| Time | Summary | |
| 16:05 | But not all those who turned bossies did so in the bush or in the war. Wayne Wiernzl would never have become a soldier if the law had not made him. // My parents had found out that I was medically unfit to go to the border and yet I was psyched up to go to the border. That is the reason why I am the way I am today, because the medical complaints were just seen as trash. You know, in an office, throw the trash in a dustbin. We weren’t just numbers. | Full Transcript |
| 16:47 | The experience pushed him over the edge and into ward 24, the psychiatric ward at one military hospital ‘Voortrekkerhoogte,’ the place where most of the soldiers who went bossies during service ended up. | Full Transcript |
| 17:02 | There were plenty of guys in ward 24 when I was there at the time and they were suffering from various different diseases. And I’m not a doctor, at that time I didn’t know what they were suffering from, but the guys were bossies. One guy was a parabat and I don’t know how he did it, but I was told by the other guys that he climbed onto a light fitting in the ward and jumped off. Maybe he thought it was an airplane. | Full Transcript |
| 17:39 | And at night you’d lie in your bed and you’d listen to these bizarre screams and shouts and behaviour and people going quite mad in the ward next door. And it was kind of, well ‘daai klomp is bossies’ [that lot is ‘bossies’]. And it was sort of left at that you know. And I don’t think the military at the time had any idea of what they were really dealing with. | Full Transcript |
| 18:01 | This one guy he was just so bossies, he was actually amusing. I mean whenever you heard helicopters, I mean this is Voortrekkerhoogte; it’s like a military town, helicopters going all the time. This guy heard a helicopter, he would shoot under his bed and he would go into … this guy was … his nerves were shot, you know. He was fucked. And they sent him back to the border. While I was there they sent him back to the border. | Full Transcript |
| 18:57 | Today we know that what these soldiers suffer from is post traumatic stress disorder. // Our problem with most people who were injured in the border problems and earlier disputes are that many of those men have gone unrecognized, undiagnosed and untreated and we do know from international experience in other countries after similar conflict that the longer the delay the tougher the treatment is, the less successful it may be and the more skilled it may need to be. And the Vietnam experience I think is one we need to learn a lot about in our country because the parallels are very dramatic. Some things do seem to make it worse, being in an unpopular war, an unpopular conflict is a problem. Our men had a problem even worse in some ways than Vietnam in that I’ve seen a number of people who talk about being exposed to mayhem and horrors in Angola and they would go back to the camp and on the radio the news would say our men are not in Angola and they would think I could be blown to ...more | Full Transcript |
| 20:14 | Soldiers do not easily speak of their memories or their scars. A cloud of silence hovers over the unresolved trauma some of them suffer. | Full Transcript |
| 20:26 | You know, PTSD is a longing back to war, a longing for a situation where one can be in control again, where you are protected, where you don’t have to explain. And you must remember there is no mother and father and brother and sister and boyfriend and girlfriend to whom you had to explain your actions. | Full Transcript |
| 20:58 | Many of the veterans I know still haven’t, either at all or to any extent, told their family exactly what happened to them, where they were, what happened and why they are still haunted by it and one does need to be able to get through that. | Full Transcript |
| 21:14 | Many feel abandoned by the Defence Force for not helping them conquer the ghosts of the past, for not acknowledging the damage that war does or at least helping them give their nightmares a name. | Full Transcript |
| 21:28 | We had come to the end of our tether. We’d been involved in that kind of thing seeing patients, seeing people being killed for 12 months already and all because I wanted to go and heal people and not kill them. And we went to see the local psychiatrist who was resident in Oshakati and the major in charge of South African medical services up there; and we were basically told to grow up and carry on and that there was nothing wrong with us. | Full Transcript |
| 22:05 | The army could have done more for Coloured soldiers. Those who became bossies on the border because of the circumstances there. Today they walk the streets. They are crazy. But they became crazy in the army. As soon as you go crazy in the army and you are not productive, you are no longer good enough for the army. | Full Transcript |
| 22:28 | The army should have done something to help us, but you can’t blame the army. I don’t think the army ten years ago knew what PTSD was. I think they would have done something for us if they could or if the disease had a name. We still believe we did a lot for our country. Part of PTSD is that many of us believe that we have not been acknowledged for what we did and that’s where we needed help. | Full Transcript |
| 23:14 | But the message that was given to many people was you’re a coward or there’s something wrong with you, and again there was the attitude of almost a joke, that bossies was a sort of a joke. People joked about whether they were or weren’t or whether other people were or weren’t, without really treating it fully. Many soldiers said if they complained at all they were sent to see the ‘dominee’ [priest] who told them that God was on our side and they should simply pray more, which really doesn’t solve the problem and doesn’t hear what the person is trying to say about it. | Full Transcript |
| 23:45 | I’m glad that our generation could call the disease by a name. That if something like this ever happened again that our children or their children need not go through the same hell we did. Remember this PTSD did not only break people – it broke families and households. It caused death. It caused a lot of damage. | Full Transcript |
| 24:20 | We have to go through years of storytelling before we can forget those stories, while they’re untold they’ll never be forgotten, but they will never be learnt from either. We learn from the Vietnam veterans I think the cost of not dealing with it properly. We learn from them the fact that on the one hand we do need what they had, some form of veterans’ service; an official recognition by the state of the duty to the veterans from all parties. | Full Transcript |
| 25:25 | Basically what it means is that it’s not a bunch of ex soldiers getting together having a braaivleis and swopping bush stories. What it is, is SWAPO, ANC, APLA, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Koevoet, Recces, all the units, every single unit, everybody whoever was trained in any way militarily getting together and just making some kind of sense of the mess that we made. | Full Transcript and References |
| 26:09 | Those who spoke tonight have started breaking the silence in the hope that the thousands of others who came back alive might now recognize their ghosts and start living. | Full Transcript |
| 26:45 | End credits | Full Transcript |
