Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: HISTORY (03/10/22)
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TITLE: Unknown War | Previous Challenge Entry
By Corinne Smelker
03/18/22 -
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But in 1986 my parents waved my brother off in Pretoria’s Church Square as he boarded the bus with other 17- and 18-year-old boys, headed for basic training. He was just one in a long line of sons who had been sent as fodder to the gristmill of a long-standing, but almost unknown war.
There was no choice in the matter. If you were male, in good health, and of age, then off you went, giving your country two years of your life. Peter, my brother, was one those of boys.
The ‘wind of change’, those famous words spoken by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan back in 1960 when he visited our country, was finally blowing, presaging the enormous changes that would rock the country.
Peter finished his basic training but because of a bum knee was made a field medic. “Not sure how that helps me,” he joked when we saw him briefly on his one and only weekend leave. “If someone is wounded, they call the medic, me, and I have to come running. Might as well give me a gun and let me shoot someone!” Mom shushed him, but couldn’t hide the fear in her eyes.
It was the not knowing that was the worst. Because the media was government owned and run, they chose what South Africans heard, and we heard almost nothing about the conflict that was happening a few hundred miles away.
People today, if they know anything about the war, attribute it to apartheid, or try to distill the reason for it down to one or two simple sentences.
Nothing is ever that simple. It really was a conflict between red and green – communism and capitalism. In the 1960s Russia had its eye on expanding its reach and South Africa with its natural resources, and millions of desperately angry and unhappy indigenous people was ripe for the picking, or so it thought. Turns out the one thing people in South Africa hated more than apartheid was communism.
My brother wrote from the border. His letters were filled with names of people we didn’t know, and would never meet. He spoke of night-time patrols, hidden landmines, skirmishes, bullet wounds and shrapnel. Most of all though, his letters were filled with the hope that soon no more young men would have to fight and die to defend freedom.
At the end of 1987, having fulfilled his two-year stint for the country, he came home. Quieter, wiser, and angrier.
The war ended in early 1990, just after the 1989 fall of communism. Much like the war itself, it went out, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Most of the world never even knew there’d been a 23-year-long conflict in the first place.
Sometimes I catch my brother staring into space and wonder if he’s thinking of long-lost comrades, of exploding landmines and bullet wounds too big to patch.
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The South African Border War, also known as the Namibian War of Independence, occurred in Namibia, Zambia, and Angola from August 1966 to March 1990. My brother and all of my male friends spent two years in the military before they could start university.
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War is devistating to the mind more than to the body. There are no unwounded soldiers. We need to pray for healing and supernatural comfort for all soldiers.
Thank you for a superbly written story.