A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  My fascination with the events on a farm across the world – where Jimi Hendrix bit his guitar and Joe Cocker was unleashed on the world – brought me the unwelcome attentions of a rotund staff sergeant, who liked to shout a lot. He was like Danny de Vito without the cute bits.

  One day under a tree, Staff Doughnut read out some typed-up orders:

  “Who wants to fail this course now? Who wants to spend the rest of his army days in a border camp?”

  My friends and I, The Slackers, went for it. I punched my hand up into the air, where it became entangled in a thorny branch. Staff Doughnut glared at me, called me kaksleg and sent me “out of the bus”.

  And so it was that 16 Army College dropouts were despatched by military airplane to Grootfontein, a greasy smudge of a supply depot in the Big Sand.

  They called us Bokkies. That’s because we wore brass Springboks on our green berets, which meant we were owned by the infantry. Body, soul and hair, which they delighted in shaving short.

  We stepped off the plane into a mad dance of heatwaves that rose from the ’strip. A skinny little supply driver called Ace arrived to pick us up. He wore a Ban the Bomb T-shirt, aviator shades and his hair curled down over his ears.

  Ace honked the horn of his Bedford truck.

  “Why are you guys formed up and at attention? There’s no rank here, only me. Hop in, let’s take you home.” Good old Ace. The Schumacher of his day.

  We chugged into Fort Grootfontein in the mid-afternoon. Unshaven louts in overalls guarded the gates, glowering down from the watchtowers, their T-shirts tie-dyed and torn. There was a general air of Lost Patrol in this camp. At first, we were frightened. Then we came to love it. It was something like Opuwo for honkies.

  The obliging Ace led us to four vacant tents and then fell to the ground laughing when one of us asked about PT schedules.

  I shared a stretch of tatty green army issue canvas with three of my crew. Maurice: a loveable Afrikaner lady-killer with a pencil-line moustache and the logic of Daffy Duck. Benny the Deal Man. Jimmy: my mate from Cape Town. And me, still slightly worried about the PT shedules.

  I soon learnt, however, that keeping fit in Grootfontein meant a very slow and amiable slouch across the parade strip to the open, multiplex john with one’s buddies every morning. Twenty plastic thrones were laid out, ten on each side, facing each other and surrounded by a wall of flimsy hessian that flapped in the breeze. I was constipated for a week before I gave in, gathered some interested parties and made a sortie to the communal latrine.

  At dinnertime, everyone stormed the mess tent and grabbed a tray of army grub and a seat at a fold-up metal table. All tables were full, except for one. That was reserved for Mal Smit, a South Wester who was very scary when you first met him.

  Mal Smit (Jacky Hammer to his few friends) was a one-man Wrestlemania team covered in machine grease. Even his lidded eyes were a kind of muddy brown.

  This jovial juggernaut had before him two massive plates of beef stew, a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Lemon Twist. His only dinner companion was his jackhammer, which lay on the table like the Hammer of Thor itself, fresh from its display case in Asgard.

  But that was where his resemblance to the Norse god of thunder ended. Mal Smit growled at his food, spat gristle on the floor and messed all over the table. As he ate, he uttered grunts of contentment and stroked his jackhammer like a wife. No one joined him, censured him or teased him. Also, no one spoke to him except for Ace, who seemed to have great status among the hard-bitten South West Africans in the camp.

  Ace the Accidental Hero. Who could flip a vehicle faster than you could say rinderpest, an ability that earned him Big Kahuna status with the drivers, most of whom had set themselves the goal of destroying their vehicles on the murderous white highway to the northern camps that we supplied each day.

  To walk away from the blazing wreck was, to them, a great and anarchistic thing to do. The locals didn’t love us much. But they were all very small potatoes compared to Ace from Cape Town, who had smashed two Bedfords so far and looked very capable of taking out another five before clear-out time at the end of the year. And here’s the kicker: Ace never meant to. He would have loved nothing better than to complete a convoy unscathed. But his destiny was to become an icon to the Gobabis Gang.

  We 16 disgraced infantrymen then met our new mentor, Sergeant Major Mole. Mole was a World War II relic, a diminutive man with spectacles so strong they could have shamed the Hubble Telescope. His rheumy old eyes hid like darting pinpricks behind the glasses.

  Mole was ancient. He had a raspy voice like a diesel engine. He was an infantryman down to his puttees. He had fought in Tobruk, he had faced Rommel’s Desert Rats in the war theatres of North Africa with his Lee Enfield rifle and his funny tin helmet and now, for his sins, he was the S’ar Major of Camp Loopy.

  “My Bokkies are here!” he exulted when he saw my mates and me milling around the mess tent after dinner. “At last! Some real soldiers!”

  Oh shame. Little did he know ...

  The Major in charge of the camp was deaf as a post. He wore what looked like a set of grapes hanging from his left ear – an old-fashioned hearing aid. We used to do the old street trick of whispering to him, having him turn the hearing aid up and then shouting down his ear.

  And then there was Corporal Kat. He hated infantrymen in any form. He was the kingpin of the camp. Sorry for us.

  Within days of being there, we had all found ourselves little niches in the camp. Like mice hiding away from Corporal Kat.

  Maurice, for instance, slid into the kitchen detail and specialised in fry-ups for a fee. Benny became the storeman, whence he despatched blankets, military equipment and essential supplies with the shrewdness of a Shylock.

  Jimmy and I teamed up and convinced the transport lieutenant he needed two infantrymen to run the spare tyre department.

  And whenever any of us needed to break out of camp, we were allowed to escort convoys laden with provender to scattered SADF camps up north. After all, that was really why we were there: as security guards for the drivers on the Great White Highway.

  On Friday nights at Grootfontein Supply Depot you wrote yourself a weekend pass and a friend in the orderly’s office would stamp it and send you on your merry way.

  Jimmy and I found ourselves on the southbound highway to Windhoek in the dead of night with no moon to guide us, only a tiny tape player next to us on the ground, grinding out James Taylor hits.

  Presently, a family from Tsumeb would pick us up in a very large, shark-like Chevrolet. Ma would holler from the front seat:

  “Stay awake, manne. Keep an eye out for the kudu.”

  That’s it. We were nothing but uniformed kudu-spotters. Racoon-eyed, fed to the gills with sweet, strong coffee and biltong, we would stare out at the road, fearing immediate expulsion into the dark night if we nodded off.

  The family would play Jim Reeves on the eight-track tape. Jim Reeves, whose voice could put a crazed amphetamine addict to sleep in three bars. A difficult journey for the kudu-lookouts indeed.

  When we finally arrived in Windhoek, we checked into Hotel Romeo, the SWA Command tent camp, and wandered about town trying to accost German girls who had far better things to do with their time. After a movie, too much beer in the tent and a few slaps in the face, we found ourselves back in Grootfontein on Sunday night. A totally wasted exercise.

  So we started hanging around the Meteor Hotel in Grootfontein, where we found equally grotesque types to party with. And it was better.

  Everything we’d learnt in boot camp dissolved in a pond of lager tins and plain old shirking. Every ounce of energy we’d put into running mini-marathons over hills, marching till the sun drooped over the Heidelberg water tower, polishing each item of army kit until it virtually disappeared, now went into an insane competition to see who could expend the least energy each day. This was not a place for heroes.

  “I’m bored with this story,” I told my silent and sli
ghtly aghast wife as we drove towards the mining town of Tsumeb more than 30 years later. “Let’s go hunt down a beer.”

  Chapter 25: Angola Days

  Across the River

  Just outside Tsumeb lies a very deep hole – the legendarily bottomless Lake Otjikoto. The one I still call Leguan Lake.

  Jules and I parked at the entrance, in front of a tall, rather dramatic carving of many startled faces in a tree stump. Which stood just to the left of a large mural of an attractive Herero woman drinking an amber-coloured liquid, captioned thus:

  “Lake Otjikoto Here you are; Touch African curios at the kiosk; Taste sweets, fruit cooldrinks and biltong love bites and enjoy Otjikoto.”

  The shop owner, an amiable old man, took us on a brief tour of his strange carved-animal garden, replete with parrots, guinea pigs and a crocodile lurking in the shade.

  “And here are photographs of the cannons that were hauled out of the lake in 1983,” he said. “The Germans dropped them into the lake at the end of World War I. You can see them at the Tsumeb Museum.”

  I bought some of those romantic biltong bits (rather yummy, actually) and had an impromptu picnic with Jules within sight of the deep, azure waters of Otjikoto.

  “We used to come here a lot in the old days,” I said. “Before there was a shop and a crocodile pit. This was where I met the Leguan of the Lake.”

  “Give me another love bite and you can tell me all about it,” said my wife.

  “On one trip, my detail was to escort a refrigerator truck full of perishables to a camp on the Angolan border and return in a Land Rover,” I began. “Which was fine, as long as Ace, cold stone killer of an army truck, wasn’t doing any of the driving.

  “We used to come here to throw bread to the tilapia in the lake. This time, we found a one-metre leguan (rock monitor lizard) at the roadside nearby. It looked as if someone had driven over his back. There was life but, like the rest of us, unless you took a pulse you wouldn’t have said so.”

  Using the Don Quixote trick with mirrors, we surrounded the animal with many silver boxes from the food truck, all but one of them reflecting the wicked sun’s rays. The antediluvian creature waddled its way into the shady box with the lid up and we had him.

  Braised steak was the lizard’s lunch. We poured the stew over his head while he glared at us, the congealing mass of stew slowly dribbling down his warty face.

  The lizard was deposited in the back of the truck, where he promptly lowered his metabolic rate to cope with the freezing temperature, and we drove on towards the camp on the border.

  Four hours later, we arrived and opened the tin box. The leguan was still in a state of silent fury, and hadn’t touched a morsel. He seemed to know all about army ration packs.

  We left him to wander about the camp. In fact, we never saw him again, but news of his exploits reached our ears months later. He’d somehow made his way into a helicopter and when the chopper pilot took off on his evening reconnaissance flight, the lizard went berserk and forced him to make a very hasty landing.

  I left the border camp the next day, bound for Grootfontein in a Land Rover with the driver and signalman for company.

  Three hours out, something in the engine went Spang! and we found ourselves in the dead-hush of the northern scrublands with a tin of bully beef and two smokes to share between us.

  So we set up a cigarette roadblock and stopped civilians mad enough to travel the Great White.

  A large trucker gave us a couple of menthol smokes, a little old lady in a Mini Minor handed over half a pack of Texan Plains and both parties were released on their own recognisances.

  “Why are you dressed like hoboes in those overalls?” they wanted to know.

  “We’re from Grootfontein,” I growled at them.

  Ah, yes, they nodded. They had heard about our camp of retards.

  The day wore on. We just sat in the heat. And sat some more. Like baboons on a rock, we quibbled a little and then lapsed into a mindless, staring silence.

  Finally, we were rescued by some engineers. Back in camp, my store partner Jimmy told me the good news:

  “A guy called Vermeulen is prepared to give us a case of beers a week if we make a nest for him at the back of the store.”

  The nest was simple: we moved two columns of huge tyres out, thus creating a double bed-sized cavity in the storage area. Vermeulen did the rest. He dragged in two mattresses, a pile of magazines and about enough beer to satisfy a large Australian wedding party. And then he simply disappeared.

  Jimmy and I would go about our business of minding the store each day, and now and again we would hear a gentle snore from the back.

  We never saw Vermeulen again, but every Friday there would be two dozen ice-cold Windhoek Lagers laid out for us on the toolbox in the store. And when someone in authority ever approached, we would just raise our voices and clang about with tyre levers, to drown out the snores of the King of Grootfontein: Vermeulen, the laziest man alive.

  Pretty soon the Min Dae (Few Days) syndrome struck. I knocked 40 nails halfway into the splitpole wall of our store. Each morning we would fight over who was to smash another nail in, signifying one day closer to Civilian Street.

  Mal Smit was celebrating his 40 Days thing in true style. Each week, he would mail a little piece of his jackhammer home to his mother in Otjiwarongo.

  Corporal Kat had vowed to stop Mal Smit from stealing military equipment, but Smit outsmarted him every time. Kat resorted to blockading the Grootfontein post office. Mal Smit still managed to send off some part of his jackhammer each week. The main body of the jackhammer grew thinner and thinner as our time of departure approached.

  The drivers decided to hold a 40 Days party out at the shooting range, where no one could remember the last person to qualify for a sharpshooter badge.

  The party began hectically and held its pace right through the evening. At about midnight I was well-oiled and starved. I grabbed a piece of steak, flung it on the grill, turned to shout at someone and then immediately took the meat off and ate it raw.

  Finally, someone dropped us off at our tent just before 2 am and I passed out on my bed, sick to my gut. Corporal Kat lumbered in and told me I was on guard duty.

  After a lot of noise, it was agreed that I should stand guard right outside my tyre store. So off I sloped, in no shape at all.

  I found a pile of used truck-tyres outside my store. But first, I had to get rid of the raw meat inside me. Then I returned to the tyres and dived in.

  The next morning, I was sitting holding my head at the fold-up desk, shuffling papers and breathing to the strangely comforting rhythm of Vermeulen’s snoring at the back, when my friend Claude Maladjusted walked in.

  “Funny thing happened to me out in the park,” he told me in his unconcerned hippy way. “I saw this thing on the ground, it looked like a red rubber discus. So I kicked it. So it just disintegrated under my takkie. You know what? I don’t think it was a discus after all.” And then he sauntered out.

  Three years later, I found myself sitting under a bridge somewhere in the Orange Free State, wondering where life would take me next. I’d just finished final exams at varsity and was hiking up to Pretoria to be a newspaper reporter.

  It was relatively safe and easy to hitchhike about the country in those days. That night was difficult. I suppose, in the fading Free State light, the sight of a bearded, long-haired scruff with a rucksack and a thumb in the air inspired no one to stop.

  I made a small fire, ate a packet of crisps, drank deep from a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and went to sleep at the side of the highway.

  In the morning, I washed my teeth with sherry and slipped under the back of the flyover and used the South West Africa section of my roadmap for toilet paper. Big mistake. Two weeks later I received call-up papers to go play in the army again. And my three-month sojourn would take me through the heart of South West.

  You’d think by now they would have lost my file at military headquarters.
I had not covered myself with glory during my national service. But they wanted me back in uniform and shipped, after some refresher training, into Angola.

  I had no idea what that war was about. It was still all Tigger and Woozel stuff to me. I was, however, well aware that it was a case of dog biscuits or detention barracks. So I bitched and moaned in my usual brave style, dug out some old army kit and found my way to De Brug (near Bloemfontein) for three weeks of fitness training, fire and movement.

  I fell in with a bunch of like-minded guys and we moved into a tent together and slept on the ground. Life was made interesting by one Lance Corporal Cuddle, bagpiper for the regiment and member of our ten-man squad.

  Every morning just before dawn, the bagpipe warm-up session sounded like seven cats in a bag trying to do each other grievous sexual bodily harm. Everyone swore at Cuddle.

  But I grew to love his pipes dearly. Once he had them tuned, they were pure single malt. Cuddle would stride off into the morning like a warrior from Glenfiddich or Glen Grant. Somewhere there.

  Then there was Gus the Gunner, a stocky, swarthy man given to acts of generosity, short outbursts of prayer and muttered words of devotion to his beloved machine gun. Gus could also run all day and never break his stride.

  Bob the Bird Man and I were the only unmarried ones in the section, so they made us scouts and our job was to walk ahead of the rest of the mob on patrol. When you could snap his nose out of the Roberts Birds of South Africa and direct his mind to matters on the ground, Bob seemed quite affable. He was, in today’s parlance, a twitcher.

  I somehow lost interest in keeping myself clean after the first three days at this bush camp. Hell, they make you sleep on the ground, they make you run around all day and clean your rifle at all hours and then they expect you to rush off and shower so you can get dirty all over again. Forget that for a lark. They called me Pigpen. I didn’t care.