Page 39 - The Circle of Life

catching crocodiles so I had no previous experience to fall back on even if the

school's history boffin. I knew something of crocodiles having seen a few in the
Caprivi where there tend to be thousands of them in the wild. One caught our
family dog (named Captain) when he went for a swim. Rather mourned for old

Captain - he never tried to bite me and I regularly asked him not to swim in the

Zambezi River even if it's hot but he would not listen. I also saw a dead crocodile
being cut open by an Army medic in a post mortem. My familiarity though was
not on how to arrest one but on how to kill it. After all it is not a Zombie and can

be killed by our assault rifles.

For interest sake that Army crocodile had the remains of a dead terrorist inside
him and we all ran away when a rusted hand grenade came out. The medic, it

must be said, ran first but he was the closest to it. I was about ten years old and
remember an Army Sergeant-Major grabbing me by the arm whilst overtaking

me to make sure I stayed far enough away for I truly wanted to collect the hand
grenade as a trophy but they took it somewhere and exploded it without calling

us kids to watch which is communist behaviour from any viewpoint! I suppose
that is where I started to view the Army with suspicious eyes. Denying a child a

trophy is very sad and uncalled for. The grown-ups also felt sad for killing an ally
and they drank quite a few beers on the deceased crocodile that night at the

local tennis club. I was upset about my lost trophy and my father gave me a
Coke as comfort. Said there would be many trophies in the future the

Nationalists were going on. And so it was and we followed the Army patrols

around and picked up their discarded equipment.

The local SAP COIN Captain had a fatherly chat with us school children never to

pick up anything which is strange or looked military so I knew the hand grenade
might be dangerous. That did not stop another commissioned officer from

picking up something Chinese and dying in the subsequent explosion. From then
on I made sure my trophies already exploded by hitting them with a hammer

first. Something which greatly upset my dad when he found me one day doing
so!

Funny thing about that school was that we had our own Zoo with wild animals to
take care off and a big stone (like a baseball ball) kept in the headmaster’s

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