A Tribute to the Late PJ O’Rourke and Brett Stephen Cronje and Ruminations on Ukraine and Military Service

Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies in day 708 of re-modified lock down Level 1 with Alcohol, no curfew, and very slowly decreasing omicron hysteria.

Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 337

As is befitting someone with self-diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder I will first talk about myself before getting around to PJ O’Rourke and my late friend Brett Cronje. One of my groupies sent me the featured cartoon which provides a pretty good insight into my life which could be construed as very boring. Was my groupie (a fellow engineer) reaching out to me to share existential angst or was it a micro-aggression? I’m not sure.

I chose to study chemical engineering when I was 18 and I’m not entirely sure why. My mother wanted me to study actuarial science, but I now know that would have been a poor choice for me. I would not have studied the 2^nd law of thermodynamics without which nobody can claim to be properly educated.

I never thought about getting married settling down in the suburbs and having children. Fortunately for me Nerine, my wife, thought all that through and provided me with very simple easy to follow instructions. I also never really thought about getting old and starting a blog. But here we are. Without Nerine, my life would have been immeasurably different and not in a good way.

About 3 years ago my friend Brett Cronje died and I spoke at his memorial service. I described him as a hedonist, and he lived a complicated life revolving around wine, women, song, and fast cars. I’m certainly not a puritan and I can’t fault the concept of hedonism but somehow, I’m way too sensible and boring to go the whole hog.

This then brings me to PJ O’Rourke libertarian satirist and gonzo journalist who died recently and reminds me of Brett. O’Rourke said, “If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I’ll add it to the wrong end.” Brett didn’t get the extra years. When I think of Brett I think of O’ Rourke’s famous and spectacularly politically incorrect essay, “How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink. https://web.archive.org/web/20030124091317/http://www.nationallampoon.com/flashbacks/how2/how2.html. O’Rourke has been described as insulting, profane, and absolutely great reading. My kind of author. Brett, this was written for you, and you did not die in a car accident just as O’Rourke predicted. For those of you not inclined to read the essay I will just provide the opening paragraph:

“When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose, and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You’d have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you’ll die of pure sensory overload, I’m here to tell you.”

Some people are law-abiding model citizens and, for the most part, that describes me but not always. Sometimes you need to feed your inner hooligan. There was a period from July 1985 to June 1987 when I shared a flat with Brett where I was not that concerned with being law-abiding. As white males, we were conscripted, against our will, into the South African Defence Force (SADF) by the apartheid government to wage war in Angola and Namibia and at that time against poor and protesting South Africans in the townships. What on earth was all that about? A stupid and senseless war as so many are. Let’s just say that we did not see eye to eye with the leadership of the SADF and their rules and laws were of little interest to us. The SADF was a vicious and cruel organisation but fortunately, it was also disorganised, dumb, and incompetent. Open defiance and belligerence were dealt with harshly and brutally. Fortunately, there was no need for open defiance. Apparent cooperation, while you were being watched, was all that was required.

During the first six months of our military training, the intention was to mostly keep the recruits in the camp with only the occasional strictly controlled weekend pass. This didn’t suit us. It took us a couple of months to work out how to work around the system but then we came and went more or less as we pleased and then some. The first lucky step was when they reorganised all the platoons in the camp. The next morning at the morning parade for all the 1500 recruits a list was circulated for us to fill in our names. Brett and I conferred for about five seconds, and in a momentary act of defiance, we put fake names on the list. Turns out this was the roll call list for the morning parade for the entire camp. In a competent organisation I guess they would then verify this list with their central records, but this involved work and a well-kept set of central records. We were not on the roll call list. The next morning the fake names were called out and they were absent.

There were only a handful of fellow dissidents who put fake names onto the roll call list. Most people complied. There was now the issue of how to get out of the main gate. Every recruit was given a passbook and you were entitled to one four-day long weekend every two months. The method used to check this by the officer on duty at the gate was checking when your last long weekend was recorded in your passbook. All that was required was to get more than one passbook. Soon Brett and I each had 14 passbooks. Every weekend was a long weekend.  

At the end of every long weekend, we would drive back to the camp at 05h00 to quietly slip back into the camp unscrutinised.  We drove in Brett’s mustard coloured Beetle or in my lime-green Citroen Club which I had bought second-hand for R700. The Citroen cured me of ever wanting to look at a French car again. We did not talk much as we contemplated another couple of days in the depressing army camp. Instead, the Pink Floyd Animals album was played at full volume to prepare us for the military.

What does one make of this? There are those who took an extremely dim view of us not abiding by the rules and saw military service as a sacred duty. We did not share that view. Conscripting young men into the military for senseless wars is a cruel and vicious thing. My heart goes out to the Russian conscripts who are being forced to fight an illegal and unjust war against Ukraine. Is it always the right thing to do to follow the rules? I wonder how motivated young Russian military conscripts are. How well do the conscripted Russian privates follow the rules when the officers aren’t watching them?

Conscription in Ukraine is superfluous because people are fighting for their homes, lives, and businesses. They are highly motivated. Even if the Russians ultimately overwhelm the Ukrainians by means of more soldiers and more equipment the prospect of a long-drawn-out occupation looms. Being a Russian conscript in Ukraine will be a dangerous and thankless job. There is no doubt that the Russian army is a vicious organisation

After six months in the SADF Brett and I managed to arrange for us to be posted to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) where we did research work on water purification. There was now no need for defiance or apparent cooperation, and I started my research for my Ph.D. there.

After we completed our military service Brett and I remained friends, but we also became embroiled in our complicated lives, careers, and young children and we saw each other less, perhaps a couple of times a year. And then, suddenly, he was in hospital in ICU in a coma, and Nerine and I went to say goodbye. He did not hear us and later that evening he died.

I still have a fast car.

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions and please keep them coming.

Regards

Bruce