The Team House - 35 Years in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) | John Dovey | Ep. 244

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

John Dovey is a South African army veteran with 35 years of service. He also has extensive experience in ITC, including 10 years as Assistant Director of the University of Stellenbosch library, where he was responsible for IT, Knowledge Management, and Online Learning initiatives. He had his final deployment in 2013/14 as Combat Demolitions Team Leader for the South African Battalion that formed one-third of the Force Intervention Brigade under the auspices of the UN MONUSCO mission.He has also worked for a Private Military Company in Iraq for four years and has provided private security and executive protection for High Worth Individuals.Grab John's books here: ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CBZPBVF3/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=e2ab2ff6-338f-4d2e-a1d3-06cb750e7375--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's sponsors:Fum ⬇️https://tryfum.comUse the code “TEAMHOUSE” for 10% off!---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#sandf #specialoperationsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 244 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park.

This is a special Saturday edition of the show. We usually go on Fridays, but Dave and I were at our little adventure out in Montana. We're back now with our guest on the show tonight is John Dovey. Really excited to have him here, a very unique experience, kind of unlike pretty much anything else we've had on the show, any other guests we've had on the show, John served in both the South African Defense Force and then the South African, it's a national

defense force, Sandif. So John had this experience going through the transition in 1994 before and after and he served in the infantry, mechanized infantry and the engineers deployed to the Congo and some other places. Again, some really unique experiences. And John, we're really happy to have you here tonight to talk about it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really, I feel privileged to be on you, especially on this 11th of November, honest as day, Remembrance Day. Veterans stay here and happy birthday Marine Corps yesterday. That's it.

Yeah, thank you. And John, that's why you're wearing the poppy today. Well, no, I'm glad that we could do this. And, you know, I will start off the, you know, the way we start off most of these interviews. I'd like to ask you a little bit about, you know, what your upbringing in South Africa was like and how that sort of brought you towards military service.

Okay, my parents were divorced when I was very young, and I kind of understand why. My father was basically conservative in a lot of ways in the idea that he wasn't really interested in politics. He just voted to go along, and that wasn't an interesting in his life. My mother, on the other hand, was, I think in today's terms, we would call her progressive. She was very liberal, especially for the times and the place. and so I had that dichotomy between the two and the experience of the two. So when it got to the military, I fell under the our version of conscription of the draft. So I had to go anyway.

But I had wanted to be a soldier almost my whole life. And when we had to, all of us had to register at 16th, while we were to the school. and on the on the form there was a place to volunteer for or to state our preferences and every time that I'd do excited to do it twice um I volunteered for special forces because I thought that that was the the ultimate thing to do um yeah so then when I finished school I went off to do my what we called national service which was um yeah which was um what what what you would maybe call the draft what what year was this and I was going to ask you about what you know there was a draft with the border war going on and everything around that time frame yeah so um i finished i did my my last year of high school in 84 and um so the 10th of january 95 um it's 10 past 10 past um 10 in the morning um i got off the the the troop train that are taking me from durban more from meritsburg um up to batoria i got off the troop train and along with hundreds and hundreds of others as a civilian and about two hours later

I had been inspected, detected, injected, issued with all kinds of kits and I was... De laused. Yeah, well, exactly, and I was... My head cut and everything and I was running around, go and fetch me that leaf on the tree and, you know, that kind of stuff by a variety of people with all kinds of sorts of stripes on the arms. So there was a rude awakening. Yeah, there were 900 and some change of us who arrived at what was, it's actually, it was interesting, it was the medical college in Pretoria and in Fertrachia with the sort of army base there. That had volunteered or being selected for special

forces. And we spent basically a week, a week and a half there doing pre-selection. We did all kinds of tests and we had to pass like a 15 kilometer route march on a certain time and with a certain weight and we had to do you know all the PT tests and then they did a whole lot of psychosomatic tests and a whole lot of machines we had a kick and see how hard what our potential was all these kind of funny things we didn't understand and then they selected about 90 of us out of that 900 and the 90 of us they put on the back of trucks and drove us through the night a couple hundred kilometers to to Blomfentine where we were introduced to one SSB, one special service battalion, which is actually armour. So this little group of potential SF but sort of infantry-leaning people, we did by

basic training in an armour unit amongst the armour, so we would wear green berets and they would wear black, so it was quite clear who was who. And when we got there, we were met by a guy. His nickname is Dwebe. He was then a captain. He had come down from three to battalion. There was, if anyone who knows anything about 3-2 battalion, they were based on the border within, with Angola. And he came down and he was also going to go through selection for special forces. And then he took us as a specialist instructor, basically, through basic training. So we did normal basic training, which was, you know, up at 5 in the morning, through until like 7 at night. But an hour or two before five and an hour two after seven, he had us.

And we'd do things like Paul PT and walking with heavy burdens on our backs and preparing us for selection mentally and physically. What's interesting about him, about Doibu Kutti as he made it through selection. He became an operator and he ended up spending just on 20 years as chief of staff with the Special Forces Brigade until they kicked him out to general officer rank and eventually retired a year of three back. incredible and so you're there going through basic training at that time 19 mid 1980s getting ready for special forces selection and what was sort of the the like military

climate at the time because you know especially for our American audience that doesn't maybe understand what the border war was going on at that time okay and it's kind of difficult because there are there were a number of sort of streams of people and and various things. So, just, yeah, so English Afrikaans, people don't, outside of it, don't quite understand how much separate tribes almost they are. Yeah. We were matched together and it was for a lot of us the first time,

interact even socially, you know, across the language groups. I mean, at school, we would have like some of our worst enemies in terms of playing rugby was, you know, the local African school and the local English school. And, you know, they were first prone on the rugby field. than before and an afterhand. So, you know, there's that continual rivalry and stuff. So we were thrown together into the mix. And then on top of that, the governor just passed a law that said any expats,

and there'd been a whole lot of expats that they'd brought in as specialists to do various sort of specialist jobs they needed. And they'd been there for some years. And they said, well, your children or your male sons, if they want to remain in the country and maintain their residency, they have to go and do national service. So they became subject to the draft. So that was one of the first years.

We had a bunch of foreigners that were thrown into mix as well. And the way the army worked is that the official policy was that it's 50-50 English-Afrikanes. So there were lots of jokes about it. And the easiest one is that one of our drill instructors, the corporal said was he says, all the numbers are in English and all the words are Afrikaans. That's bilingual. Yeah, that was interesting. especially there was one guy he was actually Belgian and the corporal didn't understand that a

large part of Belgian speaks Flemish which is 80% identical to Afrikaans this guy this big guy he was like I don't know six foot four or something and quite fat from the first day of basic training he said I don't know and he spoke French I don't understand you I don't understand and you refused to understand English of recans anything you only spoke French and they tried to teach him to march and he'd camel march and they would freak out and do what drill instructors do the shock attack smoking whatever you're going to call it

and he'd just like her and keep on doing it camel march camel march eventually they sort of gave up and he was a squad in his eye and they would sort of stumble along behind the rest of us wherever we did whatever we did at the end of almost four months of basic training we do a final passing out parade

we all do the thing we come off we finish the parade and this dude has been standing up a tree in the side of the parade ground because he couldn't be part of the prairie he can't march. Comes marching up, slams his foot in to come to attention in front of the of the corporal and in fluent of recons, greets him and says thank you for the time I've spent with you. Does a perfect about him and mocked brilliantly off the field and everyone was just completely blown away that he had the guts and the internal fortitude to be able to pull off a con like that.

With all respect to him, I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy. Yeah, it's amazing. So just, you know, so there's all kinds of things I can say. I can't onto your question directly, but let me give you this other anecdotes. So there were a lot of people who wanted to get out of the draft or wanted to not do their service. So they do funny things like drink a can of condensed milk thinking that then their urine test is going to test positive for sugar, therefore they have diabetes, therefore they must not, you know, they must be based closer to home or mustn't do their service. Those kind of things. There were all these scams that

people try to pull to get out of service. And this one guy knew that if you were homosexual and you arrived there, they'd send you home. You know, you'd get you a good class fighter's G3 and you went home. You arrived completely in drag with high heel shoes, a wig, a dress, his leg shaped, the wood. What they did to him. into the platoon, do your basic training. And every morning where they inspecting for face being shaped with a piece of cotton wool, the frickin' culpull checked his legs to see if they were shaved. This is in the middle of the most for crump, the most conservative, that, you know, government

and the most conservative organization. And that's who you are, that's who you are. But then you meet your own standard. And you were straight. This was a con. And they forced me to keep up the con all the way through basic race. Those silky smooth legs all the way through basic. And they would inspect every day.

When they expected everybody else, they would check his legs. So, you know, weird stuff. You know what the army's like? It's from the outside, the movie sort of looks as everyone sort of falls in line and does all their thing. But there's like parents within it. And there are individuals, the people that are mavericks that get away with stuff that you don't believe it. And, you know, all of these kind of things. But behind all of that was most definitely the concept that the omener, meaning the old men, the guys who were a year ahead of us, that they were coming back from the war.

And we saw that and we would see them. We'd go to church parades. We'd meet them on pass. We'd, you know, we'd see them, whatever. And there was a respect that you had to pay and that you did pay that these guys are your immediate seniors. And they'd seen something that you haven't seen and that you're training for what they're experiencing. So there was definitely a constant undercurrent of this is as much bullshit as it is, basic training.

It's for a purpose and for a reason we're training for war. And it was serious. I mean, it was fun in some ways like this. Like I've said, but it was generally, generally and genuinely serious, which, yeah, it's a good thing, I suppose. And the sort of like, I don't know even how aware of it you were as a young man just going through basic training. But, you know, the South Africa security threats at the time, they were looking at what, Mozambique, Nambia, and Angola primarily? Well, well, I mean, you know, it's very difficult to remember what I knew then and what I've seen since then.

You know, you kind of, you kind of make. make memory past that is actually memory now. So it's quite difficult. But what we were told was two things. Swarha and the Rojkhafar. So black danger and red danger. And that was a consistent sort of threat coming out of the political sort of circumstance and what have you. And we saw that to be true.

I mean, we watched. I mean, my uncle was a underground mine manager in northern. Wadija, which became Zambia. But his wife, Maureen, she was born and raised in Kenya. And as a young girl, she experienced the Malma attacks of the

barbarism of that. So we'd been watching, not through political stuff, but through lived experience, watching our families, watching some of our families coming out of Rhodesia at the transition in 1980. And we'd seen

all the stuff that they'd been doing. So for us there was a lived experience that there was in fact a terrorist threat, a revolutionary threat, whatever you want to call it. Not because of what we were being told, that reinforced what we were having as a lived experience. So I went into the army and 85 with having had family come out of Rhodesia with literally only allowed the cars that they drove and the clothes they had in their backs, leaving behind everything that they had, their houses, their clothes, they furnished, everything, they were not allowed to take any of that out. I had an aunt, a Maureen who would tell stories about the Mao and Mous

and a young girl of like seven, eight, nine years old. She would literally load the rifles with her mother to hold off people of attacking the house. So we grew up with that and was direct lived experience from family members and stuff. So for politicians to say, there is a danger from communists and from these black revolutionary forces and what have you.

Was like a, okay, yes, no, we know. You know, it was no surprise. People tend now looking back in it to try and tell us that oh you were programmed and you were um you know it was propaganda and whatever you're like no no no no no no no no one had to tell us we were seeing this from from our loved ones and from our families and from you know they lived experience so so yes there was that kind of thing and then but then there's another side to it and that was um like most men of of of that kind of age we were interested in

just a very few things and that and none of them actually wore a year uniform. That was just the way it was. And so the army was something you had to endure. Everyone had to go. You know, it's what you had to do. And politically, it doesn't matter. You have to decide, do I go to go to prison for six years or do you go to the army for two? And that was the, that was the quite stark choice you had to make. And a lot of guys made their choice on in conscription campaign what have you they said that they had an ethical issue with serving in the army and so they objected and they got locked up in prison for six years so that was that was clearly the choice you made is go through this make the best of it you can to get out of it

what you can or go to prison and you know you wanted to go all the way so i mean could you tell us a little bit about going to s f selection what that was like and i take it what were you could you go to selection straight off the bat like that to the reckey? or was there another sort of progression? No, no, no. So at the time, I think that we were like the first year or the second year that that experimented with the concept of taking national servicemen directly into the process, into the pipeline.

So we were told and we experienced that their planning wasn't terribly up to poor. That's why we had to go to the medical base and not to the special forces base, but they didn't have enough space and et cetera, et cetera. So we were an experiment because what happened is that unlike, I think, you guys generally across the board, there were a number of years where the SF, the Safran MSF held all the normal selection and nobody qualified, and they were quite happy with that. That's not the case in most other places. In most of the places, there's kind of a percentage and people look at the percent and why did only this amount and not that amount? For our guys, it was very much like, well, there was no one good enough. Which is a completely different sort of situation.

But at the same time, they knew that they needed more people. So they wanted to throw more people into the mix and hopefully find a better way of getting more people that actually qualified. So, I mean, we went from over 900 to 90. At the end of basics, there were only 30 of us. You went down to the bluff to one Rikki on the Bluff, and then eventually up to Dukudu for selection. about 30 odd and when they happened there were about 250 odd people from the other places in the army

navy air force whatever who'd come through they'd already been surveying or whatever so they also joined for force for selection and out of those call it 300 people six made it's so from i don't know what their percentage is but it's like over a thousand people down to six making it and of the 604 actually only qualify and that was a good year that was a good year I think I think the entire border were 25 years. I am subject to correction. They're only like two or three hundred guys who actually got the operator's badge. So that was, it was, you know, people asked me, well, why do you even say anything about doing it?

If you failed? And I was like, yeah, I did. But I tried. I got to a certain point and I discovered things about myself, about my ability to overcome my physical limitations because it's in your head. I went through that whole process. I pushed my body to its limits. and then beyond them because my mind could overcome that.

I learned a bunch of things along the process. I'm always proud of the fact that I did get as far as that. Do I regret not making it? Well, no. Because I try to live my life without regrets. I try to see everything as a learning opportunity. I don't always get it right. And you sometimes got to talk to yourself a bit.

But yeah, and I think my life would have been quite different if I had made it. I have a lot of friends who spent time in that community, and a lot of them done very well for themselves, but a significant number didn't. So that significant number didn't make it through. But it sounds like despite, you know, not making it, you had this growing experience in that. There must have been something in you that really loved the Army

and loved that life. Okay, so the real reason I didn't make it is they had a selection board beforehand, and then they had a selection board at the end. And the selection board at the end, because I tried the second time as well, anyway, the selection board at the end told me, you're not suited because we operate in small teams.

And the way that you operate, you require more of a traditional type military that gets recognition for what you do, et cetera, and you're not psychologically suited. Because there's no doubt I was fit enough. I was fit as hell. I had the endurance and I had, you know, all of those things.

But operating in the small teams that they were focusing on at the time, they just told me you're not suited, go on. Looking back, I was upset at the time. I mean, you can imagine. But looking back in it, where they're right, 100% they were right. So, you know, learning experience, learning experience. Yeah, it's very interesting how they're able, how selection processes are so refined that they can pull something like that out,

you know um and it's also you know you mentioned that people say to you why do you even talk about it if you didn't get selected and i think it's important because a lot of emphasis is put on special forces and special operations on you know these other things but there are people who haven't been in like a special operations unit who have an incredible career and do amazing things um and i think that it's a great lesson, you know, for you to be able to speak to that, to say, yeah, I didn't, you know, like, I didn't achieve this dream that I had had. To go on and do great things. But I went on to do great things.

It didn't, like, my life did not end because of that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, you know, it's interesting. I mean, at various times, I've had, I've had, I've been heads with some of the guys in the community over various issues where I've had to say, you know, I, I've seen, I've peaked over the fence into your side of the world.

And I've lived my side of, you know, my side of the fence. And the way you do things, kudos to you, you're a specialist, you're amazing. But you can't do our job. Of course, the way you think and operate is S-F. And you can't do, for example, mechanize infantry without your whole mindset change because it's a completely different way of thinking. Right. And I think that building that sort of, um,

mental structure has took me a while to make that that mental adjustment. And once I did, I take pride in what we call being a mecheter, which is mechanized. What's the translation is a mechanized sperm, mecheter. But that translation doesn't work. People, the guys will know. And we take pride in it. I mean, if you go and have a look at some of the most effective units in our war, other than SF, it's 6-1-MEC, 6-1-Mech,

a second-mechanized infantry battalion group, are formed in combat. They were formed on the border for a purpose, and I'm a proud, I'm proud of the fact that I was associated with them, that I managed to serve inside, alongside them for a while, bits and pieces during my career. And I take great pride in that.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because they are almost, two worlds, the specialist types that are the tip of the spear and focused on what they do and all that stuff. And the grunts who, man, that's not the easiest job in the world. That was sleepy out getting in the back of the vehicle, you know, different mindset, different worlds. And I want to talk about that. Dave, do you want to do the ad read real quick?

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You went on to serve in three of the oldest citizen forces and the S-A-D-F. Tell us a little bit about that, about your infantry career. It's sort of like what that path was for you, because you did some really interesting stuff during this time frame. Okay, so came out of National Service, and, okay, let me take a step back. At school, I went to a high school called Maritzburg College, which is, it's a high school, but an old boy school. I think you had termed a public school,

but there's quite heavy old boys involvement in funding it. and with also a very proud history. And Marisbury College has been associated with the Natal Carboneers, which is the local sort of infantry regiments in Penn Meritsburg for over 100, close to 150 years since I think 1864. Something, correct me if I'm wrong.

So the school and the regiment have been very closely connected for all that time. So before I even went into the army, I knew that the likelihood of me going to the carbonyers was high. The probability was higher. So I came out of National Service where it was largely dominated by Afrikaans and Afrikaans' military culture. There were a lot of words that I literally did not know the meaning of. I could not describe them in English.

For example, a beret, when it's shaped and formed correctly on your head, The term is Haudem, okay? And it's an Afrikaans term that was snatched, kicking and screaming and pulled into English and Zulu and all kinds of languages. Because Hoding is holding. That's what it is. It's a beret. That's how, you know, how it must be all your uniform. The actual translation is attitude, which just doesn't work.

It's not the same thing. It's holding. So, understand. So now I get to do my first camp, we used to call them camps. My first period of being in the regiment. and it happened to be in, I think it was April, there's a royal show, which is like an agricultural show, and every year the regiment would do a retreat ceremony,

and they'd spend like, we spend like three days training, you know, getting all the march incorrect, and, you know, once around in normal time, once around in, you know, in slow march. And forming and all those kind of, all kinds of formation changes and that kind of stuff. quite hectic practicing and quite sophisticated drill commands needed by Pertune sergeants and that kind of stuff.

And we dealt up into Patoons for this parade and we fell in and, you know, sorted, you know, shortest to tallest, all the normal kind of stuff. And the Patoon Sergeant started and started giving us commands because you just come out of National Service as a Patoon Sergeant and started giving us commands in Afrikaans and which we executed brilliantly because that's what we are accustomed to. And RSM Schnell shouted from the side of the parade ground, So, Sergeant, come here! And over and reported to him, and we mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter.

And RISM Schnell to the sergeant says, Corporal, join the squad. You corporal, you and our sergeant, come here. Can you dwell in English? Yes or no. And so, I'm then from this Afrikaans National Service environment to a regiment that has a very English tradition. In fact, a cavalry tradition wearing NCO rank only on the one arm and wearing black boots and not brown. And, you know, like it has, from the British colony, it has, you know, a heavy English tradition.

So we had to learn how to drill all over again, but this time in English, instead of like, sit off gear, it's order on. Sit off gear is literally put down your rifle. Now we've got to do order arms. And what the hell does that mean? I'm English-speaking. I've got no idea what they're talking about. But we're from the beginning. Anyway, so just to illustrate the cultural difference between being a national service,

going into a Citizen Force Regiment, was a major culture shock. I eventually processed this, and one of my mentors, somebody that I respect and love a lot is, is Willemstienkamp, who I actually only, I read a lot of his stuff before him, but I actually only met him when I went later to the Cape Town Harlanders, and he said it this way. He says, when you serve in the regiment, the regiment is your family. He says your unit is the regiment.

Your regiment serves the government of the day. So you don't care who the government of the day is because you don't serve them. You serve the regiment, and the regiment serves the government of the day, which makes it very easy. And why this is important for me to say right up front is that this is how we managed to serve

through those most turbulent times. because we were serving the regiment. We were serving the regiment, and it was the regiment that served the government for the day. We didn't have to have divided loyalties because our loyalties were to the regiment and the regimental family. And, I mean, there's some people there. One of them is, I must mention, is John Hall,

who was, first of all, a saw major, and then became a regimental saw major, and later took a commission. And he took a number of us junior, we came junior NCR, is under his wing, and mentored a bunch of us and taught me a lot of things, how to manage the process of managing soldiers, which taught me about a lot more things than just that.

I learned things from him like, you first of all, got to be a good actor. You've got to be quite dramatic in the way that you react to things to show, I'm angry, I'm not angry, you're done good, you haven't done, you know, and that kind of thing and then a lot of other things, how to actually be a good NCO. And I learned a lot of that. I grew up. I mean, for seven years, I had no rank at all. I was a troop. Mostly because I didn't want rank. I was actually... So let me take a step back. We came off of all selection. We returned to units. And we ended up in Fafzai, a bunch of us.

that had been RTU together and we got there the other guys were still busy with their individual training that so drivers would go off and motorists would go off and machine gunners go off and they'd all the individual training and then eventually come back together for combined sort of infantry training and so we got there and we've done a bunch of stuff and they kind of said well you guys come from special force you must know what you're doing so while the other guys are busy now we're like six months five months into the army we know nothing but whatever we're going to deploy you so we deployed for two weeks operational deployment I think I said, where I saw when we were fully trained.

Anyway, we got back and they said to us, you can choose what you want to do. What do you want to do? I said, well, I'll go for section eating. You know, rank sounds like it's nice. It's more pay and whatever, and I like the idea. Went through section leading. And at the end function, the end function in the African context is always a briar. You throw meat on the coals.

It's never not a briar. I had an eye-to-eye disagreement with the sergeant who had been, needling me the entire way through the course and that I've already disliked intensely, Sergeant Blum. And he gave me an ultimatum, and I react very badly to ultimatum, so you give me an ultimatum, expect me to do the thing you don't want me to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he said, if you don't X, Y, and Z, I'm going to send you back to the company and tell the name is, give you the LNG, the machine guy, what you guys call the M-29 Bravo now, versus LNG, whatever, the MAG, F and MAG. Yeah, the light machine gun. Yeah, yeah, the 12 and a half kilogram light machine gun, and I was, I weighed 63 kilos, yeah, that one.

And I was like, okay. And he means, what do you mean, okay? I turned around and said, well, fuck you. And I walked away. Went, packed my bags, walked up the kilometer odd to Bravo base to where the company was, walked in, saw the company, some agent, so, so major, I'm yet to be a mad gunner. And he's like, okay, two and five, trolley section, there you go. And then the next day when the guys came in, now they have a new NCOs, they, you know,

that was in course with and took over as corporals and Lawrence corporals, I was the machine go. And for seven years, I didn't get ranked until I, just after I got married. I got married in October and I spent two weeks of honeymoon for my wife and we got back for honeymoon on Friday and the Monday morning I left to go for 30 days to Borsuk in Ladysmith to go and do my sex student course. And yeah, that's how eventually got ranked because I turned it down the first time because somebody irritated me, that made me ultimaters. John, can you tell us a little bit about the difference between National Service and the Citizen. Did you call it Citizen Brigade? So very simply, you had a compulsory service that you had to give, and it was divided into two

segments. The one was it changed. At times it was more and less, but essentially two years, Okay, so 720 days, full-time, which was National Service, and then 720 days, that was 90 days or three months every two-year cycle. So essentially worked out to a 12-year commitment that you had to do military service. And then if you kept doing it, then there was a volunteer badge that I wear that indicated five years. as voluntary service. So five years voluntary service meant you had done 17-year service because the first 12 years was compulsory. So only the next five years is voluntary. So citizen force was, I find that your American system, you really struggle with the idea of the subunit level, like a battalion or even a multi-bultivetalion unit.

You tend to look at like brigades and divisions and all that kind of stuff, you know, like 80 second. Everyone knows the 80 second. Man, that's 50,000 soldiers, you know, that's not how we think about things. So, you know, we would talk about a regiment for us is actually a battalion, but with the potential of being a two or three battalion regiment. And that has like the Transville Scottish are battalion, but when the war came, they split up and became the first and the second, Charlesville Scottish. The Carbonier is the same. first and second are Will not tell Carvoneers. So the structure is there, and the concept was always one of being citizen soldiers,

and it was an interesting concept that for every post in the battalion, you actually would have three people, in theory, that could fill that post. So you had one battalion that was potentially operational, but you had three people that could fill the post because at different times, you'll have civilian jobs and only do a short period of service. So in time of war, that one battalion units could almost instantly become a three battalion unit, could become a short brigade. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Could become a short brigade. We didn't think of it that way. We thought of it. You do a month in the army. Screw them and you out of it again. Can you get out of it? Can you get to ferment? You know, it was that kind of thing.

But there was always a core group of guys who were committed to the service who spent extra time and I mean at certain times I would spend Tuesday night to be admin night so I'd go into the army and we'll be running training exercises and we're gone on weekends volunteer time and then we do you know so I would have a year where I haven't served an army at all but I've spent like four or five months of my time on and off doing work in the office you know whatever and then spending three four hours at nights and weekends and and and and on a number of occasions unpaid as well. So it was, yeah, we had a fight once where they tried to control us by,

by saying there's no budget for you to do stuff. And we said, okay, we'll do it anyway for no pay, the whole unit. So there was when I was with Kate on hundreds. For a year, we were, there was no budget. We did everything anyway, all the parades, all the commitments, all the trading we did without being paid. And that was part of an, a ton of army in-fight politics kind of thing. Interesting.

So you didn't have, I'm sorry, so you didn't really have like, like reserve or guard units in as much as your, that sort of part-time soldier was more, they augmented active duty units. Units did pre-existent. No, exactly. Exactly. Okay.

So for you, you would talk about a guard unit and, in exactly the same way that we would talk about a citizen force unit. Okay. Except that where you, you would talk about, you know, your weekend a month. and your two weeks a year, that kind of stuff. We were never that organized. Okay.

We were organized around the idea of being operational. So what you would end up doing is you do like one or two short sort of things during the year, a weekend year for a parade or like now Remembrance Day, you know, that kind of thing. But you know that you'd have a month or two that you'd be actually deploying. Sometimes the board at the war, sometimes in the townships. So your service was almost all not training at all. but operational for a large part of it. And then only for things like rank and specialist courses

would the guys do an extra amount of service to go and do the courses and that kind of thing. So I think that's a big difference between your guard will be activated to go operational. But for normal training, for us, we weren't doing any training. You were expected to be trained. You expected to be fit.

Your hair was expected to be short when you're around, in uniform in order. And the classic thing for us, I said we'd get called up and we know, okay, that date you arrive on that date, your hair is done, your uniform's in order, your boots are shined, and you come, you sign and do your paperwork for, you know, last William Testament, the normal kind of bullshit paperwork. And then the next day, they'd have like two days of legal aspects, because, you know, this is the legal situation, how you're operating and what have you, and there'd be in briefings

and the air of ops and what have you. So three days in, maybe four days in and you deploy. Wow. That's it. And then comes to the last day, you finish, you stop. You finish your patrol, five o'clock on the last day of the camp. You rush back to the base, handed all your kit, the armorous NGOA 15 times to go and clean them possibly,

to the possible stand with your weapon. And the next morning at an o'clock, you back in your job in the office. That was it for years, for years. That was how we operated. So you can try and see the equivalence between them, but I think that the mindset is very different, was very different. Yeah.

John, could, because this is also earlier on in your military career, could you talk about getting deployed to the townships and what that experience was like? Okay, so the first time I went to the townships. That was my first proper operational deployment. So 1985, we were busy with battalion level training in Borsuch, doing all the normal stuff, trench clearing and firing of Op. G7s and all that.

that, you know, patunia attacks, company attacks, battalion attacks, all that kind of stuff. And we had just finished that phase, and we were told, okay, at the end of this phase, it's pass. You guys have got a seven-day pass, go home and meet your families. When you come back, we're going to border preparation, and you're off to the border. Climbed in the vehicles, we all had these, like, reflective bands you'd wear.

We call them ride-set bands so we could stand a hitchhike. Climbed in the back of these, of the Somal 50s, the military trucks. We were on the road and this Gary, this land driver comes racing past, pulls over, stops the whole con, we turn the vehicle around and go back. And we were pissed. We were really upset. Get back to camp and they tell us no. There's been a state of emergency declared. This is sometime after July in 1985, I can't remember exactly when.

1985, state of emergency has been declared. State of emergency because of uprisings and necklissings and all kinds of things going on in the very. various townships and you guys have been told you're going to have to deploy it to the townships we've done none of that training we had done standard right control was part of our of our initial training much earlier so we knew like all this this theory and what had you but no actual training for for this environment and the next day there were two guys there two saw majors and they'd actually been contracted from the british army and they'd come and they'd spend time at the at every school in oaksum teaching the teaching the teaching the teachers

about their approach and their doctrine, their tactics, and their experiences in Northern Ireland and in Malaysia and in all the various place, small wars that they're British being involved in and their various urban, quite country uncertainty type operations. And they actually came because we were the first guys to actually be tasked with deployment to the townships. And they came and they spent, I think it was about four days, going through things like, well, some of our soldiers, is when they were walking patrol in Belfast, you know, normally the lady of the house and put out two empty milk bottles, and this guy noticed there were actually four bottles,

so you reported to intelligence, and then they realized they must have somebody in there, and they raided their house, and they caught the guy, you know, that kind of stuff. Basically, how to operate and how to keep aware and what to look for and that kind of thing. They taught us that. And then they taught us things like, you know,

how to move in an urban area, things like the caterpillar and the leapfrog and the different. informations and you know not to go too close to the walls and you know the normal kind of the kind of thing which was all new to us at the time and then a short while afterwards we off we went to paul isbeth um and we were um based there and we deployed into the townships around paul is um if you ask me to describe what our role was how it was described to us was that we're peacekeepers we are exactly like the united nations

that there are various factions there that are fighting with each other, and there were things like horrible things like necklacing where they'd burn people to death off through a kangaroo court. Was this intertribal violence at the time, John? No, no, no. This was, okay, this was not KZ. This was not Nettel. Nettel was the conflict was politically between,

the African National Congress and then Carter Freedom Party. That happened to be Taza and Zulu mostly, but that could also be different and that became, and it was an outgrowth of trouble in clan warfare, whatever. Easton Cape was something different. Port Elizabeth was something different. That was very much more political. And so they were not actually fighting each other as much as they would

disagree on someone being a collaborator and they'd murder them by putting a car tire on their neck and filling it with fuel and setting it a lot, that kind of thing. You call that a necklace. There was that. And then what was really interesting about the time was that if you want to talk about the politics, which I really rather not, but just in general, the African National Congress was banned as an organisation. So, you know, if you said I'm the ANC, they were arrested you, it was literally was an illegal organisation. MK and Koppuracies where the

Speer of the Nation was their arm doing. They were obviously banned and most of them were in exile. Obviously they'd been like Operation Urula and various things where they tried to do things and they'd planted bombs and various things. But there was a I hesitate to say it, but I believe it to be true,

a spontaneous grouping and uprising of a thing called the United Democratic Front, the UDF, where it was literally the person, people who said enough's enough we don't give a don't give a figure about politics and what have you we want change what have you and they would protest and do all this kind of stuff and there was conflict between those two things because the one was looking for power and the other was looking for improvement in their lives and whatever so so there was an issue so we were there literally because the situation was volatile these kind

of things these kangaroo courts would happen often or they'd decide to protest and they'd burn down a clinic burn down a school because it was liberate before education was the slogan so they'd burn schools and all this kind of stuff. So we were there to do that kind of stuff. And in general, that was a good thing. I must say that at that time

it was where I had my largest crisis of confidence, as it were, where I got really upset and disappointed because of a conflict between police and soldiers where the police treated people

extremely bad. And I went via my SOM Major to speak to the company commander. And I marched them under orders and reported to the company commander. And I started talking. I said, sir, I don't think we should be in the town. She said, stop, stop, stop. He said, SOM Major, take him out. So that was weird. So major marched me out. And then the major, the company commander, they call and he says, hey John, come and have a little check to me, an informal chat. So I said, okay. Now, I walked in and he said, sit down, light a cigarette. What's on your heart, John?

We're not talking as good morning officer and, you know, what's in your heart. And I explained to him what I felt. I didn't think it was right. And what I'd wanted to do was go to the border. I believe that there was rights and what was going on. Yeah, I didn't have, I had some issues with and across the comfort. He said, okay. He says, this is informal chats.

I understand you, or what you're saying. In some ways, I agree with you. He says, but if you're in orders with me, officially talking to me, I have no option but to send you to prison for six years. So go away and think about it. If you want to come back tomorrow in orders, no problem. You're going to prison. And obviously, I chose to keep my mouth shut.

And it is the one major regrets I have about my services that I did keep my mouth shut. That you profoundly disagreed with, with soldiers being deployed internally in South Africa? No, no. It was more nuanced than that. Please tell us. No, well, yes, I do. I mean, your comitos posse act or whatever, I can never pronounce it correctly,

get what is that if you make your people, you know, your soldiers convert the people, they become the enemy, and that's an inherently bad thing. It's a policing function. And I believe that then, I believe that now. And what have you. That was not my issue. My issue was that the way that it was being policed in some instances, I'm not saying everybody. I've been going to be very careful, yeah, because I don't want to paint with a broad brush. This was about my class of confidence.

I got it. I got it. But there were incidents on more than one occasion where the police were excessively violent with people for what I thought were trivial reasons and stupid reasons. and I just felt that the way it was being done was wrong and I didn't have a voice to actually express that in any other way except you go, why am I come to tomorrow? So my class of confidence there was about that particular situation at that particular time. It wasn't a political one.

Even though the rest of my career, I firmly believe that I've argued it often online and offline and making myself very unpopular, that it's absolutely. not the job of soldiers to police. And I know you guys, for you guys, it's hard-wired and written in stone. And I wish it was for everyone else, because I've seen the result of soldiers trying to police. They don't know what it involved, don't understand it, don't understand the consequence,

and et cetera. And I've been back in that situation as a commander. And then I carry this, I mean, especially as an officer, I carry the responsibility. So if my troops shoot somebody, I'm the one who, you know, goes before court martial to please explain. And that's difficult. That's a complex environment that changes like minutes to minute and day to day. Yeah, and I can talk about this various sort of things that,

various incidents that happened over years of how this kind of evolved in the way that I think they became a realization quite quickly that the policing role that was granted the bomb that was gone at policing powers under the state of emergency wasn't a very clever idea. And it actually, the beginning of the end of that actually happened shortly after it began and began with us. And Patoon Force, Patoon Sergeant, our Portune Sergeant and theirs, we met up. We were doing, we used to do 12 hours on and then 24 hours off. That was our cycle. And it was a Sunday.

And I think it was a Sunday. and in September the two platoon sergeant vehicles came together and our Pertune Zazen happened to be on our vehicle, 20 sections vehicle and we came together and we'd been playing soccer with the locals. It was a thing we'd do. We'd play soccer with the kids and you know comops and communication operations and all that kind of stuff and what have you. And it was like, okay listen guys the two platoon sergeants one quick last patrol each in our areas. I mean, meet up, we back to our temporary base, and then we'd be off for 24 hours, what's our plan? Oh, you know, oh, I meet this girl, now I'm going to have a beer,

that kind of normal kind of talk. And we separated and we went. The next thing you heard over the radio, just chaos. And we were racing over to go and find where they were because it was like, it was absolutely chaos. We didn't know what's going on. So we just went to go and find what's going on. And we drove, and as we drove past the one road, we saw down this road, this like crowd of pickanines of young, young kids, I would say, estimate between the ages of about eight years old and about 14 years old, 50 of them, like crowd of them. And we turned down the road and as we jumped off the vehicles, they all scattered and disappeared amongst the vehicles, I mean amongst the buildings. And what was left behind was

was Corporal Fai Kishuman. And he'd been stabbed 75 times. He'd been disembarked. being castrated, he had a piece of his buttocks cut off. And he couldn't speak because his mouth was stuffed with the result of the castration. And he didn't make it. And he walked with me as a ghost every day. And okay, so that happened. They called us all out. We went to what we called Sun City, which was our temporary base.

And the whole company is sitting there, fire platoon. so by 240 of us are sitting there. And the company commander stands up. Sorry, gentlemen, really sad to say. Gourgerman was declared dead in arrival. And as he said that, I've never experienced anything before since. That's the same.

There was this growl, this kind of noise. The entire company stood up. cocking weapons. I mean, we all kidded out, you know, seven magazines, 240 rounds, whatever. Magazines on cocking weapons, walking towards the vehicles. And the major was like,

oh, stop, da-da, and everyone was no, stop. We just ignored, shouldered past him on the way of the vehicles. And there was a legendary saw major, a sergeant at Westasen, Jake's at Westphazen. And he was called Roy Bart, which means red beard. He had a beard like this size,

which was very unusual. for the army, but like this real ginger, red kind of beard. And he just, he stood up in front of everybody. And just by the force of nature, you just stop, sit. And everyone stopped and sat just there. And they de-escalated and gave us like 40 hours off and what have you, what have you. And we spoke through and eventually got all got told the story of what happened and what have you.

And they sent us back in. And you spent another couple of months still there. And I think there was a wake-up call for a lot of people. He was that as far as I'm aware, the only actual casualty of death amongst the SADF during our ever in the townships, as far as I'm aware. And that made an impact to me that really, really, that was part of my class of conscious, as I said. Yeah, I was going to say, how did this sort of affect your life in your career, both. from going almost being a borderline conscientious objector to then losing a man out there in such a terrible way. I am, okay, you guys will know.

If you start talking about things like PDSDE and all the rest of it, the classic thing is 25 years is that what happens is that. Yeah, it hits you later. He's famous in American literature or in the American military for his whole idea about debriefing troops. as soon as possible after the incident, whatever the combat happened, and the debriefing process that ameliorates and reduces the impact, blah, blah, there's a whole thing, and there's a whole theory about it. And the other side of the theory is 25 years, you suppress things,

and they come out without your understanding how and why. They just get destroyed. People drink too much. They crash their vehicles. They do all these kind of things. We all know these things. Yeah, well, that's what happened to me. it's how did your unit deal with that after because I think I because I think I'll tell you

I will show you photographs up between command that took us down to the beach and plied us with alcohol we got literally motherlessly drunk vomited all over each other and then it's like okay boys that's that's done you good now let's go back into the into the game yeah it's but what were the afterfuss because I think one of the things that is is really overlooked is how personal combat becomes or can become at a certain point. Yeah. Right? That it's one thing when you're in firefights, it's one thing.

But then when you're faced with like barbarity, when you're faced with these things or when you lose somebody very close to you, war, combat can become very personal. personal. And so now you have this entire unit who is taking it very personal and looking at it like that could have been me. How could they do this? Like, and I don't want to, you know, to pretend that there's an equivocation that says that shooting somebody is better than torturing somebody. But there is, but we go through that equivocation, right, that, that, oh, we might shoot them, but we would never do this and then how does that play out for the force? Excuse me. I can't speak for the force.

I can only speak for my personal journey. And I know that the experiences that I've had like this and others have had have had a major effect to me. And only now, I mean, in two days time, I turned 57. Only now am I actually finding that I'm the last year that I've started, that the structure that I've built to process and deal with some of these things has actually started to come to fruition.

Because before, it was a coping, okay, this helps me get through it. And I've never actually stopped. That's the one thing. The other thing is I got to see a doctor see that purely by accident. I was purely by accident. My wife actually saw a thing about her in like the Fair Lady magazine or something, and she happened to be working like three offices down where I was working at the time. And she was a specialist in post-medic stress disorder, but specifically, I heard about the story.

He said, oh, come and sit down. And three minutes and he says, stop, stop, you got PESD. And I was like, no, I don't. Yes, you do. It works this and this, just for observation, you got. And I was like, okay, if you say so. Anyway, the point about that was the learning experience from me out of that has started almost a lifelong journey because let me give you just the one example I don't want to take up too much

of what we're talking about but one example I think is very important and that is that um um the the concept that we seem to have of the trauma has to be combat is a fallacy yeah the the concept that we have that oh i didn't experience trauma i don't have people is an absolute fallacy. And this is my explanation why. When you arrive in basic training, you're subjected to classic brainwashing treatments. As a basic example,

you sleep deprived, which relaxes your frontal cortex, which means that you don't, you start judging what they're telling you, so you believe what they tell you, it's classic brainwashing. The process of basic training is a major trauma in itself. So every single person who goes to the military who does basic training has trauma and how they deal with it is a whole other story because, you know, you tell me if this resonates with you, we're going to break you down so we can build you up.

Ever that in your life? Right, true. That's trauma. That's major trauma. Because what you're taking somebody's entire framework of values and ethics and the way that they relate to the world and you're destroying it, trashing it, and you're replacing it with a military sense of values and ethics and way to deal with things. Even the action reward sequence, you get rewarded things in the military that you'd be locked up for in civilian life. And that's the problem is we get traumatized by that in a way that we don't realize. and how it plays out is now the other thing.

I found it very interesting that ad read you did where they said basically making a virtue of something that is that is bad for you. And so one of the major symptoms of PDSD is hypervigilance, which is crazy. It's absolutely crazy because what keeps your life in the battlefield? Hypervigilance. You understand what I'm saying.

So you can't say who's had trauma, doesn't who has that trauma because the process is this I mean the Marines do this thing where they say boot camp is not about teaching you to be a soldier it's about putting the standpoint bang and we happen to teach how to use a rifle but the rest of it is about if you be through boot camp you're a Marine and literally until the day you die it never stops and that's the point it's literally about that is is that is that we have this complete misguiscuous conception of what is PTSD and you look at the psychologist and their DSVs and all the rest of it,

and they talk about PTSD, where they make this equivalency between someone who stub their toe and someone who's been a year in combat. And it's the same disease. It's very experiential, I think, John. Like I remember I interviewed a Brit once who lost his leg in combat.

He got blown up. And he had processed that pretty well and was pretty okay. But the medic that treated him had a lot of problems afterwards because of all the trauma and the stress if I have this man's life in my hands, what if I screw up? What if he died?

You know, so there are all sorts of different things that are not, as you point out, not necessarily you being in combat. It's very personal to the person. And it's hard for any of us to kind of, or a doctor, I'm sure, to put your finger on, this is trauma, this isn't. It hits people in different ways. Yeah. Well, yes.

But I think, I mean, to come back to you, the reason I went on this, on this, down this rabbit hall is from Dave's question about it being person. about it being personal. And this is the point is that everyone's experience is, it's like an hour will just test me as the most unreliable testament you can have because everybody processes what they see in different ways. It's like my classic is your wife,

you will say to you, you can't find the milk in the refrigerator, but you spot a duck at 700 yards. It's camouflage. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, too, because, you know, when you talk about how it's different for everybody. And for the therapist, you know, for you to just go in and have a casual conversation with her and her say you have PTSD, like we think of, especially I think like for us in America, it was after Vietnam when they had all the like made for TV movies about, you know, somebody having flashbacks or intrusive thoughts or dreams that woke them up in a cold sweat in the middle of night. And it's like that's not always a post-traumatic stress.

Like motionmatic stress sometimes just is like so much anxiety in a crowd because you can't track everything going on at the same time. Your fake assessorita is pinging all the time because you get false reports. Yeah. Yeah. A therapist wants to describe it to me as having one foot on the gas and one foot on the break at all times. Oh, yeah. That's what a friend of mine called that being functionally fucked up. Yeah.

Yeah. Like you're high functioning, able to do your job and work. But like inside you're having all this turmoil. in instability. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I mean, okay, so so so look at this. So I've done a little bit of private security type stuff. Okay. And some high-worth individuals. And what is he paying me for? He's not paying me to catch a bullet. He's paying me to be hypervigilant. Right. To constant trade assessments. Right. So I can I can preemptively stop, stop there. Let's take another route because that's a threat. Right. So he's paying me to have PTSD. Right. Right. Right.

I think of, right. No, it's, it's absolutely true. Yeah, it's absolutely true. And it's one of the reasons I think that a lot of times you see that a lot of the people who are successful in the military, you know, come from my sort of broken families and challenging because they have the hypervigilist. They have the compartmentalization or the disassociation. Like, they have that going in. So they're squared away for combat. Now it's not great for, it's not great for like when you're at home with your wife and kids.

exactly but it's great for that job exactly yeah well well yes yeah's another thing to throw into the mix okay he has a he has an exercise for the for the listers go and have a look at the list of symptoms of PDSD and those for ADHD yeah like you the same list yeah yeah so what comes first chicken or egg ADHD gets PTSD or how does it work I haven't seen any studies about that and I've been looking Right. John, could we jump into talking about your time up on the border in Nibinbia? Sure. Okay. So we were, it was, it was boring in the best possible way for most people. So there were two main sort of things that people did.

you would maintain, you know, you'd be in a base and you'd do patrols in the area and you do various sort of communication operations with people and you'd go along what we called the yachty, which was literally the border line. There were some cactus that would go along there and there was a piece of sand so that you could see if there were any square, any tracks that had come across the sand and you do those patrols and there are all those kind of sort of area functions. That was the bulk of what it meant to be on the border for most people. For some people, it meant actually going across the border three different ways.

The first one would be an organized operation like OpsProtia, Ops Dasey, Ops Hooper, Modular, Packer, there were all these operations that were planned operations across the border. There was ad hoc sort of investigative things. Oh, here comes a spoor, let's see where that's going. Okay, we'll get out of Angola again because we're not supposed to be there. And then there was hot pursuit. I mean, that's just off the top of my head. So that was going on.

So the whole time you were just doing the normal staff, traveling around, speaking to people, you know, doing that kind of thing. And then you'd be ambushed or attacked out of nowhere. Or you go into a village and you speak to the head man and then you leave. And then that village would then attack you at night. You know, that kind of thing. It was very much that kind of thing. thing. And that was most, well, I have some great stories for around the fire from there.

Like we were based with 10 Panzer in Oshkarty. And 10 Panzer. So they were an armor unit. They had the naughty cars, the French, the French earlums. And the armor and the motorized infantry worked together. And we go out. do these night patrols. We had to do funny things like they would predict, okay, they're possible base plate position for motor attacks on various places. And we go and set up a temporary base on those possible mortar places. So we go and sleep on those and to stop attacks coming and that kind of thing. But you know what soldiers are like? About three nights of that and it's boring as hell. So there's wild donkeys. So we had rodeos.

One guy from Lama, one guy from infantry, you kept, chapter the last year. We captured the wild donkeys and then right, okay, there's no bridle, there's no rope, there's no cell, there's nothing, it's just a wild donkey on the back. He stays on the longest, you know, and that would be our entertainment. A few broken collar bones and legs and arms, and that's fine. We got medics, that's why we have medics. We've got to keep them in practice. We had a talk with us, a chance later, and we go and we get to a village, and there'd be

someone who'd be the designated drinker for the day. And he would go in and he'd go in with the talk, with the translator and they go sit and then the chief, the headman, whatever. His wives would bring, you know, the calabash of beer or Mahangu is their beer. It's sort of this really weird mixture of all kinds of stuff. Anyway, and they bring out the beer and you have to drink. That's the socially accepted thing. And so we do that.

And the third day, we actually realized, while we, we were eating horrible rat packs, you know, typical rations. Our bloody translator, our talk, eating chicken every night. And we didn't understand, like, what's going on, you know? And so then we then we passed to watch him now. And all few guys, they go in the village, there's no drinker, and him go, and they sit down, their chat, walks out, and three chickens come, thick, thick, behind him.

What he's done is he died a fishing line around his waist, 20 meters back with a piece of corn on the end, so when chickens come off. You know, and boredom is terrible. So like one of our big tricks was we'd have these these thousands of flares. And then the Air Force would come over

in their boss books, these little almost Sessna-type planes. I've never known what they are. And especially at nighttime, they come over and they see movement. They've dropped these like incredibly bright flares. And so as soon as there's a flare, now it's like, oh, now you've got to pick up

well up you sleeping bag, give them the vehicles, got to move again because now you've been exposed. So we hated them. It was like this constant cat and mouse game. So we'd wait until they came over and we'd like three or four us to take the thousand foot flares, the red ones, and we shoot. And they go,

he thought the missiles are coming at him, you know, so that was what war is like being on the border. Could you, again, I mean, pardon our ignorance, but for some of the American viewers out there,

could you explain a little bit about what the border war a lot was because nabinbia previously southwest africa german colony and then you were facing a a communist insurgency on the border okay so so just to maybe first we'll give it a sort of a framework my father and i served in the same war 25 years apart oh wow okay so um yeah so that kind gives you he was at katimulilu um in i think 66 67 the year i was born of 66 and then i was there in 86, so that gives you an idea. So the concept is this, is that Namibia was German South East Africa. Then there was, then there was, twice, both wars,

there was this African invasion of German South Africa, because Germany was the enemy, and that was the war. And in that process, and I can't remember the exact details, but basically, so Africa was given a mandate by the UN, equivalent, the predecessor, the League of Nations, I think, first of all, then later the UN, that they would manage that as an occupied territory. Like administrative. The plan was then to have a, you know, a democratic election, blah, blah, blah, and what happened.

And that was the plan. And then the politics stepped in and various people got involved with rebelling against that idea and eventually became a kind of enforcement of, we can't hand over. and totally is actually these criteria that have been met in a bunch of politics. A big part of the politics was 1976 when Angola was taken over by Unita. How many acronyms and so many different things. I think the FNLA, I forgets. Holden Roberta.

Fenlo was wiped out by 76, 77. So it was that the MPLA and Unita were fighting. in. Okay, so, no, that was a transition period. That was a transition period. I mean, Unita was the southern part of Ovengola, the MPLA was slightly further north. Very complicated, lots of acronyms and various things, but essentially the Portuguese pulled out and the local started scobbering over what was left. I mean, that was, that was the point. And then the revolutionary movement, the freedom fighters that wanted a fully independent Namibia, not South East Africa, staged themselves in Angola and would then use that to then launch various

different attacks across the border. So we had that counter-insurgency warfare. At the same time, Africa aligned themselves with Junita, with Jonas Savimbi, who I still to this day, I think was an amazing man for a variety of reasons, allowed themselves with him in resistance to the. party in Angola that grabbed power and he was like a domestic that had basically seceded if you wish and so we were supporting him because that was in the South Africans interest for a buffer against all the various countries that were getting

independence and hated South Africa and all that kind of stuff so what what we sort of felt was that we were holding the line you were holding the line while the politicians sort of something out there was kind of our I think our mental justification and our process accept that. Then Fidel Castro decided to send 40,000 Cubans to fight against us. And there were a whole bunch of Russians who supplied a whole bunch of ornaments specifically because they became a proxy war. And I mean, we saw CIA people and various, very interesting guys with very short hair that wore civilian clothing, who would come through regularly.

So there is no doubt, even at my worms-eye view that all those shenanigans were going on. There's no doubt in my mind. And it's been reinforced later from various people who have spoken out about it. So we had this kind of concept of we're holding the line. We're protecting our interests. I mean, who was it? We famously said that countries and have friends have interests. We were protecting our interests.

We were protecting our homeland. steak, you know, all the stuff that we tell ourselves to justify what we're doing. And I believe that almost all of it is in fact, was in fact true, is that we held the line. We stood on the wall. And the interesting thing is the various conflicts between us and Cuba and Russia, the direct conflicts. Because I think just like the Ukrainians have shown the world that Russia is defeatable, I think we did the same thing in a lot of ways. Because we took them on and we beat them like a drum over and over.

We already did. There was one particular time where I think it was a company plus destroyed a brigade level, Cuban-led grouping. It was, we beat them like a drum. I mean, we took straight. In the entire border war, we lost. approximately 760 odd debt in 25 war as opposed to thousands and thousands on the other side. So beat the market brother.

Do you think that it was a matter of strategy or a matter of the fact that you guys were fighting for your home, essentially, that enabled you to beat communism where the United States did. you know, failed in that effort, like in Vietnam and Korea, things like that. Actually, two things. Wheel vehicles, they were mind protected. That was critical, critical, critical, critical. And unfortunately, you guys had this not invented yes syndrome. And we would, we tried to sell you the concept over and over and over and over again about mind protected vehicles.

And until, I think it was the Marines that ordered the first, 20,000 MRAPs. You didn't want to hear. Yeah. You didn't want to hear. So that's why now there's not a single mind protected vehicle, military vehicle in the world that is not designed by South Africa or have a Safna on the design team. Yeah. And there's a reason for that.

We learned those lessons. We paid for us lessened in blood early on. And that's what saved our butts because I happened to speak to somebody from the 75th who was in Mogadishu. But prior to the whole, you know, black or down thing, who's. said they did not operate they did not move on the road between bases because of the mine threats this is me and when i was visiting bragg in 96 and i said but why not i could understand says what do you mean why not we fly we have helicopters when we fly we don't move by by road and i said but why don't you just drive if your vehicle it's a landmine no problem you should

place you when you carry and going you're like what couldn't understand it and we it took me a while to process that the entire mindset that we had was if there's a minefield you drive through it so you'd lose all your wheels so what just don't jump out and set one off of your feet whereas the american mindset that i experienced in anecdotally was if there's a possibility of mind you don't move you're frozen so for us in our environment that i think is the was the biggest difference is that the whole mine strategy that worked so well all over the place did not work against us because we have the right counter. And the second part of it was the wheeled vehicles

because tracks require too much maintenance. Whereas the wheeled vehicles, we had, we called Tiffies, our technical guys, that literally on the march, while you're moving, someone would hop up on your rattle or on your biffle, and they'd have the engine open and would do stuff to the engine while it's running on the go, which you just can't do with track vehicles.

They require exercise. maintenance per meter that they do. So I think that those, and there was an interesting study done by somebody, I think at the War College in the US, and that became a seminal paper that informed your creation of your striker brigades. That is placed largely on this African doctrine

going into Angola without wheeled vehicles, yeah. And, you know, not all of your deployments were for war. I mean, you mentioned one where you were deployed to a hospital, Like got a rapid deployment to a hospital for three days. So I got the phone call. I was at home on a Sunday and I got the phone call about lunchtime. And about an hour and a half later, I was in uniform and I had a platoon. And I was issuing weapons and issuing kit.

Well, my platoon sergeant was. You know how it works. And we were ready to deploy. And then they told us, no, no, no, you're a bit too quick for us the next morning. And we deployed to the King Edward, the fifth hospital in Durban. And we got there. and there have been labor disputes. And the only people working in the hospital,

they were not outside protesting, were the mortuary, the morgue, and the maternity ward. Of course, people die, or they don't die, but they don't care, and people are pregnant, they want to get born, they don't care. What's going on? And so we got there, and I took a walk-round with my tune sergeant, and I set up, you know, observation posts, and sign task and this is what we're going to do

and watch the fence lines and watch the gates and blah, blah, and then my job as officer was done. So I'm then going, I find the head matron in the maternity ward, and I say, listen, we got our soldiers here. They're busy, they had all deployed, but what can we do to support you? Because, you know, thinking she's going to be like, well, put somebody at the door in case somebody wants to attack us

and, you know, that kind of thing. She says, lieutenant, come with me. I go, there's like four babies lying in a row. And she says, this is how it works. Watch one, do one, teach one. She says, watch. Takes the baby, intubates it, does the thing clear the throat again? This is, right, now you do it.

And I was like, okay. And I did it. And so I ended that bit. And then they had an overflow. I think they had only three nurses and one doctor. and the doctor and two of the nurses worked in the theater for, you know, emergency cesareans. And there was one nurse that was supposed to handle something like 20-some odd women who were, like,

heavily pregnant and expecting any minutes. And so I started helping her, and then she got called to do theater. And then I had, I delivered, I don't know, five or six, I'm only a million more babies in a row. You're down there with a catcher's mitt? John? Literally. It was absolutely. And, you know, and bang, here we go. All right, next. It was like production line. It was bizarre. And anyway, so somebody else got word of it and wrote it up for the paper and used the pseudonym that was so obviously me that everybody knew it was me. And so I got all the shittiest jobs the next year from like the morning.

yeah, that was interesting. There was, you know, and it's one of those things where, where, you know, people say, well, what's like in the army? And you go, well, grace yourself. Make sure that the arm is well practiced because you're going to polish your boots at least 100 times more than you're going to shoot your rifle. It's one of those kind of things, that sense of what the army is, is not what you see in the movies ever.

That's like, yay much. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You heard what I'm saying. Yeah. And this is one of those experiences that I don't even tell people anymore because it sounds so freaking bizarre. Surreal. Yeah.

I think, you know, what the fuck? And I'm like, if you're there, embrace the suck. I think our viewers would want to know, you know, we're all into foreign weapons and armament. What's the best caliber baby to deliver? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just so not going there. And I mean, then I would really like to ask you about the transition in 1994. You were in uniform for that.

As you pointed out earlier, a very turbulent time. Could you tell us what that experience was like from your perspective? So what was really interesting leading up to that was three or four years of the most incredible violence in the tell between factions. And they would, I think, jockeying for position, you know, the political position. So the ANC and Incarta were the two main sort of things. And I remember going and doing a camp, going from my civilian life into the army, and going and I wrote a poem about it about the one weekend hauling out like 10, 15 bodies a day,

open kilt, just in one little area. That was a few kilometers away from where my then-feel. was living and they were blissfully unaware of the fact that there's a war being fought just over there and they were blissfully unaware of it and traveling between the two you know was such a cognitive disson that it was crazy and and this is the thing is that all the stuff was going on and it would be reported in the paper and people go oh now I turned the comics page you know there was a warful ignorance so coming into the the actual day of elections, okay, there were all kinds of promises and threats and fears and,

you know, AWB is going to revolt and this guy's going to do that and this guy's going to do this and all kinds of stuff going on, flying around on all sides of the fence. I mean, you can't single anybody out. Everybody was really, was boiling. and the miracle of the 27th of April, the actual miracle, is nobody lost it. I don't understand it. I don't know anybody who understands it. That you came to the brink of Civil War.

It was, I mean, literally the night before, I personally heard people about, oh, this is not going to happen, blah, blah, blah, kill this and do this, and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And the next day, nothing. Absolutely. Deathly silence. Everyone was happy and celebrating and standing in the queues for hours and hours, friendly. And what happened that day?

I have no idea. Honestly, I don't think there's anybody who does. Those people who are religious, believe it was a miracle. When I say that exactly because across religions, believer was a miracle. it was truly a miraculous day. There's no doubt. From your point of view as a soldier, I mean, I think you alluded to it a little bit earlier that the loyalty to the regiment,

do you think it had from a military perspective, it had something to do with the love of South Africa and the patriotism for your country that kept things from spiraling out of control? So yes and no, because there's always been a conflict between, there's the Afrikaans version for Falkan Fadalant which is for the people and the fatherland whereas in English

it is it's my patriotism for the country there's none of this for the people it doesn't exist you know what I'm saying I mean you don't say you know for the

the blue-eyed left-handed people and they're in the country you just don't do that It doesn't know what your criteria are. So we had a conflict. That's one of the reasons why the English African-Card culture, culturally clashed quite a lot, is that the loyalty there was people first and then country second. And the English regiments made a specific part of our ethos, that it was we replaced the fork with the regiment on purpose.

So that English and Afrikaans serving in those regiments, make no mistake, that it kind of supplanted their natural. for the people first and we replaced that with the for the regiment and and i must emphasize that when i say english regiment what i mean is english tradition but we had english africans across the board mixed in all the units and what happened so so there were those kind of loyalty issues that were brewing i mean from the angri-war stories and and all the rest of it that's been a long-running sawpoint between english africans to this day maybe maybe i should point out too, John, and step in, correct me, wherever I'm wrong, that the racial integration of the units.

You had a few before 1994, like the Rekke's 3-2 Battalion, but then after 1994, did the force, when it transitioned to Sandef, became fully integrated? Yeah, so the first black soldiers that we actually saw more than just one or two of in the common years was about a year or so after 94, they started. started getting soldiers but what was interesting about that is that one-to-one battalion had been an an old zulu battalion for a number of years they'd been involved in the sADF for a number of years and they slowly started trying to shut down the ethnic battalions that they were because that wasn't what they how they wanted the army to be and so these guys were now losing their

jobs as soldiers with those units would then come and and decided becoming part of of the citizen force units that existed. So I had this interesting situation in 96 of the first black soldiers that I had under my authority where I was, I wasn't a while, something like 25 or whatever it was. And I had these 40-year-olds who'd been soldiers since they were 16 with no rank. You knew the drills better than me. You knew the weapons better than me. You knew the doctrine in taxes better than me and and that was a that was a culture shock of note because there was the social separation before and now when we put together this dude knows my job better than i know it and doesn't want it doesn't want the rank because i want the responsibility but he knows the job

that was fascinating and then and then actually starting to within the military starting to integrate in ways they were quite interesting because what's so amazing about the military and you guys will really understand this, I know, is that your social rank is, I mean, your social standing is your rank. So if you're a sergeant, then you socialize military-wise with other sergeants. You don't socialize with a major.

Right. Your social standing is your rank standing. So now, imagine this, okay? You get people who come into the citizen force who have done other things in their lives. I mean, I'm talking about someone, and I'm thinking specifically, someone who's a professor at university and somebody else who's a doctor or a lawyer, and they come in and they were a Lance Corporal.

So in the Army, this doctor is a Lance Corporal, this professor is a Lance Corporal, and this guy who's got a standard three, you know, like a grade five education is a Lance Corporal, you're the same status. That was fascinating, a fascinating dynamic. really truly a fascinating dynamic and in various directions because for me I could go and I experienced that

and actually hear things at that level that I wouldn't hear from a civilian perspective because there would be a status disparity and a social disparity so now as the military

I started hearing and experiencing things because it forced me into a status level that was equivalent with people who had the same rank so that was a fascinating dynamic and I started started learning things and learning about things and how to deal with things there, that there was a truly a learning experience that I then started applying to other things in my life

in a large number of ways. So, I mean, it literally made everything richer socially and as a country, I think, is that we started that social integration at that level, because the National Party deliberately excluded any interaction, specifically social interaction between races. It was against the law. You weren't allowed to go to a bar together or a dance together or they literally separated people based on race. And so these kind of things where it's not like a forced or a tokenism or a quotas system, whatever.

It's like if you got the rank, you've done the courses, you're qualified for the rank. That means you have the rank status and I've got the rank, I've got the same rank status and they are absolutely equivalent. And that was amazing because that was not the case. outside of the military for a long time. Right, right. It's like this incredibly egalitarian type of force once you tear that one barrier down. Correct. Correct.

So that was fascinating. I mean, it took a while. It took a while to sort of adjust to each other and what have you, but way less than the civilian sort of equivalent. Way less, especially. I mean, so in 96 we had local government elections and I deployed, that was Ops Jambo 3. I deployed with that and I had all black troops.

My second in command was a guy, Corporal Talani, which is an interesting name. Because Tula and Zulu is quiet. So his father named all his kids with the woman that he wasn't married to because he was still saving his money to pay her to Bola her bride price. He named them all variations of the word quiet. So be quiet, you are silent, you're quiet. So that was what his name was. He was basically be quiet. Anyway, side show.

And we were deployed in the area of the Valley of a Thousand Hills, and then a place called Tugela Ferry. And those people who know of it will know that there's been inter-clan conflict there for hundreds of years. So within the so-called tribal Zulus, there's lots of clans. Because the Zulu nation was actually all kinds of different people. They were brought together by basically by Shaka and his, and his descendants. And they still have a lot of those divisions.

And so there was this little village in the one side of the valley, this other little village is the other side of the valley. And the men would all go off the city to go and work. And the woman would cultivate the maize and look off the goats and various kind of things. And the men would come back on the weekend. And the woman would have made them their beer. And while they're sitting and they drinking their beer, and the woman would start,

that man's wife, she sent her a girl. I didn't stop her goats. They ate some of my corn, my millies, et cetera. There'd be something. And they'd get the men all worked up. And then on a Sunday, the men would pick up picks and shovels and machetes and all kinds of stuff. And they'd have a big fight. And the woman was standing inside and they ululeate the, they do this allelilation.

And the men get, eyes get red as a termination to do for the eyes get red, which means that the blood gets boiling. And they go. And I personally observed, a guy with an axe embedded in his skull, coming staggering out. his wife, you go back in there, you haven't saw that guy out yet before you, and you turn around and back into the fight with an axe and bed and his skull. Crazy.

So we were in that place, also a peacekeeping couple of all. Excuse me. Interestingly enough, almost no political violence, even in 96, that was directed at the process of voting.

Political violence was directed at opposition parties. If you go and you go Google now about political assassination, you'll find a place called Richmond that's right near that area which is endemic. If you're elected to office, you're probably going to die within three months because someone's going to assassinate you. It's that bad. It's really, really bad. And it has been bad like that forever and ever and ever. It's a particularly violent place when it comes to politics and other things. And so our job there was to say there's a certain

zone around where the election is happening and if around in that then you will find out and that's our job and what was interesting about it was the transition to the camouflage uniform from the Browns uniform

hadn't happened fully even though it was introduced in like the 494 it hadn't filtered down to everybody but there was this thing that's perception that those wearing the camouflage were Mandela's army, meaning that they were A&C. So my black troops refused to wear the camouflage.

They want to wear the browns because that's a real soldier. And that was weird. That was, so that was one of the strange things. They wanted to wear browns because Browns is a real soldier. And there was an incident where, excuse me. Okay, so we had intelligence from a certain village was doing various things. And so the police were tasked to go and search the village for drags and fugitives and various things.

So our task was Cornyn so they could do the search. So there we go. It's like O-Doc 13 in the back of the truck. And I got my guys in the back and I'm like, we ready to go. Yeah, ready, yeah, yeah. And you can see him that a vibe starts going. The vibe starts going. It's all, okay.

weapons stage three on safe man they know okay bang out the back of the thing you know stop debus run make a big

cord around this village all you know great raw raw but enthusiastic because this is the task and they love being soldiers absolutely passionate about these soldiers

and so there I am I'm basically squad leader but no not squad yeah I'm squad leader basically so I've got like 12 troops on my radio, the lieutenant is going with the police to go and escort them through while they do the search. And I hear shots go. And we're on the side of this little, this copy,

this little hill. And I'm like, and I swing around to look where the hell the shots coming from. And the next thing is, do, do, do, do, do, and my guys are doing fine movement up the, up the corp. And I'm running off them. And I try to talk on the radio. And the tens, I'm just, what's going on what's going? I'll tell you, no, sir. I'm running up this buddy hill. They're doing fire movement.

Turned out that it was two of the guys that were the chief's guards, and they had an old 303, like Le Anfield from like, you know, an Anglo-Boor War, 60-year-old weapon or whatever it was, 80-year-old weapon, whatever. And the other guy had a 38 special. That's what they were firing at us with.

And so obviously, when my guys started going, They ran up the hill and they were on their way. And anyway, so my guys ended up killing the two of them because they'd been shot on a normal kind of stuff. And I asked them often, but why don't you just chase them this? And they're like, no, no, no. You see they're wearing a brown basically army jacket. Yeah, they're not soldiers.

How dare they wear that? It was that strong. Their sense of being real soldiers and identifying. So that took maybe 10. years to start to transition that kind of idea and that and those kind of prejudices, I would say, after 94, to really start transitioning that. The first 10 years was a learning experience, immigration experience, and to our own troops through the various levels of training and the various ranks and that kind of thing. And, you know, as that transition process happens,

I want to talk to you about this deployment you did to the Congo. Okay. If you could tell us about how that came about, what that situation was about, how that situation was about, how that unfolded okay so i transferred after almost all my career out of the infantry i transferred to um to the engineers because they had a uh a post about it was a training officer and blah blah there was a whole story so i transferred the engineers and i'm not an engineer so i get told after i've done the transfer that no the opportunity that was going to be there from years now no longer the case they've changed their minds so now that sounds like the army yeah exactly so i'm stuck in engineers and I'm not qualified for my rank. So I'm like, I go to my, my, my

officer and I'm like, well, what do I do? Do I transfer back to infantry? It's like, well, I don't know, you have to try and see. And I could just see what's going nowhere? So I said to him, but what can I do that doesn't require this two years of training to, you know, how to build bridges and lacing and stuff that engineers do? And he's like, oh, we've got a demolitions course coming up. I said, there's, that's me. So if I went, I went to. I went to. So if I went to, I went to, I did combat demolitions and loved it. I aced the course and I really I really loved it. It just made sense to me. And we had a, and when we went, I went back home and literally two days later they told me, no, you got to take basically a patuna to back up because

it's a birthday weekend. The whole formation is getting a big parade, doing a big parade and a big function and all this kind of stuff. So back on the bus with a patuna guys and back up to current stuff to the armor sort of formation headquarters. And we go through the whole parade, we do the whole thing. We have an end function, of course. We said that's going to be Brian. And I'm standing at the brine, one of the colonels on the, on the GSC staff, one of his senior staff officers happens to sidle over to me and say,

hi, John, I'm Colonel So-and-so, and I'm like, yes, sir. He says, I hear you just did the demolition score. I said, yes, sir. And he came first, yes, sir. You want to deploy? Yes, sir. oh shit what did I just say don't worry

I'll contact you I'll get my office to contact you tomorrow we'll make the plan and I turned around and I I'll see my standing next to me and I was like what the fuck did I just say yes to you?

But you said yes to a one year deployment so I go oh shit and hold up myself and I go I stand in the corner and I phone my wife and I like tell her the story listen I just agreed to this she says well how long to the year she says

well okay and I can just hear she's her mind is spinning now how are we going to handle this and you know what happened so anyway so long story short go through the preparation and and I go up and I was a month or so I'm late because they had a post that I got to full that

they had planned to fill in the person didn't walk workout so I climb in the in the C-130 in Pretoria and fly up to to the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We land in Goma, and the new legal officer for the battalion was also there.

And so we could get into Finnskin land rovers. We drive the 10 kilometres outside of Goma to Meningi, which is the UN base there that was under siege. So we stopped there, we get out of the land rover, and someone comes running up to us, what the fuck you're doing? What the fuck you're doing? like what do you mean? There, over that container, grab yourself body armor. Over that one can grab a rifle over there, grab helmets,

and go to the front, the wall at the top with the sandbags are. We under siege. Okay, we go. And we were being pot-shot at it at the time. They had a 14-millimeter machine gun and a couple of rockets and various things at that shoot. And then there was a couple of things that were, they would shoot like an odd time from the day.

And then the 4d, see the official army of the Congo, because here's the problem, the M23 with the rebels, were actually a breakaway piece of the army. The army base is spitten off. So now you've got people with identical uniforms, identical rank structures, identical weapons, everything identical. They know each other. They've been comrades and arms all this time are now enemies. So it made things interesting. So anyway, and they'd come up and they'd have these two tanks.

and they rattle up and they come and they park and then they shoot everything from their tanks. All the ammunition, main gun, coax, everything for a mad minute and whatever and then drive back. That's their day's ammunition finished. That's it.

Okay? And then we're like, well, what now? No, then you just wait. Then the infantry or whatever starts. They all shoot for a mad minute, like maybe three minutes, whatever. And then they're done. For another hour,

they've got to read load magazines and what have you or they might not for the rest of the day so that was going on that was their that was their fighting and that or that lasted a while and then we had um we we we got some fire we got to them um that the m23 was shooting mortars at us and they were shooting these um the the chinese rockets i forget now the 122 more rockets um and a couple of them landed in the base and what have you so um the company command of um um Alpha Company was actually the whole battalion was kind of put together of various pieces, different units. So I'm standing next to him. We became quite friendly. I'm standing next to him and he calls on his cell phone to the general who is responsible for that area, who happens to be from the Indian Army. And he's general, this is Major Vic. We being shot at by mortars, we want permission to return fire.

The general's like, hold on. doesn't put him on hold so we can hear. So Vic puts it on speakerphone, we can hear. He calls up the rebel commander. Says, hey, what are you doing? Why are you aiming at my base? The guy's like, oh, sorry, I didn't hit it. I didn't mean to hit it.

So the Indian Army General says, okay, no, that's good. Just make sure you don't hit it. Back to Vic. Okay, they're not shooting at you. They're just shooting it in the general direction. They don't mean that you in any harm, so you're not allowed to return fire.

Wow. Oh. Okay, so that was interesting. So that lasted about two weeks where that would happen. And we get 12.7 rounds coming through that we were sleeping at night and and rockets sometimes would fall in the base and all that kind of stuff. But the reason we were there is that the year before, the entry through the rebels, they actually come into GOMA.

And the United Nations was on a PIC mission, a protection of civilians. So the assaults deployed, who've got five rounds. in one magazine and that's it and those rounds are essential for self-defense that's it and you can't tell me you're a soldier if you have such a restricted around the rules of the gate. It's crazy. So this whole thing happened with

entry to you coming into the tower into the city and all kinds of other political synonygans and so you know United Nations issued only for the second time as history and offensive mandates. The first time was in 61 also for the Congo coincidentally for the Belmont

that they did that peridrop into Kinshasa. And now the Force and Avenged Brigade, us, we were given an offensive mandate. So we were allowed to do hunter kill missions without, we were requested to cooperate with the local army, the 4DC, but it was not essential. And we had a full load of ammunition, everything that we deemed necessary.

And we could literally do hunting kill missions not just self-protection type missions, which is really a first. So now we're there, but the entire structure there, 21,000 odd peacekeepers, that entire structure has for years settled themselves into the local economy. And they've got side hustles going to get to our consent. It just is the nature of all things. From prostitution to business opportunities or various things. I mean, you know, all kinds of stuff.

And now we arrive on the scene and we are like the bull in the china shop. We're stomping on everybody's on everybody's, you know. You're there to kick some ass. Well, yes. And we're Africans. You know, it doesn't matter the color of our skin. We are aggressive bastards. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you've seen us play rugby. And so, so, so now we're stomping on everybody's on everybody's toes. So they moved us 30 kilometers out of Goma. We built our own base of Pazard Saki. And we started operations and we started various patrols and getting involved in various places. And then what happened was the Pais-ZEP, the brigade and division level, came up with this plan that nationwide to coordinate it from different angles and different sort of acts of advance to corner M23 rebels in like three different places and blah, blah, blah. There was a whole plan. and we were tasked with going to a place called Ruchuru, but actually Kewanja, place called Kewanja.

And they ferried us there in, is it that, okay, M26, sorry, not, yeah, M26, the big Russian helicopter that's like a C-130 with rotors on top. Yeah, yeah. I've got photos of somebody. It's been a while. I haven't thought of it, my apologies. But so we put two armoured 18-ton vehicles in the back of that chopper plus two protoos of troops ferried us over the enemy lines into Kiwanda, into a siege, into a little UN base there was manned by also by a battalion of a battalion of a battalion of a Indian army. And so we ferried us in there and we proceeded to dig in, build bunkers, built trenches,

you know, this kind of stuff, which had never existed because they didn't need them. while we're doing this, Mary Metcalf, who'd been Prime Minister of England, she was negotiating a peace treaty and there was a ceasefire in place or whatever. So we saw the rebels that came up to within 50 metres of our base, stood there and like pointed the weapons at us and were like, hmm, you're going to shoot you and then put them down, you know, that whole provocation kind of thing. And that was quite difficult. And then a ceasefire ended. And we had various indicators. There was, you know, so the whole ops plan from outside actually pushed the various elements of M23 that they would actually come that we would be the anvil. And so that's what we had.

We had three, we were basically, we called this our task force, but we were three platoons reinforced with a QRF and a special forces detachment from South African and Tanzanian. And the three axes come together in Kiwanja, and that's why we were there. And so one platoon was tasked with each one, and the one that was on the ridge line, actually started taking contact. So that was the trigger. So the Indian Army had been tasked, and they were in fairly decent APCs. They were small arms resistant at least. They were tasked to go and actually do an armoured sweep

and the coroner by fire in a certain area to clear it so that our advance would be easier to do without worrying about our flanks, blah, blah, there was a whole like ops plan involved. So what happens is we discover no more than 300 meters outside the base just around the corner. They all parked, hatches down, not going anywhere. We went literally and banged on the hatches. And they were like, go away.

go away, sitting inside the, inside their vehicles. So we were not impressed with them. So then the one-the-one, a whole bunch of stuff happened, but the one-partoon was taking, like, really heavy fire. And they were like, this is not just a company level that is attacking us. This is serious. We actually, the initial intelligence was it would be a platoon level. Now they say it's not even a company-able.

This is like hectic. We discovered later, it was actually two companies, but the companies were like 500 each. It was like, you know, it was crazy. And they were between them, and they were taking serious strain and serious fire. So QRF was called. Curriff goes out.

Two special forces teams go out with us and got into firefights. And, oh man, I tell you, I'll never forget. He was a captain. He was commander of the heavy weapons platoon, machine gun platoon other words anyway

so he had the your mark 19 yeah that equivalent in this African army that's made in lowness Africa

it's the Yankee 2 the Yankee 2 I get them confused Yankee 3 Yankee 2 same as the Mark 19 so you know what I'm talking about and you know that the safe arming the army distance

and the safe distance you're talking about like 30 meters 40 meters you were shooting that literally that the Shapno was coming back and pinging off us. It was so close. As we drove, we got out of the markets, a little abandoned markets, and

he wiped it out completely with that thing, with just the shrapnel hitting us as he was doing it. Anyway, that was the first thing that he did, that was of note. And the second thing is, so then the tenant from Lema, from Tanzania, he was the commander of the SF detachment.

The general officer command in the FRIB, he was a general Macri Bola, and he was from Tanzania. And the night before, Lema and I had been standing and talking, he'd become very good friends. And I was joking with him and I said, oh, you see, he's Tanzania army, you're going to have his, you know, take his job one day. And he looked at me and he said, no, I never will. So what he mean? He says, I just never wore. And the next day, he was lying under a big boggy villa. It's a thick trunk like this. And he was going around the trunk and he was shooting. And the fire came

from his left rear flank and hits him automatic fire. One round hits his helmet, knocked the helmet forward, and the second round took him in the base of the skull. And so he was instantly dead, but none of us knew this. We just knew that there was, oh, he was wounded. And I watched, and I've got video of it as well, I watched that captain that, I told you about him on the machine gun launcher. Under fire, climb out of his vehicle, jump off, run, make pickup,

pick up in Lima, and carrying him back to the vehicle, and hand him over to the medics, and then come back in his vehicle again, which to me is the definition of valor. He has got no recognition for that, but that aside. You can actually see in the video for example, I told the ambulance is actually also an APC,

and they pull and they try and come around this vehicle, and the fire is so heavy that they actually pull back in again because it's like such heavy fire. Anyway, so that was a fight. That was a, there was a hectic fight, and there was only Lima who was KIA, was really fortunate because it could have been much worse. And yeah, so that was interesting.

That was Kiwanja. Sorry, I'm, I mean, this is the sort of like fascinating details about this stuff that like we just don't hear about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, people complain about the United Nations and what have you. And I say, yes and no, I mean, you're right, but you're also wrong.

You know, if you're a command on the ground, I believe very strongly that you command, you don't manage. So regulations are for the guidance of the commander, and a court marshal is his only checks and balance. And unfortunately, too many officers are corporate ticket punches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not, I'm a Mustang. I made such trouble for all my hierarchy because I ran to the sound of the guns and they did not like it.

What do you think you're doing? That's not your post. I said, I don't give it fuck. Yeah. They shoot. My troops are in combat. I'm going. And they didn't like that.

The whole notion of peacekeeping is that before you can keep the peace, you have to make peace. And you got sent there for a reason to do that. Yeah. Correct. So I mean, so what they found is that they actually ran us back. And South Africa became notorious for that. They had to rain us back. But there was odd things.

I mean, my good friend made that sniper kill. He's somewhere in the top 10 that keeps changing. But he 2,125 meters. It's on Wikipedia with an NCW20, but with the 14.5 caliber. because he did a barrel change for 14.5. And it's odd Wikipedia as the longest sniper kill, but what it doesn't tell you in that is, as you know, you published an article about it as well,

is that it's likely that he killed four people with two rounds at that range. That happened there. You know, so much stuff happened there that is not spoken about, and I don't understand why, because why not take his story? and parading around the country. Look at this guy. He's done something amazing. But there was a board of inquiry

to find out who leaked the information, which was crazy because everybody that was there knew the story and was telling their friends and family about it. And not just to Africans. I mean, across them, as he came out after he'd reached our lines again, they were all calling his nickname like,

from like three different countries. they were cheering him. So this was no secrets, you know, and yet they made an issue of it that I think was, could have been a public relations masterpiece. So that was odd. But, you know,

people criticize the UN and all the rest of it. And it's our own faults. When we do these kind of things, the way that we deal with them and we handle the media and we handle the story and the narrative is bad. We just don't do it well. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Like the Tanzanian, who ran out and saved the guy. the South African sniper. Yeah, I mean, why aren't those stories told? Exactly. Exactly. You know, so I think also some of it is a legacy of this kind of secrecy thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't talk about stuff and, you know, you'll be punished if you do. And it's just not true. Well, let me give it another example. I mean, when I was still publishing books, I published a book by, by Dedey's by André Dietrich, who was, past decorative and VALA, HCS,

H-C, etc. And prior to that, almost all the books and stuff would have this black masking across the face. And so, I looked at this

and being the sort of Berksian lawyer I am, I am, I asked, so where's the rule? Show me, show me,

you know, who says I must do this. Because I don't want to be this, ugly, I was destroy these photographs. No, this is nonsense. And nobody could show it to me. So I thought,

Okay, how am I going to force them to actually rule this one way or the other? So via a variety of people, I got it to military intelligence at the national level. And I asked them two questions. So please make sure he's not talking shit in the book. So go and check that he's, you know, the operations you mentioned are the correct things. And also, please confirm for me that I don't need to put black marks across or tell me what the regulation is that prevent that makes the force. me to do it. So they're okay, took them a week and they didn't come back to me. They went back to General Nell, who was GEOC, General Officer Commanding of the Special Forces, and then

he then got older me via somebody else to say, I've got your book here and this is the thing. Everything that's written in the book, we've checked against the archives, against the files, all the operations are correct, etc. And the only regulation or rule was in Rhodesia, the pseudo-ops that the SAS and others ran require them to mask the faces because they literally went amongst the local population. There was a real logical reason. The rest of it, there is no legislation.

So I brought out that book with the faces open and the names attached to the people. And a lot of people were exceptionally upset and were with me and I said, actually the way the law has changed is that you've got to be, under the law in Africa, identifiable by your face and by your name tag

so that you can be held accountable by the people. So it's actually you're breaking the law by doing what you think is the law. Right, right. Which was weird. But if you look at the books now, all of them are, nobody puts the black things on anymore because they realize they don't have to. So I'm always quite chuffed about that, is that my Berksson lawyer stuff sometimes works.

I want to talk to you more about the publishing aspect, But let's first talk about your transition out of Sandif after decades and decades serving in the South African military. What was your transition out of the military? Okay. No such thing. Because I was reservist, I was citizen force, whatever, how do you want to describe it, the military and civilian were inextricably interlinked constantly. I mean, every part of my life was inextricably. intellect. I mean, I literally started a job at the University of Stenbosch on the first of April 94

and reported from my first day of work a month later because I phoned up my new boss and I said, I cannot come to work to start my new job because I've got to be in the army and he said, does any notion of the long? It's in the national interest. Do you do what you got to do, which was fantastic? But this is my point. My civilian and military was in a strictly interlinked all the way through. So there was no such thing as a transition. I'm still an officer if they call me, I go, you know, even now. So until I'm 65, that's just how it works. So, I mean, it was a pretty like seamless transition for like as far as you're like retirement.

Well, lack of retirements. There are no retirement benefits for citizen force people. No medical. There's no retirement. There's no social security. There's nothing. This is something also that is very difficult people to understand. Most of my service was for passion and pride.

not for money. Yeah. There is no, unless you were permanently employed, full-time regular soldier, there is no pension, there is no medical treatment, there is no social security,

there is nothing. There is no benefit whatsoever. There's no retirement. Just that is what it is. But so you've finished your time there and then started contracting in Iraq, right? Okay.

So, So end of 2014, well, towards the end of 2014, one of the guys that was there, he was actually a commander, 5-1 commander, one of the special forces guys, he actually had left the army, retired or resigned from the army, he was full-time. And he had got a job in Iraq. And what had happened is that ISIS-based, he overran, overran, over-run, um, belior. the Americans actually evacuated and the South Africans, there were 75 Syracians, remained behind on the base.

And they actually ran everything on the base. They ran the kitchen, the bakery, the generator, the everything. They kept it going and they slept on the walls and defended the base against ISIS, etc. And then, so which saved the contracts. And then Americans came back and then they realized they needed to expand the specificity, their QRF, but the fourth on base, they needed to expand it, and then they did a rapid hiring process

and me having a friend there, he put my CV down and said, I recommend him, and that's how I got the nod to go there. So I spent four years there, three months on, three months on and one month off for four years. And what was that environment like, because it's a little bit later,

it's when ISIS is active. Were there active, like, military forces in the area that you guys could rely on or excuse me no we knew that that there were

just up the road at Missal and various other little bits and pieces but essentially we were together with the Iraqi Air Force

operating in an infantry role and that was interesting as well because some of what we did was to train them supposedly to guard the base but what we discovered is that they had this magical

ability to kind of forget everything and we could understand and probably realize that the iraqi were taking the guys that we trained and rotating them out to the units they were going to mousal and giving us new guys so we were continuously training new guys and we could understand these guys we just trained them the other day now they don't understand what the hell they're supposed to be doing and we start again from the beginning and we were joking there was some kind of magnetic thing in the gate that when they walked out it like right their brains and it wasn't they were literally rotating guys to take advantage of our of our training um so we would spend end eight-hour shifts where we do exercises, patrols and training, in training, and training

their arcies. And that's what we did every day or every night or, you know, every mid-shift. And were there active operations in that training or was it mostly in a like permissive or semi-permissive environment where that was happening? Okay. So it was in the base, within the 25-oddometer perimeter perimeter of the base, we ran exercise all the time. We ran exercise all the time. Understanding that for a large part of the time, there were two of the militia units that were inside the base. So you and I both know exactly who the militia units are, who they're influenced by, etc. And in the period that we were there, they were going through the transition phase to actually be adopted into the Iraqi army. There were two aspects of that. The first is there were

quite a few confrontations where nose to nose at three o'clock in the morning, on base with a kind of Mexican standoff and you know blah blah blah that kind of thing happened and then the other one was um a whole political kind of process that wanted us to train them and a reluctance from the american company to be involved in training a iranians inspired militia or you know supported militia and that all kind of that all kind of played out way about my head right uh picked up bits and pieces of of that. But the outcome of that was us actually building them a semi-base outside the walls of the base. I mean, if you know, Anna-Connor, the big gate of the north side, just to the east of that was we built a base to right next to where their gate is, next to the Tigris River.

And then they moved out there. Then they were happy because then they could do their thing and nobody bothered anybody, and then it was a lot easier. Right. And these were the Iranian back militias that were, I mean, the PMU. Yeah, our enemies, but also ISIS's enemies. That's right. Yeah. They were called PMU and then we hadn't changed to call them militia to there was some other, some other term which I forget now that was more sort of politically correct now that they're actually officially part of the army, which was weird.

But they were the fighters. There's no doubt. They had the guys who fought the Americans. They're the guys who fought ISIS. they're the guys who fought everybody. They were the ones willing to fight and die. So they had a lot of power because of that, irrespective of the political aspect of it.

So it was a, it was a fraught place. It was not an easy place. So, you know, we kind of took it seriously. We took our training seriously. I learned, oh, so much stuff. I just, I was so privileged to have spent that time working with a bunch of really top-tier guys. you know from the American side

all the all the like force recon and the this and the that you know all this kind of stuff all really good guys some ranges too one of them was my team leader for a while Al who jumped in here to Rio Hutto in 89 which was interesting to hear wow yeah so you know some good guys

and on the African side some SF some peace task force and all this so like really experienced guys you've got all kinds of skills and meshing those skills together and learning from all sides and what have you was fascinating to me really i mean all my wife i'd shot with a chicken wing and pull three minutes in over there to getting hit on the elbow hey no chicken wings you got to cock your elbow and pull your and then cock your wrist and pull your elbow into your side and it took me days to get that right to start shooting differently but that was there there were

good reasons for it and it was finding a common sot between all these different um um um type sort of hard charging spear tipping kind of guys was fascinating to watch the process. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. So then how long you said you did that for about like on and off three and one for four years? And then why did you leave that? That was not my choice.

I actually brought my family out here based on the fact that we were told we're going to have at least another year on the contract. and I left my family here in this new country and I went back to Iraq and I was there two weeks and then one day, like 8 o'clock the morning, I just come off night shift, I hear this knock on my door and one of the guys says, hi John, you said, listen, can I have your weapon? So I'm like, okay, I hand him, hand in my AK, make safe,

and I hand my AK and he says, oh, on your side arm too, and I'm like, okay, and my side arm, I'm like, maybe he's doing, you know, clipboard weapons check kind of thing. You hands them off, to someone I can't see. He says, John, I've got bad news for you. He says the U.S. Department of, you know, the U.S. Defense Department ever have canceled a certain number of lines on the contract.

So that's one, that's yours. You don't have a job anymore. You leave tomorrow morning. Holy shit. And there were 75 of us that got the news. Wow. Yeah. Just like that.

Across the board. QRF, gate guards, mentors, trainers. dog handlers, you name it, across the board. They literally just said, okay, line item, this line item that are out of them, canceled. Almost sounds like the war on Afghanistan. Line item, Afghanistan canceled. Yeah, exactly.

So my bags and I come back here to a new country, I expecting to make some decent money for another year or two and, you know, build a new life, yeah, and then I had nothing. So fortunately, I networked quite quickly and had right kind of friends and started rebuilding my life here and getting a little ad hoc work out and there making some money and started a hostel and then along came COVID and knocked me down in my face again.

Yeah. Yeah, it closed down my business. So that was done. And now I'm slowly building up again and we're rebuilding again and we bounce back and we learn from experience and we do it better next time. John, is there, I just want to ask you mentioned you're in a new country. Is there a reason you left South Africa? Was it just retirement, a cheaper way of living?

So you'll see the modern use hammer covers scars here, defensive scars. It was like 2 o'clock in the morning, and I was at home on R&R. And I'd been reading to my daughter, who was six of the time, for her to go to sleep. And like dads do, I fell asleep in the bed next to her. And I woke up, something woke me up, and I sat up on the bed, and I looked at my front door is right there just outside her. her room and I saw two guys coming past the door. Two o'clock in the morning they broke into my house. So I stood up in the bed and I was shout, hey, what are you doing? And they turned around and they came into the room with knives at me and tried to kill me. And so I fought them off while my daughter's

lying here like this on the bed and I'm bleeding all over her and, you know, all the rest of it. And I fought them off and forced them out of her room into like the lounge area, turned on the light so we can also see each other's faces, so I could see what's going on. I picked up my firearm, so I had my firearm in the waistband of my pants. And I said to them, here's my wallet, it's empty. Anything you want, you can take and leave. And I got inside the Udu, where they were like, ah, and I got, you triggered an automatic log, which was a lie, on the sponsor on their way, which was a lie.

So you better hurry up, grab what you want and go. And one of them was like, well, what's down the passion, way and that's what my daughter's where and I said that's got nothing to do with you. I said I'm telling you grab stuff and go if you want to go those passengers away that's a different discussion because that's like you know and I ushered them out of the house locked the door then called my girls out and they all were awake and we're hiding behind their doors and stressed as hell and they all just heard me shouting and screaming and and knew that I was bleeding and my eldest daughter was like had heard them shouting but we want

money so she'd gone through literally a piggy bank and her whatever she was going to come and offer them money and thank goodness she didn't and you know um so that whole process was traumatic um and and what it did is it's not about me being ticked it's about the fact that four days that are to fly back to iraq right and my family alone yeah so now i'm not there and well-meaning people the next day would send messages and say to my wife oh it's so i'm so glad john was there And she's like, well, yes, but he's not, you're not going to be there tomorrow. You know, and so it made it worse. So we found, we found another house to rent in a sort of gated complex.

There was, you know, there was a bit safer and what have you. But that started the real process. We had a whole lot of other reasons why we wanted to leave. Systemic degradation of the, of the infrastructure, the beginnings of like really rabid racism and blah, blah, blah, a whole bunch of reasons that we really felt that it was not the right thing, not the right environment for our girls to grow up and lack of opportunity for them. But this was the trigger to the final decision. Actually, okay, now no more messing around.

Now let's get the process going. Can I ask you, answer a really personal question. If you don't want to answer it, that's fine. You had your firearm and you had it with you. What kept you from shooting them? Why did you not shoot them? Two reasons. The first one is the second I pull the trigger.

It's a firearms offense, which means that I cannot work for American company in Iraq. So I lose my livelihood until the case proceeds through. That's number one. Number two is pull the trigger. I've got drywall partitions. My daughters are in rooms with drywall partitions. You and I both pull the trigger. You don't know where that round's going to go to.

Yeah. So in my mind, it was if you cross the line, I'm going to do the thing, but you fall back and you're shooting up towards the roof and it's much less likely, but all this is going, you know how your brain goes. The processing speed goes up so your time perception goes down. My head is in combat mode in this whole thing. And I'm making those decisions in microseconds of, and that processing, I went through my decision trees and consequences and actions and all that kind of stuff.

And I decided for myself that I don't, I don't, how I described it to other people was, I don't want my six-year-old daughter to walk out through the brains of somebody that I've just killed. Right. Yeah. Right. I describe it like that. I cannot describe to them the decision-key process that I had to go through that was tactically based. Right. Because people don't understand that. They don't. They don't get it. They haven't been through what we've been through. Right. You do a hot wash and you do, you know, an AAR and you process this thing, you know, in a cerebral way.

And you ignore the emotional side of it. And people don't get that. They want to hear the emotional. So I said, would you like your six-year-old girl to walk through someone's brains? You've just killed? Right. And people understand that. They don't understand the, the cerebral side of it at all. You're going to make a decision in half a second. In South Africa, you know, and I don't know if it's a, like, if it's a federal or a nationwide thing or if it's like by the districts or states or however it's broken down. But would you have been within your legal right to have shot them after they broke in with, with knives or not really okay so the policeman two black policemen who arrived um on the scene when i reported it were absolutely mad with me that i had not shot it because they were like now we're going to

have a problem because they're going to keep on doing this stuff and we've got to chase them and someone else is not going to be able to do it and they're going to kill somebody and why don't you shoot them we do some paper we're going to have done that was from from the police So for me, self-defense comes down to one very basic thing, imminent threats. If I personally, I'm not talking legally, morally and ethically, if I had pulled out my weapon and shot them when they were trying to kill me with their knives, I would have been 100% legally justified and morally justified. The second they stopped doing that, I no longer was.

I could have faked it easily, but I would have not liked that. Right. Even when they made the threat to my daughter, now the imminent threat is back. Right. Utterly, kill them and go on with my day. Right. You understand the process that I was going through? Absolutely.

It changes from second to second as you go through and you evaluate what's the threat now. Oh, it's elevated. It's not elevated. I'm going to get out of trouble. Oh, no, I'm going to have to shoot them. I went through that process like numerous times. Yeah. Yeah.

I hope that makes sense. No, it does. That's a tough decision to make. I mean, it's an impossible decision. to make real. And sorry to hear that your family went through that. I'm sure it was very traumatic for them also. Extremely. Yeah. Extremely. Yeah. But, you know, so Africans are, we're tough. We've got a, we've got a sort of a saying,

well, a couple of the sayings. The one is Fatsbake-Lakanoe, which is bite, bite down. It'll be nice now. So grit your teeth, you know, you've been nice now. But the one I prefer is Kate Nuit and Falkford, which is look north and fuck off a head. It means ignore the flanks. have the bugle of sound of charge and off we go and that's like a that's that's that's that's like in a lot of ways but that's what we've relocated your family and uh moved on to new endeavors i want to take a little sidebar here to talk about your career and publishing uh how did you get into that and like what did you publish why i mean what what was yeah tell us about that that's that's

that's very simple what happened is that um um um i mentioned as then before when i was the Ketan Haunders, the Lim's Deencombe, who was a historian and what have you, happened to be a captain in the Kato Henders, and him and I became good friends. He became my mentor for a lot of things, especially when I made the transition from the NCO to officer. I'll never forget, talking about sideballs. When I was appointed as Canada officer, how it worked, I was in the, the Warrant Officers and Saunders and Svens Mess. And we all dressed up, it's our sort of monthly function, and we all got our fancy. uniforms on kilts and and dirks and all and there's this bang bang bang at the door and it's the the commanding officer with a bunch of officers and he and the RSM who's the head of the of the mess obviously and he calls out who is it who dares to stir my meeting and the the commodity officer is like RSM it is I your commodity officer they're playing this game it's like they're honestly playing this game and he's like, reluctantly, Sergeant, when you open the door?

I goes, he opens door, and the Kawani officer comes in, and Doris him turns around to us, to the mess, and he goes, who's the traitor? And he pulls out his dirt. Who's the traitor? And I'm like, it was me, and Chris, we hear him, come here, and he comes, and he slashes off our sergeant's ranks and, like, throws them on the table,

and says, they're yours now, and we go over to him, and he puts on our, like, white tear from Canada officers like this, and he leads us out. And as we go out, the Oresum shouts to us, and there to return! And now we know, we're now going to the ox's mess. Anyways, so it was, it was, it was fantastic. It was like theater. It was, but the whole point of it is, something that villain points out to me later, he says, the idea is to make the shift from being an NGO to take commission is a lot. much larger shift than you can imagine until you go through it. And he says, this is why.

He says, Yazad Vass, there's two pieces of advice that can give you becoming an officer. The first one is three most important words that officers can ever utter or carry on sergeants. Okay. In other words, tell your sergeant what to do, not how to do it. That's the whole philosophy and what have you. So that's how you do that. But there's the other thing.

He says, he's told me, and I've taken this on board as my personal philosophy, every time you get an order from a senior officer to you, the first words out of your mouth, but rather not keep them in your brain, must be, fuck you. So your initial, your instinctive reaction must be when you receive an order must be fuck you. And that sounds weird, but yes what it means. He says, you have an obligation and a duty to only execute lawful legal orders. Yeah, yeah. So your reaction must be first to objects. Right.

And then figure out, okay, you've given an order, what is legal about it, not accept the order and then say, oh, but this is illegal. And that's the mindset you have to have. He says, well, this is how it works. As an NGO, you can receive an order, you must carry it out. End of story. If it's illegal, you will say, I can't because it's illegal, then that's it. But as an officer, not only you have to carry an order you've given,

you've got to accept responsibility for commanding those below you. So you are not just passing on the order. You are actually responsible for mentally processing it. And then issue the order because the commission by definition gives you the authority of the government. Whereas an NCO does not have that authority. They operate under the ages of an officer, of a commissioner officer. That's what commission is about. But it's summed up by the first thing is fuck you.

and the whole process behind it is really a heavy process but it's summed up by that attitude. Okay, so him and I were good friends, and he'd published some books before, and he was struggling he wanted to bring out a new version of his book because he'd used a bunch of pseudonyms the first time because they're still politically sensitive, and I'm a military book,

and I said, well, I'll try and help you, see what I can do. So I took his book, and then the process I was moving up to back up to Durban, and I figured out, how to do the editing for him. I prepared the documents. I was going to stop there. And then I realized,

oh, but there's this new thing. Brit on demand. There's lulu.com. And I then said, oh, villain, listen. We can try and do this thing. Self-published. He was like,

okay, it sounds good. Let's do it. And we did it. And that's how it started. I did the first book and that's how it started. So I then came up, the next thing I came up with was like a mission, visiony kind of statement,

which was, and I believe this passionately, is that the stories of the people are the history of the nation. And I believe that passionately because when histories are written by historians, they look at these people in positions that are generals and politicians

and not necessarily power because people themselves are power as well. I've avoided, I put my words quite carefully. They're in this higher position. They look at it sort of from an eagle-eyalized view, looking down on it over time and all the rest of us. But I believe that the real history is the worms eye view. So it's the ordinary person who writes the story of the ordinary person. And that's the equivalent of the

archaeologist going through the midden heap and finding, you know, a broken piece of pottery. We're in the modern age, we don't leave broken potter, we can leave a whole story of, and the best example I have is I did these two different books. The one was the story of a guy who's did his national service as a chef. And you have to understand, everybody did basic training. Everyone learned how to draw, how to use a weapon, et cetera, et cetera.

But then after that, his individual training was to be a chef. And this was his story of his army, his two years and army. And the anecdotes of what happened to him and the friends around him and the ups and downs was an army story

and was his story. That wasn't the one hand. In the other hand, I published a book by Colonel Ander Deertricks, nicknamed Didis, who was twice decorated for Valor with Norris Crook Silver and the Norris Crooks. He was a Reki Special Forces officer, who was, he epitomized the, the small teams concept, who developed an extent of the small teams concept, etc., etc., etc., etc. Two different books that are the stories of the people. And when you do the history, which one's more important? And I believe, neither.

I believe the more we can get of those stories, and this is what I believe, and this is literally why I started doing the publishing, was to tell people's stories. So I did a lot of autobiographies and what have you of various people. I mean, across the spectrum, probably 70, 30 percent military versus non-military because that's the people I know. But we did a whole bunch of books, and we were doing, oh, sometimes 150, 200 books in the year, which is huge amount.

That's crazy. But we had to do it because that was what we had to do to make ends meet because we might sell 10 copies of a book ever. So you put in all that work and you only sell 10 copies. I mean, you've got to have a lot of titles to be able to make up, you know, enough to actually make enough money to put food on the table. Where can people find these books, John? Well, I mean, I'm not doing it anymore, but most of them are either on Lulu or on Amazon.

But I'm not actively doing them. Well, there are a couple of books that still sell like Jack Creer's book, I'm a great issue of honor. We still print in small numbers 20 to 30 at a time, deliver to him and he'll then send them to people that when he goes and he talks somewhere or something that he'll sell them. But his book is available on Lulu.com. You just have just Google it.

I mean, you know, if you want what's looking for, you'll find it. The company, my company was just done production. John Dovey, J.D., just done. So that made sense. And the motto was, if you want it done, it's just. done. Yeah, that's yeah, anyway, I thought that was

amusing. But we stopped that and we left because changing countries, you know, laws and admin and tax and that, all that stuff doesn't work. So we do it. We help people out now with, if they want to publish stuff,

we'll format it for them, help them get onto Amazon, that kind of stuff. But it's not our primary business anymore between my wife and I. She's doing online stuff with, she basically organizes and runs people's online presence and what have you. And I'm doing bits and pieces, keep food on the table. And then when I get security stuff, then I do it. And that's why I do all these funny little jobs.

Are there any of these more recent adventures that you've had since we've relocated that you'd like to talk about before we get out of here tonight? Well, yeah, I mean, just as a, you know, just maybe to show the sort of scope of things. I mean, I had some, I had an occasion where somebody was working for one of the, the liners, you know, the pleasure cruises, the big boats. And they'd had an injury on duty in IOD. And so the company put them up in a really nice hotel while they waited for something to go through for this person. to get treatments or what have you. But they were suspicious that maybe there was a fake injury. So I was looking to street next to this person and surveil them and follow them on the

street and all this kind of stuff, which I wasn't very good at because that's not my thing. So anyway, so that was that was the one, that was one tiny little job I did for like four days. And you caught them doing back flips off the high dive board. Well, yes, it wasn't quite that bad. But it was like, you know, walking without any kind of pain, you know, meeting. Yeah, yeah. All that kind of stuff.

And then I've done another thing where I arranged a trip and escort for a bunch of geologists into the Darien where they got to ride on one of those really those hollied out log boats with some of the local people and bang rocks with hammers and sniff them and they go, oh, you smell that? And stick it in my nose and I'm like, no. It's organic. It's organic. It's a million years old oil

that's in these rocks. And so that was fascinating. And I've served papers on people for, you know, the normal kind of stuff. They've been doing naughty shit shenanigans and they get served papers or I've done, you know, all kinds of bits and pieces. There's one client to, he arrives here on his private jet. And then he's got a rule. He does not sit in a vehicle for more than 21 minutes. So if the traffic's going to make it more than 21 minutes, we fire the chopper up.

So that's $3,000 to turn on the helicopter. To take him, man, not even seven kilometers. And then we're picking up with the armored vehicles and taking to hotel and, you know, look after him, what have you for a couple of days. So it's all these different bits and pieces. It's fun. I'm having, I'm having a great time when it comes through. And you've also taken up photography. Yeah, I was just saying to somebody a bit earlier.

I just got myself literally yesterday or day before EOS R5. So it's really a nice professional level. camera but I was saying to somebody I was walking on the beach at dawn two mornings ago and I was like taking of the sunset and the waves and all the rest of it and the kind of the sun was up and it's boring I've done what I'm going to do and I'm walking with a camera and I catch him out the side of my eye and I picked the camera up and I go like this and when I looked at the photo later on man there it is smack bang in the middle is this bird in flight and I was explaining to to the person I was talking to us like these are

the old skills. Yeah. Yeah. This is reflective shooting. This is, man. This is reflective shooting. It's good at the same old. Bam.

So now what I, and the reason I actually got the camera is actually for this reason is that, you know, we were talking about, excuse me, about how, um, how vigilance is good and bad, depending on circumstances. So all this stuff that I spent so much time of my life trying to perfect and building muscle memory for and which I'll never use unless the, you know, zombie apocalypse happens. Let me transfer that to something that is peaceful, enjoyable, gets me out, and blah.

You know, pull the blanket over my head because the end of the world is, yeah, you know, I do this thing. And I'm so excited about it. And I think it's like really cool. The fact that I've used photographs for the end is kind of a bonus. It's the process. That's the, you know, the person being the punishment. The process is the pleasure.

So, yeah, I'm having fun. John, I mean, any like... I mean, oh my word, I lived my whole life with the shaven head. I'm going to be. I'm just doing it because I can for no other reason. Yeah, live in life, man. Yeah, exactly. You know, as we reflect back on, you know, decades of military service and out of military,

I mean, do you have any final thoughts, any big takeaways, lessons learned that you'd like to share with people? Brothers. Brothers. What I've come to learn is that the most important thing for us at this age and this stage of our lives is to make sure we look after our brothers. I've lost about 47 of our brothers in the last six years to suicide accidents and various other things. I'm tired of it. I'm really tired of it. And that's why to me I will advocate always speak.

This is why I talk is because we speak about it means that it normalizes it. the fact that I and I will tell people that my daughters tell me because I will say what's the problem people say and my daughters will say you look scary and I'm like

what do you need scary I'm a dead bear and they're like no one looks and I'm not scary you understand what I'm saying so the perception is weird and so I try as much as I can to advocate that we not necessarily in public but that we speech each other as men or as veterans, honestly, honestly, and we actually speak about emotions, which we normally

don't do. So I had this conversation with somebody other day, and I said, and they are like, hey, how are you, brother? I'm doing a check-in. I said, I'm sad. And they go, oh, that's not good. And I said, no, no, no. I'm sad, but I'm learning to be okay with that.

Right. Right. And that's difference. It's not to make me happy. I've got to learn to be okay with it. I've got to learn to accept, okay, so this guy, something bad happened to him and I'm missing. Like so bad he was like he was my brother, he was my buddy. And I'm missing.

I'm sad about the fact that he ended up doing what he did, you know, to end it all. That's not going to change. Right. I'm going to sad. This today, this today, 11th of the 11th is the day I cry. Yeah. Like tears because that's the day I allow myself. off to be okay with being sad.

Right. And I believe passionately that we need to, we as brothers need to remember that we support each other, that no matter what, that we talk to each other. Honestly, we don't talk shit, we talk honestly. It's not about when you sit around and cry and what have you, but it's like when you're feeling crap, then you say I'm feeling crap and why.

Right. You don't like, I'm fine. You don't do that stuff. Right. And then the last part is, the lesson is that all the stuff we talk about about post-traumatic stress and the this and that and all the rest of it. What it comes down to for me is about us discovering ways, mechanisms that we can deal with it in a healthy way.

And I think the more we explore these topics together, the more we talk about our history and things that happened to us and how they affected us. And like we were talking about that, it's a personal thing and your reaction is different depending on who you are and the medicate and was traumatized, not the guy lost his day. The more we talk about these things, the more people, the more our brotherhood can realize, that's okay. Yeah,

they're not alone. You're not alone. You're not the CAG operator or the, you know, the this or that. You're the chef. But your trauma is as real as that guy and what have you.

And it's okay. It's okay. We don't want to have a pity party. We don't do all that stuff, but you figure out ways of dealing with it and mechanisms to get through day and what have you. I think that that's the that's the important thing and then and then the other part of that is um we say these things glibly and they become slogans on shirts and what have you

but I believe that I've lived this my whole life and that is to be the shit dog to stand on the wall to stand on the bridge and what have you and that we speak out and not only speak I stand up for against evil and for what's right and starting with our families and, you know, and that we do these things. I think that's, that is, that is why most of us stayed longer than two seconds when we actually got the opportunity to be in, I mean, service. Right. Am I, am I speaking?

I mean, is this? No, I agree. I think that so many of the people that are in the military, especially in combat arms, are, are there for that reason. But my point is that as veterans afterwards, is to keep that mindset that that's what we do. Yeah. That is who we are. And I believe that's important. That's vital.

Yeah. Anyway, that's me. John, if people want to follow you or get in touch with you, is there anything that you want to plug or tell people where they should go and look for you? Okay. Well, I know you posted a link to my, the book I just did on Amazon. I wrote a book called Advice to Partisans. And without one, I'm not trying to punt the book. I just want to say, I've had some one-star reviews because people don't understand.

I was literally trying to say to people in the book, man, think about things like this. But anyway, so you can find the link there on the description to that. And you can track me on that and just Google me or search me on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, post bits and pieces all the time. I can share more if you like. Yeah, go for it. If there's anything you want to tell people about it. You can plug anything you want. Like, we're happy.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have anything to plug. I mean, I wrote the book and I put it out there for people to buy it if they want. It's literally just above cost price just to, you know, whatever. I'm advice to partisans. I'm looking at what's happening in Ukraine and I'm hearing what's happening in other places that people want to do stuff. And what I was trying to say to people, and I'm curious to hear what people think about it, you actually maybe know something about this thing, is that don't forget, you need to make sure that you have medical supplies and knowledge. I'm not trying to say to people, this is how you treat medical issues.

I get a criticism on Amazon about, oh, this book is useless, you know, because he says that. And I'm like, no, do this an 80-page book that is like, he has a framework. think about these issues. You've got to deal with the fact that if you are going to be a partisan, someone in your group is going to die. You need to think about logistics. You need to think about communication. These are some of the things like you're an abatist to stop tanks

and you can do this. But when you do that, remember, and it's advice to partisans. Right. You know, and so I wrote the book specifically because I got the feeling that there's too many people who don't understand what's going on. They don't see. And I keep talking about this. I've been speaking about this for a long time about,

the difference between rural warfare and urban warfare and what's happening with Putin who observed the second Battle of Brosne where they just flattened it and they're all over the rubble because the first Battle of Brosne, the Russian army got absolutely destroyed and, you know, talking about these things. And these are important things because they affect what's happening right now. And how people think and how people approach this. And the other part of that is that I think that people have forgotten what warfare is. We used to police actions. Bigger or smaller, they police actions. They're not the grind. I mean, today's the 11th of 11th. The omicists was signed at 5 a.m in the morning. And in the omicis, they agreed that the guns would stop at 11 a.m.

Between 5 a.m. and 11 am, approximately 10,000 men died. That's what war is. Right. No reason for those men to die. Right. They signed the omicist at 5 a.m. in the morning and they it was just convenient to make the gun stop at 11 so 10,000 men died for convenience yeah can you imagine that in today's world impossible to imagine yeah so people have

forgotten what war is they honestly have and those of us who've experienced war hate war the most we're also the people who miss war the most right yeah yeah yeah and i can say that to you guys And, you know, yeah, no, no, I understand. Because you understand. You get it. There's lots of things that go and spoken about the experience that are very attractive to men. It makes it make so much nonsense and focuses on on things that are really important and are oriented the way our minds work and how we work is, you know, with other men and in teams. And there's all these positives to how we work in this.

A living life is just too much complexity for a lot of us. Right. Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely true. Yeah. Yeah. So, and it's, you know, if you've got a problem, shoot it. Yeah. It's the same thing. It's pure, yeah.

If it blow it up to that, it's a shoulder, you haven't used enough explosive. Exactly. Simple. Yeah. So we have two questions real quick, actually, to Hassan 1166. Thank you very much. Hey, John, Umberto S from the old Army talk days. glad to see you on here on the team house you finally made the big time thank you man i've got to

tell that story so um just soon after 94 what i mean talking about about talking is nobody was talking okay right just nobody communicated about stuff and so what i did is i created a um a list of called omni talk and as we started an email conversation and it builds up to you about between 200 and 300 regular subscribers and at the peak of it we were exchanging like 600 messages a day emails a day wow and so it was like really busy and what was interesting about it was that there were people on there

that I've become a lifelong friend with look at this hello Humberto there are people on there like Barry Fowler who became a really good friend of mine who was an army psychologist and he actually him and I had long conversations about all these kind of topics We'd have these really interesting topics. And I mean, Trevor Perks and all kinds of interesting people. Even Donald R. Morris, who wrote The Washing of the Spears, he was a subscriber for a while.

David Hackworth, who wrote About Face, as you'll know, when he started Solvers for the Truth, he actually corresponded with him for a while because we were talking about, you know, the kind of thing that he was doing. And literally, because of the Army talk thing, that he thought there was a correspondence in what we were going to do. And then that didn't happen. I mean, died and all the rest of it. So, I mean, Army Talk was very important for a while. And then things like Facebook and came along and all these online boards and it kind of peaked it out.

But the list is still there. I still still on Google groups. It's awesome. We still check. So thank you very much. And the second question was from KJAM. Thank you very much. How much of an outlier is your 35-year Sandoff service?

Seems to me that you cross a unique geopolitical and generation. part of the 100 plus year history well okay I don't know so so what happened I think is that a lot of guys served because they were compelled to serve so when they they they went and they did the they they they service their camps as we approached after about 91 the the the the call-up ratio the the the the response the reporting ratio decreased heavily there were a lot less people who were willing to actually do it. I think as much as like 70% non-reporting or something,

it was like really, really hectic. So, yes, that was a small grouping right there. And then after 94, there was even more reluctance because there was no compulsion. People had still had political issues. They had, you know, those kind of sort of issues. And so there was a much smaller retention rate. ratio people actually continue to serve over that. I would say that there's a couple of hundred of us, a couple hundred of us, maybe as much as that, and we probably all know each other.

We run each other so many times and exercises and deployments and schools and that kind of stuff. In fact, you probably find most of them in my friends list on Facebook. John, thank you so much for this wide-ranging interview and like a super interesting perspective that, you know, over here, us Yanks, we don't necessarily get to hear this so often. So, I mean, I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Absolutely pleasure. I was a bit concerned that, you know, it would be a bit boring for people who don't know the background to a lot of this stuff.

But I hope it came across all right. No, I think you did a terrific job of explaining the background. And I hope people come away from it with like a greater understanding of like the complexities. and what a difficult time in history this was and, you know, I don't know, a greater understanding, right? That's the goal. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

Much appreciated. Thank you, John. We really appreciate it. Anytime, John, and please stay in touch. And we will be back with all of you guys out there next Monday. We're going to have Greg Coker here in studio. So we will see you in just two days. John, again, thank you so much.

And we'll see you. see everyone out there in a couple days. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much.