Archive for June, 2011

I was there Anti-tank platoon call sign 70.Rest in peace Second Lieutenant Meiring.We lost two Ratel 9omm call sign`s 72 and 72A.

Mnr. John Ya Otto Nankudhu (78) is gisteroggend by sy huis in Windhoek dood. Hy was ’n geskiedkundige vryheidsvegter vir Swapo in die 1960’s. ’n OOMBLIK van stilte is gister in die Nasionale Vergadering ter gedagtenis aan mnr. John ya Otto Nankudhu (78) gehou wat vroeg gisteroggend by sy huis in die Wanaheda-woonbuurt in Windhoek gesterf het. In ’n verklaring wat namens President Hifikepunye Pohamba gister in die Nasionale Vergadering deur die Eerste Minister, mnr. Nahas Angula, voorgelees is, is gesê dat Namibië ’n vreeslose, vaderlike en beskeie vryheidsvegter verloor het. “Hy was ’n baken van inspirasie vir baie Namibiërs wat in die geledere van Plan vir die bevryding van hul moederland geveg het,” lui die verklaring. Mnr. Nankudhu het in 1958 by die Owambo People’s Organisation (OPO) aangesluit en is tot die voorsitter van die OPO-tak op Oranjemund verkies. Met die totstandkoming van Swapo in 1960 het hy sy posisie behou en hy het dieselfde jaar in ballingskap gegaan. In November 1966 is hy deur die Suid-Afrikaanse magte by Omugulugwombashe gevange geneem en tot 20 jaar gevangenisskap op Robben Eiland gevonnis. Hy is vroeg in 1986 vrygelaat, waarna hy verskeie leierskapposisies beklee het, wat die posisie as voorsitter van Swapo in die sentrale streek insluit. In 1990 is hy tot streekraadslid vir die huidige Samora Machelkiesafdeling verkies. Mnr. Nankudhu is op 24 Junie 1933 in die noorde van die land gebore. Hy laat sy vrou Jakobina en vyf kinders agter. Begrafnisreëlings is nog nie bekend nie. (Eie berig en Nampa)

Of Blake’s three books, From Soldier to Civvy took the longest for me to assimilate as an entity. Much of this has to do with the format. It consists of four separate sections: short, complete accounts of National Service by eight individuals; Blake’s own Letters from Basics; the Border War as experienced by women; the view of ex-servicemen today. Of these, the last two are mildly similar to the form adopted in Troepie, except that each consists of a chapter with integral responses by the individuals concerned, rather than their interviews being divided up according to theme. As a consequence of this diverse format, the book highlights the state of the debate on the issue of National Service in the old SADF today. A hostile and negative review of Soldier in the Witness complained about the low level of debate on this issue 20 years after the Bush War. I am not sure this is accurate. For many years after the war, there was no debate at all. Men who experience combat are reluctant to talk about it. The political pressure on ex-servicemen as a consequence of apartheid has exceeded that experienced by either Vietnam Vets or ex-Warsaw Pact conscripts. Most ex-SADF servicemen have chosen to remain silent about their time in uniform, just to fade into the background. Generally, ex-servicemen are good at this; it was one of the first crucial lessons we learned in the SADF. Until recently it was certainly very NPC to recount positive military experiences, let alone to value one’s National Service for what it accomplished in one as an individual. And the camaraderie was, after all, the bonding of the bad guys against the good guys. Yet despite the post-1994 changes, the old balsak remained stored in many a roof or garage, though one almost pretended it didn’t exist. And in any case, men don’t whine about things like army training! There is this thing, too, that guys who have too much to say about their war experiences, and tell them too dramatically, and offer them too freely, tend to be taken with a bucket of salt by those who were in the thick of it all. Perhaps this is unjust, but it’s real, whether one likes it or not. Then came the book that changed everything: Jacqui Thompson’s An Unpopular War, with that seminal phrase which, in my opinion, unleashed what followed: “Today it is not socially acceptable for [ex-SADF conscripts] to speak about their experiences. But even if one wishes to condemn the politics of the time, one does no wish to do likewise with the soldiers.” The floodgates were opened, and life was never quite the same again. I was one of those whose floodgates were opened by this phrase. I had been reading about conscription in the NVA, the East German National People’s Army, and had compiled a rather apologetic account of my own diensplig in German for one of the authors. But somehow that phrase of Jacqui’s made it possible for me to roll back all the cover stories (in truth, defensive lies) I had built around my diensplig, and to tell it as it really happened. For the first time, a book had appeared which set the paradigm: that military service in the SADF was not just a political thing, that a soldier’s life is everywhere the same, that war is war wherever you fight it, that SADF soldiers suffered as much as any others and are deserving of understanding, and that one could be positive about one’s experiences as a soldier in the SADF. “Bella vita militar!” as the bellicose gypsy Preziosilla has it in Verdi’s’ opera La Forza del Destino (which, incidentally, contains some of the best operatic military scenes ever, including a patrol returning to camp at dawn). Blake took up the idea in Troepie, which weaves his interviews with a plurality of ex-soldiers into a single, continuous account of diensplig, together with the accompanying Troepie Snapshots. Both of these are descriptive rather than reflective volumes. But in Soldier, as Dorothy Sayers said in the introduction to her translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, “the sermons begin”. Soldier is at once a more reflective volume than the other two and a spectrum of the debate on National Service today. Blake refers to his three books as complementary. He calls them a triptych. One needs to remember that that debate on National Service in the SADF by ex-conscripts, as a significant public phenomenon, is only about five or six years old. The state of it at the beginning of this period, when Jacqui’s book appeared, is well summed up by one of the conscripts in the last section of Soldier: “So, in my twenties and thirties, I never thought about [National Service] much. It’s only in the last few years after meeting an old army friend that I’ve started thinking about it. We listen to each other. Nobody really wanted to listen to me about my experiences before, or he his...” Quite. It is where I myself have stood these past few years, and where, I suspect, an increasing number of other old conscripts now stand. Two years ago I almost never referred to my military service. Now I talk about it to the extent that I sometimes drive my friends crazy. I suppose it’s a phase one goes through... But they are all here. The highly melodramatic account of a very old soldier (a Bat, naturally) from the sixties with call-ups so secret they weren’t even put down on paper, who appears to have done camps for 14 years. The positive ones, the negative ones, the reflective ones; some informative accounts with technical information such as a Bat, an SSB gunner, an SPG and an SAAF loadmaster. Some like “André”, the Bat, have thought their positions on National Service through cogently. Some are irreconcilably contradictory. Some have the strong gut-reactions of men who are unused to expressing themselves, and who tend as a result to overreact and overdramatise. There is a significant element of masculine self-pity sometimes, too, and an apparent need in some cases of trying to persuade the interlocutor in order to persuade oneself. It is difficult as yet to form an objective picture of National Service. As Marlowe’s Jew of Malta has it, “…that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead…” And in that arresting phrase that opens L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-between, “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” When it comes to diensplig, there are so few official records to go on, and so few men as yet are prepared to open up about their own past. And, of course, we have our own individual experiences, our own axes to grind, all situated within the context of the small sliver of SADF life we actually experienced. These colour our objectivity. Very few people have heard of Hans Georg Gadamer, let alone his philosophy of the Fusion of Horizons, so as to be able successfully to apply the kind of objectivity he proposes: that in such a situation as this, it consists rather in identifying and isolating one’s subjectivity than eliminating it, so that, while being able to enter into and engage with the experiences of others, we nevertheless do not confuse ours with theirs. But the more one reads, the more a general pattern does begin to emerge. That is why it is so important for ex-servicemen to write and publish, or to be published. And it is in this above all that I am at odds with the Witness reviewer. As far as National Service is concerned, we have not yet achieved the critical mass of sufficient data on record to allow us a deeper and more reflective view of the Border War. Certainly the accounts of Louis, André, Matt and Kevin, the four best in Part One, show that such reflection is starting to emerge. In the process of this reading of others’ accounts, with the varied experiences it brings, a more attenuated and objective view about National Service, the bigger picture of it, will eventually appear. The serious intellectual debate will come…it just needs to be given time. The best way of objectifying experience is without doubt to get it down on paper – to give it an independent existence outside ourselves, so to speak. This always allows it to be considered in a more dispassionate light. Now for some specifics. The order Blake has followed is as chronological as the material allows. It starts with the old soldier from the ’60s and concludes with the section on contemporary reflections. In dealing with accounts of SADF experience, three main type can be distinguished. There are the short comments some people offer, which can be woven into a larger treatment of the topic. At the other end of the scale, there are the complete books such as Steven Webb’s Ops Medic and Granger Korff’s 19 with a Bullet. In between there are the complete accounts which are too long for the former, too short for the latter. Blake has done well by giving such authors a voice in this book, in gathering together such a variety of military experiences. I would love to see more of this kind of collection in print. The short accounts are often most informative, containing as they do the essence of the particular conscript’s service. The short section on women’s voices is for me the most difficult. They were the ones most affected by the propaganda and the blanket of silence that lay over so much of what happened. Most of the time they just didn’t know what was going on, and ended up filling in the gaps between official releases with intuitive (and mostly distorted) reconstruction of a world which was as foreign to most of them as it was to the soldiers in their lives before they were called up. I had no idea that the censor’s black Koki-pen could have such an intense effect; I suppose the fear of what lay behind those heavy black lines was that there is something unknown that ought be known. The women’s stories can be heart-rending. Their confused and sometimes contradictory views on the conscription of spouses, brothers and sons is understandable. Their boys came back to them changed, and they didn’t know why, and least of all were the boys concerned going to tell them. My mother, who was in the army during WWII, took my conscription with apparent equanimity, and my sister trusted in her confidence. Many years later, though, my sister told me that when I arrived on my first pass at 02:00, my mother was so afraid it was the military coming to tell her that her son was dead, that she refused to answer the door. I remember how extraordinarily happy my little sister was to see me whenever I came home on pass, and how she cried when I had to go back. In the last section, the views of ex-soldiers today are extensive and varied. The opinions expressed here are mostly just that; personal opinions rather than considered evaluations. But it’s got to start somewhere. In ten years’ time, what is written in these pages will form primary sources for studying the long term reflections of conscripts from the Border War era on their service. One cannot expect these accounts to be academic reflections – nor should one. But one can be glad that they have been captured for posterity. They are valid, inasmuch as they are the expressions of actual participants. For the moment, that is sufficient. Lastly, we come to Blake’s own Letters from Basics, which seem to have had an inordinate effect on the Witness reviewer, who thought them “dull…very dull.” He heaps scorn on Blake for being a G3 who never knew the tough training that G1K1 soldiers had to endure in the Seventies and Eighties. The attack is ad hominem, and has the unmistakable flavour of Lady Macbeth’s protests. But he is wrong on both counts. Blake’s letters are no more dull than a banana. The question is, do you like bananas? If not, you probably will find them dull. These are nothing more nor less than actual letters written by a soldier in Basics. Again, primary sources. A G3 conscript is no less important than a G1, and has just as much right to a hearing. Sure, when we were in Basics, the G1s did sneer at the Ligte Vrugte. But we were immature 17 or 18-year-olds, and it was also the politics of envy. My attitude on that issue had changed well before uitklaar. Today we are all simply ex-servicemen. And that’s what really counts. Secondly, Blake’s position is makes him uniquely qualified to write on the SADF. He did 12 months, like those called up until 1976, and thus feels no resentment about the duration of his military service. He does not carry the emotional baggage or the putative guilt of participation in the Border War or the Township patrols, which were over by the time he went in. His letters reveal the authenticity of his experience; it is not difficult to recognize this as we read them. Cameron was a genuine, full-blooded SADF troep. In consequence, he is able to grasp and contextualise the accounts of ex-servicemen, while remaining just removed enough to write about the Border War era without imposing a strong agenda of his own. Cameron, I assuredly did not find your letters dull. In fact, I had a good laugh over them. How could you spend so many pages telling your girlfriend and future wife about all the women you were ogling while in Basics? I’d have been too terrified of a “Dear John” letter on the lines of, “Well, have them all to yourself, then!” Books like Soldier are always vulnerable to carping and nitpicking. It’s not hard to rip them to shreds. It is easy to complain about specifics; it is easy to be negative. It was easy to be so in army Basics, with its opfoks and rondfoks and afkaks and vasbyt. But to be positive about something that you experienced negatively; to be able to see the “big picture”; to co-operate willingly and committedly with the guy who’s “breaking you down to build you up”, and tells you so, and expects your samewerking; to be positive about these kinds of things is very difficult. So is being positive about a book like Soldier, and for similar reasons. But there is in it a great deal about which to be positive. And the best is that is records, to repeat, so many primary sources. Even if that’s all that happens for the next ten years, even if the level of debate or reflection is not of the most articulate; none of this matters. What matters is that the story as told by those who were actually there, is recorded. We must entrust the raw data to another generation, one that was not involved. They will make something thoughtful and considered of it all. But if we do not tell our own stories, someone else might do it for us, and in a way that does not necessarily reflect reality. One last comment. I don’t know to what extent Blake intended this book to be a Mikrokosmos of the SADF and those whose lives it touched, but that is what it has turned out to be. In a discussion with the composer Sibelius, Gustav Mahler, himself a symphonic composer of note, countered Sibelius’s proposal of the symphony as a compact, logical form with: “No! No! A symphony is like the world. It must contain everything!” Ditto Cameron’s book. Read it. You’ll certainly get a 360º view of SADF National Service from today’s perspective.

Hi there. Like to ask Jim if I could use some of his alouette pictures in my book and to add to the gallery on my website. Also, if anyone else would be ok with me using some of their pix, in particular border action pix including the use of or related to aircraft or choppers, let me know. I am building up a collection. ontheflightlines (at) gmail (dot) com. or just post a link here for usable pix. Thanks gyts.

Here are some from my collection. http://www.ontheflightlines.net/songs.htm

Lovely story there Johan. I would like to invite you to visit our aviation forum at http://www.flyafrica.info/index.php and in particular : http://www.flyafrica.info/forums/forumdisplay.php?117-Aviation-Tales-(Civvie-amp-SAAF) : more more stories about the bush war from an aviation perspective. Please come and post your story there and join us for a chat. About tthe landing at Ondangwa There was a concern about shoulder launched heat seeking missiles so the pilot would throttle back and nose down into a 15 000 feet per minute dive (200 KPH vertical, 200 KPH Horizontal). This would maintain the airspeed, but would cool the engines and and dissapate the exhaust gasses, as well as minimise the period of target visibility and the infrared signature so that there was nothing for heat seeking missiles to lock onto. Unlike a long shallow decent where the plane is vulnerable for a long period, the plane would get quite close to the field and cruise height over the unsecured area, and then drop like a stone, beginning its flare at about 8000 feet (3000 feet / 1000M above the field, and then slow its vertical velocity from 200 KPH to 0KPH over the last 1000 meters. The turn you mah have experienced would be if there was a crosswind over the field, the rapid descent would have been into the wind to slow the horizontal as much as possible, pushing the drop more to the vertical, and then after leveling out, a right hander onto the runway. So, if you have ever tried to slow a car doing 200 kilometrs per hour, you an imagine what it is like slowing 50 tons of flossie with nothing but air to stop you, and then its full reverse thrust as reverse thrust is used to kill the forward speed and that uses up another 1 kilometer of runway. So yes, it was roofie ride of note.

Cape Town – Justice Minister Jeff Radebe on Thursday said he did not know how South African Ratel armoured infantry carriers may have ended up in strife-torn Yemen.

Radebe was responding to a question from Democratic Alliance MP David Maynier, who has circulated a Reuters photograph taken this week, showing Yemeni soldiers, who had defected to opposition forces battling the regime, sitting on a Ratel in Sana’a.

Maynier asked Radebe, who is chair of the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), whether he was aware of this, and whether the committee was investigating a possible violation of the end-user certificate by another country that had bought Ratels from South Africa.

“There is no evidence that these infantry vehicles were exported directly to Yemen, but my question again is, is the minister aware of this case and is this case being investigated by the NCACC’s inspectorate as a possible violation of user certificate agreements?” Maynier asked.

Radebe replied: “On Yemen, I’m unaware of any rerouting that has happened there. If Mr Maynier has any information he can tell us, but also we will find out from the inspectorate.”

Yemen is gripped by bloody political turmoil as government troops battle Islamic militants and separatist tribesmen.

The NCACC’s annual report for 2010 shows South Africa exported R373.8m worth of conventional arms to Yemen last year.

This included R239m of Category A weaponry, defined as “sensitive major conventional implements of war that could cause heavy personnel casualties”.

The NCACC approved arms sales of R68.9m to Libya last year. A breakdown shows Libya bought R1.9m worth of Category A weapons, R10.7m of Category B weapons (such as assault rifles) and R56m of Category C (support items like radios) equipment.

Pro-democracy protests

Radebe hastened to add, however, that South Africa had not exported arms to nations affected by pro-democracy protests that had swept through North Africa and the Middle East this year, including Libya.

“Since the revolution started in North Africa in December, January this year, we have put on hold many of those things and in fact we have denied applications that have come before this committee, but that would be for another time because our main preoccupation for now is really 2010.

“The other countries that we have put on hold in the period under review … where we denied countries such as Gabon, Syria, Yemen, Namibia and Zimbabwe.”

He added: “In terms of the export to Libya, it is indicated there, and the report indicates what category of weapons was sold there, but I need to emphasise that this was in 2010. We have not exported anything in 2011.”

Radebe took exception to repeated demands from Maynier to say whether last year’s arms sales to Libya included sniper rifles.

“He did not answer the question. He could answer it with a simple yes or no. So my question stands,” Maynier said.

Radebe indicated he was not at liberty to disclose the exact nature of the hardware sold to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, but referred to fact that the categories are indicated in the NCACC report.

“I have answered Mr Maynier, so him saying that I did not answer his question is totally wrong. I cannot answer the way he wants me to answer and he has the answer in front of him, if he has the annual report.

“It is totally irregular for him to want me to answer in the manner in which he wants, like he is a principal. I’m not a school boy.”

Asked about the approval of the export of R8m worth of arms last year to Syria, which is now seeing a crackdown on opposition protests, Radebe said the weapons had in fact been sold to a United Nations peacekeeping operation “that happened to be there”.

“It had nothing to do with a direct authorisation to the Syrian government. It was for a United Nations procurement, nothing else.”

Hi Johan Het jy dalk op die nuus gesien waar die SILENT SOLDIERS MC  n krans by die muur le . Hel dit was n groot oomblik vir my want ek is die stigter van die club.

I was part of the Sector 10 or G2 Battery which took part in Operation Packer near Quito in 1988. Very little has been said and mentioned about the massive success and amount of hits the G2's had in the war and specifically Ops Packer. Is it possible to give more Photos and info? I do not have any as we were not allowed cameras. A photographer did however come to our battery to take photos of the gun me and my fellow gunners served on which took out a ground to air missile launcher with air burst but we never received any photos of that day nor heard of it ever again. We were the number 8 gun and i was the driver of the gun tractor and ammo number on the gun. Best Regards Bdr Etienne Dalton

Dewald Nel is in the process of creating an online database of all the Anglo Boer War Medal applicants and their entitlements.

For further information click here.