Does the world really need an article about a defunct military unit from a defunct military force?  I reckon so.  If I type ‘Witwatersrand Command’ into Google, I get a lot of toss back.  It gets even worse if I add ‘HQ Unit’.  Wits Command was a pretty plum posting for national servicemen during the apartheid years – until you got sent into a township, caught in a riot or bombed… but more of that later.  I can’t believe that the only proper links are a photo of a fat general that probably couldn’t fit into a trench and someone’s record of the unit’s badge.Â

 

Anyway, anyone who got sent to wits Command thought they had landed with their arse in the proverbial butter.  After the hell of basic training and the courses that came after it (which were worse, try sleeping in the bush on a raincoat for a few weeks at a time), you’d be frazzled.  You’d report to your new unit expecting the customary large and sandy parade ground, crap prefab buildings and wonderful selection of colours that ranged from brown to nuclear orange to dark green.  Instead, you found yourself in an eighteen story (if you counted the sleeping quarters at the top) office building.  Here’s what the building looks like.  Incredibly, we used to have a roll call parade very morning and afternoon on the first floor where the glass is painted sick.  After the army abandoned the place, it filled up with squatters.  When the unit had all of the free labour in the world, in the form of national servicemen who’d land in detention barracks if they dared to complain, this building was so clean and polished that it almost glowed in the dark.

 

On the basis that I knew how DOS functioned, I got the job of working the fax machine and doing typing onto the old Q&A database.  I’d play office boy all day to a whole series of officers who’d spend all day reading the newspapers and translating what they’d read in English into Afrikaans.  They’d give it to me and I’d type it out before printing it out and stamping it ‘SECRET’ in big red letters.  Then I’d fax it toPretoria.  I always assumed that someone on the other end didn’t read English and didn’t like sharing their news (hence the need for it to be stamped).  I was being paid (although not very much) to do this and my faxes were somehow helping defend Western Christianity from the onslaught of godless communism.

 

At the bases where we’d done our basic training, we’d stand guard nearly all of the time.  This was especially so if you didn’t get chosen for a course to get above the rank of canon fodder.  I had the correct attitude, proficiency and general make up to be cannon fodder - so I did a lot of guarding.  Guarding was a pleasure compared to being on duty at Wits Command.  For one, no guarding stint lasted a whole twenty-four hours.  For nearly the whole day, whoever was on duty would stand in the foyer in a dress uniform (gay green cravat and white patties on top of the brown uniform) looking like a tit.  If anyone needed to come into the building, they’d show them around.  They’d have to open up the parkade for all of the very shady characters who met very late at night (it turned out years later that the CCB had an office in the building) and carry their rifles back to the quarter master’s store.  You never got any sleep and were responsible for carrying slops of food to everybody else in the building.  One night a rat ran over my boot as I crossed the courtyard with some officer’s food.  Lieutenant/Captain/Major/Whatever had his supper drop.  His vegetables got scooped up off the ground and delivered.  I made sure that I got my food when on duty from the pizzeria next door (I’m sure loads of people remember it as being next to the escort agency).  Whenever it is freezing cold, I’m tired and I can smell a real pizza oven, I’m transported back.  You might wonder who worked the fax machine and did the typing while I was on duty?  I did.  Somehow I supposed to carry slop, deliver rifles and play usher while typing.  Once I had to put my fingers into the stab wounds of someone who got knifed on a Saturday evening to stop his bleeding.  Everyone standing around him was afraid of Aids and I was the most junior rank.  I didn’t get Aids and he lived long to get stabilised by the ambulance crew.

 

It wasn’t all standing duty though.  I learnt to drink at Wits Command.  The foundation had been laid in Potchefstrrom but the finishing touches happened on the first floor in the NCO’s bar.  I’d puke myself broken some days, unfortunately not when I happened to be on duty.  The worst part of duty was raising and lowering the flag and I would have loved to have been drunk.  To do the flag thing, I’d have to walk a good distance near the edge of a ledge about forty meters up.  I don’t do heights very well.  I’d have to stand on the ledge and salute it, step back and turn an about turn after I’d raised it and vice versa when it came down.  The blood would stop going to my head.  To make it worse, the flag would always obscure my vision entirely at a point as it came down (it was folded for the trip up).  A couple of times I had to bite my lip hard to stop myself having a panic attack.  Some military types were always watching too and if the flag ceremony wasn’t down properly, I might attract the sort of punishment that would make standing outside on the ledge more attractive.

 

What were we doing in an office building anyway?  Good question.  The unit had been there since the historic Drill Hall around the corner got blown up.  Everyone assumed the ANC’s military wing did it.  Later on it transpired that our guys did it, the rogue ones who didn’t like the negotiation process and were trying to harden the attitudes of whites against the ANC!  The same guys who met in the building!  They did a lot of damage (and not just to a beautiful old building) some of the guys at Wits Command were permanently scarred – physically and emotionally.  The Drill Hall eventually burnt down.  Check out this photo of when it hit rock bottom.  I hear it got restored and turned into a museum (it was of course the location of a series of high profile apartheid-era trials and the place where South Africans wanting to fight in the world wars would go to volunteer.

 

I, and my mates, used to amuse ourselves by throwing fruit down from the fifteenth floor onto passing cars, demonstrators (mass action had just begun) and pedestrians.  The Lady Femme Escort Agency over the road (a different one to the one next to where I got pizza), where the produce would suntan on the roof was also a good target.  Lieutenant Trollip once landed a pear right between two bits of merchandise.Â

 

Besides the bombing (which was long before our time), we lived in dread of being told it was our turn to do some driving around in an armoured troop carrier around one of the black townships.  Sleeping on top of the mine dump next to Meadowlands Hostel was one of the not-so pleasant experiences of my life.  I can’t remember, but I think that might also have been the time we were all issued a kind of rifle we hadn’t even been trained to use.  Anyway, the beer was cheap.Â

 

Just after my batch finished national service, the Shell House Massacre happened.  Shell House was around the corner.  Nearly everyone at Wits Command got given a rifle apparently and pushed onto Bree Street.  For an easy posting, the unit was racking up a good few real and unique combat experiences.

 

So, there we have it.  A posting for no other reason than Wits Command didn’t have at least one decent Google hit.

 

Oh, the photos come from one of those racist e-mails that do the rounds from time-to-time showing apparently how blacks have messed up ‘our’ city.  I can’t pretend to have any right to them - in much the same way that the real owners of the pics can claim to own Johannesburg for their race group.   Some of the shots are really old too - take the Drill Hall, it apparently looks better than it did since the 1940's.  Besides it isn''t as if central Jo'burg was looking too good in 1992 when I did my national service either, white city council et al...