‘No soldier ever really survives a war’.

Audie Murphy

That morning, I was woken by the alarm of bird calls; the sky was turquoise, becoming lighter close to the pencil-line horizon. I levered myself upright and began putting on my boots. Motionless, the land lay stretched out below me.

Charged with the army’s acrid coffee, I was sitting up against a large boulder enjoying the cool, morning air when the quiet was punctured by the dry snapping of rifle fire on the valley floor below. It didn’t take me long to grasp what had happened. One of our patrols had got caught up in what sounded like a very serious firefight.

Almost immediately our radio crackled into life. ZANLA forces had been encountered in large numbers. Our orders were to sweep down from our OP (Observation Point) in the foothills of the Mavuradonha Mountains and attempt to engage them from the rear (they had fled by the time we got there but they came back later and found us).

As I grabbed my rifle and webbing and slung on my backpack I found myself thinking, once again, about the weird unreality of it all. How in the hell had I, a pacifist by nature, managed to get myself mixed up in this vicious bush war? Landed in this strange situation where the unfamiliar had suddenly become familiar?

It was not a war of my choosing, nor one I particularly wanted to be part of. Even today I still cannot adequately explain why I stuck it out until the bitter end of the conflict and carried on fighting long after many of those who had believed far more passionately in the cause than I had decided to call it quits – “gapped it” to use the slang of the day – and left the country. It is also no use pretending I was anything else but an extremely reluctant soldier or that I showed any real aptitude or talent for military life. Indeed, for the most part, I never felt I was anything more than a resentful, inadequate, half-trained civilian.

Looking back across the years I sometimes have difficulty recognising that man in the grubby camouflaged kit as myself; there is an abiding strangeness about it all. It is as if I am looking into a broken mirror and all those experiences happened to someone who looked like me but was in fact an impostor. For me, the past is, indeed, another country.

And yet, now that I reflect back on it, I realise the army was not all bad. It had some value. Firstly, it tested me in ways I would never have otherwise known. I learnt about physical and mental hardship, about dealing with extremes and staring into the abyss. I discovered what it was like being stripped down to my most basic self. At various stages, I was the hottest, coldest, most tired, thirstiest, hungriest, terrified, angry and miserable (but not the happiest) I have ever been in my life.

The fact that I survived these in extremis tribulations and emerged from it frayed, disenchanted and proud afterwards was, I suppose, an achievement of sorts.

Secondly, the army took me into areas I would have not otherwise seen and in so doing heightened my appreciation and love of the African landscape. In some perverse way, all the discomfort, fatigue and fear I experienced during those war days became a form of mini catharsis; it made me feel more part of the bush. We even had a term for it, one that suggested a temporarily disarranged self – one became “bush happy”.

The landscape affected me in other ways. Not sure whether my role was that of the hunter or the hunted I found my senses becoming sharpened to the sounds and smells of the bush. Far from the comforting normality of civilian life, I became increasingly feral in my habits, always watching and listening for anything that might threaten my chances of getting out alive.

For much of my initial national service – and in the subsequent seven years of military call-ups – the regiment I was with operated in the extreme North-East of the country, an area where civil administration, outside a few sandbagged strong points, had all but broken down. Not too far from the border with Mozambique, it was among the harshest and most rugged landscapes in all of the then Rhodesia and, along the escarpment itself, virtually uninhabited.

What always struck me most about this landscape – apart from the heat and general sense of discomfort – was the feeling of immensity it evoked. Behind us, the Mavuradonha Mountains rose in a steep pitch from the Zambezi valley floor while ahead of us a vast plain stretched out almost without undulation. And beyond that lay more of the same, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of raw, unspoilt, and untrammelled country leading up through Mozambique and then into the rest of Africa.

The more time I spent in it the more I began to see the beauty in the timelessness and silence and hugeness of the land. The sheer vastness of it seemed to be immeasurably increased by the dryness. Then there was the silence, broken only by the occasional bird song or jackal howl at night or a sudden gust of wind blowing in waves of warm air. It is a kind of silence you just don’t get in the normal, urban world with its bustle and false pleasures.

This, in turn, brought with it a vague feeling of loneliness, a sense of being cast off from familiar moorings, an awareness that there was no one else within easy reach. Strangely enough, this only added to its appeal.

Operating in this sort of country was never easy. In summer the heat could be stupefying. Weighed down by my heavy pack and ammo I could feel the sweat trickling down my back and soaking my shirt. It chafed between my thighs.

Thirst could plague us like a nagging toothache. We had to develop the will to endure it. Because we only carried a couple of bottles each, I was forced to restrict it to little sips. On several occasions, I suffered from severe leg cramps. Most awful of all was the time I collapsed from heat exhaustion and complete dehydration. My legs refused to function, my tongue became dry and swollen, like an old piece of leather while my throat felt like it was coated with fur.

If it wasn’t for a spotter plane that picked up our distress call and later returned to drop water, I often wonder if I might ever have got out…

The heat was not the only thing we had to contend with. The Shona word Mavuradonha roughly translates as Land of Falling Water and as the season progressed you could understand how it got its name. After months of nothing but sun and dust, the weather would begin to change. It would grow more unsettled and windy, moving smells around. Tall, purple-bottomed clouds would build-up to the north.

Once the rains broke we were put through the whole gamut: heavy rains, moist, intermittent rains, a half-hour sprinkle, a thundershower, drizzle. Our clothes and equipment became cold, damp, smelly. At night we had to endure all the discomforts as it poured down on us. Now and again, especially in the early stages of the storm, the darkness would be torn away for a second by a dazzling flash of lightning which would bathe the surrounding bush in a strange, otherworldly light. Then the thunder would roll, like the sound of cannon fire, and we would lie there dazed and stupefied and shivering in our sopping wet sleeping bags while the rain came pelting down around us.

Usually, the storm would pass as quickly as it came, the wind would die down and we would do our best to get back to sleep. In the morning the sun would shine through the wet leaves to where we lay sodden and miserable. Once we had dried out our gear and re-oiled our rifles we would continue on our patrol.

We couldn’t drop our guard. Such is the nature of guerilla warfare that we never really knew who we could trust – if, indeed, we could trust anyone – amongst the local civilian population. In most villages we visited the response was usually muted – neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was difficult to know, too, who the locals were more scared of offending – us or the other side. Many, accused of being “sell-outs”, had been arbitrarily killed by the guerillas as a warning of what would happen to those who chose to betray them. Others had been caught in cross-fire between the opposing forces and died that way.

While the more cautious hedged their bets, I am sure many did want to see a more representative government, one not made up solely of whites. For all we knew they could be in direct contact with the ZANLA forces, maybe even feeding them and passing on information about our movements.

In this sense, the war had already begun to highlight something of considerable political significance – it provided the ultimate test of the black “povos” ( English translation: the masses, the common people) real feelings. Although it helped, of course, to be armed we could never quite escape this sense of hidden danger or that, outside of our fellow soldiers, there was no one we could rely on.

For the most part, we operated in five-man ‘sticks’ sometimes linking up with another stick at night for added security. Patrolling in such small groups through a potentially hostile country, where the loyalty of the locals could not be relied on, I did my best to keep my eyes open, my mind alert to my surroundings or any movement in my peripheral vision. Alone like that, it was easy to feel eyes watching us, indeed the suspicions of being followed and watched became a constant companion. The uncertainty weighed on our minds.

Towards evening we would usually stop for one last brew-up before moving into our final position for the night. It was the time of day I liked most. There is something about the dissipating violet light as the sun sinks which makes everything seem, holy, natural and familiar. It is a time when earth, rock and sky seem to marry, a time when surrounded by the great wall of the mountain the landscape seemed to acquire an uplifting, transcendental quality. I could feel its beauty penetrating my soul. It made me feel grateful for being alive, grateful for having survived another day, grateful that I would shortly be able to sleep.

Far from the big city lights or man-made pollution, the night swarmed with stars while the sky above us seemed bigger than any I had ever seen before. Sitting in the middle of nowhere, staring into the enormity of space and feeling, in the most animal sense, my infinite littleness it was often hard to make sense of all. Perhaps that was the point of it. To make us feel very small, to remind us that we are just a speck and that our time on earth is short and fleeting.

Of what importance was I, caught up in this forgotten, war, in the grand scheme of things? Like many a soldier before me, I was forced to acknowledge the helplessness and insignificance of my lot – while at the same time cursing the old folk who had got us into this jam.

Not that these moments of philosophical introspection lasted long. Where, the night before, the world had seemed ethereal, dream-like, in the morning light I was only too aware of its hard contours, its physicality and my sense of discomfort.

One experience, in particular, still haunts my memory. It was our first major cross-border excursion into Mozambique, an exhausting march not made easier by the fact I was suffering from severe diarrhoea during the high summer heat and only had a limited amount of water to drink. There was something strange and spellbinding about crossing into an enemy country. It was like we had been passed through more than just a physical boundary. We had entered another dimension, reached the very edge of the known world. Civilisation, as I knew it, seemed a very long way away.

The further we penetrated, the more cracked, bleached, and wild the country became. The heat left me breathless. After days of tramping through the dry, Mopani-dominated scenery the vegetation suddenly began to green up and thicken and in the distance, we could make out the unmistakable sound of flowing water. We had reached the Zambezi.

The broadening river was full of cigar-shaped islands covered with reeds. Tall vegetable ivory palm trees, massive Ana trees and Natal Mahogany’s dotted the far shore under which grew a mass of riotous vegetation. Fed by several additional large tributaries the river had grown even wider and more powerful and imposing than the one I was familiar with, stretching out before us like a rumpled sheet of blue vinyl and measuring a good kilometre or two from side to side.

The emptiness of the country we had passed through was reflected in the emptiness of the river and its banks. There were no signs of human activity: no men polling along in dugouts, no fishermen, no women washing, no children playing on the water’s edge and no domestic animals. Indeed, the scene before us had probably changed little since David Livingstone and his mutinous crew came steaming up the river in the Lady Nyassa all those years ago.

The landscape itself – aside from the river – was similarly devoid of feature. No cliffs nor distant mountains were framing the river valley. There were few roads or paths to follow and the odd villages we passed through had long since been deserted. It all seemed strangely peaceful. For all intents and purposes, it appeared to be uninhabited although we knew were not alone. Somewhere out there was not only ZANLA but the Mozambique resistance movement, Frelimo, as well.

That thought kept us on our toes.

Reluctant to leave the cooling shade of the river we lingered as long as we could before turning around and heading back to our extraction point where we were due to be picked up and choppered back to our military base in Musengezi, just across the Rhodesian border. We could see no sign of life from the air either as we flew over the baked, engulfing landscape; just trees and more trees stretching from horizon line to horizon line.

So undifferentiated was the landscape that if not for the occasional baobab, I would have lost all sense of perspective. Looking like prehistoric animals with enormous bodies and a multitude of limbs spreading out laterally, as if they wanted to pluck us from the sky, they towered above the surrounding trees.

As we skimmed over their outstretched branches, I remember thinking to myself that winning a war in this sort of country would be virtually impossible. All the enemy had to do was stage hit and run attacks and then allow themselves to be swallowed up by the empty space where no one was likely to notice them because there were so few people to notice anything and those that there were would be unlikely to be in any hurry to trek to the nearest Security Force outpost to report what they had seen.

Time, the Great Revealer, would prove me correct on this point…