The soldiers of Five Recce have never hesitated when it comes to charging into battle, but the regiment has been more tentative in adapting to change in South Africa, writes Stefaans Brmmer
PHALABORWA is the type of mining town where streets are still named after the likes of presidents Steyn and Kruger. Its burghers give the impression they’d cart change to town on an oxwagon – proud of traditions that have sustained them, blissfully innocent of the advantages of modern transport.
A few kilometres to the west, about 40 lean young men in camouflage uniforms, their expert training apparent in the precise choreography of their attack, race with guns rattling towards a mock target. Their mode of transport is a tough little all-terrain battle-wagon whose futuristic design angles would win it pride of place on the set of a Mad Max remake. Eat dust, slow-trekking Phalaborwans!
But the battle-wagon, especially developed and built for these soldiers, is called the Vlermuis. “It’s not a `bat’,” says Colonel Julius Engelbrecht, commanding officer of 5 Special Forces Regiment. “You cannot translate it.”
Perhaps Engelbrecht has a point. Five Recce, as his unit is commonly known, has members of 21 ethnic groups, speakers of about 24 languages. Naming your vehicle a “bat” in 24 languages could be problematic. Traditionally, the command language of Five Recce would have been Afrikaans, so why not stick to Afrikaans?
Extend that logic: Five Recce’s base outside Phalaborwa has its own multi-denominational church, the United Church of the Conqueror. This soldiers’ church has incorporated military paraphernalia into its practice of religion such as the baptismal font consisting of a polished upside-down helmet on heavy-calibre shells. The church interior also sports two old-South Africa flags – the “national colours” earned by the regiment which were “laid down” in 1994.
And a glass case next to the pulpit contains the standard of old-Rhodesia’s (extremely notorious) Selous Scouts. The padre explains that so revered is the scouts’ martial legacy, and their inspiration for South Africa’s own special forces, that elements of their standard remain in the insignia of the church and of Five Recce itself.
A military unit, especially if it is probably the most elite in the country, can hardly have no tradition, and if the only available tradition dates from the wars and battles fought across the region by apartheid South Africa, why not stick to that tradition, the argument seems to go, again.
So, as with the slow burghers of Phalaborwa, change is coming slowly to Five Recce – Vlermuis or no Vlermuis. The tradition which sustained Five Recce as one of apartheid South Africa’s most effective military units – reconnoitring and destabilising deep behind the lines in Angola, running Renamo rebel operations across the Kruger National Park in nearby Mozambique, perhaps even taking sides in the violence-wracked South African townships – may have become the factor to blind its proud soldiers to the need for change.
Tour the base for confirmation of this: the mess building’s walls sport photographs of old Boer fighters and a trophy, consisting of a shot-up AK-47 (symbolism: the defeat of the liberation movements), which was once awarded to soldier Willem Ratte, now better known as the right-wing occupier of Fort Schanskop and subsequent hunger striker. Other walls are decorated with articles and montages dealing with subjects like the recces’ superiority over their foreign counterparts “in spite of sanctions”, or the disbandment of the (notorious) 32 Battalion, which fought side- by-side with Five Recce in Angola.
Then there is the empty, remote room used for the “dark phase”, when recruits’ training is almost over. The recruits would be captured and taken there by the “enemy”, who would try and “turn” them. The room’s walls are covered with “enemy” graffiti – in this case proclaiming “Viva ANC”, “Viva UDF” and “Down with the Boere”. This room is supposedly no longer in use, but the graffiti remains – two-and-a-half years after the enemy became the government.
What appears to have saved embarrassment so far is that those who might have been offended by the Five Recce tradition have hardly been confronted by it. While the unit has been racially mixed since its foundation in 1979/80 (because the generals had identified a need for black soldiers in “pseudo” operations), the regiment is not integrated in the same sense as much of the rest of the army. So far, former Umkhonto weSizwe and Apla soldiers have not made it past the stringent selection criteria, although a few are in the pipeline and a few serve in a supporting capacity.
Engelbrecht and his top command appear to realise they live in a new country. A media visit last week to their base, at their invitation, was a first – and it was in the name of transparency. Ironically, if what the journalists found was an army base still struggling to emerge from a pre-1994 timewarp, the present government may have sent the signals that put Engelbrecht and company at ease.
In 1993, FW de Klerk’s National Party government, mindful of the need to move away, at least publicly, from all that represented the old South Africa, changed Five Recce’s name to 452 Parachute Regiment. Two years later, publicly unannounced, Nelson Mandela’s ANC government changed the name back to 5 Special Forces Regiment. “They said they did not have a problem with it: they needed special forces,” says a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) member.
Mandela put that need to graphic illustration when he ordered the SANDF to end a police mutiny in Umtata in February last year. Five Recce was given the task. They boast that 30 of them, the total Recce deployment (sent in on the backs of Vlermuise, of course), sent more than 1 000 mutineers scurrying. One mutineer died.
Skilled in the arts of bush war – infiltration, survival, reconnaisance, sabotage – one change that Five Recce’s soldiers have had to accept is that, for now, their job will involve little bush. Like many other SANDF units, they are deployed inside the country in support of the police.
Brigadier Borries Bornman, commander of special forces, this week agreed that Five Recce still clung to its old traditions. “What you are saying I can find no fault with – these are the facts – but you have to understand that it takes time to build a new tradition … The core of the unit is still from the old dispensation, but these guys are not politicians. They want to stay, and they feel they have a future here.”
Bornman said the old-South Africa flag “national colours” were displayed in the church in the absence of a military museum – which the unit would get next year – but would not be displayed on parade or at functions.