Farms and Drinkers

I will tell you about Pieter van Rensburg, who was my friend, and about a six-week bush trip in the operational area east of Mount Darwin in the winter of 1977, because I have been asked and because I remember it clearly and because it seems to me that a thing clearly remembered ought to be clearly told. I am sitting on my veranda as I begin this, with a gin and tonic going warm in the evening heat, and the Lowveld light has turned the colour it turns at this hour — the colour of old brass, of something valuable left out in the weather. My children are inside. My wife is inside. The tobacco is curing in the barns. I mention these things because they are the life I returned to, and they are real, and I want you to understand that what I am about to describe happened to a man who survived it and went on to live in the ordinary way.

I arrived at the forward airfield outside Mount Darwin on the seventh of June, nineteen years old and three months into my national service, having volunteered for the Rhodesian Light Infantry with the particular certainty available only to boys who have grown up on farms and believe that defending a country is the same activity as defending a boundary fence. My father grew tobacco outside Karoi. His father had grown tobacco outside Karoi. I understood the land the way a son understands his father’s body — by proximity, by inheritance, by the stubborn conviction that it would always be there.

The FAF was what all forward airfields were: a strip of cleared bush long enough for a Dakota, a scattering of tents, a fuel dump surrounded by sandbags, and a pervasive institutional squalor that was somehow comforting because it was shared. The red soil got into everything. It coated the tents, the weapons, the food, the inside of your nostrils, so that after a week you blew red and no one remarked on it. The mopane woodland pressed in from every side — sparse, flat, smelling of turpentine under the midday sun, the canopy ten or fifteen metres up and below it a kind of cathedral emptiness where the light came through in bars and the only undergrowth was pale grass and the exposed roots of trees gripping the eroded earth like the fingers of hands that had been reaching for something and given up.

I was assigned to a four-man stick. My stick leader was a corporal named Gillies, who had done three rotations and spoke with the compressed authority of a man who had stopped explaining himself. Our machine gunner was Pieter van Rensburg, a farmer’s son from Chinhoyi, six foot three and built like something you would need a permit to transport. Pieter was a big man who moved quietly, which is the most disconcerting combination in a soldier. He carried the FN MAG and four hundred rounds as though the weight were a personal grievance he had decided not to pursue. He read nothing, wrote nothing, and laughed at things that were not funny with a generosity that made you wonder what he found so amusing about the world’s failures.

The fourth was Ndlovu. I will call him that because it was the name he gave us and because I never learned whether it was the name his mother had given him or a name he had chosen for the purpose of serving alongside men who would not have troubled themselves to pronounce the other one. He was a tracker, seconded from the Selous Scouts or from the RAR — we were never told which, and asking would have been a breach of something, though I was never certain what. He was smaller than any of us, thin in the way that a cable is thin, and he spoke three languages and said very little in any of them. His silence was not hostile. It was the silence of a man for whom speech was an expenditure he could not always justify.

I want to be precise about these men because the alternative — the vague gestures of remembrance, the soft-focus business of old soldiers and their toasts — has never seemed adequate to what they were. They were specific. Pieter’s hands were too large for the trigger guard and he had filed the guard wider with a piece of emery cloth he kept in his webbing. Ndlovu tracked by scent as much as sight, and I once watched him drop to one knee, press his nose to a patch of disturbed earth, and tell us how many men had passed and how long ago and whether they were carrying weight. Gillies had a scar on his forearm from a cooking accident he would not discuss and which everyone called his war wound, which was a joke he tolerated with the grim patience of a man who has been told the same joke four hundred times.

The first weeks of the bush trip were the weeks of waiting. We rotated through the positions — heliborne, paratrooper, landtail, off-duty — and between rotations we sat in the heat and cleaned weapons that were already clean and listened to the yellow-billed hornbills screaming in the mopane like rusty machinery running without oil. The boredom was its own kind of violence. It compressed time until an afternoon became a physical thing you had to push through.

Our first contact came in the third week, and I will describe it because it was clean and because a clean contact is a simple thing to tell.

The K-Car had spotted movement in a drainage channel four kilometres south of the FAF. We scrambled. The Alouette banked hard over the bush and the downdraft kicked up a column of red dust that trailed behind us like a wound in the atmosphere. Gillies was beside the pilot, his A63 radio already crackling with the Fire Force commander’s voice from the orbiting K-Car eight hundred feet above — a voice that was calm in the way that the voice of a man watching from eight hundred feet can afford to be calm. The Dakota was ahead of us, the paratroopers already standing.

The G-Car put us down in a clearing two hundred metres from the contact. We were running before the skids touched soil. The bush swallowed the helicopter sound within thirty paces — that was the thing about mopane woodland, it absorbed noise the way sand absorbs water, and within a minute of the insertion you were in a silence that felt ancestral, as though the trees had been standing in that silence for a thousand years and the helicopter had been an offence they had already forgotten.

We swept south. Pieter had the MAG at his hip, the bipod folded, moving through the bush with that impossible quiet of his. Ndlovu was out front, reading the ground. The contact was brief. The 20mm from the K-Car had done its work — the sound of it was like a zipper the size of the sky being drawn open — and what we found in the drainage channel was already finished. I will not describe it in detail because detail in this context is not precision but indulgence, and I have no interest in performing the thing for you. We counted. We reported. We extracted. No casualties on the Rhodesian side. Gillies filled out the contact report on his knee in the Alouette on the way back, writing in that careful hand of his, and Pieter leaned his head against the bulkhead and closed his eyes and was asleep before we cleared the tree line.

That was a clean contact. I tell you about it so you will believe me when I tell you about the one that was not.

But first the mopane worms.

It was during a patrol in the fourth week, a foot patrol through mopane woodland after two days of rain. The rains had brought the worms out — fat, green-black caterpillars the length of a man’s finger, covering the mopane branches in clusters so thick the branches sagged. Ndlovu stopped walking. He looked at the worms. He looked at us. Then he reached up and pulled one from a branch with a motion so practised it had the quality of ritual, pinched it between his thumb and forefinger just below the head, and squeezed. The innards came out the back end — green frass, bright against his dark skin — and he held up the emptied casing like a man displaying a small, private accomplishment.

Pieter swore and turned away. He had a farmer’s son’s contempt for unfamiliar food, which was the contempt of a man whose plate had always been full.

I took one from the branch. The caterpillar was warm, muscular, gripping the bark with rows of tiny feet that released with a faint tearing sound. Ndlovu watched my hands. He said something in Shona — not to me, I think, but to the process itself, the way a man might talk to a piece of machinery he was calibrating. I squeezed. Too hard. The worm burst. Green across my fingers, a smell like crushed leaves and something mineral beneath it. Ndlovu shook his head, took another, placed it in my hand, and guided my thumb and forefinger to the correct position. The pressure required was specific — enough to expel the gut but not enough to rupture the body wall. It was the kind of knowledge that lived in the hands, not the head, and as Ndlovu adjusted my grip I felt the odd intimacy of being taught something by a man who had no reason to teach me anything and every reason not to.

I ate one. Sun-dried, it had a texture like bark and a flavour that was woody, faintly smoky, not unpleasant. Pieter watched me eat it with an expression of magnificent disgust and said nothing, which was his way of saying everything.

I have described this moment with more care than it perhaps warrants. It was a small thing — a man showing two other men how to prepare a caterpillar in the bush. But I find that my memory of it is more complete than my memory of either contact. Ndlovu’s hands adjusting mine is a thing I can still feel in my fingers twenty years later, when I cannot feel much else from that time at all.

There was a leadwood tree at the edge of the operational area, at the point where the mopane gave way to a dried watercourse running northeast toward the Mavhuradonha mountains. It was enormous — three men could not have joined hands around its trunk — and it was dead. Had been dead, I learned later, for perhaps three hundred years. The bark was pale grey, deeply fissured in long vertical lines, and the wood was so dense that termites, which devoured everything else the bush offered, could not penetrate it. It stood in the exact posture of a living tree. Its branches still reached. Its silhouette against the sky was indistinguishable from the silhouettes of the living mopane around it. I found it remarkable — that a dead thing should retain its shape so perfectly, should remain upright and composed and present long after whatever had animated it was gone.

I mention the leadwood because I passed it twice — once on the way in and once on the way out — and because it was the kind of landmark that fixes itself in a soldier’s memory. Not tactically significant. Just present.

The second contact came in the fifth week.

The K-Car reported a large group in a drainage channel six kilometres east of the FAF — fifteen, perhaps twenty, which was larger than anything we had seen. Our stick was heliborne. The Alouette lifted and banked and I watched the bush scroll beneath us, the red earth and the pale mopane and the dark thread of the drainage channel cutting through it, and I remember thinking that from the air the land looked simple, as though its problems could be solved by someone with sufficient altitude.

The insertion went wrong. The pilot put us down two hundred metres north of where Gillies had called for, in thick jesse bush with sight lines no longer than ten paces in any direction. The jesse was head-high, dense, the stems grey and interlocking. It was like being inside a cage made of the bush itself. Gillies swore into the radio. The K-Car commander’s voice came back, calm, corrective, already adjusting the sweep pattern. Somewhere to the east I could hear another G-Car putting down another stick, and to the south the 20mm was working — that sound, that tearing-sky sound — and the bush was full of noise and none of it was useful.

Pieter moved forward.

I want to be clear about what happened next because clarity is the only thing I can offer and because I owe it to Pieter to get this right.

Pieter moved forward through the jesse toward the sound of contact, the MAG at his hip, four hundred rounds across his chest. He moved the way he always moved — quietly, deliberately, his big body finding passages through the bush that should not have existed for a man his size. I was behind him. I was covering him. Gillies was on the radio, trying to establish our position relative to the other sticks, and Ndlovu had gone left, or right — I lost him, which was what happened with Ndlovu; he moved in and out of visibility like something the bush produced and reabsorbed at will.

The jesse opened into a shallow depression where the drainage channel widened, and the contact was there — muzzle flashes in the scrub on the far side, the sound of AK fire, which is distinctive, a kind of flat coughing that the bush dampened into something almost gentle. Pieter dropped to one knee and set the bipod and began firing. The MAG has a sound that is nothing like the AK — it is heavier, more authoritative, a hammering that you feel in your chest. I was beside him. I was putting rounds into the scrub line, firing low, graduating upward the way we had been trained, and the brass was ejecting past my face and the smell of cordite was everywhere and the ground was shaking from the 20mm working the far end of the channel.

Then Pieter made a sound. It was not a dramatic sound. It was a grunt, the kind of sound a man makes when he is struck in the stomach by something unexpected — a ball, a fist, a piece of news. He sat back from the MAG. His hands were still on the weapon. I saw a redness on his chest that had not been there before and I understood what it was immediately and completely and I want you to know that in that moment I acted. I pulled him back. I got my hands under his arms and I dragged him into the jesse, away from the lip of the depression, and he was heavy — God, he was heavy, all that size and muscle and the four hundred rounds and the MAG still slung across him because I could not think to take it off him and neither could he — and I pulled him into cover and held him and he said something.

I could not hear what he said. The gunfire, the 20mm, Gillies shouting into the radio, the jesse scraping against my helmet — the noise was total. I saw his lips move. I saw his eyes, which were brown and very clear, and I saw the expression in them, which I will not attempt to name because to name it would be to diminish it and because I did not then and do not now possess the vocabulary for what a man’s eyes contain when he is dying in the arms of someone he trusts.

Pieter died. I held him until the casevac Alouette came in and then I helped lift him aboard and the MAG was still on him because nobody remembered to take it off and I cannot tell you why that detail persists — the MAG on a dead man, the ammunition belt trailing over the edge of the stretcher — except that the mind in extremity fixes on the particular and releases the general, and the particular was the MAG, and the general was that my friend was dead.

Toombs — I have not mentioned Toombs. He was in another stick, a rifleman from Bulawayo, an English-speaker who read paperback westerns by torchlight and had the long, bored face of a man who found reality consistently less interesting than fiction. He was somewhere on the eastern sweep line during the contact, and I heard his voice on the radio once, clipped and mechanical, reporting movement. I did not see him until the debrief.

At the debrief, things were said that are said after contacts. The body count was reported. The commander noted the insertion error. Gillies gave his account. I gave mine. The accounts were factual, sequential, stripped of everything that was not position, direction, and time. War is bureaucracy punctuated by noise, and the bureaucracy reasserts itself the moment the noise stops.

That night, at the FAF, Toombs got drunk on Castle lagers he had procured through methods I did not ask about. He sat on an ammunition crate outside his tent and he said a thing that I will report to you now, as exactly as I can recall it. He said: “Funny how it goes. Pieter moves and everyone else is still counting their fingers.”

I did not ask him what he meant. I said something about Pieter being brave, having always been the first to move, and Toombs looked at me with the flat, appraising expression of a man deciding whether to say more, and then he drank his beer and said nothing else. I mention this because Toombs was the kind of man who said things that sounded oblique and were in fact precise, and because I have thought about that sentence many times in the years since and have always arrived at the same conclusion, which is that he was praising Pieter’s courage.

That is what he meant. I am certain of it.

The remaining days of the bush trip passed. The bush was the same bush. The mopane smelled of turpentine. The hornbills screamed. Ndlovu tracked and said nothing. But something had changed in the quality of the days, the way light changes when a cloud passes even though the temperature does not drop. The landscape, which I had previously regarded with something like wonder — the violence of the afternoon sun, the way the drainage channels cut through the red earth like the lines on a palm — became merely accurate. I could describe it but I could not receive it. The bush was information, not experience.

Ndlovu’s silence acquired a weight it had not previously had. I found myself watching him — the way he moved, the way he held his rifle, the direction of his gaze — with an attention that was not tactical but something else, something I could not have named then and will not attempt to name now. He did not look at me differently. He did not look at me at all. And I want to be clear that his silence was not accusatory, because Ndlovu was not a man who accused. He was a man who observed, and his observations stayed inside him like water in a well — present, undisturbed, unreachable.

I grieved for Pieter. I want to say that plainly. The grief was the kind that has no performance in it — no weeping, no dramatic gesture, just a heaviness that settled behind the sternum and stayed there like a stone that could not be coughed up or dissolved. I carried it through the last days of the trip and through the ten days of leave that followed and through the next rotation and the one after that, and eventually I carried it home.

We were extracted at the end of six weeks, flown back to Salisbury, given our leave, and dispersed into the country like seeds from a pod. I went home to Karoi. My father was on the veranda. My mother had made bobotie. The dogs came to greet me and I knelt in the dust of the driveway and pressed my face into the neck of the old ridgeback and breathed the smell of dog and dust and home, and I want you to understand that at that moment I was entirely present and entirely absent at the same time, which is a contradiction I cannot resolve and do not intend to try.

That was 1977. I am telling you this in 1997, from a veranda not unlike my father’s, on land adjacent to his former holding. I could not afford to keep the whole farm after independence — the economics changed, as everything changed — and so I bought what I could and planted tobacco and hired men and built a life that is, by any external measure, the life of a man who came back. I have a wife. I have children. I have this veranda and this gin and this view of the Lowveld at dusk, which is the view my father had and his father had, and which I defend now not with a rifle but with a chequebook, which is the instrument of a different kind of war and one in which I am considerably less competent.

I have not seen Toombs in twelve years. He went to South Africa in the eighties. Someone told me he was working in security in Johannesburg, which was what many of us did, because the skills we had acquired were the skills that particular industry required, and because Johannesburg in the eighties was a place that required them.

Ndlovu is dead. He died in 1983, of causes I did not ask about, in a country that was by then called something else.

I drove past the leadwood last year, on a trip to the eastern highlands. It is still standing. The bark is the same pale grey, fissured in the same long vertical lines. The branches still reach.

I bought the farm. I was lucky. I came back and I bought the farm, which is one of the two things that the men I served with did. Some bought farms and some drank and some did both. I am one of the ones who bought a farm. I tell you this from the veranda, with my second gin going warm beside me, and the Lowveld light turning from brass to copper to the deep, exhausted gold that precedes the dark. Inside, the children are arguing about something — I can hear them through the screen door, and the sound is so ordinary it has a kind of violence to it, the way ordinary things are violent to a man who has been elsewhere.

I have told you about Pieter, who was my friend. I have told you what happened. I have told it clearly because I remember it clearly and because carrying the MAG to the Alouette was the thing I could do, and telling it is the thing I can still do.

The evening is settling. Somewhere in the mopane a hornbill is making that sound — the rusted-hinge sound, territorial and pointless and utterly itself. I lift my glass. The ice has melted. The gin is warm. But I drink it anyway, because waste is a thing I cannot abide, and because the alternative is to set it down and sit here in the silence with nothing in my hands, and I have found, over the years, that a man with nothing in his hands is a man with nothing between himself and whatever it is he has spent twenty years not thinking about.