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Thoughts and opinion from the wards
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Recollections of a soldier doctor
For two years of my medical career I was a soldier doctor. Not just a rank carrying uniformed doctor in a sickbay or a medical outpost, but a weapon-carrying kick-ass fighting soldier, whose main job was firstly to fix injured soldiers, and secondly to take over their roles as fighting men if need be.
In 1987 South Africa was at war. Nelson Mandela was still in jail, and the African National Congress was a banned political organisation. Communism was alive and well. Every white South African male was conscripted into the armed forces. We had a choice not to go, but that meant leaving our families and homes into self-imposed exile. I was keen to experience military life. Every generation of men in my ancestry for hundreds of years had fought in some conflict, and I had grown up listening to stories of close escapes, ambushes, major campaigns. I read book after book as a teenager about war and soldiering. When I was conscripted, I had a choice between the mundane and the ordinary route or excitement and adventure. I volunteered, underwent a selection process, and found myself one of twenty recruits that year who would provide medical services to Special Forces teams. The conflict in 1987 was predominantly across the border in Angola. South Africans were fighting Angolans assisted by Cubans, East Germans and Russians. The enemy had complete air superiority and advanced ground-to-air missiles. Our helicopters could not fly during the day. Our forces fought far from home across enemy lines. Standard policy was ‘a doctor within an hour’ for any wounded soldier. This meant doctors would have to go with the teams into action, however far away from home that would be. Any soldier knows a chain is as strong as its weakest link. We had to be able to walk, fight, survive, antitrack, and escape as well as the others in the team. I learned how to freefall from 15 000 ft at night with 40kg of equipment and my weapon, how to strip and reassemble an AK47 in the pitch dark, fire an RPG7 rocket, how to make fire without matches, how to set up an operating theatre in a submarine, how to walk miles with 50kg of gear on my back. We carried enough instruments and drugs to do a full laparotomy. One day I amputated a leg underneath a thorn bush to save an allied soldier’s life. Other than the enemy fighter jets overhead I never saw an enemy soldier. Shells fell around our positions on occasion. On one particular standoff I dug a large covered bunker for a medical position, but decided to leave a small fist-sized skylight for light. A shell hit our position and a piece of shrapnel flew through that hole into the soil inches from where I sat. I still keep that jagged piece of steel as a lesson. And yet malaria and accidents killed far more men on both sides than direct military activity. I treated predominantly malaria and gonorrhoea, and every now and then a minor shrapnel wound. As complex, high tech and vicious this war was, the daily numbers of injured and killed were seldom, if ever, more than the casualties of crime and alcohol-fuelled violence in any one major city back at home. It was bizarre. Two years goes by very fast. I left the army, and within three months was looking after patients, my own patients, in another country, and who were avowed supporters of the regimes I had been fighting. Within six months the war was over, and South Africans turned their attentions to the internal struggles that preceded the handover of power and true democracy in 1994. I understand the addiction of war, the adrenaline rush that makes mundane activities of life in a warzone thereafter thrilling, and the dissociation that civilian life can bring. I can understand the violence behind political ideals, but not the alcohol-fuelled violence that permits friends and family members to fight and shoot and stab each other as is so often the case in our ‘normal’ communities. Any regrets? None whatsoever. I grew up during those two years, as do many men, some too young, in combat zones around the world. I carry more scars from my work in urban trauma units than I do from my military experience. Funny thing, that! The military war has been over for over twenty years, but the urban war, the conflict born of poverty, continues.
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I too crept with stealth in the night, armed only with a bayonette in my teeth, a prescription pad, a melting Mars Bar and a Danish salami in my basic pouches, all but devoid of ammunition as a man can not live on bread alone and after a while 7.62 mm rounds become a bit boring even with tomato sauce. My teeth were trained to tear men's hearts out and to eat them slowly, right atrium first (I am right handed), the the RV, a chew on the LAD and then, to descend on that delicacy, the left auricle which tastes so much of a sow's ear. No silk purse for sure but...I will spare you the gory details of this military Hannibal, this Dexter of dextrocardia.
We too were laden with bullet pock marked kevlar and Rid mosquito repellent lest our real enemy the mosquito assail us; dengue by day and malaria by night. Is there no end to this hell. If the mozzie doesn't it'll be Japanese encephalitis or a rabid monkey... all those 17 shots for nought.
Hence it was always sleeves down, and no fish net stockings, disrupted camouflage uniforms to confuse the wily Anopheles and Aedes aegypti. We Australians are no fools. We have overcome Germans, Japanese and even Italians who surrendered with their crates of chianti. Mosquitoes are smaller than crocs, smaller than water buffaloes and dingoes. We are invincible.
How I longed for the solace of an ice cold Coke or even, pray tell, the weekly ration of beer to be opened in front of the quartermaster lest we secrete it in our sleeping bag and fondle it to sleep.
Women there were in tight hugging PT shorts but nurses were out of bounds except for our UN Portuguese guards who had big biceps, big machine guns and even bigger... well not always as Australia is bigger than Portugal.
It was a living hell inside a tent on the equator with 100% humidity and 40 degrees C not the mention the steriliser next to my sleeping bag. Talk about wet dreams.
Well now the war is over and we are all friends again. The 75,000 dead are but a bad dream. Yes, sharing a kerosene tin with an rabid aardvark and carrying five magazines of 7.62 mm for your telescopic Steyr with scope sights with hardly enough room for your stethoscope and portable CT scanner is tough but I came through a better better better person..
Yes, I was a great war and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Now pass my bong, Jeeves.
Now back to darkest Africa.
The best book I have read about doctors at war is Tramstop Moscow.
I wrote three articles which were published about my "war hero" experience. One was on military incompetence based on the book, The Psychology of Military Incompetence which is a must for all cut lunch commandos, weekend warriors or doctors who have a bent to the stupidity of war which is in essence a licence to kill legally until the umpire declares that it is full time and thence illegal.
War is the obscenity of the species.
War, like marriage, is a funny thing, both have their adherents and detractors, their good and bad times.
Bit like being a doctor really.
Whether you are a doctor, infanteer or cook, we are trained first and foremost as infanteers. I certianly was an knew how to use a bayonette as well as a range of weapons.
I never thought of myself as a doctor first and a soldier second and when the bullets start zipping past and your sandbagged dugout no longer feels so impregnable you are just a target in someone's sights; your brain about to be an exploding water melon.
I also think of people around me even in civilian life as whether I would like them to share my foxhole in a scrap.
At night, before dimming the light, I still have the same routine which I will never forget.