Conscription
Apartheid-era South Africa had universal conscription of white males. One was supposed to do the initial service after completing high school. Those who intended going to university could either serve beforehand or defer service until after graduating (or dropping out). In the '70s there was no allowance for conscientious objection. If one didn't want to serve, one either had to flee the country or be sentenced to a protracted period in a military prison. By the late '80s, if one managed to get classified as a bona fide religious objector it was possible to perform approved alternative service instead of being in the military. My little brother Ian managed to get religious objector status. That wasn't an option for me because it wasn't available in the '70s and in any case I wasn't sufficiently religious.
Had I served directly after high school, my initial period would have been either 9 or 11 months. But I took deferment and by the time I graduated the initial period had been extended to two years. After the initial service one was still liable to be called up for periodic "camps". The number of these and the period for which one remained liable had also increased. Do I regret opting for deferment? Definitely not. I may have had to serve for longer but I certainly had it easier than I would otherwise, including avoiding being involved in active combat. So, much as I complain below, I know I was very fortunate compared to many of my peers. My other brother, Mick, served a couple of years after me. He ended up in the S.A. Medical Services (SAMS) and was initially assigned to the Navy Medical Center in Simon's Town, but later spent time in the "operational area" either side of the border between (then) South West Africa and Angola. He had trained as a social worker and served in that capacity. He made it his mission to classify as many conscripts as possible as being unfit for combat duties.
Becoming a marathon runner
Backing up several years … Although I enjoyed playing a variety of ball games (cricket, rugby, soccer, squash in particular) I had neither the basic speed nor the hand-eye coordination to be any good. I started running about the time I turned 16 - because my dog needed exercise. For the first couple of years I always ran alone (other than with the dog, though later the dog became lazy and I left it at home). I usually ran on days I wasn't playing another sport and always ran the same route. I have no idea how far it was, but do recall it taking between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on how I felt on the day. Although I didn't train with the high school track team and was entirely uncoached, I did run a couple of meets in the last month of high school. I have no recollection of what events I ran and never knew what my times were. I certainly didn't come close to winning.
In college I continued running when not playing other sports (intramural rugby and soccer, sometimes both on the same day). In 1975, soon after turning 21, I completed the Stellenbosch M marathon, though I am fairly sure I didn't go even as far as 10 miles on any training run. I managed to finish shortly before the time-keepers disappeared. Steve Moss, a frequent training partner at that stage, was probably about 15 minutes behind me and the finish line had been packed up and the time-keepers had left when he finished in around 3:45. This was years before digital stopwatches became available, so he had to estimate his time from the stadium clock.
Over the next couple of years I gradually increased my running and decreased participation in other sports. In March 1977, in my third marathon I managed to get under 3 hours for the first time, finishing the Peninsula Marathon in about 2:55. (The map shows the approximate route of the Peninsula Marathon, running roughly north to south.) A few months later I started running with Bruce Robinson and Peter Hodson, who had placed first and second in the Peninsula Marathon. They were both final-year medical students and most lunchtimes they would run laps around the perimeter of the university's main cricket field (so most of our running was on grass). In July of that year I ran in the South African Universities cross country championships - only because it was in my home town during winter break. My college (University of Cape Town) didn't have a cross country coach, any scholarship athletes, or any travel funds, so the team at the meet consisted of those who lived in Port Elizabeth or were willing to make their own way there. According to my running log I narrowly avoided being lapped and was 49th out of 67 finishers. Back in Cape Town, trying to keep up with Bruce and Peter helped me improve substantially. In my next marathon, in September, I dropped my PR to 2:36, finishing ahead of Bruce and Peter (as well as some other runners who I'd thought of as being much better than I was). For the first time in my life I felt as if I had some athletic talent. In December, after final exams, I was back at home in Port Elizabeth and ran a 10-mile race. That was the first race I won - and the first time I received a prize for anything athletic rather than academic. Not exactly a big prize though. As I recall, the first 2 or 3 finishers were given a 6-pack of cans of guava juice to share (not even a 6-pack each).
The above is all by way of background, laying out that at the end of 1977 I was starting to think of myself as a reasonable runner. I had no illusions of being a great runner - I had reasonable endurance but didn't have enough basic speed to be very good.
Off to war (or at least to the Navy)
In the first week of January 1978, I boarded a troop train with a bunch of other conscripts called up to the Navy. I don't recall whether it was one of the items we were told to take with us, but I had a very large bottle of aspirin (probably at least a thousand pills), the relevance of which will become clear later. After a long train ride we reached the naval training base at Saldanha Bay, about 50 miles north of Cape Town, on South Africa's west coast. Then, in good military hurry-up-and-wait style, we spent a few days hanging around waiting to hear our fate. The base was large and as we didn't have much else to do, I was able to run. The base commander somehow heard I had a degree in operations research and so put me to work trying to find an optimal schedule for assigning guard duty. After a few days, those of us who had completed college were loaded up and sent off to a much smaller training base in Simon's Town, which is just short of a marathon distance from central Cape Town (the Peninsula Marathon used to go from Green Point Stadium in Cape Town to the naval sports fields in Simon's Town). See the leftward pointing arrow on the map above. The naval training base there was hardly bigger than a postage stamp. (The whole naval base was much larger, with several contiguous and disjoint components. )
There were 30 conscripts who had been to college first and we were put directly into an Officers' Orientation Course (OOC) without having to do basic training. The navy didn't seem able to make up its mind how to train graduates, with the plan varying from intake to intake. Both the intakes before us had their officer training at Gordon' Bay, the navy's main officer training base. The rightward pointing arrow on the map indicates Gordon's Bay. I think one of the two intakes first had to do regular basic training, the same as lower ranks, before an OOC whereas the other intake had to go through the full officers' training (not just an orientation course for graduates).
While on the OOC we had the "rank" midshipman (i.e., candidate officer) Also on the OOC were 6 graduates who had signed up for the permanent force (that is, career military rather than being conscripts). Even though they were also fresh in the military, they had already been assigned actual officer ranks. At least a couple of them were in their 30s and some were heavy smokers and very unfit, especially a Lt. Booysen. In overall charge of the OOC were S/Lt. Morris and Warrant Officer (W/O) Harmse, with a variety of other people responsible for specific aspects of the course.. W/O Harmse liked to remind us that in terms of the naval hierarchy "midshipmen are lower than shark sh*t).
The photo shows us -- conscripts, permanent force officers on the OOC plus some of the officers in charge of us, in our "ice cream suits" (summer parade uniforms).
Being the military, we had to do nearly everything in squad formation, including running. But Lt. Booysen and 1-2 of the other permanent force guys were so unfit that they couldn't run for more than about 100 yards without needing to rest. So we didn't get much exercise. As I mentioned, the training base was very small. Unless I was willing to run many laps around the buildings, there was no way I could maintain any running fitness. I put in a written request to be allowed to go running outside the base, but that was turned down. We were kept busy (even if not physically busy), so I was too tired and unmotivated to want to run laps around the buildings.
Then for part of our course we had a few days with an instructor who was a first-class asshole. Lt. "Gunner" Mead was a gunnery officer, though that wasn't his role in our training. (As a gunnery officer he used to train seamen to load and fire naval guns. The photo shows the Lower North Battery where they used to practice, right next to the main road to Simon's Town. Manual loading of these big guns was probably already obsolete in proper navies by that stage. He used to claim that his gunnery teams were so fast they would be able to shoot down an anti-ship missile. I don't think he had any conception how fast a missile travels.) Gunner Mead seemed to be taking out his frustrations on us. Maybe it was because of a sense of inadequacy - he was middle-aged, yet in a rather lowly officer rank and without any skills needed to progress further, whereas we were recent graduates with supposedly bright futures ahead of us. I won't claim to have been singled out in any way, though I did have my own feeling of inadequacy; in one of the activities in Gunner Mead's part of the course I was the only one with so little upper body strength that I couldn't pull myself up a sheer slope using a rope.
Part of Gunner Mead's section of the course was on riot control. The Army and Air force we involved in the war to the north, so the Navy was apparently supposed to deal with internal unrest. The formation we had to adopt when facing rioters was called "Form D". The straight edge of the D had to face the rioters and whoever was in charge of the formation would be in the middle, along with soldiers firing tear gas and the like. The idea that we might be required to fire on fellow citizens (most likely of other races) was deeply disturbing to me. I don't think the Navy ever ended up having to do riot control. The police were often involved though, such as in the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre. Other units of the military may also have been involved at later stages of the Apartheid era. (There have been numerous massacres in South Africa over the past couple of hundred years. Not all have been between races. Some were black on black, at least one white on white, and in the nineteenth century several black on white, along with the white on black ones suppressing anti-Apartheid protests. This list on Wikipedia seems rather incomplete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_South_Africa.)
By the end of the first day of Gunner Mead's training I wanted out. I decided to try to make myself ill. All I had at my disposal was the large bottle of aspirin mentioned previously. I didn't want to cause myself permanent harm, so decided to start with 8 aspirins the first day and then gradually increase the dose until it was enough to make me ill. The next day with Gunner Mead was equally bad. However, early that day I realized he was essentially a caricature, with more bluster than real bite. Even though he may have been serious we didn't have to take him seriously. Instead, I found we could laugh at his over-the-top behavior (as long as we didn't actually laugh in his face). That took all the pressure off and I felt no need to take any more of the aspirin. (I have no idea what happened to all the pills after that.) The rest of our time with Gunner Mead might not exactly have been "fun" though at least it was a source of some amusement. I was still despondent about not being allowed to run and there was no easy fix for that.
We had a day to two of weapons training, part of which was learning to take apart and reassemble a rifle and a pistol and then some time on the rifle and pistol ranges. On the day we had to do actual shooting, half of us were assigned to the rifle range in the morning while the other half went to the pistol range. In the afternoon we were supposed to switch ranges. But it started raining and the afternoon's shooting was abandoned. So I never got to fire a pistol. Naval officers carry pistols, not rifles. That meant I didn't get a chance to practice with the weapon I would be expected to use, though I had learned how to disassemble it. I used to joke that if I was attacked I would have to say "Hold it right there. I don't know how to shoot you, but look how quickly I can take this pistol apart." We weren't issued our own pistols but for some duties (mentioned below) were allocated one to use while on duty. I usually left it in the safe.
I don't recall exactly when we had our first "pass" allowing us to go off base for a few hours one afternoon. I seem to think that it happened to be on the day of the Peninsula Marathon, which went right by the main gate of the base, less than a mile from the finish of the race. (See photo below of the main gate.) I didn't watch the runners going by that morning. There must have been a strong headwind though. Brian Chamberlain, who won in 2:32:43 was a better runner than Bruce Robinson who had run 2:30:47 to win the previous year. Also, the winning time in each of the next 10 years was not only under 2:30 but under 2:20. I don't remember what we did with our free time on that first "pass". I know I didn't go for a run. Probably went to a nearby bar.
Each component of our course lasted a day or two, at the end of which we had an exam on that section. The instructors generally had at most a high school certificate and had little experience setting exams. They usually pretty much just gave us the answers. And as there weren't any consequences for doing poorly, the exams didn't add any stress. One exception was the section on law and the Military Discipline Code. That part was taught by a (uniformed) navy lawyer and he set a more realistic exam. I tried looking for loopholes, such as ways to get off base to go for a run. So I studied the material carefully and ended up with the highest score in the class, even doing better than the 4 fellow midshipmen who had just finished law school.
One day we got to take a couple of sailboats out on False Bay. The morning was relatively calm, with little wind. The wind picked up nicely as the day wore on, enabling us to sail at a good clip. I say "us" though I didn't exactly do much. I have little interest in sailboats whereas some of the others were keen sailors (and one had qualified as a naval engineer). There were more of them than were needed to man the boat. So I let them do the work. I went below deck and had a very pleasant nap, with our speed across the increasingly choppy water being very soothing.
At some point we competed in a track meet against some of the other local units. The meet was on a 300m grass track - on the naval sports-fields where the Peninsula Marathon traditionally ended. I ran the 1,500m and maybe also the 800m. What made the 1,500m memorable was that after I finished W/O Harmse accused me of running a lap short! I hadn't even won; I was just a not-very-close second. He obviously didn't think much of my running ability. He wasn't the only one. Several months after the end of the OOC, after I was back in reasonable shape, a fellow conscript said he didn't know how I managed to run so fast because when not running I always looked very lethargic. I hadn't been aware of that and was too taken aback to think of a response such as "That's because I am conserving energy."
Near the end of the OOC we had a couple of multi-day activities that were referred to as "Leadership Training". There wasn't any formal training involved. At most it was a case of "work things out for yourselves while you do these activities".
The first part involved hiking in full gear (plus rifles) in the Karbonkelberg (literal translation: Carbuncle Mountain) part of the Table Mountain range. (See downward arrow on map.) I had forgotten that that had included camping out for two nights. (I was reminded by glancing through a copy of the occasional newsletter we produced while on the OOC, in which I had written one of the two articles about the Karbonkelberg experience. I have copied my piece below) We were divided into 4 groups, with each group given a map and a two-way radio. We were told to make our way to various points (in different order for each group) and to report in by radio from each of the points. One group "failed" the test. One of the points was next to the ocean, reached by going down a long and rather steep slope. That group decided they didn't want to go down and then right back up again, so they radioed in from the top of the slope, saying they were at the bottom. What they didn't realize was that the bottom was in a radio shadow from the base camp and so they should not have been able to make contact if they had been at the foot of the mountain. When they returned to base camp they were made to go out again to do the task properly. The group I was in didn't make the same mistake. We went all the way down, though took a different route on the way up because of where we needed to be do reach the next checkpoint. While traversing a steep section of quite thick bushes we disturbed a swarm of bees, which promptly attacked us. Bee stings don't affect me much. Although I was stung multiple times, all I did was hold my helmet over my face to protect it. I was very amused at the big tough guys in the squad crashing through the bushes and screaming as they tried to avoid getting stung. What we didn't realize was that one guy in our group was very allergic to bee stings. Fortunately for him he moved in the opposite direction from where the other guys were hurtling down with the bees in hot pursuit. So he emerged unscathed. Apart from that, our hike was tiring but uneventful. (The least fit of the permanent force guys must have been excused this exercise.)
The next part of the leadership training was spending two days going down the Palmietrivier (literal translation: Bulrush River) on rafts. We were split up into pairs and had to tie foam-filled fiberglass "logs" together to make the rafts. I was paired with a quiet Afrikaner, Andre Kruger. Or at least initially it was going to be just the two of us. Then we were told that we had to take Lt. Booysen, the least fit of the older guys, along with us on our raft. Most of the first day was spent pulling the raft through the bulrushes giving the river its name. The other pairs merely had to pull their rafts over the bulrushes. But Lt. Booysen not only was unable to help pull, we had to pull him along on top of our raft. Andre was one of those dependable types one wants to have with one in the trenches - no complaining, just get the job done. Even so, the first day was rather tough for the two of us. We all camped together next to the river that evening. In the morning we found that the previous day's work had got us through the bulrushes and we had reached the part of the river where we could actually ride downstream on our rafts. Even better as far as Andre and I were concerned was that the powers-that-be decided we no longer needed to have Lt. Booysen on our raft. So that turned out to be a very pleasant day being carried by the current, over several rapids and across stretches of open water. (I may not have any interest in sailing but I've always enjoyed being in and around water.)
When we graduated from the OOC we were assigned to the units where we would spend the rest of our two years of initial service. I was among several seconded to the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT) which, notwithstanding the bland sounding name, was the naval branch of Armscor (the Armaments Corporation of South Africa), a government body doing military research. IMT is located in Simon's Town. Full-time employees of IMT were civilians, could wear regular clothes and were paid a respectable salary plus good benefits. (Very good benefits, which is why a few years later I went to work at IMT as a civilian.) Those of us doing national service had to wear our navy uniforms and were paid the same pittance as other conscripts of the same rank. (Pay scale for conscripts did improve quite substantially during our period of service though.) At the time IMT was in a building less than a stone's throw from the training base where we had endured the OOC. Several years later it moved into a fancy new building on the waterfront. My work at IMT is a subject for another day, though I did mention something about it on Facebook a while back.
With the OOC behind us, we moved into the naval officers' mess and, outside working hours, could come and go as we pleased. One might think that I would immediately have started running regularly again. As is so often the case, one might be wrong. I was rather unmotivated. I went running a few times before I even bothered resuming writing down the distance of each run. For the week ending April 9, 1978, I recorded just a total (20 miles). Three weeks later (April 29) I ran a marathon in 2:48, so clearly I had retained some running fitness.
As mentioned, we were each assigned to a regular day job, such as at IMT. But we still "belonged" to the navy and they made sure we did our fair share of naval duties. At first we had to take turns at being Officer of the Day (or night), that is, the person in charge of the whole Simon's Town naval base overnight on weekdays or on weekends. While on duty we had to stay in the command center (but were allowed to sleep). Duties of the Officer of the Day included giving ships permission to enter or leave the harbor, directing firefighters if there was a bushfire on the mountain behind the town, and generally responding to any crisis that might occur, such as an enemy invasion. There was a pistol in a safe for us to use if we needed it to repel the enemy.
We hadn't been given our proper officer ranks at that stage though and after a while some high ranking officer decided it wasn't appropriate for midshipmen to be in charge of the country's main naval base, even if just overnight or on weekends. So the navy had to come up with some other duties for us. They decided that outside regular working hours we should drive around checking that guards were all at their stations (and signing the logbook at each site to show we had been there). We were supposed to carry a pistol while doing these rounds, but after the first few occasions I left it in the safe. On weekdays we had either a 4 PM to midnight shift or a midnight to 8 AM shift (on top of our regular workdays). Most of my colleagues preferred the 4 PM to midnight shift, whereas I have always preferred running in the late afternoon, which made that shift less desirable for me. If assigned to the midnight to 8 AM shift, most of the others would do a quick tour of the various guardhouses right after midnight, go back to the officers' mess to sleep for several hours and then do another quick tour shortly before 8 AM. I was much more conscientious and so would spend the whole time driving around. To help pass the time I usually tried to accompany the crew of the harbor patrol boat on at least one of their trips around the harbor, rather than just signing their log.
There weren't very many midshipmen assigned to jobs in Simon's Town, so we had one of these shifts every 3-4 days. Because we also had our regular jobs at IMT or elsewhere, these frequent night duties were rather taxing. Fortunately our proper officer ranks came through and we were able to go back to being Officer of the Day - not only were we allowed to sleep while doing that, but there were many more officers available to take turns with this duty. It took about another 18 months before we received our actual Deed of Commission certificates (see image below).
Looking at maps and photographs of Simon's Town, much of it seems similar to when I last saw it (probably about 1985). The wardroom (that is, commissioned naval officers' mess) where we were housed after we'd completed the OOC no longer exists though. Update: It turns out that I was wrong. My brother Mick sent an email saying he'd seen it in November 2017. I'd obviously just forgotten the exact location. Here's a photo from Google Maps with the wardroom partly visible in the background. That's the closest I could get to it on Google Maps.
The wardroom had previously been a hotel (Seaforth Hotel if I recall correctly). It was just over the road from Boulders Beach, a crappy, windswept collection of rocks and sand next to a frigid ocean. The beach has since become world famous. A web site even has it as #40 on a ranking of the world's best beaches: https://www.flightnetwork.com/blog/boulders-beach/ though in my opinion it wouldn't even make the top 40 best beaches in South Africa. A couple of penguins were introduced to the area in 1982 and the penguin colony now numbers around 3,000.(Some sources I've seen say the initial two penguins were introduced to the area, others that they found their way there themselves.)
Below is the piece I wrote for the "Gunroom Gazette" about our Karbonkelberg adventures [with some attempts at explanation in brackets, like this]. In days of yore midshipmen were housed in the gun rooms of ships and "gunroom" has since become the term for the sleeping quarters for midshipmen.
Some you win, and some you lose
Karbonkelberg in retrospect
For many of us, Karbonkelberg was the highlight of the course. Typical Naval organization resulted in the trip taking place on the "wrong" weekend (ask first starboard watch [I presume that group was supposed to have a weekend "pass"]) but apart from that the operation was smoothly run. My memories, as indicated by the title, include a number of contrasting experiences.
To 32 of us, our rifles were the worst possible curse that could have been inflicted upon us while Alan Woolfson's saved him from an untimely end [not by shooting anyone - we were not issued with ammunition, so he must have used it to stop himself falling]. Adri Smuts drank so much water that his stomach rejected it, while Harry Trisos suffered the same fate from having too little water. For two days we would have paid any price for a beer, whereas on Saturday night most people had more than they were able to drink.
The star skinniver [Google is no help in finding a good explanation; basically means someone who has a knack of avoiding work or anything requiring effort] of the course lost his unbeaten record when his group succeeded in contacting base from an area previously thought to be "blind" for radio transmitting, and paid the price for their mistake.
A hot night in luxury at base camp made a welcome change from the two (Southern) uncomfortable nights spent in the bush although many of us woke up exhausted after a collective dream that we had been made to run up an enormous mountain shortly after midnight. [The "Southern" refers to Southern Comfort whiskey, that some people must have taken on the hike to provide "warmth". I presume the "dream" was real - that we were roused from sleep to run up a mountain, though I don't remember that.]
For all that we suffered (and most of us did) the experience was worthwhile in that many of us dragged ourselves (or were pushed) to levels of endurance not previously reached and there is a (Southern) ring of truth in the idea that we came to see facets of character in others (and ourselves) which could no longer be camouflaged.
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