Battle Scarred: Hidden costs of the Border War
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Battle Scarred - Anthony Feinstein
Preface
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 patient’s 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
1
What happens if they break you?
‘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. I’ve 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 can’t 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 won’t.
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 Kultuurvereniging’s 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? It’s 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 I’m 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. That’s a possibility, but it won’t work for me. I’ll be tossed into jail for three years and every now and then just to remind me of my high and mighty principles I’ll have a few teeth knocked out or get my nose moved around my face. I remember those poor Jehovah’s Witness boys brought in to the ER from the local jail, full of pacifism, but bruises and broken bones too. In truth, I don’t 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 I’ll 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.
So I pack my bags and go home and I begin to march down a road that not even my fevered imagination could have envisaged. For if the journey is the destination, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, no sooner have I swapped my civvies for brown overalls than I have already arrived at a very strange place. The irony, which is lost on me at the time, is that as much as I mourned leaving Paris and joining a system I loathed, that fateful decision made on a bench in the Parc Monceau will lead me towards a career that comes with much pleasure and professional satisfaction.
But first there is a price to pay.
2
An introduction to psychiatry
I am the property of the State: 68504194BG. That is me, a number. It comes before my name.
I step off the plane in Johannesburg, kiss my mom and dad and sister, shave off all my hair, and, with thousands of other recruits, climb onto a train heading west to Klipdrif. For three months we run, jump, crawl and climb to the accompaniment of men screaming into our ears about how fucking useless we are. Lower than snake shit – that is what one corporal calls us. I will hear it many times during my period in uniform.
Oh, those days in officers’ school. One day we are coming off the parade ground after three hours of endless marching, the warm winter sun low on the horizon, the rays mingling with clouds of dust thrown up by a thousand marching feet, the air a burnished gold.
No doubt we are poor foot soldiers, slow to respond to the shrill screams and exhortations of the drill instructors: left turn, right turn, halt, forward march, left wheel, right wheel, attention, stand easy, up and down, down and up, on and on and on to the point of dehydrated insensibility that is disconnected, almost other worldly.
It is in this state of torpor that our platoon limps past her – a female corporal and member of the standing army. She is attractive, albeit in a butch way, but it is the sneer on her face that holds our attention, top lip curled insolently as she spits out her contempt for what she has just witnessed: ‘Julle dril so swak, dit maak my poeshare krul’ (Your marching is so poor it makes my cunt hairs curl).
No one responds. Not one of us well-educated doctors can fashion a reply. So complete is her damnation it stymies a quick comeback. All we can do when the full weight of her words have sunk in is laugh and shake our heads in disbelief. Until then, I never knew there were women who could talk like this.
This kind of madcap thinking is everywhere, it is like a virus. After our basic training we are each given a piece of paper and told to write down our name and pick a specialty. The army will do its best to accommodate you, we are told to barely concealed snickers. So, I put down plastic surgery.
I have some vague notions of wanting to be a plastic surgeon because the aesthetics appeal to me. You take a tuber and turn it into the cutest little nose, and then stand back and watch the person enjoy a new life. And it sure pays the mortgage. That last bit of advice was given conspiratorially by one of my lecturers at medical school.
So I choose plastic surgery as my contribution to the nation, but what does the nation give me? Psychiatry. There must be a mistake, I think, but it turns out there is not. Plastic surgery has a couple of slots only and they are filled in no time. So, what comes next?
‘Psychiatry of course, stupid.’ This is explained to me by a very pock-marked, extremely irritable sergeant. ‘Shit,’ he yells, ‘don’t you know your alphabet? PS comes after PL. Now fuck off.’
The army decides that I am to be a psychiatrist. There’s nothing I can do about it – I am lower than snake shit. I have my orders and off I go.
The army’s main medical centre is in Pretoria. A brand-new hospital has been built up on a hill, where it sits like a gleaming trophy. One Military Hospital is the official name, but everyone calls it 1 MIL. Nothing has been spared, no expense too great, state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. The old 1 MIL is at the bottom of the hill, a hodgepodge of decrepit, ramshackle wards and offices – and it is here that the mentally unwell are admitted.
Day one and I say good morning to my new boss, a pint-sized colonel with an exotic name, at least by SADF standards – Ronaldo de Jager. His smallness is disconcerting at first, all those sartorial trappings of power, the glinting epaulettes and stiff-peaked cap with orange band, the works sitting awkwardly on so petite a frame. The nurses tell me he is very experienced and has been dealing in mental illness for years. That may be, but first impressions are jarring. All his movements are jerky, twitchy, like a marionette, and he is asthmatic too. Within minutes of meeting him, I hear a wheeze. Out comes his puffer and up to his mouth it goes, but oh my goodness the coordination is dreadful. The first squirt misses completely. Spray shoots by his cheek and past his ear. Perhaps that was a practice run? No, not at all. He caps the inhaler and pockets it. The wheezing stops.
Klipdrift violin.jpgPlaying my violin at Klipdrif.
The psychiatry unit is a large one and to manage the clinical load another conscript, a colleague of mine from medical school, is seconded with me. David is a delight, a real charmer and a connoisseur of women. Listening to him describe the unique characteristics of some beauty who has caught his eye is like taking a university course in art appreciation. Even women whose looks tend towards the ordinary arouse him to extraordinary levels of fantasy, anchored in a stellar record of seduction and an almost clairvoyant understanding of what women find erotic.
Less appealing is the personality of a third conscript, who has been in the unit for six months already. Both David and I remember him well from medical school. But this short, dumpy man with a formerly laid-back, benign temperament has morphed unrecognisably into a bossy, officious fellow. He scurries here and there ordering us about, admonishing us, and yes, even occasionally complimenting us, puffed up as he is with a bogus seniority. At first we are amused by his antics, but there is spite in his bombast and within weeks we tire of him, give him the nickname ‘Warthog’ and avoid him as much as we can.
To my surprise I find the work fascinating. I know very little, but I am eager to learn. The last psychiatric patient I saw was three years back, during a six-week block of psychiatry as a medical student. That has been the sum total of my training. Now, in a blink, I am given a lot of authority for very sick patients.
Severe mental illnesses – the schizophrenias and the bipolar disorders – present for the first time in the late teens and early twenties. Just about the time the envelope with that dreaded postmark arrives. Coincidence, I am sure, but the demographics keep us very busy. My days are awash in psychosis: boys talking to the stars, or howling like wolves, or convinced they are being poisoned, or claiming to be Jesus. Lads with plans to make billions, cure cancer or turn corn chips into gold, young men so depressed they beg for death and go looking for it with a rope or a bottle of pills or, worst of all, a gun. No shortage of those, of course. State-subsidised suicide.
Two months into the asylum work and I don’t hanker after plastic surgery any more. A wounded mind is now of more interest than some nip and tuck, or mammeries that nature has short-changed. And it is not just the delusions and hallucinations that hold my attention. It’s the pathos of lives that have come off the rails. There is a world of sadness wrapped up in these walls. The psychotic patients, floundering in another dimension, are unaware of their plight. Their families see it all, though. When Mom and Dad arrive at the gates to pick up their lost son, their worry lines run deep, shoulders slump and anxiety makes their eyes dart like pinballs. The army knows there is no way back for these boys. Damaged goods must be returned.
At times I flounder, for some patients’ problems are complicated and I am a novice. Do I know what I am doing? I am given a man’s mind to work with and I worry that I am in breach of Hippocrates’ sacrosanct principle taught to us in medical school: Primum non nocere — First, do no harm. Implicit is the cautionary advice that we as doctors should desist from risky decisions of which the consequences are hard to predict. To offset my deficits I read furiously. Textbooks, journals and classification manuals stack