War School 101

I think it was late 1985 when we did our military maneuvers in the Eastern Free State. Lesotho had some internal strife, and it was probably also aimed as a show of force for the rebels in Maseru.

We left early in the morning, driving along the main roads toward Fouriesburg, and then on to Ficksburg, building temporary bridges across what seemed every single stream. In between it all we had ambushes along the road, minefields to clear, wounded people to casevac . The ambushes didn’t always work so well – the sergeant major would shoot at us with blanks from behind a tree, we shoot back, he declares us dead, we say not a fuck and drive off. I think he found it very frustrating.

I was assigned a driver for the Gharrie (the word Gharrie, usually assigned to any jeep-like vehicle, is actually a Swahili word, and is still used ubiquitously in East Africa) as I never got around to getting one. By the 1st afternoon I made him sit in the back and he became my radio operator. He was a useless driver – kept falling asleep at the wheel.

The vehicles in the pic were my part of war school 101, lined up next to the parade ground at 2 Field in Bethlehem (not the one with 3 wise men and a virgin).