Wits University Historical Papers Sybie Van Der Spuy A3079/B.16 INTERVIEWER: It’S August 30Th 2005 and This Is an Interview with Sybie Van Der Spuy in Pretoria
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CLIENT : University of the Witwatersrand – Historical Papers SUBJECT : Sybie Van der Spuy IDENTIFICATION : Tape 16 CONTACT PERSON : Michele Pickover SUPPLIER : Barbara van der Merwe TEL NO : 082 571 1203 E-MAIL : [email protected] DATE : 2 June 2009 Please note: 1. When typist is unsure of names, speakers will be identified by title. 2. Transcriptions are typed verbatim, and typist, when unsure of jargon, industry terms or individual’s names, will type phonetic spelling followed by (unsure) Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 INTERVIEWER: It’s August 30th 2005 and this is an interview with Sybie van der Spuy in Pretoria. Tell us about the military tradition in your family. How did you get into this? SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: I was actually bamboozled into it but honestly we, and I say we, my brother and myself we got exposed to military traditions and military way of life from a very early age…my dad was a staunch soldier type person although he wasn’t when I got to know him he was a civilian working at his own electrical company trying to build that. His grandfather was a boer fighting the English in the Anglo Boer War and he was actually killed and I grew up with one of the first keepsakes from my dad was visible in their display case at home, was Martini Henry shell, a spent casing of a shell. Apparently or this was supposedly picked up right next to the place where my great grandfather died, so that was supposedly the last shot that he fired…then we were brought up as very staunch Afrikaner conservative Afrikaner young men and later on my sisters as young ladies …and INTERVIEWER: Where were you brought up? SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: In Kempton Park of all places on the East Rand, but what was nice about the place where we grew up was right across the road from us when we moved into this …into Bonero Park an area saturated with 52 different nationalities, all immigrants congregating to work at Atlas Aircraft Corporation where my dad also had a job and then he started realising what was going on about us, three, four years old. Right across the road from us the farmlands started so we had both of the best sides, to our backs we had town life Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 and relatively rural at that stage…and right in front of us we had the best of the best, woods and dams and farmlands and horses and what have you…but my great grandfather’s soldier’s ghost haunted my dad and he got involved in …well as a matter of fact he was a volunteer at the age of 17, he did his service, not that it was at all compulsory then, it was very much a …he started with Jan Breytenbach and who else… Magnus Malan…the three of them started I think it was Magnus Malan, as the first intake in the then Army Gymnasium…and he finished his year at Gym, my grandmother wouldn’t sign him up because of his age, so he was forced to carry on with his studies. He joined the citizen force of those years …the Armour…and his study was adorned with citizen force photographs and military memorabilia. When him and my mother came back from after their extended honeymoon of three years in the UK where he furthered his studies and did some work, and when they came back he joined up with the South African Navy and now the Navy is smart, they have got swords and glitters and gold and white and gold, its very fancy…and that obviously caught the eye as a youngster …its much nicer than all this dull brown stuff that he also had. So at the tender age of 5 or 6, I cant remember but I think it was about 5, we …he got involved at Atlas Aircraft Corporation, they had a local commando …like all big corporations or rural areas had a natural …a stipulated commando which was a local area…you know what a commando is…he joined up with the Atlas Commando and there we went into an exercise one Saturday, my boet and myself…and dad, and him being the Captain there, the only ranking officer in the group he had a R1 which is a semi-automatic rifle FN 30 calibre, and the rest of Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 the guys I remember clearly had 303’s and we laid a mock ambush and dad had his, everybody was firing when the ambush was sprung…everybody was firing away with their blanks at each other and one of the spent shells ejected from the FN and it fell into my neck where I lay next to my dad …and I was absolutely convinced, now this thing is red hot…burnt a bit welt in my neck … I was convinced that I was wounded and I shouted apparently like a pig and so I had my first wound, contact delivered wound at the age of 5 or 6…and obviously as we say in Afrikaans “die gogga“ just bit me, I got hooked in the way of doing things. Then rumours came of this unconventional warfare grouping which consisted at that stage very much out of ex Congo Mercenaries….just after the Congo debacle…and the South Africans who did their dogging and warring issues who lived their dogs of war style up in the Congo came back to South Africa and these guys formed in one of the civil service units…a grouping called the Hunters. Now it was a totally undisciplined group of hooligans reputedly… INTERVIEWER: Willy Ward? SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Willy Ward became part of that just afterwards and the citizen force commander who had parentage over this grouping, approached my dad to become involved and get some discipline into the organisation…and so our Saturdays from then on became one long adventure, driving out to Doringkop Military Base which used to be the old jail…and there I met Willy Ward and quite a number of other…no cut Willy Ward out of it…I met quite a lot of very unscrupulous and dodgy characters…some of them after an initial clean up staying behind and Willy Ward’s names popping up, Willy Ward, a certain very Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 colourful character, Gideon Nel, Brian Mills, Oom Floeker…Oom Floeker was a medic …I will get to his surname now we called him Oom Floeker because he swore so much it left a lasting impression…Jannie Mathee…he was this teddy bearish looking guy and very fluent and expressional in everything he did and said except when he started talking to woman, he stuttered like mad and again there the stuttering was totally due to trying not to swear while he was speaking to a woman but it was a very colourful environment and what was so nice about it is we were allowed, my brother and myself, to actually clean their rifles after shooting exercises. So we invariably ended up with 30 or 40 weapons of all origins which we had to clean and make sure that it was in perfect pristine condition …and this at the age of six. INTERVIEWER: You thought that was pretty cool at that time. SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: That was so cool, your mates never would believe you at school, they just wouldn’t believe you….this was really before war became a part of our lives and it so happened that the Hunter Group at the end of 1973 were invited to come and do selection, special forces were formed in 1972 …Hunter Group was going already from 1968 I think…we got involved in 1969 / 1970 and then in 1974 about 20 guys went and did selection …only five or six of them came in, passed selection. At that stage, that was in 1974, I was in seven or eight, we had the, on exercises…now that they are now qualified operators, the seven of them they had to formalise their training exercises over weekends and we used to go out on Friday evenings on route marches, usually to a shooting range about 40 kms out from Doringkop and now with five or six guys Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 qualified one had to stay in base to control the operation which usually was not bad and then you had to have logistics runner which was usually medic and then you had four guys, now four guys is two small teams, in those years we didn’t know, the term small team wasn’t reality, so we ended up in two three man teams and myself usually with Willy and Brian …myself being the radioman …I had a B25 to carry and my boet usually with Jan van der Merwe and who was the other guy…and then we would klap this 40 odd kilometres and we were very proud of it…we never wore shoes, so it was barefooted, short trunks, this big military radio on your back, but the top of it all by then already we could carry each a weapon. Not loaded. INTERVIEWER: You are still little kids at this time? SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes seven, eight years old.