Anthony Feinstein - Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War

Battle Scarred

Anthony Feinstein

Tafelberg

For Pip, Saul and Clarrie

Battle Scarred would not have seen the light of day but for the encouragement and belief of the commissioning editor at Tafelberg, Annie Olivier, the skill, attention to detail and patience of my editor, Nicola Rijsdijk, and the sustaining love of my wife, Karen. To all three, my deep appreciation and heartfelt thanks.

As a medical officer working in the psychiatric unit during my national service in the early 1980s, I assessed and treated hundreds of soldiers, both in South Africa and up on the border in Owamboland, Namibia. After my two years of conscription were up, I was called up for month-long camps at small units set up on the outskirts of the Sebokeng and Sharpeville townships. Throughout these periods I kept diaries and I have returned to them for the material in this memoir.

It may surprise the reader to learn that psychiatry is filled with the mundane. This is not to trivialise a single patients illness, but the common disorders repeat with monotonous regularity. My memoir bypasses those patients with lesser degrees of sadness, anxiety and irritability, and instead focuses on the few case histories in which the floridness of the symptoms left an indelible impression. The scenario in which the serviceman takes ill also comes into play, for life in the military follows a rigid set of constructs that a man who has lost his mind cannot fathom. It is this startling clash between iron-clad discipline and reality overturned that first seized my attention early in my service, and the fascination has never left me.

Writing about patients demands tact even after the passage of many decades. Confidentiality cannot be betrayed. To meet this challenge, I have changed names and altered identities. In some instances timelines have been concertinaed or condensed, while for certain patients geographical locations have been shifted, surrounding events altered and distinguishing characteristics modified. These attempts at deliberate obfuscation are necessary to maintain the anonymity of those who entered my consulting room and trusted me with their most intimate histories. At times I have applied this reworking to some of my colleagues as well. In making all these changes I have allowed myself a degree of latitude.

The dialogue as it appears owes everything to reconstruction, imperfect recall and poetic licence. None of it is based on verbatim quotation. What has not been touched, however, is the case material itself. Signs and symptoms and the manner in which they were revealed remain true to the notes as I recorded them on the day.

ANTHONY FEINSTEIN

Report to the infantry base in Upington.

No sooner have I turned sixteen than the dreaded envelope with the South African Defence Force postmark arrives. Ive known the call-up is coming, of course, but it is a shock nevertheless to see Upington on the papers. A world away from my quiet suburban life in Joburg, where I pass the afternoons after school with my violin and my chamber music friends, and where the only orders to be obeyed are the fortissimos and pianissimos that came from Haydn and Mozart.

Upington it is said to be the worst base in the whole army. So bad that the men there once did the unthinkable and mutinied. Upington is where they break boys and turn them into men, or so the official rumours go.

Is that really possible? What happens if they break you and cant put the pieces together again?

Forget it! Sorry, Brigadier, excuse me, General, I am not for breaking. You will not get your hands on me, not in Upington you wont.

Anyway, at this point I am still in school with plans to go to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand for six long years of study. The army will have to wait, and there is nothing they can do about it except send me those yearly reminders of a debt still to be paid. A decade of unyielding and dogged call-ups tell me to report to Upington, and every year I reply with a regret that speaks more than the truth: Sorry, I am otherwise engaged.

But the army is patient in the knowledge that sooner or later I will finish my studies and run out of excuses. When that day finally arrives, my country is at war right up on the Angolan border in faraway South West Africa and the army wants me more than ever. It is a stupid, nasty war that anyone with two ounces of common sense knows will be lost, but that does not stop the government from coming after me. Except this time, I too am far away. Fortune has smiled on me. I have recently won the Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurverenigings music prize for string instrumentalists, which comes with a lovely medal and a generous cheque. Flushed with this success I am now in Paris, living in a grungy building on the rue Puget opposite a brothel and boucherie chevaline, and taking violin lessons with a Korean virtuoso who is Paganini reincarnated. But even here the army finds me. The only thing different about the dirty brown envelope this time is that it has an airmail sticker obscuring my initial. The contents are the same: The State is calling in its marker.

Now what do I do? Its a sunny day in May and I am sitting on a bench in the Parc Monceau. I have just read that American singer Art Garfunkel, in town for a performance, claims the Parc Monceau is the most beautiful park in all of Paris. He may well be right. It is lovely, which makes me think even more highly of Art, who in truth I always identify with, playing a distant second fiddle.

The Parc Monceau makes me feel good too and then my eye catches the postmark on the envelope in my hand and my homage to Art ends abruptly.

I open the letter. Report to Klipdrif.

What is this? What happened to the Upington post? It seems that the training camp has been changed now that I am a doctor. The medical corps has staked its claim. Does it make a difference? Upington? Klipdrif? Not really. Both are stink holes. What if I tell the authorities, sorry, I am in Paris, the Korean master has much to teach me, please wait a little longer? Which is true, I do have a lot to learn on the violin so much, in fact, that my teacher has told me bluntly to stick to medicine. So that rules out that option.

What else can I do? I close my eyes and rehash scenarios I have gone over countless times before. Option one: Stay in Paris, become an exile. Possible? Not really. No money, no papers, just a matter of time before Im deported, in breach of the law not in one country but two.

Option two: Go back home and become a conscientious objector. Claim that all war is anathema, never mind one to shore up apartheid. Thats a possibility, but it wont work for me. Ill be tossed into jail for three years and every now and then just to remind me of my high and mighty principles Ill have a few teeth knocked out or get my nose moved around my face. I remember those poor Jehovahs Witness boys brought in to the ER from the local jail, full of pacifism, but bruises and broken bones too. In truth, I dont have that kind of courage.

Option three: Go home and serve, stop running and get it over with. Two years is a long time, but Ill be a doctor and an officer and who knows, I may even get to sleep in my own bed. Never mind the rights and wrongs, just keep my head down and watch the shit fly over.