My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  On the Afrikaner side the soldiers of the Boer Republics pioneered, then perfected, a new form of combat in response to the overwhelming force they met from a regular army: it was to them that Nick traced his military heritage. Each Boer community had formed its own irregular unit known as a Commando. Because these men shot animals either to eat, or in self-defence, they knew how to make every bullet count: for the khaki-clad farmers, it was a lot easier sniping British soldiers than it was hunting antelope. After the Republics were occupied, the Boers fought a devastating guerrilla war. They targeted water treatment plants, railways, bridges – practically any aspect of the infrastructure vital to the British occupation they could disrupt or destroy. Hundreds of British troops were killed, or humiliated by capture at the hands of irregular fighters. The poor farmers of the bushveld had transformed themselves into the first modern guerrilla army. In his gun cabinet at home, Nick told me with pride, he still kept his grandfather’s old Mauser rifle – the iconic weapon of the Boer Commandos.

  As Nick saw it, the resentment the British campaign engendered in the Afrikaners lit the fuse of Boer vengeance. It led to the foundation of the Afrikaner Broederbond: a secret, exclusively white, male Protestant organisation dedicated to the advancement of Afrikaner interests. Its philosophy was born out of the deep conviction that the Afrikaner people had been planted in South Africa by God Himself, destined to survive as a separate ‘volk’ with its own calling. The traditional, deeply held religious convictions of the Calvinist Afrikaners gave their struggle an aspect of Christian predestination that led to a quest to free the whole of South Africa from the English-speaking British and secure its future in the hands of Afrikaans-speaking whites. The consequences that would have for the country’s black and mixed-race inhabitants were immaterial.

  The original drive for independence from the British that had in part prompted the Boer Great Trek into the interior from the 1830s had joined to it a new impetus for total independence under a Nationalist government. Together they formed a kind of Christian Nationalism that dominated South Africa until 1994. When Nick was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, apartheid wasn’t just a unique political idea, it was a religious certainty.

  Finding ourselves united despite a century of mistrust and resentment was not inevitable: Afrikaner opinion of the English at times echoes stereotypical British attitudes towards the Germans. It felt like ancient history, but my great-grandmother, who helped raise me, had been twelve years old when the Boers surrendered. She never forgave them for unsettling Queen Victoria’s last months on the throne. Nick laughed.

  ‘I served with a lot of English guys from Rhodesia in the Recces,’ he told me. ‘They were good, they knew the terrain we were fighting very well and all the tricks the terrorists would use.’

  ‘Did they have to learn Afrikaans?’

  The language was perplexing, though its guttural intensity seemed somehow fitting for barking orders.

  ‘Yes, but we had to learn English, too. That’s how I learned to talk it properly. The army would switch between English and Afrikaans on the parade ground: we’d do one month on, one month off. What we spoke to each other was mainly Afrikaans, though. You could use any language with your friends.’ Our breakfast had arrived late: rice in water with a sprinkling of dried milk powder that the rebels hopefully called ‘ride pudding’. It was a cruel disappointment. As we sat at the card table licking the plates clean, I wondered if Nick had a lot of foreign troops in his unit. It was a history that I knew almost nothing about.

  ‘In Special Forces it was a bit different. My regiment, 5 Recce, was reorganised in 1980 with a lot of Rhodesian SAS. We had Angolans, and some guys from Mozambique, too. There were a few Portuguese officers – most of them came over in ’75 from Angola. There was this one guy who was really great, from the Portuguese Hunters, but he must have been in his late forties. He was on my selection course. He did everything great, but he just couldn’t do the last run. Vok, if you didn’t cross the line at six o’clock, you were out. We dragged him the last bit, and pushed him over a wall. He just made it. By that time we were all nearly dead on our feet.’

  I asked him if he had any black troops in the Recces. His eyebrows shot up. Maybe he worked out then how little I really knew about his world.

  ‘Most of those foreign guys were black,’ he said, ‘with only a few whites.’

  I was shocked: I had imagined that the apartheid state’s shock troops would have been composed uniquely of blond-haired, blue-eyed Afrikaner boys.

  Our conversation was posing a lot of questions, most of which I did not know how to ask.

  ‘No, man. We had apartheid, but in Special Forces, we were far ahead of the rest of the country in terms of race relations, and equal pay and what-not. I had black South Africans in my Commando, too. At the end there were quite a number in the junior ranks. When you’re fighting like we did, you have to know the guy behind you is watching your back whether he’s black or you’re white or whatever. At first, though, there were hardly any of us, anyway. When I passed selection my group took the number of Recce operators in the whole army up to twenty-four.

  We had a totally different life from outside. We were relying on each other in battle. You couldn’t have any of that political shit getting in the way. You had to trust them. Some of them were good fighters, especially the Angolans.’ We sat as still as possible as the day heated up, me with a cigarette constantly at my lips, Nick lying prone on his mattress unpicking the threads of his life, which took him from a smallholding to the battlefields of Southern Africa. Nick grew up a farmer’s son in Lydenburg, to the east of Pretoria, and imbibed a sense of national identity that was as casual and unthinking as drinking water or breathing air.

  ‘I spoke Afrikaans, only Afrikaans.’

  When he talked about his mother tongue, his accent seemed to pitch and swell with his rendition. ‘A’s became harder, ‘r’s rolled out of recognition, ‘u’s sounded almost French.

  ‘Then I started to go with my dad to the market to help him sell the things we had on the farm. At first I was completely fokken lost because there were people there who only spoke English, the people who were buying. I learned a bit, and I got quite good at it, and helped my dad, who didn’t understand a word.’

  As he grew up, the fact that the races were separated (and non-whites oppressed) under the system of apartheid was a given fact, and criticism of it remote and unthinkable – not because it was beyond criticism, but because there was nothing to compare it with. The Government strictly controlled the media: no Afrikaans newspapers criticised or even questioned the system of apartheid until well into the 1980s; there were no independent radio stations; and no television whatsoever until 1975 – the year that Nick joined the army.

  ‘You see, it was like this,’ he went on, in an effort to explain. ‘We had some trouble with these black kids who belonged to the guys who worked on the farm. They’d been stealing small stuff, and I managed to get hold of one. My dad and I didn’t have a clue what to do with them, so we took the boy to his father. He thanked us and said he’d deal with it. Vok! He put him in a grain sack and suspended him from a beam in the barn. Every time he walked past he gave him a right moering with his belt. And he was a big guy.’

  I looked over at him in the sweltering hut. He still looked impressed at the memory.

  ‘They just did their own thing. They were good people but, man, they were tough. Our lives were just …’ He searched for the word in English. ‘… different. We didn’t have any problems back then.’

  Nick’s words hung between us. It was as if he was pining for a simpler time, an illusion unburdened by the weight of history.

  Our conversation petered out into the lethargy of another hot afternoon. I sat and smoked. Nick became withdrawn; I wondered if he regretted talking with me about the army, about his life. By that evening, he’d hardly uttered another word. I feared I’d offended him in some way, and kept my head down. Absorbed in turn by th
e camera manual and a private game of patience, I’d not paid attention to his comings and goings. I lit our Charles Taylor lamp at dusk (a rudimentary palm-oil lamp, so called because the villagers said the president had left them with no power and no other lights; you couldn’t even buy a candle) and peered at him hunched on the floor between the jumping shadows thrown up by the dirty orange flame. His eyes looked sallow, his face waxy in the flickering light.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’ve got dysentery. Quite bad cramps. Ja, it’s a bit …’

  He tailed off. I stood up and gathered up my sleeping bag.

  ‘Here, have my bed. It’ll be much more comfortable for you.’

  He didn’t protest, and I knew at once he must be in pain.

  ‘Ja, thanks. I’ll be okay in the morning.’ He looked unconvinced. We both knew that was a lie. ‘Vok!’

  He got up abruptly and staggered out of the doorway into the humid twilight. Our latrine was on the edge of the village about fifty yards away.

  That night he ate nothing, and ducked in and out of the hut a dozen times. I looked with new eyes at the rancid stew we’d been given. Suddenly it seemed the most potent threat to our survival. It was time for antibiotics.

  ‘Do we have any Flagyl, you know, metroni, er, what’s-its-name?’

  ‘The metronidazole and the cipro went in the river.’

  Nick was impassive. We had no tablets to treat him with, and no rehydration salts to drink, either. I poured him a cup of purified water from the gravity-feed filter he’d carefully set up when we arrived. A few minutes after draining it, he was out the door, mumbling in Afrikaans.

  If the order to move came in the morning, we were in trouble. For days I’d been desperate to leave; now I craved time for Nick to recover.

  The next day saw Nick slide further into the fog of his illness. His temperature jumped, the cramps worsened. All conversation stopped. I gave him water as often as he’d take it. He sipped at the cup distractedly. There was neither salt nor sugar with which to improvise an electrolyte solution. At regular intervals he convulsed in agony.

  ‘When you, er, go, man, er … what’s it like?’

  At first we had lived alongside each other almost gingerly – always respectful of each other’s space and privacy. Now all bets were off. I wanted to know what his excrement looked like, to help gauge how ill he really was – but it was hard to ask outright.

  ‘It’s just fokken water. And pus and blood.’

  There was not much more to say. I sat and played cards. Deku came to see how Nick was, and looked concerned. He looked up to Nick as an ‘ol’ sol’iah’ and was shocked to see him prone on my bed, for once unsmiling.

  ‘Sarry,’ he offered, dumbfounded, and asked the women who cooked for us to put extra hot peppers into our food to help ‘kill de bug’. Later that evening he reappeared with a boiling cup of herbal infusion. Nick drank it. I guessed we both thought the same: it couldn’t do much more damage. He dozed off in between shivers and lurching for the latrine.

  By the third day, Nick was unspeaking and unmoving. I called the production company and explained the situation. They suggested getting a doctor to phone me for advice, but Nick was a paramedic. The truth was there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Good luck,’ came the sign-off.

  I hung up, and sat on the scorpion step outside the hut and smoked. I tried to keep calm. I could keep giving Nick water to drink, but he would need a drip if this didn’t lift immediately. I’d seen it done dozens of times in Zimbabwe when I’d lived for a short time in a bush hospital out in the boonies. We had the right needles, tubes and saline in our kit to do it; but mess it up, and I could kill him. If air got into the giving set, it could trigger a massive heart attack. I walked back into the hut, and peered at Nick in the sweaty gloom. His face was set like a mask, his body completely still.

  ‘Nick?’

  Nothing. I put my hand on his shoulder, and rocked him gently. His body felt heavy and unyielding. His eyes didn’t flicker, the lids hardly closed. I shook him harder. Everything became very quiet, all the background rattle and hum of the village draining from the bubble of stillness emanating from around his bed. I spoke his name again, louder, and put my hand on his forehead. He was cold, waxy; a fine layer of cool moisture clung to my hand. I was convinced he was dead.

  My first thought was this: how will I get his body home? Thereafter, my mind raced with logistical conundrums. I didn’t even know whom to call. I had no idea what his wife’s number was. I felt nothing. The situation was overwhelming; it paralysed any emotion. I stepped back, and took in the scene – his body facing away from me, curled up in the foetal position on my mattress. It burned into my memory, a disturbing photographic negative.

  For the first time since leaving London, I was entirely alone. I was by myself in the middle of a malarial swamp surrounded by mad Africans in a country governed by a psychopathic president. The only way out was a week’s walk through dense forest, and swimming a river that would be even higher than when we first crossed. I had the physical reserves for neither. Anyway, that would only get me to the border. Home was another world away. Outside the window, the evening collected sounds of cooking and women laughing.

  I swore into my hands. Nick was dead. What had begun as an adventure was ending in tragedy – farce, almost. Weird thoughts flooded in – a boat trip as a child with my grandparents in Arundel; Nick’s old Mauser rifle unclaimed in Pretoria; my car parked at home in Canterbury. And then I remembered with a jolt what a doctor had told me in Zimbabwe, that it can be very hard to tell if people were actually dead or not, even for a trained medical professional.

  I leaned in over him and looked at the open V of his shirt. I concentrated hard on his chest. At first I saw only a blur of hair and pale skin. I thought about the drip, the saline, and dismissed it again. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and then saw an almost imperceptible movement in Nick’s chest. I thought it was my own body that was shaking, rocking my vision. I squinted at his thorax, and lips, and then back to his sternum. He was definitely breathing. I exhaled hard and slumped on the floor, resting my back against the metal frame of the bed. On cue, Nick straightened his legs and groaned in his sleep. It was probably another cramp. Nice one, Tiger, I thought, keep kicking.

  I sat up that night and watched him. He hardly moved. At dawn the palm-oil lamp guttered out and his fever broke.

  The next day he was walking again, and managed to spoon a thin pepper soup between his cracked lips. His recovery was startlingly swift, and we began to dissect his ailment in gory detail. He seemed to take illness for granted in the way that someone does who has endured worse, and knows he’ll recover.

  ‘Has this ever happened before?’

  ‘Ja, but I haven’t had it that bad since 1985 in Zimbabwe. We were on this undercover raid, and I was completely gevok. It hit me like a hammer out of nowhere.’

  ‘Zimbabwe? Whereabouts? I loved it there. I was in Harare, and also in Murambinda, out in the sticks in Buhera.’

  ‘Harare, and the bush. We were planning to hit some terrs there; they had a base in Zim, which they used for attacks over the border in South Africa. The war was quite active then.’

  By ‘terrs’, he explained, he meant ‘terrorists’ – ANC activists commonly referred to by most of the people I’d grown up with as freedom fighters, or guerrillas, in black liberation movements. By ‘war’, I knew he meant South Africa’s mounting onslaught against her neighbours, which sought to destabilise their governments and eliminate these so-called terrs. I was still too relieved by his recovery to be shocked, but the revelation was clear: Nick really hadn’t been a regular soldier. He was a very specially trained operator. In some people’s eyes the raids like the attacks on Zimbabwe would make him an assassin, a murderer even – or at least an accessory to murder. This, he told me in between diminishing stomach cramps, was what his unit, 5 Recce, was best at, in fact specifically designed for: unconventional, counter-revol
utionary warfare. That was one of the reasons why it contained so many black troops.

  ‘I was one of the founder members of 5 Recce,’ he said with transparent pride. ‘Eventually, we divided into three Commandos and a Small Teams section. I started off in One Commando – which was dedicated to pseudo-operations. When I became too well known for that, in ’78, I moved to Five-Two as the second-in-command – they were more conventionally operational, with a lot of those Portuguese and Angolan guys mixed in. Eventually, I ended up as the commander of Five-Three, which was an offensive unit mainly made up of Rhodesians. They were good guys.’

  Pseudo-operations became regarded as among the most controversial carried out by the South African Army. The tactics had been learned from Rhodesian Selous Scouts after being pioneered by the British in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. Special Forces operators, posing as enemy fighters, lured members of the armed resistance into death traps. In Rhodesia, local white pseudo-operators were said to have attacked black and white civilians to spread fear and turmoil – portraying the liberation movement as bloodthirsty murderers in a bid to manufacture justifications for even more draconian military crack-downs. Always careful to maintain that he personally had been a conventional soldier fighting an unconventional war, the real implications of Nick’s past remained hard to grasp.

  His men searched buildings suspected of being terrorist bases, shot whoever was inside, gathered evidence and then blew them up. He spoke about it matter-of-factly, and – despite the terrible history it recounted – occasionally with humour. It was on a similar raid that Nellis (the gunship pilot I had met in Sierra Leone), having picked up a bunch of Recces fresh from a Commando raid in Zimbabwe, landed his helicopter unexpectedly before crossing the border back to safety. To the amazement of his passengers, Nellis got out of the cockpit and urinated copiously. ‘I just ’ad to ’ave a piss on Bob’s Zimbabwe, eh?’ he’d cackled on the beach at Freetown. Nick smiled, but didn’t comment. I’d noticed he’d never named anyone when talking about his army days.