Voeteoppiefokkenkas!!!! Our first instruction on the day basics started. After the haircuts, after collecting all your shit from the stores. The first day of basic training.
Next to each bed was a “kas” or cabinet where your clothes went, and typical army, it was painted a drab green and had little sliding doors that never worked. The kas was about a metre high, so if you put your feet on the locker, you were doing vertical push ups. Minute one of our 3 month basic training and I’d learnt a new word – voeteoppiefokkenkas! (always spelt with an exclamation mark at the end of the word).
We started with 150 push ups. Now half of us were fat bastards, very few of us were fit bastards, so doing 150 push ups on the first day wasn’t going to go well. My bed was right at the top end of the bungalow, next to the window. Next to me was Tony Barnes (he’s dead now). Both of us were pretty fit, but after about the tenth push up we looked at each other from under the bed where our faces were lying flat on the floor, and we started grinning.
By this time one guy was crying (I kid you not), and some other were screaming that this was unfair. I was listening at our corporal (Conrad Ramsay was his name, from Barkly East I think) screaming insults as only an instructor can. Barnes and I got the giggles, and both looked up to see if we’d been noticed. Ramsay was looking at us, with a huge grin on his face. His stream of incessant swearing didn’t stop for a moment, but he knew that we knew that none of this really mattered. And from that first day one he never gave the two of us any shit.
-- I lost contact with Tony after the army, and only recently found out he's died. Conrad and I bumped into each other a few times at the University of Port Elizabeth. We got on well --
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