Military
When people discover I was “in the army” they usually express disbelief.
I’m perfectly fine with it.
If a war-story is told or I am asked directly about military service in the SADF my default reply is that I was a terrible soldier.
It is true.
I was.
Even visualizing myself as a soldier is a stretch.
But, I was one, really.
I was conscripted into the South African Defense Force like all white South African boys my age.
There is a lot more to my year in the army which I usually reduce to “terrible soldier” but I do avoid when-I-was-in-the-army stories.
I will not pretend it was a good season for me.
Real war stories told by real soldiers and sailors who fought in brutal wars can be tiresome and there is already enough that is tiresome, told, and retold, and exaggerated, without my adding my two bits.
On the occasion I seek reminding about the horrors of war and the evils of which we humans are capable, I open Wilfred Owen’s 1920 poem, Dulce et Decorum est and I’m satisfied.
Fully.
Owen warns against the glorification war and I never came close to one.
Like Owen, I too have seen human evil, thankfully not to the degree he recounts, but I do know it requires no uniform.
I’d rather leave war stories to war heroes and those who are able to hold an audience.
My dad was a war hero.
For him it was frighteningly close.
Extraordinarily personal.
How much closer, more personal can it be than knowing your two best friends (my brother has their names) were killed in an upper-deck explosion while you scrambled off the side of a kamikaze-wounded destroyer into the Indian Ocean in the hopes of finding safety as your ship disappeared from beneath you within 8 minutes?
Able Seaman 67799 EWG Smith was 19 years and 4 months old when he took to the water searching for life and safety.
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