. I’d barely noticed him before–I was too caught up in caring for Susan and queuing for food and water. Even in the dark I could see the pain and loneliness shining in his eyes. He was alone on his blanket; I could see no sign of a parent or a grandparent. I wondered why the welfare people had not taken him to the un accompanied children’s section.
I asked him where his mother was. He did not react. I sat next to him and took him in my arms. He leaned against me, but although he didn’t cry or sob, his body was like a dead weight. When I thought he was asleep, I laid him down and crept back to my blanket.
The next day, we heard we were to be moved to a hotel that was donating its rooms to those of us who had lost their homes. I looked around for the boy; I had some idea that perhaps he could come with us, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. We stayed in the hotel for two weeks, and when my sister was offered a job at a large bakery near to Masiphumele, I went to work with her. Again, I was lucky. It is much better than being a domestic. The bakery has a crèche and I can take Susan to work with me every morning.
Later, when all the Americans came out to South Africa to look for that fourth child, an investigator–a Xhosa man, not one of the bounty hunters from overseas–tracked me and Busi down and asked us if we had seen a particular child in that hall where we were taken. He matched the description of the boy I had seen that first night, but I didn’t tell the man that I’d seen him. I’m not sure why. I think in my heart I knew it would be better for him if he wasn’t found. I could see that the investigator knew I was hiding something, but I still listened to the voice inside me that told me to keep quiet.
And… he may not have even been the boy they were looking for. There were many intandane [orphaned children], and the boy did not tell me his name.
Private First Class Samuel ‘Sammy’ Hockemeier of the III Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Courtney on Okinawa Island, agreed to talk to me via Skype after he returned to the US in June 2012.
I met Jake when we were both deployed to Okinawa in 2011. I’m from Fairfax, Virginia, and it turned out that he grew up in Annandale, so we became buddies straight away. Found out that in high school I’d even played football against his brother a couple of times. Before we went into that forest he was just a regular guy, nothing special, quieter than most, had a sense of humour that could pass right by you unless you were paying attention. He was a smallish guy, five eight, maybe five nine–those photographs that were all over the Internet made him look bigger than he actually was. Bigger and meaner. Both of us got into computer games when we were there, they’re big on base, kind of got addictive. That’s the worst I could say about him–till he flipped the fuck out, I mean.
We’d both signed up for III MEF’s Humanitarian Aid corp, and in early January we heard that our battalion was going to be deployed to Fuji Camp for training–a full-on disaster reconstruction. Jake and I were pretty upbeat when we heard about that. A couple of anti-terrorism marines we’d gone up against at one of the game cons had just come back from there. They said Katemba, one of the nearby towns, was a cool place to hang out in; had a joint where you could drink and eat all you liked for 3000 yen. We were also hoping to get a chance to head into Tokyo and check out the culture. You don’t see much of it on Okinawa, on account of it being seven hundred clicks from mainland Japan. The view from Courtney is awesome, looks right over the ocean, but you can get sick of looking at that day in day out, and a lot of the natives on the island don’t have a high opinion of the marines. Some of this is down to the Girard incident–that marine who accidentally shot a local woman who was collecting scrap metal from the firing range–and that gang rape back in the nineties. I wouldn’t say the locals were actively hostile, but you could tell a lot of them didn’t want us there.
Fuji Camp itself is okay. Small, but the training area is cool. Got to say it was colder than a witch’s tit when we arrived there. Lots of mist, ton of rain; we were lucky it didn’t snow. Our CO told us we’d be spending the first few days preparing equipment for the deployment to the North Fuji Manoeuvre area, but we’d barely settled into barracks when the news about Black Thursday started filtering in. First one we heard about was the Florida crash. Couple of the guys were from there and their families and girlfriends emailed them the latest news. When we heard about the UK plane, and the one in Africa, you should have heard the rumours that were flying around. Lot of us assumed it was terrorists, another rag-head reprisal maybe, and we were convinced we’d be deployed straight back to Okinawa. It’s kinda ironic, considering where we were, but the last one we heard about was the Sun Air disaster–none of us could believe it had happened so close to where we were based. Like everyone else, Jake and I were glued to the Internet that night. That’s how we heard about those survivors, the flight attendant and the kid. The connection was bad for a while, but we managed to download a YouTube clip of that kid being hoisted into a helicopter. We were bummed when we heard that one of the survivors had died en route to the hospital. It’s freaky to think about it now, but I remember Jake saying, ‘Shit, I hope it wasn’t that kid.’ This is going to sound bad, but knowing there was also an American on board, and that she didn’t make it, made the Sun Air crash seem more real to us. The fact that one of our own had gone down.
On the Friday morning, my CO said they needed volunteers from the Humanitarian Aid div to help secure the area and clear a landing pad for the search and rescue helicopters so they could get closer to the site. In the briefing meeting, he told us that hundreds of distraught family members had flocked to the site and were interfering with the operation. The press were also turning the whole thing into a clusterfuck; some of them even got lost or injured in the forest and had to be rescued. I was surprised the Japanese wanted us involved. Sure, the US and Japan have an understanding, but the locals are big on doing things their way; guess it’s a matter of pride. But the CO said they’d been criticised for dropping the ball after that bullet train crash in the late nineties; didn’t get their act together fast enough, waited while the wheels of bureaucracy turned, would only act when a superior told them what to do, that kind of thing. Cost lives.
I stepped up right away and Jake did too. We were told we’d be working in tandem with a bunch of guys from the nearby JGSDF camp and Yoji, this GSDF private who was assigned as our translator, started telling us about the forest en route. He said it had a really bad rep because of the number of people who had killed themselves there. Told us that there had been so many suicides that the cops had been forced to set up cameras on the trees and that the place was full of unidentified bodies that had been there for years. He said the locals stayed away from it because they believed it was haunted by the spirits of the angry dead or some shit like that, souls that couldn’t rest or whatever. I don’t know much about Japanese spirituality, just that they believe the souls of animals are in pretty much anything, from people to chairs or whatever, but that sounded way too hokey to be anything but bullshit. Most of us started cracking jokes, messing around, but Jake didn’t say a word.
Got to say, the Search and Rescue and the GSDF guys hadn’t done a bad job of securing the scene, considering what they had to deal with, but they were seriously out-manned. No way they could control the number of people who were milling around outside the morgue tents. After we were briefed, Jake, me, some of our squadron and a bunch of GSDF guys were sent straight to the main crash site. The rest of the division were deployed to secure the temporary morgue tents, help ferry the supplies and set up latrines.
Our CO told us that SAR and the JTSB guys had mapped where most of the bodies had fallen on impact and now they were bringing them down to the tents. I know you’re mostly interested in Jake, but I’ll give you an idea of what it was like. When I was at school, we’d studied this old song, ‘Strange Fruit’. About the lynchings that went on in the Deep South. How the bodies hanging from the trees looked like strange fruit. That’s what we saw. That’s what some of those freaky trees were holding as we got closer
to where the body of the plane had landed. Only most of the bodies weren’t whole. Couple of the guys puked, but me and Jake maintained.
Kinda worse than this were the civilians who were stumbling around the scene, calling for their parents or families or loved ones. Most of them had brought offerings–food or flowers. Later, Yoji, who was assigned to help round them up and get them away from the site, told me that he came across one couple who were so convinced their son was still alive, they’d brought him a change of clothes.
Jake and I were sent to help the guys clear the trees for the helicopter pad, and although it was tough going, it was away from the wreckage and it took our minds off what we’d seen. The NTSB guys didn’t make it till the next day, but by then things were far more organised.
Our CO said we were to stay at the site that night and we were assigned sleeping quarters in one of the GSDF’s tents. None of us were happy about that. There wasn’t a private there who wasn’t feeling spooked about spending a night in that forest. And not just because of what we’d seen that day. We even spoke in whispers; it didn’t feel right to raise our voices. A few of the guys tried to crack jokes, but they all fell flat.
Round about three hundred hours, I was woken by a scream. Sounded like it was coming from outside the tent. Bunch of us leaped up and ran out. Shit, my adrenaline was just pumping. Couldn’t see much–the air was full of mist.
One of the guys–I think it was Johnny, this black dude from Atlanta, good guy–pulled out his flashlight and shone it around. The light was wobbling ’cause his hand was shaking. It settled on this shape a few yards from where we were standing: a figure, its back to us, kneeling down. It turned to look at us and I saw it was Jake.
I asked him what the fuck was going on. He looked dazed, shook his head. ‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘I saw them. The people with no feet.’