The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  Break him they had, eventually, but it was a physical breaking achieved by stomping on his ribcage until he passed out and then cracking his skull with the tips of their steel-capped boots. They stopped kicking only when they saw that he wasn’t moving. This time there was no self-induced hypnotic state of trance. This time De Villiers was truly unconscious, his brain functions slowing inexorably under the pressure of subarachnoid bleeding.

  The DB sergeant told them to wipe the blood from their boots while he called for an ambulance.

  At I Mil the ambulance crew dumped the stretcher with De Villiers on the floor of the Casualty Section. A plane-load of wounded soldiers had arrived from the bush and all the gurneys and operating theatres were occupied. When De Villiers started convulsing again, an intern fresh out of medical school rushed over and cradled his neck in her hand. She looked around for assistance, but everyone was busy. She ran to the maintenance cupboard and emerged with a Black & Decker drill. After a quick spray of iodine on the drill bit and on the side of De Villiers’s head, she got down on her knees and, without any hesitation, drilled a hole into his skull above his left ear.

  A mixture of blood and spinal fluid squirted onto her blouse and dribbled onto her skirt. She sat back on her haunches with the drill in one hand and the other over De Villiers’s eyes. When she felt a flutter under her hand she took it away to find his bloodshot eyes staring up at her.

  ‘I have orders to report to General van den Bergh,’ De Villiers croaked, repeating his mantra for the hundredth time.

  He immediately slipped back into unconsciousness where he would remain for a month, hovering between nine and ten on the Glasgow Coma Scale, not quite at the level of brain damage, but dangerously close and threatening to fall lower on the scale as infection set in. The notes on the chart at the foot of his hospital bed recorded the doctors’ dilemma – the need to treat the life-threatening infection reduced the options for treatment of the swelling. Brain cells died and memory cells were scrambled, the synapses which hold a healthy mind together having been damaged by either too much or too little blood. With the drugs the doctors administered intravenously to keep him in a coma, they ensured that De Villiers would never have any memory of the time he spent in their hospital, their daily ministrations and the visits from his family swallowed into a dark hole from which not even a sense of time could escape.

  With the perverse randomness that is part of nature’s grand design, there would be pockets of clear memory scattered amongst vast areas of dark confusion when De Villiers recovered, and when he finally opened his eyes, the woman with the baby on her arm next to his bed was a total stranger to him. When he strained to remember, he suffered a petit mal seizure, and when he regained his senses, she had left.

  After three months, during which they managed to patch up his physical scars, they moved De Villiers to Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital. There they locked him in an isolation cell with rubber-lined walls so that he could not disturb the other patients at night with his demonic screaming.

  Pretoria

  1985 & 2008 26

  De Villiers was booked on a Qantas flight from Auckland to Sydney. It was a school day for Zoë and he had been able to persuade Emma that it made sense for him to take a shuttle.

  The suburban streets were wet and deserted as the minibus made its way to the airport.

  Service through the airport was fast and efficient, friendly even, and De Villiers quickly made his way to Departure Gate 5 with his boarding passes in his pocket. He was early. He had booked aisle seats for both flights – QF 40 to Sydney and QF 63 to Johannesburg – as Dr Annette de Bruyn had recommended.

  In the busy departure area, De Villiers sat contemplating his immediate future as he waited for boarding to commence. A noisy tour group of Chinese chattered without inhibition and pressed towards the front of the queue forming at Gate 5. De Villiers boarded last.

  The Boeing took off towards the sunrise and made a slow turn across Auckland in a wide arc. De Villiers leaned forward to look at his own house above Macleans Reserve, but it was too far away to see. When the aircraft had completed its turn and straightened out towards Australia, he went into defensive mode and slept.

  In his dream he was walking through the Kalahari without food and water. He woke up on the descent into Sydney when his ears started hurting and he had to close his mouth and nostrils and blow to equalise the pressure on his eardrums.

  The accents were different at Sydney’s Kingston Smith International Airport, but the service was of the same quality, friendly but businesslike. He ate a full English breakfast, having slept through the service during the first flight. QF 63 was late in departing, a common occurrence according to some travellers waiting with him at the designated departure gate. Then the departure gate was changed and they had to trek to the other side of the airport to Gate 37. The announcements on the public address system were made in English and Mandarin.

  De Villiers fell in beside a smartly dressed African woman speaking Zulu into her cellphone. He slowed to keep pace with her. When she put her phone in her bag, he struck up a conversation with her. She told him that she was a nurse from Soweto, was working in a Sydney hospital and went home once a year to take money to her family and visit friends. ‘The hospital is awful,’ she said, ‘not like Bara. Here you never see blood and they don’t allow you to do anything, not even put in a drip or give an injection. But the pay is good and you don’t have to worry about tsotsis taking your money on the train.’

  At Gate 37 De Villiers eyed his fellow travellers. Families of expatriates, men and women with South African features, the women well coiffed and the men stern with a military sway to their shoulders. There were fit-looking young men with their girlfriends and older men with boeps and moustaches, some wearing rugby shorts and sandals. A fair number of the passengers appeared to be of the age of grandparents, and De Villiers couldn’t help wondering whether they had been to visit their children and grandchildren in Australia.

  Fourteen hours later De Villiers stepped off the plane. The Highveld air was as he remembered it, crisp and cool under a clear blue sky with white clouds on the horizon approaching for the seasonal thunderstorm later in the afternoon, but everything else was different. There were aircraft on the apron from airlines he had never seen here. Egypt Air. Air Congo. Angolan Airlines. Air Malawi. Aerolinas Argentinas. Zambia Air. Emirates. Aeroflot. The walk from the Qantas plane to the customs hall must have been a kilometre or more, he guessed.

  He joined the queue for foreign passports and presented his New Zealand passport to a sullen customs clerk.

  ‘You’re a South African citizen, aren’t you?’ she demanded without making eye contact.

  ‘No,’ De Villiers answered.

  She pointed with her finger at a screen De Villiers couldn’t see from his side of the counter. ‘We have you on the computer.’

  De Villiers said nothing.

  The clerk read an identity number from the screen. It matched De Villiers’s birth date and he nodded.

  ‘That’s mine,’ he confirmed.

  This time she looked at him when she spoke. ‘Well, you are a South African citizen and you must use your South African passport.’

  The queue behind De Villiers had come to a standstill.

  ‘I’m not a South African citizen any more and I don’t have a current South African passport,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘Then I can’t let you into the country,’ she said.

  De Villiers considered his position. His South African identity document and passport, both long expired, were in his suitcase. ‘I’d like to speak to your supervisor,’ he said at last.

  The clerk stood up and shouted across the floor, ‘Ma’am!’

  A woman approached and stood next to De Villiers. Her nameplate said Linette van der Meer. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

  ‘He won’t use his South African passport,’ the clerk said.

  ‘I’m not a South African citizen any mo
re,’ De Villiers explained.

  Van der Meer went into the cubicle and peered at the computer screen. ‘You’re shown here as a South African citizen by birth. You left for Heathrow in 1992 on a South African passport.’ She looked De Villiers in the eye and waited for his answer.

  De Villiers sighed. ‘That’s true, but I gave up my citizenship when I became a citizen of the UK and later of New Zealand. It was automatic. If you applied for a foreign passport, you automatically lost your citizenship.’

  Van der Meer nodded. ‘Yes, that was so, but the law has changed now and you can reclaim your citizenship if you want.’

  ‘May I think about it?’ De Villiers asked.

  Van der Meer turned to the passport officer. ‘Stamp his passport with a temporary visa, valid for three months.’

  She said to De Villiers, ‘You won’t need that long.’

  The clerk stamped the passport and scribbled her initials and a date in it. She flung the passport towards De Villiers, but it landed on the floor.

  Linette van der Meer was standing next to him. ‘You see what I mean?’ she said.

  De Villiers had been in Weskoppies for three months before anyone tried to make sense of his persistent refusal to speak to the doctors and his agitation when they wouldn’t let him call General van den Bergh. The man who came to see him was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pretoria, a Professor Nienaber, member of the underground third force. Nienaber’s task was simple: to keep De Villiers from telling what he knew. There were still too many covert operations to complete before the members of the third force could retreat safely to their day jobs, satisfied that they had changed the course of history.

  ‘I know what I know,’ De Villiers insisted when Nienaber tried to explain that the memory which De Villiers had, or believed he had, was false.

  ‘I know what I know,’ De Villiers said a second time. ‘I was there and I know what happened.’

  ‘Tell me again what happened,’ Professor Nienaber said. ‘Give me the broad outline of what you believe happened.’

  When his patient didn’t respond, he added, ‘What you tell me is between us, protected by medical privilege. I won’t tell anyone, and if I were to do so, I would be struck off the Medical Register.’

  De Villiers thought briefly about the wisdom of what he was doing, but decided to skip the details. If he cooperated, he might be released from detention sooner.

  ‘We were sent on a special mission to Angola to shoot a man.’ He gave as little detail as he thought he could get away with.

  Nienaber gave no indication that he believed or disbelieved what he was hearing.

  ‘That’s what happened,’ De Villiers said when he reached the end. ‘The rest you know. I was in DB and now I’m here.’

  ‘You were also in the hospital for three months. Don’t you remember that?’

  De Villiers frowned. Nienaber pressed a buzzer on the desk and a nurse entered immediately. She must have been right outside the door waiting for the signal.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ Nienaber asked.

  ‘Yes, please,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘How do you take your tea?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Rooibos, if you have. Black. One sugar. Please.’

  ‘Make that a pot of rooibos, please,’ Nienaber told the nurse. ‘We’re going to be a while, I think.’

  Nienaber waited for the door to close behind the nurse. ‘I’m going to tell you what really happened. Is that alright?’

  De Villiers nodded.

  ‘A number of factors have combined to fuck with your mind, and it’s up to you and me to unfuck it.’ Nienaber smiled at his little joke. ‘Yes, you and I are going to unfuck it.’

  He drummed with his fingers on the desk. They waited for the tea and watched in silence as the nurse poured two cups. She left them with a curt, ‘Call me if you need anything.’

  The aroma of the tea was overwhelming, the first smell of the real world De Villiers had experienced since his detention in DB. There the food had been prison fare. Here at Weskoppies he had been given hospital fare, everything cooked to a pulp with no salt or spice. He held the cup under his nose and inhaled deeply.

  Nienaber became businesslike again. ‘You started at the beginning and I’ll start at the beginning. You played open cards with me and I’m going to play open cards with you,’ he promised.

  ‘Here’s what happened. You were trained for the operation at Donkergat and Langebaan and were taken from your base, you and eight others, and boarded the submarine in Saldanha harbour in the middle of the night.’

  A bell was ringing faintly in De Villiers’s ear, but Nienaber continued in the same voice. ‘The operation was called Argon and you were taken to Cabinda to sabotage the oil installations there.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ De Villiers protested. ‘That was last year and there were only four of us.’

  Nienaber gave nothing away. ‘Tell me about that operation.’

  The memory was vivid. ‘We were dropped off by submarine, as you said, but it was July last year and there were only four of us, not nine. We blew up their oil pipeline and went back to the submarine. That was it. We saw later that UNITA was claiming responsibility.’

  Nienaber opened the folder on the desk and studied a few pages. ‘No, Pierre. You’re only partly correct. We know about your involvement in that operation.’ Nienaber pointed at the sheet in the folder. ‘That was 12 July last year. And you went back for another reconnaissance of the facilities in November last year.’

  De Villiers remembered the second infiltration. It had been uneventful. He looked at the papers on the desk and pointed with his tea cup. ‘Is that my file? And are you saying there was another Cabinda operation, a third one?’

  ‘Yes, this is your file, and yes, there was a third operation in May this year, and you were part of that.’

  De Villiers shook his head.

  ‘Here’s what happened, I can tell you. You went ashore in Gemini rubber boats from the submarine twelve miles offshore.’

  Nienaber sipped from his cup.

  De Villiers remembered the Geminis. They were used for training and had been used on other missions.

  ‘There was only one Cabinda operation and that was last year,’ he insisted. ‘The November operation was strictly reconnaissance for a big operation, but we never followed up on that.’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Nienaber pleaded and refilled De Villiers’s cup. He changed tack. ‘Do you know Captain Wynand du Toit?’

  ‘Yes. We trained together and he’s with me in 4 Recce.’

  ‘And Rowland Liebenberg and Louis van Breda?’

  ‘Yes, they’re both corporals.’

  ‘They were on Argon with you,’ Nienaber said.

  De Villiers shook his head. ‘This is crazy. Du Toit was with me last year in November. He was in command, but we’ve since gone in different directions. He’s in ocean water-borne operations and I’m in inland water-borne operations.’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Nienaber admonished him. ‘Just hear me out before you pass judgment.’

  Nienaber waited until De Villiers made eye contact and nodded. ‘You got ashore all right, but you were detected by the local FAPLA forces before you could complete the mission. In the fighting which followed, Van Breda and Liebenberg were killed and you and Du Toit were captured. The others came back, some wounded, but they all made it back.’

  De Villiers listened but didn’t believe what he was hearing.

  ‘Where’s Du Toit now?’ he asked. ‘Can I speak to him?’

  ‘No,’ said Nienaber firmly. ‘He’s still being held by them. They’re parading him all over the place for propaganda purposes.’

  ‘Then how come I’m here?’

  ‘That’s where I come in,’ Professor Nienaber explained. ‘You were released near Rundu nearly two months later after they had brainwashed you to believe that you had been sent on a mission to assassinate Robert Mugabe. But there was no Bushman, as you claim. It
was just you. There was never any Bushman.’

  ‘Why would they want to do that, just let me go?’ De Villiers left the second question unasked. When did I say anything about a Bushman? I never did, did I?

  ‘It is for propaganda purposes, Pierre,’ Nienaber explained. ‘They have Du Toit to prove that we’ve been trying to sabotage their oil installations inside Angola. There’s an international outcry over that because those oil installations belong to an American company. On this side they accuse us of being involved in the civil war in Mozambique to destabilise their government. And if they can show that one of our soldiers had been sent to kill Mugabe, we will have another international outcry because we will be shown to have tried to assassinate the President of Zimbabwe. So they planted that in your mind with their mind-altering techniques.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ De Villiers claimed. ‘Unless someone actually took a shot at Mugabe, the plan doesn’t make sense.’

  Nienaber looked at De Villiers for what felt like a minute. His patient was not as compliant as the doses of medication secretly administered to him ought to have achieved. ‘It would make sense if you were to keep this in mind,’ he said. ‘You were captured and the other men were killed on the 21st of May. Mugabe was to make his speech in a village in south-eastern Angola on the 28th. That gave them enough time to brainwash you.’

  ‘But why would they release me then? They could just as well have made me talk in front of the cameras to tell everything,’ De Villiers demanded, still in pursuit of a logical explanation for everything.

  The psychiatrist looked sideways at the window. ‘Pierre, I have to break this to you gently, so please be patient with me, okay?’

  De Villiers didn’t know what to say but nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ Professor Nienaber said. ‘I suppose I must share something with you. I would have preferred not to tell you, because this information may not be good for your mental well-being or for your recovery. But I’m going to tell you, because I think that’s the only way I’m going to be able to persuade you to accept that the events did not occur as your mind tells you.’