TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 8

Subsection 7

Mr Tim Ledgerwood, a former conscript

34 Mr Ledgerwood had a privileged upbringing in a white, English-speaking, middle class and deeply religious home. He said that:

The society that I grew up in asked no questions about military duty (this was in 1980). You went to school, you registered when you were sixteen, you went off and did your national service, you came home and life carried on as normal. Your girlfriend was proud to have somebody who was on the border, and the war was far, far away. None of us had ever been to Namibia.

35 Mr Ledgerwood started his national service in January 1980, with the Second South African Infantry Battalion in Walvis Bay. He described his growing disillusionment, first becoming a conscientious non-combatant and eventually, towards the end of his second year, going AWOL (absent without leave) with the intention of joining the ANC’s military wing.

Being young, foolish, unprepared and on my own, I was caught as I was about to climb over the border fence at Ramatlabana. It was then that the nightmare began. I was handed over to the Zeerust branch of the security police who interrogated me for about two weeks or so. I can remember very few details except the screaming. I was nineteen years old at the time. The dark nights of my soul had begun...

36 He was later handed back to the military police and eventually sentenced to six months detention.

My life after that was substantially and subtly different. I found myself emotionally exhausted for years afterwards - I’m talking twelve years afterwards. My sense of dissociation and alienation was acute. Before the Commission, I’d never met anybody who’d been through even remotely similar experiences to these, except for one guy who is now my best friend, a guy who spent his time instructing UNITA in Angola and had gone through some quite harsh things.

Professor Johan Hattingh, former captain in the Citizen Force, Stellenbosch Commando

37 Professor Hattingh, currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, did his initial one-year of training as an infantry soldier in 1973.

The rest of his national service was completed as part of the regiment of the University of Stellenbosch and, from the beginning of the 1980s, as a member of the Stellenbosch Commando. He described his gradual shift from wholehearted support for and full co-operation with the national service system in 1973, through disillusionment with the University of Stellenbosch regiment, to his reluctant participation in and passive resistance to the militarisation of his home town and his professional and private life.

We then had the opportunity to apply to be transferred to Stellenbosch Commando and we thought that would be better. We would not be transferred to border duty far away; we would be in our own home town. But that turned out to be more stressful as it were because, in a sense, we were now in military uniform walking around in our own home town, in our own backyard. We were in the public eye of our friends and family...

Besides Saturday mornings spent away on shooting practices, during the mid1980s, there were lots and lots of twenty-four hour standbys we were put on. There were roadblocks and you had to do duty over and over again. At that stage, Stellenbosch Commando was an all-white commando and the perception of the enemy was that it [consisted of] people on the other side of the colour line.

Mr John Deegan, conscript in the SAP and former member of Koevoet

38 Mr Deegan gave detailed testimony to the Commission about his initial involvement with the Security Police and his subsequent life in the early to mid-1980s as a ”Koevoet killer”, a member of a notorious SAP counter-insurgency unit on the Namibian border. His life vividly illustrates the continuing, destructive psychological toll of these activities on him and those around him.¹⁰

Mr Sam Sole, former conscript in the townships

39 Mr Sole submitted a first hand account of the experiences of a SADF soldier/ national serviceman in the townships of the Eastern Cape.¹¹

40 Sam Sole portrays the staggering gulf between the official instructions (“as members of a disciplined, effective and respecful security force each individual’s conduct must at all times be responsible and courteous”)¹² and the daily and nightly behaviour of the white troops and the police in the townships. For example:

One night ... we are hanging around and suddenly one stone smashes the windscreen of an SAP bakkie and two cops with shotguns bound off like dogs let off the leash. They stalk the one lone stone thrower and corner him. He continues his desperate barrage and they shoot him dead. He’s about sixteen; he was a kid.

41 Sole also tried to describe his own reaction to the “insane situation” in which he found himself :

My own guilt at my inaction in the face of this brutality, as well as the sheer physical impact of it, created an enormous tension and conflict of behaviour. My response was enough to get me labelled a ‘Kaffir boetie’ and a ‘Kommunis’, yet it is impossible to isolate yourself completely. You have been living fart to fart with these people for nine months. They have humanity although they abuse it in others and you have to continue to live with them. So you are forced to compromise yourself and, treacherously, you lose that sense of outrage until the next time.