Confessions of a Conscript, Disclosures of an Historian: An Autohistoriographical Essay

Life Writing ISSN: 1448-4528 (Print) 1751-2964 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlwr20 Confessions of a Conscript, Disclosures of an Historian: An Autohistoriographical Essay Gary Baines To cite this article: Gary Baines (2019) Confessions of a Conscript, Disclosures of an Historian: An Autohistoriographical Essay, Life Writing, 16:4, 513-526 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2019.1633457 Published online: 03 Sep 2019. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlwr20 LIFE WRITING 2019, VOL. 16, NO. 4, 513–526 https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2019.1633457 Confessions of a Conscript, Disclosures of an Historian: An Autohistoriographical Essay Gary Baines History Department, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa ABSTRACT KEYWORDS At the age of 18, I was drafted in to the South African Defence Force. I was a reluctant conscript who became increasingly uneasy in the knowledge that I was being trained to defend the apartheid system. I was deployed on the Namibian-Angolan border in the very early phase of what came to be known as the ‘Border War’. About 30 years later, I began to write about the war in my capacity as a professional historian. While I sought to produce scholarly work on the subject, I realised that my personal experience of having served in the army informed my approach to writing about the ‘Border War’. Indeed, I was persuaded by Simon Schama’s view that ‘all history tends towards autobiographical confession’. Like a confession, my ‘Border War’ project seeks to recuperate my sense of self-worth. To this end, this autohistoriographical essay about the ‘Border War’ explores the interstices of experiential knowledge and academic expertise. It seeks to come to terms with my embodiment as a veteran, with the modalities of memory that define my experience of military service and attempt to ascertain how these might have influenced my approach to the history of the ‘Border War’. Conscript; veteran; South African Defence Force; ‘Border War’ In the preface to my book South Africa’s Border War: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories, I proffered the following statement: For the sake of full disclosure, it should be noted that I am former South African Defence Force (SADF) conscript and hence a veteran. I make no claim to speak on their behalf though. In fact, many of my opinions are at odds with those of large segments of this ‘community of remembrance’. Nor did I set out to write myself into this (hi)story. But it would be disingenuous or dishonest to deny that I have something personal invested in this project (Baines 2014, vi). To reference my prior statement as a point of departure for this paper might well be deemed self-indulgent or solipsistic. But my intention of repeating it here is to problematise this articulation of the relationship between my younger self as a SADF conscript and veteran and my current self as an historian of the Border War. When I was first asked whether I wrote myself into the (hi)story of the War, I demurred. My training as an historian prompted me to take recourse in the largely discredited notions of objectivity and impartiality. But I soon realised that while I might not have been fully aware of it at the CONTACT Gary Baines G.Baines@ru.ac.za © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 514 G. BAINES time, my personal experience of the military informed my approach to writing about the Border War. While I acknowledged as much in my book, I did not explore my epistemological assumptions and how these influenced my historiographical practices. I propose to do so here. Practising historians seldom articulate their epistemologies, and I am no different. This is partly because the theories of how we acquire and create knowledge seem abstract or abstruse to historians trained in the tradition of empiricism. Suffice it to say, I have forsaken the view that we have a direct access to reality and come to accept that language and genre—in the sense of the codification of discursive practices—mediate the past. Hence historical knowledge is not simply derived from observation of the evidence and the inference of its meaning. Rather, I have come to accept that the meaning of historical narratives are not discovered in the events themselves but are reconstructed from traces of the past. I subscribe to a ‘soft’ version of constructivism that allows for the existence of an independent reality that sets limits to what meaning(s) may be gleaned from texts; they cannot mean simply what we want them to mean. History, then, is a discourse based upon a set of rules that define how truth is arrived at and how it is (re)presented and (re)produced (Munslow 2000). My postmodernism—if that’s what it is—has made me more self-reflexive about the practice of history. It behoves me to recognise that my epistemology defines my positionality as a scholar and underpins this venture into life writing. Confessions and autobiographical memories The confession is a mode of autobiographical writing. It has its origins in Christian ritual but subsequently became literary genre exemplified by the writings of the early Christian father, St Augustine (397–400 C.E.). Although secularised, the confession has retained its form as a series of self-disclosures that amount to the recounting of a transformative or conversion experience. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘foundational autobiography’ Confessions (1782) serves as a ‘serious exploration in the limits of truthful self-representation’ (Crowley 2015; 1–2 cited in McCooey 2017, 277). The confession reveals the narrator’s fears and foibles to the reader; it renders the subject vulnerable to being criticised, judged, misunderstood, or even to not being believed. Confessional narratives are crafted as intensely subjective explorations of the self that are principally concerned with the ethical dimensions of growth (Murray 2013, 185). The conventions of the confession are evident in memoirs and other forms of life writing. The confession is usually regarded as being an altogether different genre from historical writing. Whereas the confession risks exposing the inner self to close scrutiny, the academic essay is designed to establish distance between the subject matter and the self. Thus when writing about war, the normative social discourse of scholarship requires me to disavow the embodied self of a veteran (Bulmer and Jackson 2016). However, I regard this as untenable as I have come to share Simon Schama’s viewpoint that ‘all history tends towards autobiographical confession’ (Schama 1988, xiii). In what follows, I will suggest that my positionality as a historian of the Border War was shaped by my experience as a SADF conscript which is, in turn, contingent upon my memory as a veteran. LIFE WRITING 515 Memory is not merely stored in the brain as a series of snapshots of the past. Instead, it is constantly reconstructed to make sense of our experience and knowledge in the here and now. We tend to align and fashion our memories according to how we define ourselves in relation to others; according to our understanding of self within a group or social context. In other words, our identity is shaped by the intersection of collective and autobiographical memory. Geoffrey Cubitt notes that autobiographical memory refers to ‘any recollection of past events or circumstances that carry a trace of autonoetic (or self-knowing) awareness’ (Cubitt 2007, 69–70). If my autobiographical memories reveal something significant about my identity and an essential truth about the self (Heyns 2000), then they are tantamount to confessions even when appearing in the guise of life history. The confession is thus a mode of life writing that takes the form of testimonials that recount personal experiences that provide a version of past events from the perspective of someone who directly experienced them. Those that testify assign responsibilities to others and assume as much for their own conduct—unless the confession is deliberately evasive or self-serving so as to shift blame for reprehensible deeds such as human rights violations or atrocities. This might take the form of an ordinary soldier insisting that his conduct was justified as he was simply following orders, or it might take the form of an officer ascribing his conduct to conformity to institutional authority. The subordinaton of individuality to the institution and its corollary, the denial of personal agency, is seldom absolute. There are always some choices to be made, even if these are circumscribed in the case of conscripts. At the age of 18, I was conscripted into the SADF. I went reluctantly, opting to render national service straight out of school rather than defer it until after university. My service was wholly undistinguished. I never volunteered for anything and did not rise above the rank of rifleman. Following my training, I was deployed in the so-called ‘operational area’ on the Namibian/Angolan border but did not experience combat. Instead, I became a casualty of war as a result of a near-fatal vehicle accident towards the end of my stint of ‘border duty’ (‘Grensmanne Vorder Goed na Ongeluk’, Die Burger, 17 December 1974). I spent a number of months recuperating in military hospitals from serious injuries before being discharged. After being declared fit enough to resume my military commitments, I was transferred to Donkin Commando in Port Elizabeth (where I was teaching). When my citizen force unit was deployed to quell ‘unrest’ in the local townships, I refused to comply and was charged for refusing to obey orders. But the officer commanding my unit preferred not to make a public spectacle of my case, especially when it turned out that I was one of a number of troops who objected to having to ‘police’ the townships. Consequently, I was permitted to perform my duties in the stores in the unit’s headquarters. Neither of these episodes are mentioned in the official records of the SADF (although the first incident was reported briefly in the press). When I accessed my personal file in the Department of Defence Documentation Centre, I found no trace of either of them. What I did discover was a medical report concerning my injuries and treatment following surgery in 1 Military Hospital, as well as a detailed register of the hours spent issuing uniforms and equipment to members of Donkin Commando. I found this archival ‘silence’ somewhat disconcerting as there seemed to be no official confirmation of my acts of recklessness and defiance. Nonetheless, my recall of these episodic memories suggests that my military experience impacted profoundly upon my social consciousness and political awareness. I abhorred 516 G. BAINES being treated as a cipher by an institution that sought to break down and then remake me in its own mould. I developed a deep-seated resentment of the arbitrary authority abused by NCOs and officers who did not earn respect but demanded on the basis of their rank. While I did not directly challenge the opinions of instructors for fear of being victimised, I resisted the SADF’s indoctrination in other ways. For instance, I had the gumption to submit a piece to the base rag of 2 South African Infantry Battalion in which I drew an analogy between the futility of fighting the desert sand infiltrating Walvis Bay and Swapo (the South West Africa Peoples’ Organization). I was berated by an officer as a ‘communist’ for my troubles. Deployment in Namibia and the performance of ‘border duty’ made me question the legitimacy of the SADF’s occupation of that country. Subsequently, during my years at university, I came to regard my service in the SADF with misgivings and the war in Angola/Namibia as morally indefensible. I could not identify with those who came to regard their time in the SADF with fondness, who evinced a nostalgia that I personally found nauseating. Like World War II military veteran and scholar, Paul Fussell, who adopted the persona of ‘the pissed-off infantryman in the guise of a literary and cultural commentator’ (Hoy 2006, 173), I became a bitter veteran indignant at having had to defend an unjust system. In some respects, my Border War project seeks to recuperate my sense of self-worth or, at the very least, affirm my humanity. My border war project My scholarly interest in the Border War was piqued by my reading of a number of conscript memoirs. Their publication punctured the conspicuous silence in the public sphere about the subject. I attributed this largely to the need to observe political correctness and circumspection in a climate of national reconciliation. SADF veterans who had been on the ‘losing side’ of history adopted a wait and see attitude towards the new dispensation. As the new ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) consolidated its position as the premier liberation movement and constructed a triumphalist ‘Struggle’ narrative. The Angolan/Namibian War was regarded as only a sideshow in the anti-apartheid struggle but the armed struggle waged by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was accorded pride of place in the official narrative.1 School curricula and history textbooks were revised, memorials erected, commemorative stamps issued, and a pantheon of heroes and martyrs was constructed to legitimate the new regime. Notwithstanding the ANC’s use of history to validate its rule, the party has entrenched a constitution that safeguards freedom of speech and so allows counter-narratives to circulate in the public sphere. The existence of divisive memory regimes afforded SADF apologists an opportunity to claim control over the SADF’s institutional memory by the dissemination of their own narratives. Meanwhile, in the private sphere SADF veterans shared their stories with compatriots and family members. Any reticence on the part of former combatants to do so was caused by an inability to come to terms with their own trauma, or the burden of guilt and shame. Thus personal inhibitions and public constraints combined to produce a relative silence rather than amnesia (Baines 2015). In the new millennium, SADF veterans found their voices and the silence has been well and truly shattered. I have suggested elsewhere (Baines 2014), their renewed self-belief was made possible by the belated discovery of PTSD and the appropriation of victimhood. It also owed much to the advent of the internet that provided an unregulated (cyber)space LIFE WRITING 517 that enabled veterans to air their views and relate their stories. Indeed, the internet has provided them with a ready audience that is not particularly demanding as to accurate historical contextualisation nor discerning when it comes to the literary qualities of their output. The Border War has also been the subject of a stream of commercially and privately-published personal narratives, a documentary film series screened by the Kyknet television channel, a revived anti-war theatre production, a musical and popular songs, art/photographic exhibitions and media installations, and so on. The market for Border War cultural artefacts and memorabilia has been saturated in the last decade or so. My monograph seeks to understand the ‘afterlife’ of the Border War. I employ a framework that focuses on collective memory and cultural production that shapes the representation and remembrance of war. The book traces the forms and practices of the transmission of such memory by mnemonic communities, particularly SADF veterans. It also has a comparative dimension, as it draws on insights gleaned from the literature that examines the legacies of wars waged by the German Wehrmacht, the US military in Vietnam, French forces in Algeria, and the Israeli army against its Arab neighbours. This transnational approach enabled me to make a study of common cross-cultural themes in the depiction of war in an array of representations including literature (imaginative and non-fictional), photographs, theatre productions and memorials. It also allowed me to move beyond the parochialism of South African historiography and the narrow focus of traditional military history. I accept the premise that cultural memory shapes social understandings of the war as much if not more than published history—including books like my own. This is because products of memory are increasingly validated as the veridical representation of the war. The meanings of the war produced by veterans through memory work (such as writing memoirs), memorialising practices (such as erecting makeshift and permanent sites of memory), returning to Angolan battlefields, and so on, has resulted in narratives that resonate with the national service generation (NSG). As I have already pointed out, many of these veterans have taken to the internet to share their experiences with others of the NSG where they have created virtual bunkers or discursive laagers.2 In the anonymity of cyberspace, some veterans have become cyber warriors, re-fighting the war with their keyboards. One of the objectives of my project is to destabilise the sometimes racist and recidivist discourse that passes for discussion of the legacy of the Border War. My pluralist credo as an historian recognises the ‘messiness’ of past reality and leaves the way open for multiple readings of the past—‘none claiming any special privilege, but each providing some illumination from its own perspective’ (Southgate 1996, 8). This does not imply that all claims are true but that they should be judged in terms of the evidence they marshal and the coherence of their argument. With this is mind, my project avoids constructing a (grand) narrative that offers a singular political and ideological explanation of the Border War. I fully appreciate that my approach runs the risk of being regarded as ‘relativistic’ because it frequently juxtaposes conflicting narratives rather than endorsing a particular version of the past. It may well be seen by some as a failure of commitment − even the resort of a coward − because a stand is not made. Actually, I do not avoid making judgments as I employ common language that is far from being value free so that the very terms I use implies political positioning. My criticisms of the conduct of the military hierarchy in refusing to admit its poor record of and condonation of human rights abuses has earned me a reputation for being ‘anti-SADF’ in certain circles. In this regard, I part 518 G. BAINES company with most (military) historians who steer clear of moral judgments and tend to explain violence and aggression as an ineradicable aspect of human nature and so regard the harm caused by conflicts as unavoidable. This type of military history (with which I take issue) appears to be located within a technicist paradigm. Its primary concern is with military strategies and tactics, as well as with the lessons of history. It avoids having to make moral judgments by invoking a commitment to impartiality and objectivity (Venter 2009). Neither does it have much truck with the Keeganesque Face of Battle school or the so-called ‘new military history’ that pays more attention to the experience of ordinary soldiers than the decisionmaking of commanders in the field (Van der Waag and Visser 2009, 127). Nor does it have much time for the linguistic and cultural turns in war studies. Not only is my work indebted to the last-mentioned approaches, but also to the writings on war and remembrance by scholars such as Jay Winter.3 Thus my approach to the legacy of the Border War is informed by an eclectic—but not random—array of paradigms but is underpinned by the understanding that historians are never free from affect as sensory and somatic stimuli are as much filters of knowledge as intellectual ones (Sylvester 2013). Writing war experience Embodied or lived experience is affective and my own recollections of the military were often emotionally charged. This became evident when I was moved to tears by the stories recounted to me by certain of my informants who confided details that they had not previously shared even with loved ones. There is little doubt that I was deeply affected by the experience of revisiting my own and others’ repressed memories. Many historians might feel uneasy about the capacity of intimacy and emotion to evoke the past as they aspire for objectivity and truth. I share this discomfort to some extent as I believe that historians are still bound to be responsible to the evidence and people of the past. But what we know about war is always mediated by knowledge and feeling. Therefore I think that it might be prudent to heed Christine Sylvester’s advice that: To access [the myriad] experiences [of war] requires that the researcher takes a close look at himself or herself; that s/he engages in self-reflexivity; that s/he relates to moods, feelings and attitudes or the affective (Sylvester 2011, 129). Accordingly, war scholars are giving increasing attention to the relationship between war and the body, or what Kevin McSorley calls the ‘corporeal turn’ (McSorley 2012, 13). This lends credence to Sarah Bulmer and David Jackson’s claim that ‘the struggle to articulate embodied experience is the key problem for research on war’ (Bulmer and Jackson 2016, 27). War is visceral and physical. Elaine Scarry has noted that war is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’ (Scarry 1985, 72). Accordingly, some scholars admit the impossibility of addressing the topic adequately, of making sense of wartime experience. Others place a premium on first-hand experience and hold that veterans have earned the right to write about war by being there (McLoughlin 2009). But does this necessarily disqualify historians who have not participated in war from writing about it with authority? Readers of war stories tend to accept at face value the authenticity of first-hand experience; they routinely regard experiential knowledge as LIFE WRITING 519 more credible than the historian’s expertise. But is this warranted? Are there hierarchies of knowledge when it comes to writing about war? Why is it assumed that the war memoirist has direct access to past reality whereas the historian has to defend his/her expertise when s/he lacks military experience?4 It is my contention that the historian’s authority to write about war is not diminished by the memoirists claims to authenticity and veracity. It is not a zero-sum game. Personal narratives and histories do not compete with one another. They are discrete genres of literature, each of which add value to our knowledge of war. For knowledge of war is acquired from the body and the mind, from feelings and words. As a literature of lived experience, memoirs are assumed to have been written by people who have actually been through the events that they relate. But given that they are based on personal memory and written retrospectively, memoirs actually depict remembered experience. Nonetheless, as participants, memoirists are regarded as having privileged knowledge of the events in which they are involved. The historian, typically, holds that being experientially distanced or removed from the event better positions him or her to ‘piece together the confused, disparate, and sometimes contradictory accounts by participants into a plausible whole’ (Wood 1991, 14). Historians tend to adopt the position of omniscient narrators who use the third person whereas the memoirists appear as the protagonist in their stories and use the first person. Memoirs tend to be judged by their fidelity to the ‘real’, by their veridicality and veracity, whereas histories are bound by the rules of the discipline or share certain, albeit seldom articulated, epistemological assumptions. Although histories and memoirs bear close family resemblances, they are distinct discourses about the past that have to be evaluated on their own terms (Motzkin 1994). The war memoir is a well-established genre.5 In his survey of personal narratives titled The Soldiers’ Tale, war veteran and scholar Samuel Hynes champions the veterans’ voice but does not do so unreservedly. He reminds us that personal narratives are not history (Hynes 1998, 16), and that comprehensive knowledge of an historical event—especially of one as complex as war—is beyond the subjective experience of any one person. Eyewitness accounts are necessarily partial, as conflicting accounts of battles often demonstrate. John Keegan points out that the ordinary soldier’s battle is a microcosm of the war offering a limited or keyhole perspective on the overall situation (Keegan 2001, 48). This is not to argue that his experience is any less valid than his commanding officer, but to suggest that the view from the foxhole is different from that of the ops room. However, access to past reality is beyond our grasp by virtue of the very nature and limitations of language as it is an inadequate and arbitrary means of communicating the ineffable (Hynes 1998, 25). Indeed, no account of war however faithful to the actual events can enable the reader to (re)live the experience of war. If lived experience is culturally and socially constructed as remembered experience (as I believe it to be) then the subject is constituted through such experience. The memoirists’ narrative provides internal coherence and ascribes meaning to the experience of the individual; it does not guarantee the veracity of the text. In respect of the American experience of the Vietnam War, Brendan Boyle rather pointedly notes that ‘if the veteran author knows the ‘truth’ about the war, then there would only be need one novel, memoir, play film, or history, these representations being interchangeable and all following the first, redundant’. He adds that ‘the biographical, ‘truth telling’ power of the veteran should not be privileged over those who do not claim veteran status’ (Boyle 2015, 8). 520 G. BAINES In his discussion of Great War memoirs, Dominic Harman notes that ‘narratives exist as discourse rather than lived experience, [and they] can never bring us to a full understanding’ of war … ’ (Harman 2001, 11). As language is unequal to the task of describing warfare, there exists a gap between life and literature, or experience and its representation (McLoughlin 2014, 20). Memoirs work towards bridging this gap by attempting to transcend the obvious limitations of language. As such, they ‘offer colour commentary on history’ (Isherwood 2017, 105) and so add extra dimensions and layers of meaning to the reader’s understanding of war. But they also suffer from an inherent weakness, namely, a loss of overall perspective due to an intense focus on the singular lived experience. Memoirs that examine unremarkable events and quotidian experience from the perspective of the individual soldier often lose sight of the bigger picture or the overall context that frames and gives meaning to the soldier’s conduct during war. Veterans are wont to assert that their participation in combat and proximity to the enemy accords them special knowledge of war—even though the majority of those in uniform do not experience fighting (Vernon 2006, 2–3). Their premise is that individuals’ sensory experiences produce knowledge of war that is the preserve of the soldier. It is, above all, bodily experience that is deemed to be crucial for knowledge of something as visceral as war. Accordingly, only those who Yuval Harari calls ‘flesh witnesses’ are qualified to speak about war (Harari 2008). Furthermore, this intimate knowledge cannot be passed on by narration; it cannot be acquired second-hand. A soldier might relate what he (and occasionally she) experiences, but in order to know what s/he knows, someone would also have had to live through it. In other words, ‘you had to be there’ (Morillo and Pavkovic 2013, 54). This has become the veterans’ mantra and is invoked as a catchphrase in much war writing. Indeed, ‘being there’ is widely regarded by veterans and their readers as a prerequisite for providing a credible account of the Border War. This is typified by a collection of writings by SADF veterans compiled by its former chief, General Jannie Geldenhuys, first published in Afrikaans as Ons was Daar and translated into English as We Were There (2012). The title of this volume is an assertion of authority based on participation in the conflict, of knowledge derived from being on the battlefield. In his preface, Geldenhuys calls the contributors to the volume ‘real-life participants’ who ‘relate the real history of the war’ (Geldenhuys 2012, 16). They would appear to believe that they alone are qualified to relate accounts of combat and other war experiences; that their experience affords them special knowledge of the Border War. The implication of this is that only witnesses and participants are authorised to speak about war; ‘experts’, including historians, are according to this view, mere pretenders to knowledge (Morillo and Pavkovic 2013, 54–55). Thus scholars and armchair critics are confronted by the rhetorical question: ‘How can you understand?’ followed by the dismissive retort: ‘You were not there … ’ (Facebook page for Grensoorlog/Border War 1966–1989, http://www.facebook.com/group.php? gid=103819570796). This amounts to a strategy aimed at asserting a hierarchy of knowledge and silencing those who venture to produce alternative accounts of the Border War. The ‘retired generals’ are regarded as the epitome of the received wisdom of the conflict. This assumes that their authority cannot be challanged. But this is clearly not the case. LIFE WRITING 521 Border war stories It has been argued that a poor literary tradition in the SADF exacerbated by a censorious approach to the dissemination of information curtailed the production of personal narratives by veterans (Van der Waag and Visser 2009, 126). While the bulk of the literature on the Border War is in the form of campaign and battle histories, unit and regimental histories, there has been a burgeoning of autobiographies, biographies and prosographies, memoirs, as well as fiction and other imaginative literature of late.6 It seems safe to say that much of this literature has been produced by veterans for fellow veterans or military buffs. A few well-written personal narratives or memoirs provide something approaching canonical accounts of the Border War. On the other hand, some of these memoirs have little historical or literary value as they are clichéd and unoriginal. Their significance, if any, lies in the fact that they confirm that ‘the lived experience of war is culturally constructed’ (Harari 2007, 307). SADF veterans’ memoirs have a limited range of storylines and narrative structures. Some are coming-of-age stories suffused with nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ when national service was a rite of passage whereby boys became men. For some memoirists the Border War was a just and necessary war, while others express the conviction that they were betrayed by the older generation that sent them to wage an unwinnable war (Roos 2008, 141–8). Some are stories of life-long male friendships that have resulted from national service on account of the bonding occasioned by the camaraderie of training and battle. Still others narrate subversive strategies pursued during national service in order to make life easier by ‘gyppoing’ (avoiding duty) or in order to test the resolve of the military authorities to discipline troops that were armed and ‘naafi’ (no ambition and fuck-all interest). Stories are inclined to be related with considerable candour and unflinching honesty. Whatever their mode of narration—tragic/traumatic, nostalgic, ironic, comic—the authors invariably follow the traditional literary-confessional conventions of the memoir form (Vernon 2006, 23). The majority of memoirs published by English-speaking conscripts constitute a corpus that Christo Doherty has described as a genre of trauma and anti-heroic narratives (Doherty 2014, 2015). He holds that Rick Andrew’s Buried in the Sky (2001) established the trend of anti-heroic accounts with its portrayal of the boredom and inaction experienced by three-month ‘campers’ on the Border. This was followed by Clive Holt’s At Thy Call We Did Not Falter (2005), Steven Webb Ops Medic: A National Serviceman’s Border War (2008), Frank Nune’s Altered States (2008), Tim Ramsden’s Border-Line Insanity: A National Serviceman’s Story (2009), Peter Tucker & Marius van Niekerk’s Behind the Lines of the Mind: Healing the Mental Scars of War (2009), Granger Korff’s 19 With a Bullet: A South African Paratrooper in Angola (2009), and Anthony Feinstein’s Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War (2011). Given that these memoirists are mainly ‘ordinary soldiers’ from the lower ranks, who served as infantry riflemen, artillery gunners, junior officers and medics in the SADF, suggests that they are representative of a cross-section of experience. But what has gone previously unnoticed or remarked upon is that whereas in earlier wars the quintessential wounded veteran displayed physical injuries, the wounds of Border War veterans are seldom inscribed upon their bodies. So, for instance, the narrator-protagonist in Korff’s 19 With a Bullet, a gung-ho paratrooper, is the very incarnation of the grensvegter (literally, ‘border fighter’). Yet, although 522 G. BAINES Korff’s account is replete with descriptions of acts of derring-do related with boastful bravado, it is tempered by the admission that he was traumatised. Haunted by memories of committing or being party to heinous acts, Korff recounts how he suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a Veterans’ Centre in Los Angeles. In fact, the trope of trauma seems to be a common denominator in the abovementioned memoirs. Trauma narratives have become almost de rigueur in SADF conscripts’ narratives. Feinstein’s In Conflict was revised and re-published as Battle Scarred (Doherty 2015, 48). It relates a number of episodes that reveal the deep emotional and psychological scars incurred by those involved in the fighting in Ovamboland. For instance, Feinstein tells of the security policeman who, following an ambush in which he failed to overcome his fears, experienced nightmares during which he regressed into a state of childhood. And Behind the Lines of the Mind depicts Van Niekerk’s attempts to manage his inner turmoil stemming from his attempts to confront his culpability for atrocities he committed while deployed as a paratrooper in Angola. The titles of Feinstein and Van Niekerk’s texts both bear the word ‘scar’ which alludes to their self-diagnosed psychic wounds. Both frame their stories within a PTSD paradigm—the first because he is a psychiatrist and the second because he familiarised himself with the discourse after viewing TV documentaries about the treatment of US Vietnam veterans. Like Doherty, I have previously noted the trend that SADF soldier-authors have taken to framing their war stories as trauma-cum-healing narratives (Baines 2017). I would attribute this to the destigmatisation of PTSD. The psychologist Lynne Jones holds that PTSD has come to signify the moral, social and political suffering of war. She has observed: … the growing hold that this one diagnosis, PTSD, had on the professional and public imagination. PTSD appeared to be taking hold of the professional and public imagination even when it did not apply. Perhaps it was because PTSD was a diagnosis without a stigma. The rise of biological psychiatry and its focus on mental illnesses as ‘brain diseases’ had failed to remove the taint of moral and personal failing associated with the majority of psychiatric disorders. But here was a disorder that came packaged with a clear-cut cause that was obviously not the patient’s fault, and which set them in the sympathetic and dramatic light of victimhood. Here was a diagnosis that could be taken as a badge of suffering (Jones 2014). In the South African context, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) arguably laid the platform for the destigmatization of PTSD although this went largely unacknowledged by military veterans at the time. In any event, the TRC Report encouraged them ‘to share their pain and reflect on their experiences’ (South Africa 2001, 221). The Report also advocated raising public awareness about the reality and effects of PTSD and suggested veterans seek ‘help to tell and write their stories’ (242). The public profile of PTSD was raised by the broadcast of the Carte Blanche feature ‘The War Inside’ on M-Net in 2001. It was produced in response to the publicity generated by Andrew’s Buried in the Sky and the author was categorised as a PTSD sufferer although he made no claim to displaying the characteristic symptoms of the malady in his memoir or during the course of the programme. But the (non-medical) diagnosis of PTSD offered former Koevoet operatives who appeared on the programme a sympathetic hearing and even a kind of exculpation for their nefarious deeds (Doherty 2014, 66–67). It is little wonder that soldierauthors such as Holt and Van Niekerk have pursued narrative therapy in the belief that the writing of their memoirs might prove cathartic and assist with their healing processes. LIFE WRITING 523 Here it is worth bearing in mind Dominick LaCapra’s useful distinction between ‘writing trauma’ and ‘writing about trauma’: the former being the ‘experimental, gripping, and risky symbolic emulation of trauma’ whereas the latter constitutes a form of writing in which the author attains some degree of critical distance from the experience by imaginatively recollecting the traumatic events from the perspective of his or her present-day perspective (LaCapra 2001, 105). The abovementioned narratives certainly fit LaCapra’s ‘writing about trauma’ category as these authors ‘strive to achieve coherence and closure on their experience of war’ (Doherty 2015, 36) The American historian Jerry Lembcke has argued that PTSD is a socially constructed category whose meaning is only partly derived from its medical context, and that it has mutated from a diagnostic category to a social trope. He contends that the seductiveness of PTSD caused some US veterans to embrace it as an identity and their comrades to assign it as a badge of honour (Lembcke 2015, xi, 18–19). Accordingly, they were viewed not only as ‘victims’ but as ‘heroes’. This badge was worn by those who were said to have fought hard and experienced ‘real’ war. PTSD was no longer regarded as a mark of failed masculinity but rather that of the brave soldier who had been on the frontline in perhaps the ultimate display of typically heteronormative masculinity. Whether victims or heroes, returning soldiers adopted the symptoms of PTSD and a war-story biography that conformed to what they thought family and friends would expect to see and hear (10). Lembcke’s scepticism concerning PTSD as a medical category in the postVietnam American context has a degree of resonance in post-apartheid South Africa. Here the veteran-as-victim and anti-hero has decentred the narrative of the SADF soldier as the grensvegter and hero. Possibly the best example of a Border War story written in the anti-heroic vein is not a memoir but is Johan Vlok Louw’s ironicallytitled novel Eric the Brave (2012). Conclusion Like the above-mentioned veterans turned authors, my military experience has followed me my entire adult life. But, unlike them, I have not seen fit to write a memoir.7 Instead, I have produced a monograph and this essay. Neither work is a substitute for fully-fledged autobiographical writing, yet both offer clues as to my identity as an historian and veteran. Like Jaume Aurell, I am convinced of ‘the futility of separating personal experience from intellectual activity’, of disentangling my personal and professional identities. And given that ‘autobiographical style mirrors historical style—and vice versa’, I am equally convinced that ‘reading academic historical texts through the prism of autobiographical narratives extends the possibilities of historical interpretation’ (Aurell 2016, 263–4). Thus I have re-read my monograph as a revelation of personal issues that are imbricated in disciplinary discourse. And I have undertaken this exercise in autohistoriography8 that has revealed that my identity is not merely represented but enacted or performed in the process of writing. In this essay I have sought to come to terms with my embodiment as a veteran, to confront the memories that define my experience of national service and attempt to ascertain how these might have influenced my subsequent development as a historian of the Border War. To that end, I have divulged personal recollections of my time in uniform, acknowledged my personal relationship to the subject of study, and reflected upon the linkages 524 G. BAINES between my veteran-historian identities. My attempt to don two hats simultaneously, to conjoin my veteran and historian selves, is in recognition of the fact that my personal experience is inseparable from my intellectual activity. This exercise in life writing has enabled me to venture outside of my comfort zone, to tear down the ramparts of my ivory tower, and deconstruct the premises of my profession. I have entered a liminal space or no-man’s land where veteran and historian meet. This has been a difficult terrain to negotiate. For ‘like history, life writing is a discourse that generates considerable insight, and sometimes anxiety, about its generic and literary status, about the limits between ‘life’ and ‘writing’ (McCooey 2017, 280). But the risk has been repaid as it has earned me some self-respect and validation. Notes 1. iBy ‘official’, I mean state-institutionalised or sanctioned narratives. For example, see the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET)’s ‘Road to Democracy’ project established at the behest of (then) President Mbeki. Unisa Press has to date published 10 volumes under the editorship of Bernard Mbenga. 2. Roland Leikauf’s notion of virtual bunkers created by American Vietnam veterans bears a striking resemblance to that of discursive laagers first employed by Edlmann (2014). See also Usbeck (2017). 3. See, especially, Winter (2006, 2017). 4. The eminent military historian John Keegan felt obliged to defend his bona fides in The Face of Battle, 15–22. 5. Yuval Noah Harari (2007) distinguishes between war memoirs and military memoirs by suggesting that civilians might author the former whereas only combatants write the latter. For a treatment of the different genres of war memoirs and military autobiographies, see Vernon (2006, 1–40). See also Dwyer (2017, 1–26). The Japanese use the word jibunshi (self histories) for the tradition of veterans writing memoirs. See Moore (2017, 115). 6. For a sprawling and sketchy survey of the historiography of the Angolan/Namibian War, see Van der Waag and Visser (2009). The most comprehensive bibliography that includes works of fiction and non-fictions is Westhuizen (2015, 165–200). 7. Were I to write my own memoir, I would be inclined to highlight a combination of choices that I made during my military service that set me at odds with the authorities. It would have to be written in an ironic vein. I might have been inclined to title such a putative memoir Slegtroep! My Stint in the SADF or perhaps The SADF: My Part in its Demise. For readers unfamiliar with the allusions, my first title parodies that of the exculpatory military memoir by Malan (2000) whereas the second plagiarises Milligan’s (1971) with its characteristic absurd humour and irreverence for military authority. 8. I have borrowed this term from Aurell (2016). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Gary Baines is Professor of History, Rhodes University. He published widely in the fields of South African history and culture with a particular focus on music and literature. Has also published on the apocalyptic imagination and on the afterlife of war. Published works South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as a volume of LIFE WRITING 525 essays co-edited (with Peter Vale) called Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts (Unisa Press, 2008). References Aurell, Jaume. 2016. Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention. New York: Routledge. Baines, Gary. 2014. South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories. London: Bloomsbury. Baines, Gary. 2015. “SADF Soldiers’ Silences: Institutional, Consensual and Strategic.” Acta Academica 47 (1): 78–97. Baines, Gary. 2017. “Memoir Writing as Narrative Therapy: A South African Border War Veteran’s Story.” In War Stories: War Memoirs in History and Literature, edited by Philip Dwyer, 252–276. New York: Berghahn. 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