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OK, this isn't my story, it's a story I was told by our art teacher in high school. I'll call him Mike. So this was back in the days of apartheid South Africa, when there was universal conscription (of white men only). Mike went to university for art, which delayed this. Most of his friends were then ducking conscription by moving to the Netherlands to live off government money as artists (this was a thing back in the 80s). But Mike got a girl pregnant, and decided to allow himself to be conscripted as penance. There was a system for people who were pacifists. They could be conscientious objectors. Conscientious objectors went through all the military training, and were used by the military, but weren't made to enter combat situations. They were also treated like poo poo by literally everyone in the military. Mike decided not to do this, but didn't actually want to shoot anyone on behalf of a racist authoritarian government, so he made friends with the medics in basic training, and always had an excuse to avoid range. To make sure he wouldn't actually see combat himself, and to put himself in a position to do maximum disruption to the actually pretty fascist apartheid military machine, he went through officer training for his entire first year of service, coming out a 2LT. He ended up in the middle of the Border War. He had a few vague stories of calling for random reinforcements and things just to gently caress with the system until they reassigned him. He also had a story about the time that a platoon radioed in from patrol to say that they'd found a "crazed bushman", then a few hours later returned to base with an elderly and very dead Khoisan man, and a story about how he had a rifle and totally threatened them. (The rifle was standard SADF issue, and had just enough ammunition in it that it could have come out of their rifles and avoided the checks after patrol.) He didn't have enough evidence to bring charges against them, so instead he snuck into the morgue and made a cast of the body, then left concrete replicas of it around the camp to haunt them. Anyway, the story that sticks with me was the time his socker team went to play against Koevoet. Koevoet were a notorious At one Mike's centre forward scored, and the opposing centre forward grabbed him and put a knife to his throat, saying "that's not a goal". He then started dragging their centre forward around the field, knife to throat, with the crowd cheering along. Eventually Mike's driver crashed their APC through the gates of the soccer field, then got onto the 20mm cannon and trained it on the Koevoet team, while Mike's team all rushed inside so they could GTFO. Anyway, those are the stories I heard. Mainly he was an idiot for not loving off to the Netherlands when he had a chance.
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| ← # ? Jul 17, 2019 08:42 |
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