Special Hearings — Health Sector Hearings — 1997-06-17

SEAN MARK CALLAGHAN: I am glad that you made a slip because at least it calmed my nerves slightly.
 I want to really touch on two main issues today.  Firstly my experience as a medic in the South African Defence Force, and secondly my struggle against post-traumatic stress for the ten years after that.
 I was 15 years old in Standard 9 when I was asked to sign all the papers for military conscription, and part of the questions which I had to fill in was which unit would you like to serve in and why would you like to serve there?  I put down that I would like to be a medic, and my reasoning was I would like to help people rather than kill them.  That was the motivation from which really most of my life was going and from which in January 1982 I got on a train for Potchefstroom.
 I spent three months in Potchefstroom learning how to march in a straight line, learning how to shoot at the target and things like that.  
 I was then sent to Pretoria for a further six months of training to become an operational medic.  During that time I learnt as much as I could about pharmacology, about trauma, about casualty, about nursing, everything from how to make a bed with square corners through to what do you do when a patient had a rocket through the middle of their chest.  
 During that time, the first time I ever put a stitch into a person, or the first time I ever gave anybody an injection was at Tembisa Hospital.  As medics we were sent there on Friday and Saturday evenings to practice on people because quite frankly it didn't matter if we made a mistake because they were Black people, and many mistakes were made.  Certainly we weren't asked to practice at 1 Military Hospital.  At 1 Military Hospital we learnt how to make beds and how to give pills to people and things like that.
 The first time I ever put a drip up successfully was actually in Angola when I was confronted with a patient because up until then I was too scared to practice on my friends because they would have to practice on me.  
 In essence after nine months of training and really six months of medical training I was posted to Oshakati in Northern Namibia where I worked at the Oshakati Hospital which at that stage was the main casualty evacuation hospital.  I spent 13 months in South West Africa and Angola as a medic.  
 All of us who left Pretoria went through Grootfontein and there we were divided amongst the various units, amongst the various hospitals.  Some of the people who went with us were sent straight to Unita, to be medics for Unita, particularly one chap who used to sleep in the bed next to me in Pretoria, and when we all came back 13 months later he didn't come back and I still to this day wonder what happened to him.  
 Nobody in my family has ever died.  All my grandparents are still there.  My parents are still there, my brothers, sisters, my cousins.  I've never been to a funeral.  In fact I've been to a colleagues funeral subsequent to going to the army.  I've never seen a dead person until I was in the army.  
 My first night in Oshakati I was supposed to go on duty and happened to be at a music concert which had come to town, and heard helicopters come over and from the stage they said any medical personnel please go back to the hospital, which I ignored, and a few minutes later, anybody with B-negative blood please go back to the hospital, and being a medic and having B-negative blood I thought well now I've been called twice I had better go back, to be confronted with a patient who had no arms and no legs, was blind and was deaf, who had been in a mortar pit launching 80mm mortars when one of them exploded in the pipe, that was the first patient I ever saw in the operational area.  
 Right there and then I realised that as an 18 year-old I am not going to be able to handle this after six months of training, and right there and then I decided that the only way to cope with the situation was to switch off my emotions immediately, not to feel anything for anybody, not to try and fit into any kind of humane circumstance but just to be a cold machine that did what I was trained to do.   
 Most of the patients that came through Oshakati Hospital were Black.  Most of them were 32 Battalion.  Most of them came out of Angola.  I would say that on average there probably were ten patients that were very seriously injured that were flown in every day.  One or two of those dying every day.  If you look at the official statistics you will see that the Angolan/Namibian war cost South Africa 250 odd people which flies right in the face of what I saw.  And when I asked who are those 250 odd people they were White national servicemen.  We never counted, seemingly, any of the mercenary troops, any of the Black troops, again because they weren't really there, and they weren't really official.
 There were 10 to 20 medics at that Oshakati Hospital, maybe four doctors, one surgeon, one anaesthetist.  The surgeons and anaesthetists used to come in on a weekly or two-weekly basis.  We had two theatres and it was pretty much get in and do what you could.  If you had 20 patients come in from a landmine explosion there weren't enough of you, and there certainly weren't enough doctors or surgeons to go around and it was a matter of get in and do your thing and hope for the best that you are actually going to be able to save some of these patients.  Doctors became surgeons and anaesthetists, medics became doctors.  Schedule 7 drugs were, well we think this will work so let's put it in and hope for the best.  I must say that I think we did pretty well for the little group that we were, but we could have done a lot better if we had had more personnel.
 During December/January 1982 I had been in the operational area now for three/four months and many people had been there for many, many more months.  Again I would guess that there must have been about ten suicides that I heard about in the operational area during that Christmas time, national servicemen who couldn't take it.  They were away from their loved ones, and they in a sense couldn't take the pressure and they shot themselves.
 In January or February 1983 I was posted to Onjiva which is maybe 50 kilometres inside Angola.  It was a 32 Battalion and Unita base at the time.  I specifically remember going there because I specifically remember Pik Botha saying on television that we weren't in Angola at the time and there I was.  
 One of the operations which was being run out of that base was the resident doctor ran a little clinic under a tree outside the base for the local population and we did everything from give-away vitamin pills and aspirin for toothache, through to anything that we could possibly try and treat.  The Military had a term for it, it was called COMOPS, Community Operations, basically trying to win hearts and minds, make them feel like we were the good guys.
 While we were there the International Red Cross, who were based in the town of Onjiva brought a woman to us who had breast cancer and asked us if there was any way that we could possibly arrange for her transport to South Africa for treatment.  When the doctor and I took this back to the base commander we were severely reprimanded because we had spoken to the Red Cross, because quite frankly we weren't in Angola so how could we be there to talk to them.  Any acknowledgment of our presence would have meant an acknowledgement of troops being there and therefore any treatment for this woman would have meant that the only way we could have treated her was if we were actually there.
 Another one of the patients who came into the base while I was in Onjiva was a young White South African conscript who shot himself in the foot while on guard duty in an attempt to get out, and that was quite a good way of getting out because he couldn't walk around and fight anymore, so he was obviously sent home.  I am not sure whether his foot was saved but it was, in his mind, better than being there.  At that stage there was no doctor in the base, there was me and me alone.  I treated him with as much morphine as I could possibly get into his body every few hours and flew him out the next morning.  
 A few days later the new doctor arrived and as he arrived I got a message to say that a number of 32 Battalion members had been involved in quite a serious contact and that the helicopter that dropped him off would be going straight on to pick up those patients and were coming back to pick us up to fly us back to Oshakati with these patients.  We identified blood groups and drew as much blood as we possibly could from the people in the base.  I essentially told the doctor, put your kit down and get ready we are getting back on the helicopter.
 We were presented with two patients, one who had shrapnel wounds covering his body and certainly looked like the worse off of the two.  Another complained of chest pain in his lower right chest and had lacerations on the top of his left shoulder.  It was pretty obvious that he had internal bleeding within his chest cavity and we put in a chest drain and he pumped out 1.5 litres of blood and we thought okay, probably what we have done is chopped open an artery and let's hope like hell that he actually survives the airplane flight.  What we didn't realise is that he had a live rifle grenade stuck in his chest.  It was an anti-tank grenade which had flown through the air and hit him in the top of his shoulder and lodged against the ribs, at the bottom of his chest, and 30cms of bomb were sitting inside of him.  We happily unloaded him at Oshakati and when they took him into X-rays they immediately cleared out the hospital and the operating theatre and brought in the bomb squad to actually remove the bomb out of the man's chest.
 Later in February I went back to Oshakati and back to the Hospital and one Wednesday evening a helicopter came in with four patients who had been in a Buffel that had driven over a double landmine.  The landmine had blown a core through the middle of the diesel tanks of the Buffel and sprayed burning diesel all over the people inside.  Those that came to us, the four that came to us were essentially 90% third degree burns and I landed up treating one of the patients, giving him a mixture of valium and morphine, dressing his wounds ready to send him to Pretoria, and he was still conscious and he pulled out of his pocket a photograph of his girlfriend and he said to me I'm really glad I've been injured because I'm going to go home and I'm going to see her.  I didn't know what to say to him because I knew that he wasn't going to actually live through the night.  He wasn't going to get on the airplane, and yet nothing had prepared me to counsel him, to talk him through that, and I just said, that's great, she's very pretty.   That night I took off my clothes, which at that stage smelt like burnt flesh, and threw them in the corner of my room, and the next morning went through to Ondangwa Air Force Base where the remains of the other six people who were in the Buffel were brought in.  Essentially there were about 20 pieces on the table.  Nobody knew which piece fitted with which piece, which piece belonged to which name, and most of the pieces were contorted from the heat. They were burnt black to the bone.  Eventually all we did we put the pieces into six body bags and put them into coffins and put big labels on to say don't let the parents have a look at this and sent them back to South Africa.
 That night again I threw my clothes in the corner of the room and the next evening I started having nightmares about that incident.  My room stank like burnt flesh for weeks afterwards.  The only way that I dealt with the nightmares was that I just didn't sleep for about three days and then they seemed to go away.
 While I was also at Oshakati we had at least one SWAPO patient who was chained to his bed.  The thing that surprised me about him was how dignified and intelligent he was, because I was taught that he would be this uncouth animal.  He spoke Afrikaans, he read Huisgenoot, he asked me where I came from, I told him a small town in the Eastern Cape and he said Port Elizabeth or East London?   He obviously knew a lot more about my situation than I knew about his.
 While at Oshakati there were a number of gay medics who would sexually harass patients and which many of us knew about but there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.  
 Having been there for six months four of us were asked to go and join Koevoet, to be medical personnel to Koevoet.  All we knew about Koevoet was they were the guys who didn't strap themselves into casspirs where the rest of us had to.  They were the people who drove down the middle of the road, even if there was a landmine there, not through the middle of the trees and bushes, and they were the guys who drank beers while sitting on top of casspirs instead of drinking water while on patrol.  And in a sense that was something which was quite attractive to 18 year-old boys who were living under military rules and military regime.  
 We cashed in our browns for camouflage uniforms, we let our hair grow long and four us went and worked with Koevoet for a further seven months.
 I was seconded to the Koevoet team Zulu India led by Marius, I cannot remember his surname, and second in command John Deegan, with probably about 50 Black, many ex-SWAPO combatants with us.  I stayed at the base, Onamwandi, which was next door to the main Koevoet base which was a prisoner of war camp, for those prisoners which Koevoet members caught.   
 The procedure at the camp was that those who were captured were brought back to solitary confinement until they were prepared to sign application forms to join the South African Police or the South West African Police which immediately mean that they weren't prisoners of war anymore and therefore the Red Cross couldn't touch them.  There must have been a couple of hundred prisoners of war who stayed in that camp while I was there, and one of the big questions that still remains in my mind is what happened to those people when we pulled out of Namibia, because certainly we wouldn't have declared them.  My gut feeling is that when Koevoet broke the UN ceasefire in 1989 that that was a good time to assassinate all of those prisoners of war.
 Koevoet worked on a bounty policy where anything and everything that you brought in had a price on its head.  People somewhere around R2,000, large calibre mortars probably a bit more, landmines slightly less and so on, which was a great motivating factor for the combatants and the teams because you could earn double, triple your money.  It also meant that score boards were kept and that the teams competed against each other for the most number of kills in a given week in the bush. 
 During this time I went home on leave probably for the first time since I had left Pretoria. I had long scruffy hair, I had a scruffy beard, I wore camouflage uniforms and when I arrived at Port Elizabeth airport my mother ran away from me because she couldn't believe what she saw.  
 While I was on leave my unit, Zulu India, was involved in an ambush and the casspir which I would have been in, and the place where I would have been sitting, my replacement had his legs blown off.  
 I had applied for Medical School and Wits had offered me, well had got me as far as interviews and I went for an interview with Wits Medical School during this leave and said to them I don't want to be a doctor anymore, not after what I've seen.  I went off and applied for Computer Science at the University of Port Elizabeth.
 While at Koevoet I was involved in clashes with SWAPO, probably every week that I was in the bush.  One of the first ones was a situation where we were driving down the tar road back to Oshakati and a number of SWAPO personnel were drinking at a shebeen on the side of the road and we turned off, it was just dusk, we turned off straight, driving straight towards them and one of them managed to shoot a rocket grenade right into the middle of our engine and we were stuck in the middle of this clearing.  I remember pushing my rifle out of the gun port and pulling the trigger not knowing what I was shooting at and not knowing what was happening for the next five or so minutes.  There were just loud bangs, flashes of lighters, rockets flew by as anyone and everyone shot anything that they could out of the holes in the casspir.
 At the end of it I realised that I hadn't shot a single shot because my rifle had jammed right there and then.  I was so angry that somebody had tried to kill me, the fact that I had been part of a team that tried to kill them hadn't really entered my mind, and I stood up on top of the casspir and there was one insurgent who had died in that conflict and I shot his dead body, in a sense to get rid of the anger within me.  
 Later that night I had diarrhoea, I was vomiting, I just had a complete physical reaction to that whole situation and everybody laughed at me, everybody in the team, they said don't worry it happened to all of us the first time, but you'll get used to it. From then on I carried an AK47 not an R1 because I knew that maybe it wouldn't jam the next time.
 Another incident which I specifically remember while with Koevoet was two SWAPO members who were captured at the beginning of the week that we were in the bush and they were interrogated, they were shocked with telephone winders on their genitals in order to get as much information out of them as possible.  The unit commander used torture to get information so that we could find other SWAPO members, so that we could find other arms caches, because all of that meant money.  
 At the end of the week they were told to dig graves and they were shot and left in those graves.  I always wondered why they weren't just taken in, but maybe it was because they were shot at point-blank range and somebody would have noticed.
 Every time there was a contact bodies were tied to the casspirs' bumpers, to the mudguards, to the spare wheels and we drove around for a week maybe with those bodies tied there, through dense bush, the skin being ripped off of those bodies.  Really, for two reasons, one, it intimidated anybody and everybody that saw us, and two, those bodies represented money and those faces represented a command structure that was being put together in the prisoner of war camp, and those bodies were shown to prisoners of war to say who was this, where did he fit into the structure.
 Once we picked up a spoor and chased a political commissar for two days.  We chased him relentlessly towards the tar road knowing that if he managed to get to the tar road before us he would probably be able to avoid us and we would probably lose the track.  There were 50 of us in casspirs with canons and rifles and enough ammunition that five casspirs can carry, and food, chasing one person running with an AK47.  That was pretty normal for Koevoet, they did that all the time.  
 Eventually we did catch up with him two days later.  He was hiding in a kraal.  My unit commander, second in command, because the unit commander was on leave, John Deegan chased everybody out of that kraal and of course he stayed hiding in the hut.  He lined up a bunch of Koevoet members on the one side of the hut and drove over the hut with a casspir.  Everybody then fired into the rubble and they pulled out the political commissar who was then handed over to me, as the medic, to treat.  He had been shot in the arms and the legs.  He'd been ridden over by a casspir.  I immediately started applying bandages, putting up a drip.  At the same time John Deegan was interrogating him, because as a political commissar he would have been carrying a handgun.  His handgun couldn't be found and I guess that John wanted it for his personal collection. While putting up a drip John got so frustrated that eventually he shot the patient while I was working on him, through the head.  That patient was just then somebody who got tied to the bumper of the casspir.
 I've met up with John earlier this year to try and understand why he did that and how that affected him.  I went to visit him in Johannesburg.  He still wears camouflage uniforms, the room where he was living was covered with camouflage netting, he's dropped out of society, he's on drugs, he's an alcoholic and he tells me that it was all because of that day and what he did, and that he completely lost it, and that 15 years later he's still carrying that incident with him.
 A couple of weeks later I was at the Koevoet base and was called into the detention cells where I was presented with a patient who had been tortured by pouring boiling water over his chest and genitals and he had welts and burns all down his front.  I was completely incompetent and unable to treat him and went and called a doctor from the local hospital.  And essentially was told you don't tell anybody about this, this never happened, he wasn't a SWAPO member, he was just a member of the public, but we made a mistake.  Make him go away in a sense.  I don't have any idea what happened to him because I handed him over to the doctor.
 While I was still at - my last month or so there, one of the Koevoet unit commanders was killed in a road accident.  Basically the rest of the White Koevoet police members went on a complete rampage.  They threw handgrenades at each other.  They fired AK47's.  They essentially demolished their whole base camp over the death of one of their members.  Again, as I look back at that I start to understand the trauma that they were going through because of the things that they were doing.   As medics we had unlimited access to schedule 7 drugs.  We were given ampules of morphine, Sosegon(?), and if you are on patrol and if you drop an ampoule of morphine you didn't have to account for it as much as if you were in base camp and opened an ampoule of morphine and injected it into yourself, you didn't have to account for it.  And in a sense many of my friends were either complete alcoholics or abuses of schedule 7.  
 I remember sitting up one night waiting for a friend of mine to die because he had injected himself with a mixture of two ampules of morphine and an ampoule of valium directly into his arm.  He didn't die but I certainly thought he was going to die.
 Around that same time I remember phoning my mother and telling her that I wasn't sure if we were going to actually survive the night because we had got to the point of being completely suicidal.  We had come to the end of our tether.  We had been involved in that kind of thing, seeing patients, seeing people being killed for 12 months already and all because I wanted to go and heal people and not kill them.  And we went to go and see the local psychiatrist who was resident in Oshakati and the Major in charge of South African Medical Services up there, and we were basically told to grow up and carry on and there was nothing wrong with us.  Eventually we did get out.  
 A bunch of new recruits arrived.  I happened to recognise one of them from school, got him and three of his friends, I said you are not going there and the four of us got on the same plane and left town, and a week or so later we arrived back in Pretoria with everybody else.  That was November 1983.
 In theory we should have had 50 odd days leave due to us because we were promised one day of leave for every weekend that we spent in the operational area, and with only 20 something days left until the end of our military service we all expected to go home.  Instead we stayed in Pretoria, had no leave and built a bar for the officers.  There was no de-briefing, there was no "what happened to you"?  There was no, "this is what you can expect when you go home"; "this is how you should try and integrate yourself back into society".
 I do remember a letter, I think being sent to our parents, with 10 points on it saying something like, you had better lock your alcohol and your young girls away because these young boys are coming back home.  But that was the extent of the support that we got.
 I went home and I had heard about things like "bossies" and so on, not understanding what it was.  I was hyper-vigilant.  I was having screaming nightmares every night for at least six months. I was very anti-establishment, anti-social, I was cold.  Whenever I heard a loud noise I would dive to the ground.  When I heard helicopters I would look for somewhere to hide.  I used to wear camouflage uniforms because I had brought a whole box of memorabilia home with me and every time I went hiking with some friends in the Wilderness I would put on my camouflage uniforms.  I remember going to see a film with my father and a helicopter came flying over in the film and a gunshot went off and I dived under the theatre seats.
 Eventually I learnt the avoidance tactics.  Eventually I learnt that I don't go and see these kind of films, I make sure that I don't go into those kind of places, I learnt how to cope with what I later became to understand it was post-traumatic distress order.
 In 1989 I had quite a good breakthrough, which was seven years after being in Angola, and I made a bonfire in the back garden and took all that memorabilia and burnt it and marched around and sang songs and my parents and my sister were crying thinking that I had gone completely mad having watched me deal with this unknown thing for seven years and then seeing this.  That brought some relief.  
 And then at the end of 1990, the beginning of 1991 the Gulf War started and CNN carried the feed for 24 hours a day and I happened to live in an area of Johannesburg at that time where I was able to receive CNN feed and got completely addicted to CNN, completely addicted to the Gulf War. And once again all the nightmares came back, but by this stage they had been distorted completely out of reality.  The recurring nightmare at that stage was a swimming pool full of blood and helicopters landing in the back garden and me carrying patients from the helicopter in my bedroom to treat them.  Waking my house mates up night after night with this nightmare.  
 I eventually, during the Easter of '91, went to go and seek psychiatric help from a private psychiatrist who immediately diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder.  I couldn't afford to see a psychiatrist so he made a plan for me to go and receive treatment at 1 Military Hospital.  
 I was there over the period of Easter '91 and during that time I saw a psychiatrist for about three hours in about ten days, at the end of which he declared me fit for battle and sent me home and that there was nothing wrong with me.  The point was that I wasn't fit to be a father and I wasn't fit to be a husband, but I was certainly fit to pull the trigger of a gun.
 For the rest of '91 and '92 I had to seek out my own counselling.  I had to go to friends, I had to go to church, I had to go to anybody that could help me.  By '94 I was offered an opportunity to go back to Oshakati by a journalist who would write a story about me and I turned her down purely because I couldn't face the ghosts that still lived there.
 In '91, '92 I remember going to see the film, "For the Boys", by Bette Midler and I remember coming home crying and not wanting to sleep all night again because of the nightmares.  And that was after my treatment and after my counselling.
 Essentially I think I am pretty healed.  I think I have come to a point of being whole.  I have my emotions back.  I am a father.  I am a husband and I can do those things pretty well, but no thanks to the SANDF or the SADF for helping me.
 I think as a last point the question remains in my mind, what can the Commission do for other people like me?  Every South African family, be they Black or White, has been involved in a conflict, and if statistics are anything to go by that means that there are a few million of me walking around who haven't dealt with their post-traumatic stress.  I don't know how the Commission can help set up some kind of counselling for those people, but if the Commission can't I don't know if anybody can.  And I am not sure that many of them would even be willing to come to the Commission or to counselling purely because they are South African men and we don't cry.
 And secondly, I think maybe we can take a lesson from the vets of Vietnam.  Maybe we need to build some kind of a memorial where we can go and have our time of mourning.  Some place where maybe the names that you are collating as a Commission of everybody who has died in this conflict, from all sides, are put up on that wall, so that all of us can go together and touch something, something tangible that says it's over, and something that says it was this big, and something that says it was important enough for us to be healed from it.