19 With a Bullet by Granger Korff Read Free Book Online

designed to be carried and had sharp edges that cut into your shoulder, no matter how you tried to carry them, making the whole business almost unbearable after just a few minutes .
    Six guys would be carrying the pallet while the other two took a ‘sanitykeeping break’ of about a minute. We alternated almost continually, with the front guys eventually ending up at the back resting for a minute before they started at the front again. If you were the two guys at the back who were next in line for a break, your mind would almost be at breaking point from having carried the thing for something like five minutes and having moved from the front to the middle, and then to the back position. The men who were resting had to keep running to stay up with the team. Nevertheless, we got it past the gate and ran like this for 21 blood-and-sweat-soaked, nonstop kilometres across long open fields and endless dusty sand roads, with our instructor behind us, carrying a long switch. One of the guys on our team, a ‘Dutchman’, an Afrikaner, nicknamed Cheese, lost his mind at some point. He screamed and sobbed and had to be slapped repeatedly across the face to get him to get a grip on himself, because if one man cracked and gave up the team was sunk.

JUMP COURSE
    Comfortably numb—Roger Waters
    Cheese thanked us afterwards for the face-slappings and said that was what snapped him out of the hell. By this time my feet were numb, but I knew the damage that was being done with each step. So we bit the proverbial bullet and somehow our class came in first. It was the first and last time that they used the steel pallets. When the top brass heard about it they banned the pallets from being used on future PT courses because they were too gruelling for the troops. Some guys really broke down after that run. They went back to using telephone poles and tyres.
    Suddenly, one afternoon at 16:00, it was all over. Two hundred of us stood on the parade ground; all that was left from the 700 hopefuls. Two companies of paratroopers. We had made it through the PT course. Two weeks of nonstop PT. I smiled stupidly, shook my head and swore with sheer relief.
    After a week’s break to recover, the next step for everybody was the threeweek jump course. For me, it was hobbling straight to the hospital in sandals, where a horrified doctor looked at me strangely after checking my feet and immediately gave me enough antibiotics to kill a horse and three weeks’ light duty, also in sandals. I had lost all my toenails. He could not believe that I had gone for two weeks with feet in that condition. He shook his head as if disgusted with the army and muttered something in Afrikaans. I said nothing. I spent that day—and the next few weeks— once again comfortably numb from double doses of the strong painkillers he had given me.
    My feet would take years to fully recover and were to give me trouble throughout my whole military service. The rest of the guys from the newly formed D Company went off to do the threeweek jump course while I worked in the stores on light duty. I would do the jump course a month later with H Company. I found myself side by side with the shithead staff sergeant who wouldn’t change my boots in the first place. He was a real prick, oblivious to the suffering and pain he had caused me, but needless to say I got the perfect size boots for myself. I also picked up some old, faded uniforms, which was cool because all of us had stiff, brand-new brown uniforms. Only after a long time and many washes would they fade to a light khaki colour, the symbol of an ou man , an ‘old man’, a veteran.
    One crisp winter morning we were all standing stiffly on the parade ground as usual when the fish eagles in the huge aviary at the battalion gates whooped loudly. Eight large trucks, billowing black smoke, came roaring through the gates, past the admin offices and pulled up to a stop on the parade ground, sending a cloud of brown dust drifting over us.