To Larry, and my lost youth

On a Saturday morning, it all got very real. We were 19. We were immortal. And the beer bottles clinking in the small canvas Fire Force “day pack” meant we were ready to party … even if that party was next to Larry’s bed in the hospital.

We never got a chance to smuggle the booze into the ward.

At the varnished wooden counter, she looked at us. Severe uniform. Severe face. I suppose nurses grow thick skins.

“Oh, him,” she said, when we asked where he was.

“He’s dead.” And she was gone.

We sat on the curb, in the car park. We opened Larry’s Lion Lagers. We clinked the glass. Here’s to him, we said. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it?

Then we went drinking in earnest, so I remember nothing of the rest of that day … or the rest of our 10-day time off.

Larry and I had met in geography class in Form One. He was rangy and tall, a farmer’s son and a boarder in Shangani House. He sat next to me and we both couldn’t see the point in isotherms. We drifted apart a bit because he was moved to a different class, and because he chose hockey instead of rugby. After we got our national service call-up papers at age 18, he ended up in a rifle company in the Zambezi Valley. I got a single stripe as a lance-corporal and spent some time carrying a machine gun in a fire force “stick” on the other side of the country.

Somehow, the 7.62mm AK and RPD bullets missed me, as did the shrapnel from the 82mm mortars and the 122m Katyusha rockets.

The landmine didn’t miss Larry. He was badly burnt when the vehicle fuel tank exploded. Casevaced out by chopper to a top hospital, he lasted just long enough to spoil our planned party.

My war was comparatively mundane, especially when you think of the soldiers on the Somme in World War I, the grunts on Omaha Beach on D-Day and the South African troepies on the Lomba River in Angola in 1987.

But we thought we were heroes. We were rough, tough and hard to bluff. We jumped out of choppers and wasted gooks. We were fighting Ian Smith’s crusade to stop communists. We didn’t ask questions. And, of course, we believed the song Rhodesians Never Die.

But Larry did die. For many years, I never thought of him. Life carried on. I bought a T-shirt which said: “Southern African war games, 1972 to 1979, Second Place.”

No one remembers the losers. But now, as I get older, I choose to remember the soldiers.

All of us – no matter the side, no matter the ideology we bled to defend – share a special bond. Those people in the chopper around you have the same knot in their stomachs as you do before the incoming rounds shatter the reverie.

They are your family. You will die for them, not some politician’s lies.

And when the guns fall silent, you will share the same contempt for those politicians.

So, yesterday, on Armistice Day, when the world remembered fallen soldiers, I had a quiet glass of wine. For Larry. For the others. For my own lost youth.

Brendan Seery.

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