IF YOU AIN'T STRONG, YOU'D BETTER BE SMART
An army is a really strange place to find yourself. The principal purpose of having an army is to protect your country from all the awful people outside of it who wish to do you harm. But the truth is that before you even get to those awful people, you must first deal with all the awful people who are supposed to be on your side. And here’s another truth: they can be just as awful.
In 1975, just as the SADF (as it was then called) was doing it’s “big push” into Angola, I was obliged to do my compulsory duty in the army. Never mind how the legal technicalities for that came about, the fact was that I already had two university degrees under my belt, unlike the majority of those poor boys who had just matriculated and now felt obliged to throw away the next two years of their lives for a lost cause which would soon be crushed, regardless of our sweating away in leather boots and khaki uniforms while being shouted at by sub-human idiots who could never survive in civil society.
The thing about it is that there’s a lot of badly managed testosterone sloshing around in army camps and I guess that at least as much energy goes into repairing the ongoing damage which that causes, as is spent on preparing these bewildered young men to focus their destructive instincts on an official enemy. I was a small guy (and thin, too, in those days), I was unduly short of muscle, and more inclined to jot down a few quick lines of bad poetry than to whack my neighbour on the head with a half-brick. That put me at an immediate disadvantage.
I meditated on that for a bit and then it came to me: if you ain’t strong, you’d better be clever. I could do clever, but I couldn’t do strong. Oh - and I was lucky too (it certainly helps to be lucky). It goes like this:
I don’t know whether it’s like this in all army training camps but in my camp troops slept in long, single-storey bungalows, each of which could house about forty “soldiers” (ha ha) - twenty beds down one side and twenty beds down the other: so unless you were at the end of a row you would have three neighbours: one across the passage and one on each side. I was lucky: I had nice neighbours - a very normal, tall matriculant from Potchefstroom called John on one side (who was subsequently introduced to the joys of gay sex by someone else in the bungalow, one weekend while I was on leave); a boy who had planned a career as a Dutch-Reformed Church minister in the bed opposite me; and Tiny on the other side of me.
I guess this story is really about Tiny.
Tiny was the son of a Free State mielie farmer. He was about 7 foot tall, a veritable mountain of muscle. No brains at all. But he was one of those salt-of-the-earth characters who restore one’s faith in all the good in humanity. I think he was probably incapable of a mean thought, and I’m probably being a total shit talking about him like this. He didn’t know how to use a tickey-box (pay-phone), and that was the only instrument of communication that was available in those days. One day he shyly asked me to come to the tickey-box with him. He was so shy about it that at first I had doubts about his intentions (you learn to be bloody careful in the army), but I went anyway, and when we got there I realised why he needed me: he didn’t know how to use the phone, and he felt a great need to call ma. He had the number on a piece of paper and he gave me the money and I dialed and got him through and handed him the receiver. I waited outside the box until he said goodbye. Then he didn’t put the receiver back on the hook - he handed it to me and I put it on the hook for him.
I did all this with an air of great solemnity because I didn’t want him to feel humiliated about the incident.
This was a scene which was repeated many times. He just never got the hang of that tickey-box, but I never let him down, and I never mocked him, and I never revealed his secret to anyone. It was just between me and Tiny.
So Tiny and I shared the biscuits and biltong that we got from our parents, and he told me about the mielies and I told him about the university, which for some reason he found interesting.
(Here’s a quick aside: most of those boys were so simple that if they knew that you were a university graduate, they immediately assumed that you were a doctor (a medical doctor), and I very quickly found myself being referred to as “Die Dokter” - so much so that when the boys developed a primitive way to tattoo each other, they insisted that as “Die Dokter” I had to be present at the tattoo sessions. I tried to explain, but they would have none of that.)
But having Tiny around was a blessing. Some of those guys were really bad. Three of them broke out one weekend, stole a car, and drove all over the country. Another one was a Knysna woodcutter (I’ve written about the Knysna Forest Folk somewhere else - did you see the movie “Deliverance”? - Well, it’s like that.) And the fifth member of the gang was a "stoker" (the person who digs coal off the coal tender which travels immediately behind the locomotive on a steam engine, and throws it into the fire-box underneath the boiler of the engine).
This gang was a constant source of chaos and torment to the rest of us.
One night (must have been about one or two a.m.) I awoke to the sound of a cry of pain from the other end of the bungalow, and a lot of intense whispering and laughter. I recognised the voices (so much for whispering!). It was those guys. A moment later I heard that cry again, but from a different voice. And then another, also from a different voice - but the voices were getting closer. They were coming down the row of beds, starting at the far end. I sat up in the darkness and dimly saw what they were doing. As they came down the line of beds, they would take hold of the foot-end of a bed and flip it over, so that the occupant woke up on the floor with the bed on top of him, Hilarious, no?
I resigned myself to my fate, got back down under my blankets and waited.
Eventually they reached my bed. I tensed up but remained motionless. Then I heard the rumble of Tiny’s gruff voice: “Julle vat nie aan daai ou nie” (“You will not touch that guy”). I slept on. There was a deathly silence. Then I heard the retreating footsteps of the guys going back to their beds. Just like that, the party was over.
If you ain’t strong, you better be smart!
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Harry Friedland
MARIMBA
2 December 2022
