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

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. So I had my own folding butt R1 and you carried your rations with you and there we went, so as I said in the beginning I was bamboozled into it, I was indoctrinated into becoming a soldier.

INTERVIEWER: Did your mom have any say in any of this, do you think?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Like any good South African or Afrikaans conservative woman no not much…no she was comfortable with it, I suppose she really looked forward to having a bit of a day off with us being off with dad…we really were a handful, we …it was before the days of crèches …day schools and what have you, so we were usually ten or eleven boys at home …a gang of youngsters and if we weren’t building tree houses we were out shanghaiing the areas horses together and we were very busy.

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 INTERVIEWER: It sounds like military discipline is probably the only solution here.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: No I don’t think so, it was very much a normal day, it was …mothers didn’t work they looked after the kids, and boys being boys we were busy, we weren’t naughty, we were never negative in what we did, our energy was boundless so I don’t think my mother really minded us being away from home over the weekends…but …so this progressed into high school life and 2 Reconnaissance Regiment as they became to be known became more and more operationally involved at the stage here in 1975/76/77 I saw my dad for three months a year…the rest of the time they were up in the bush…

INTERVIEWER: So your dad was in 2 Reconnaissance.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: He was a commanding officer in 2 Reconnaissance

Regiment.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: And we got to know everybody and his dog and invariably seeing the guys off at Waterkloof and meeting them again and funerals, and ….well social gatherings …we got to know most of the 1 Recce and well at that stage 1 Recce and Bravo Group and Alpha Group guys and later 4

Recce and then 5 Recce. 5 Recce I never really got involved with as a kid

…maybe because they formed later than the rest and I was then already on my way to the military myself, but we got to know them, as we call them the Ooms, the Uncles…and it was good fun. By the time I …by the age of 17 I think, no by the age of 12 there wasn’t a Russian weapon that I hadn’t fired, and that includes

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 heavy weapons. I was fully trained in the spectrum of weapons …I was conversant with all tactics, patrolling tactics, bush craft, I was very into survival and survival skills and what have you. So I had a very unfair advantage when going to the army as a National Serviceman later in life…it was also very unfair to myself but I will get to that now…so we grew up playing soldiers over weekends and playing rugby during the week and later in my school years it really became a conflict of interest …rugby is a social sport…social sport you get to be invited to parties, if you are socialising parties, girls, fun, social life at school and I really had a conflict of interests with …am I going to pursue social life at school or am I going to go out at weekends and train with the guys and help them or whatever…but I think in the end we managed a good balance. Also by the time I reached the age of 17 or 18 the regiment became structured to such an extent that it was really an automated machine…weekend parades started falling away

…it was a big organisation by then. At the age of 18 I matriculated …I joined up as a National Serviceman in the Infantry and it was good fun. I happened to land in the same tent with five of my class mates, school mates and all of a sudden I had to come to a shocking realisation that the military is not what I perceived the military to be. It’s a bureaucratic damn organisation that’s very difficult to manage in …it takes you weeks to get anything done …the corporal that’s training you probably knows less than you do…but try now and be the clever guy and tell him what to do, I mean it just didn’t work….it was my first year as a

National Serviceman …I was very frustrating in a sense …now I couldn’t wait…throughout my school career I came home from school every afternoon

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 and I said to my mother its so many days before I go on National Service, I couldn’t wait for the military, and I had it big, I had it planned, I was going to become a lieutenant at the School of Infantry and then I am going to the border for two years and I was going to study at the military academy…and then I am going to become an operator and then …and I had it pegged up to Lieutenant

General level at the age of 45 or 46…and my cousins who were years older than me, they always had a good laugh if they pulled me to the side and I had to explain how …give them a career preview and when all this absolute believe myself …totally in full earnestly related my career path to that. Now here it was good aspirations…coming back to National Service I very soon realised that life was a bit more harsh in reality and directly after National Service my intention was to join up with Special Forces, go and do selection and carry on with my life.

Now I did, I finished School of Infantry as a Lieutenant…so the first step was okay…Second Lieutenant…I was then posted hastily to Special Forces Regiment down in Langebaan where we arrived three days late for selection, bureaucratic whatever…and the OC then decided to put the four of us from School of Infantry on our own selection course which was a major mistake. Needless to say four day, about four days later I was the only one left on that selection course and…

INTERVIEWER: Was it different from the sort of main stream selection?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Those years selection was very much a process but it wasn’t formalised and it was probably better not having such a formalised structure as we have it now, however, I wont say it was different in contents but maybe in approach. It was an on schedule course, it was on plan for whatever,

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 so the selection was called off after I had missed my second RBM…I was as thirsty as hell, that’s the one thing I remember, so I flunked my first selection and

I was totally devastated. I had this bubble of being this big operative and I couldn’t make selection, however it may be I put a transfer to Special Forces HQ

Unit because I am now in Special Forces and being transferred, I was then put before a choice of either going to 32 Battalion for a six month period or go to Fort

Doppies which was our training area…up in the Caprivi strip. That was a cross road in my life and I only realise it now, or very much later on I realised that could have been the cross road. I chose to go to Doppies with the intention of catching up, getting to understand this animal Special Forces a bit better before I re- attempt the selection. I went to Doppies and had six of the best months that I ever spent in my life up there, I really fell in love with the Caprivi …with the game, it was just great. I met Jan Breytenbach before but there was the first time that I really got to know him. He was occupying a base across the road from us …

INTERVIEWER: Sorry what year was this?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: This was 1982/83…and I got to know oom Jan quite well…my main focus was anti-poaching in Doppies and we used some unconventional methods of anti-poaching…methods to anti-poaching and we did apply mortars against poachers and some heavy machine guns and what have you, but lets not venture too far down that road, but we never had poachers, not while I was there…I don’t say it was me, it was the environment was so anti- poaching that nobody dared lift a rifle against the environment…the six chefs and builders that we had as National Serviceman up there under contingent of about

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 twelve bushmen, every weekend we went out on snare hunting checking for snares on the boundary, so it was a holiday of a lifetime, you know you got so intimate with animals and big game that you…people don’t believe you, I don’t even want to go down that lane, it just seems so incredible. Where else do you bump into an elephant at night and you take you bush out and whack him on the backside to get him out of your way and he goes. Well after Doppies I went back…I in the meantime attended a four month mortar course, it’s a big combination course, Infantry based combination course where I met with Roes

Terblanche [?] who became a life long friend of mine. Sakkie Seegers, Gif

Opperman, and quite a number of 32 Battalion guys and 32 Battalion guys…it was actually an operational area course that came down, they gathered guys from all over and we attended this 14 weeks of …I don’t think Oudtshoorn ever wants that 14 weeks to be repeated in its history, but it was good. We had one long party and we did some mortaring and night sights whatever in between…it was excellent and there I really got for the first time really got to a social level at my own age level got to interact with operators…and

INTERVIEWER: And now the military was starting to look a bit more like your child version of it.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes I was starting to understand the animal and I had …things started to work out and I liked what I saw and Theuns Kruger, I met him there at the gate, we arrived simultaneously there…now you know it was an incredible journey, that course also again is one of the top class, it was a noble point, a consolidation point in my life. From there …I must just think, it was

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 actually after that, that I went to Doppiesville…after Doppies I came back and I went to join up with 1 Parachute Battalion while I am waiting for my next selection let me just get on with what I can do in the meantime, and I did a parachuting course but the full Battalion Parachute course which at that stage was about six weeks, I cant remember PT training before you actually went into your…it was four weeks and then two weeks parachute training…that was interesting, it was hell. The course was scheduled for the whole company, about 400 people …we ended up arriving at the course or “klaring” in for the course…we started the course with twelve guys only…and you had instructors available to drum around

400 troops and here we were twelve on the course. So there wasn’t any short cuts during the four weeks of PT, it was bloody hell, I was two weeks of PT and the rest was course….it was tough but good friend of mine…we became very good friends on this course…he was from 32 Battalion Eugene Rheeder, we were the only two operationally minded guys on this course, the rest of them were gunners and what have you, guys that came through punching their tickets, and Eugene and myself had a good time…we partied at night and worked hard during the day, and we became …we qualified as paratroopers. Now I was a qualified paratrooper, I was very proud of this and I had an opening to go to

Military Academy which I grabbed with both hands, and I was off to the Military

Academy…and here again I was very badly shocked to reality.

INTERVIEWER: Disillusioned?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes disillusioned in a sense but also I was still very much a boy in my heart at that stage and when you are a youngster you …I have

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 just now started feeling what its like to be a soldier and now I am in this academic environment …however its military but very much academic focused and oriented as it should be and my recently acquired parachuting skills and my …the environment just opened to me, I now have got a car…I bought myself a car in the meantime…life just opened up to me and there wasn’t much time in my social calendar for studying…and I was trying a BSc Bachelor of Science and man it didn’t go….it went very well except with mathematics and maths and myself never saw eye to eye resulting in after a year they asked me to leave as soon as possible, please get into your car and get out of here…look we partied that place to pieces…it was again a fantastic holiday but its not what I wanted so away I went back to Special Forces HQ and now I was starting to feel really pissed off with myself …not getting anywhere…things are going too slow…my plans …I am not going to be a Lieutenant General by the age of 42 if I carry on like this…I have to do something about this, and I then went onto selection, passed selection and during the cycle I was actually invited by the Military Academy to come back…not to study science but in the proper BA Literary Sciences Degree.

I went down to the selection board to find out what this was about …I was quite chuffed at the thought of them wanting me to come back, but I showed that…I then realised that the war was starting to slow down …taking a twist and I am going to miss out on it if I don’t hurry up…so I thanked them and got back into my

Volla …my beetle and drove back to Dukuduke [?] completed my …how shall I say it…my very unprofessional cycle, training cycle…when I say unprofessional it was a relative new curriculum that they followed with us…very scientifically

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 developed training cycle…now Special Forces soldier…they identify you and then you go through …once you have volunteered and they are happy on face value with you, they will put you through a physiological test batter when you pass that they will put you through a physiological test battery and upon passing that a series of PT physical tests and then we fell in for training. In those days we started immediately with the selection course and after selection course you started doing [inaudible] courses and about a year later after your selection course you qualify as a Special Forces Operator, going through a battery of different training of the special areas focussing on signals, on urban warfare,[static inaudible] and this culminated into an operation at the end of our selection where we joined up with One Reconnaissance Regiment from Durban, all their operators flew in and for five weeks we combined our energies and joined up and trained and for a specific operation with UNITA and then we infiltrated and executed by operation…. I fired shots in anger before during my tenure in school in Infantry and tenure at Doppies …they fired back but never really in combat.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, so your first operation …

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: My first Special Forces operation then was a grand affair, a total fiasco…but lots of bullets flying and we talked earlier about intelligence…we actually followed in a so called turned SWAPO and with the

UNITA guys we were over a hundred…and we infiltrated just to the south of

Sangongu which was a very active FAPLA stronghold in Southern Angola and to cut a long story short, we were going to mortar them and then ambush the

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 pursuing force. That was the plan, and in the end it worked out but it really was good fun, we fought for over two hours with the initial contact and then trying to break away and ex-filtrate…instead of attacking we never, for a special forces soldier 100 people is a major force…and you feel invincible with all these fire power around you, so as youngsters we thought we had to attack and luckily our commanders tried to get us out of there and it was my first experience of 122’s fired at you, and in a series of contacts over a six hour period, we managed to break away with only one serious wounded UNITA and some shrapnel between ourselves and it was good fun. I was hooked totally, hook line and sinker and after that action I was posted to 51 Commando which was situated in Ondangwa

Fort Rev…we went to South Africa, finished our urban training and the cycle, got badged and the next opportunity flew up to Ondangwa and clocked in. That was another nightmare…the day we arrived there about ten or eleven in the morning we were picked up in this clapped out old Hi-Ace bus in a peculiar blue, powdered blue colour at the Airport and we were driven down to Fort Rev…and that night we deployed in our first operation …it was a quick one, came back two days later and we deployed on a proper operation into enemy held territory…now we were 51 Commando was a pseudo Commando so our focus was to act as the enemy, to animate the enemy and fight and operate as they did…and 80% of our charges, well at that stage I was in charge, 80% of the soldiers serving in 51

Commando used to be either SWAPO or FAPLA soldiers and they would…

INTERVIEWER: All of them turned?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: All of them turned, some of them walked away but

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 they turned, and they were fighting with us against their erstwhile comrades now.

INTERVIEWER: But could you trust them?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: It was a difficult one, by the time [interjected]

INTERVIEWER: What convinced you that you could trust these people?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: By the time that I got there many of the guys were well established already…they were fighting for a few years, five or six years already in that role…during my …by the time I reached Ondangwa the was had changed quite dramatically in the sense that things became more specialised from the enemy point of view. Gone were the days of mass infiltrations and trying to hit as hard as possible with hundreds and hundreds of planned infiltrators rushing the border and trying to get through. Your enemy now was a very sophisticated gorilla fighter and gone were the days of massive attacks, massive air strikes brought down on concentrations of 200-300 soldiers.

INTERVIEWER: No more turkey shoots.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: No more turkey shoots, this was totally, you had to go and look for these guys, it wasn’t a situation of them coming to you…you had to go and look for them and it was frustrating, you know you were brought up in the organisation with the idea of man there we were 300 against one and did we baste the one…inverted in a sense.

INTERVIEWER: So you were better matched then?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Oh much better, from what I understand from the past, much better matched and also I am answering your question, but in a round about way…because we were better matched and they the enemy were more

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 sophisticated in their methodology, we saw less of them so we weren’t these hundreds to pick from and work with towards turning them for application. So in my period of operations we had about six guys who we had the opportunity to work with, not necessarily that we caught, they could have been caught by infantry or wherever captured, but in the past Roes Terblanche worked with companies of FAPLA or SWAPO where they captured, what we used to call the

Hokke P.O.W. Camp…where they would select these guys and interview them and start working with them towards using them. So the guys that we caught or used I was very careful.

INTERVIEWER: What was the status in relation to the Defence Force, I mean they were obviously…they weren’t members of the SADF or ….

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: They didn’t exist.

INTERVIEWER: They didn’t exist, okay.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: They existed in our hearts, minds and our sub- system and our …I must tread carefully here…but in the Special Forces hierarchy they existed very substantial, they were there, they were part of the organisation. But to the outside world, even to most of the inhabitants of

Oshakati Ondangwa, they didn’t exist, they were …many of them lived out in the townships but nobody knew where they worked or what they did…and it was quite easy to get away with it because you had so many organisations…Koevoet,

101, 31, 32 Battalion moving through that you had quiet a turnover of people. I am not for one moment convinced that we really managed to shanghaai the local population with these guys between them and all of a sudden they disappear for

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 six weeks and then they are back for three days and then they disappear for six weeks…bull shit, some of the local population must have known what it was about but we were very careful to expose our soldiers officially in uniform …we lived, we physically lived in the base behind 20ft. earth walls with corrugated iron fences on top, it was a jail…and we were very careful on any deployment to make sure that none of the faces that we use will ever be linked to uniform for whatever. In the end of the war when we couldn’t fly any more, Cubans had air superiority…where we had to travel by making use of 101 or 31 Battalion, we made a lot, we used a lot of 31’s Battalion’s capacity in the Western Namibia,

Angola to take us as far as they could and then we went further…but we went to great extremes to look after our own. But be it as it may no I didn’t trust the guys

…the soldiers I got to know in the organisation I trusted my life to…and we had many a scrap where they saved our lives and it was reciprocal…that’s quite an act…the three or four new guys, it was difficult…one of them ran away with us or from us during a battle, during a contact, the other one during my first operation lead us astray and absconded and actually warned some [inaudible] that we were coming…so it was a dicey situation and also with the enemy being more sophisticated it was not a question of just walking into an enemy encampment any more…and presenting yourself as another branched off or shot up grouping that you are now escaping from the Boere and you are joining up …even the local population in Southern Angola were extremely careful when anybody approached them and you really had to prove your capacity as an MK or as a

FAPLA or Flan soldier before they would support you. So the Boere SWAPO

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 was well known by then…unfortunately because the …due to our fantastic ……

Side B

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: 32 Battalion ventured into the reign of pseudo type of operations …the police, Koevoet’s, mimicked the strategy stuffing it up totally in a sense that the approached that we had was to engage with the enemy, meet up and melt in with them, work with them, stay with them for a week, if it needs to and get as high a concentration as possible then we would bring in aircraft, airstrikes or land forces to box them in and take them on, and the moment the shit hits the fan you will withdraw your forces out of there as part of your escape plan, so it happened that you could actually put the same guys back into the same grouping two or three times…it actually happened like that but there was this stupid chasing of heads …there was actually a competition up there in sector

10, which unit got the most heads on a monthly basis…there was this…you measured your successes by the number of heads you brought home in a month, so when we started hunting heads it was this whole process of pseudo operations became prostituted and it was a difficult one to work with, but

[interjected]

INTERVIEWER: Who were the best head hunters, I mean who had the?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Koevoet by far…by far but towards the end of the war, the later 80’s Koevoet had a mandate inside Namibia …inside South West

Africa and I think something like five kilometres over the border line…and as I said your enemy became very sophisticated and so they …by the time that they reach the border they were in one’s and two’s so Koevoet weren’t that effective. Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 In the later years 101 Battalion we operated up to 200 kilometres north of the border with their Casper’s following the same doctrine as Koevoet…we were very effective, so it was a difficult one, it was a difficult environment to operate in, however following the enemies doctrine to a T and mimicking them gave us a lot of freedom of movement, we really managed to get to places where we wouldn’t get to without it. It had its own dangers in a sense that I don’t think it’s totally legal to operate in an international scale in that manner but you know what, if you are faced with a sophisticated enemy and you have to get results, you do it.

Personally I never had a qualm with FAPLA…I thought FAPLA was a waste of time, they interfered where they shouldn’t have…and complicated their lives and our lives. SWAPO was an interesting enemy…I never had a personal grudge with SWAPO themselves, they were fighting for what they believed and I saw the

SWAPO exposure as a good training ground during, exposed myself towards fighting in the end, the real enemy which was Mkonto Isiswe …in my mind South

West Africa was a gone case by the beginning of the 80’s already, so it was winning time that we were busy with…but in the meantime keeping the red bear at bay so we really believed in that stuff and I still believe we made a change, we made a decided difference in the communistic plot, or capacity in Africa by fighting the South Western Angola. During my years in Angola and South

Western Angola I had fantastic experiences, it was the best years of my life…its sometime ago I lost some very valuable documents on CD’s and I misplaced them and I just couldn’t find them and it was time critical, so I went to a psychiatrist who put me under hypnosis to try and help me to go back in my mind

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 to try and recollect the places where I placed it…now this guy had different techniques and it was a lot of bullshit in the beginning to start off with, and really he wasted my time and I wasted his time, but in this process that was the first two encounters, on the third one he really took me back, it was a wow experience but what he does is he takes you in your subconscious state to your absolute comfort zone and from there he takes you to where he wants to take you. And it so happened that in my subconscious mind my absolute comfort zone is a little mole, on the mountainside and one of the terrorists is coming down…in Southern

Angola overlooking this vast plain laying against my back pack which was my home for three months at a time…my AK across my knees, my camera net over me, in that stinking heat…and according to him that was the most content that I have ever been in my life. That couple of hours, and I can relate to it, consciously I can relate to it, it was a fantastic life honestly. The best experience

I had, one of the best experiences was one night we were a team of four and we dog legged for the night, they had identified a small beach, I only worked at night,

I only moved at night when in deep enemy territory and I identified this ridge to sleep when we were going to go down for the night and we dog legged around it, and a dog leg is lay a trail in front of that area where you are going to go down so that if you are trapped your enemy will pass in front of you and it’s an automatic ambush onto them. They came into the hiding place laid up and the drill is you go down and you are dead quiet…as you go down you sit and for a minimum of twenty minutes usually about forty minutes you just sit and listen…because its night, vision is not that important but you listen for any movement. Its not only

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 people in your tracks…but you don’t know if there is a kraal, local population close by…and if there are you will hear dogs barking or smell firewood, you drink in your surrounds and then you decide whether this is the place or not …if your sixth sense tells you no this is not the place, you go and that night my sixth sense was just not on…but now this is a whole Angolan Nature Reserve so there is not supposed to be many people about…it’s a beautiful area and we …I just had this premonition that something is wrong and I took my night vision equipment very carefully, because the moment that you switch it on there is a green glow and I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what it was and I brought it right up to my eyes and I had these rubber suction cups to close off any light escaping from …and I pressed it right against my eyes and I switched it on, and low and behold we the four of us walked right into a herd of mountain zebra …and there we were sitting right in the middle of this herd …they didn’t know what was cooking the zebra, they were standing dead still, not moving, because they knew something is amiss and they were carefully specking their environment, so were we, so it was a lose lose situation…the moment anybody was going to move the zebra was going to be off and if they are off we are compromised we cant stay there, we must move on again, but what that showed me was that we could actually …after three weeks you stink like an animal, but we actually meshed with nature…and when you get to these realisations…another …there were a couple of other incidents like this, that happened that gave me a very comfortable assurance that we are doing the right things right, we are insinct with nature, we are insinct with the environment and we are, our past experiences have shown

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 us that we can overcome the enemy even at much greater numbers than we are and so it really was good to be at war. As a Special Forces soldier other than the commander that Shawn served in, which was a mobile sabre type of organisation, our job was to find enemy, pinpoint them and then bring in forces to fight…so we weren’t the fighters, we were more the lovers of the organisation…the recce groups. We were, I wasn’t at that stage exposed to these massive machine gunning napalm type of incidences…but what we did we did well. We were, we found the enemy and we brought home the bacon…whenever it was needed. I at a later stage at 51 Commando we swarrecce …which was our sister grouping in South West Africa, South West

Africa had its own territorial force, military force and they had their own Recce’s trained by us but they disbanded late in 88 and we inherited a number of their guys into 51 Commando and there I had the fantastic privilege to getting to know

Chris Schulenburg of Salute Scout fame from Rhodesia…to get to know him quiet well and I started working for Chris exclusively on operations, we were both

Captains at that stage…I was a Senior Lieutenant…I became a Captain under his command, but there I got involved with small teams operations and small team operation is very much an environment where you do not want to fight, your security is not weaponry and ammunition its stealth. And your focus is to gather information and intelligence, and another chapter of absolute adventure opened up to me, un-professionalism, under this guy Chris Schulenburg I absolutely learnt what the word professionalism is, this was a first time in my military career where I really was exposed to operational completeness. This guy was

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 absolutely out of this world, he was …he really worked his butt off for us and we for him, and there I got to know Angola from another angle and that is just myself and my Portuguese compatriot and his English stopped very much at the New

Testament in English where he identified words where ever we were laying up during the day underlining words in the Bible and then if we had the opportunity to chat he would ask me to translate or explain the words in my three word strong

Portuguese…so it was, and he only had one eye …Abbel Daniele[?] a staunch soldier, a ruthless fearless bugger.

INTERVIEWER: What was his name?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Abbel Daniele…now we had many adventures together, long treks all alone, I had one mission which took us about four months from the day of infiltration to ex-filtration…

INTERVIEWER: Four months in the bush?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Four months in the bush the two of us, that was good fun that was, during that operation I sat on the knoll that is now my subconscious comfort zone…

INTERVIEWER: So your subconscious comfort zone is a knoll in the bush in a war zone…with an Angolan as a comrade.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes 50 metres away, that was great it was absolutely great, you know your back pack becomes your home, it becomes your life, you become so familiar with it, its your couch, its your clicking companion, you carry everything in it, you live out of it, it was good fun. Chris Schulenburg taught me many things and one of the interesting things that he had and its done

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 quite as a standard, but he had flair in doing this…is on Sundays, now your standard deployment would be nothing less than eight weeks so its quite extended periods that you are away from home and wherever, and some guys doing this type of work got promoted in the period he was away and then he was an old ranker already by the time he gets back to base and then he didn’t know about it, so Schulies had this thing…the only life line that you have got is your radio that you carry with you, we had one radio and two batteries and a solar panel with you, so you are not …you are very conservative with application of your radio because without that you are a gonner, there is no link to the barracks, and you are far, far away from home. But on Sundays twelve o’clock, now we synchronised our watches on BBC world time …he did and so did we, so we synchronised our radio communications not on the minute or half an hour or whatever, but on the seconds, absolute seconds…and he had a rule that on twelve o’clock on Sundays if you could you were to tune into a specific frequency an optimised frequency for the distance that we had, and twelve o’clock GMT, on the dot if your watch goes on twelve you will hear Schullie come up and “this is radio fuck knuckle reporting from you know where”…and then for the next half hour he would relate in code everything that is happening in the base, that is happening with your girlfriend in the States, he actually reads your letters and he then takes critical information out of that and he would relay it if its good news…he will relay that to you in front. Now you cant believe what that did for morale out in the bush, its incredible…and you were up to date…there was no ways that you can listen to…you are cut off from the world but at least by doing

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 that or by following radio fuck knuckle I knew more or less what was happening in the world and I knew the Americans were again at war in Afghanistan and things were happening and it was …that was Schullie, his attention to detail was fantastic and if you ever have the opportunity to speak to anyone, you should speak to this guy, he is a marvel, but then as all good things happen Dries and myself, Dries is my very good friend up in Ondangwa [?] we took one of our guys down to Windhoek one weekend, for him to get a passport, he was going to see family in Portugal and we made an R&R exercise out of this, and we went down to Windhoek, it’s a long drive from Ondangwa but okay…now there was a military reason also for us to go there and this guy we dropped him in

Kataturra[?] the so called coloured township of Windhoek and the next morning we were supposed to meet in town and he didn’t pitch and we fell back to our emergency rendezvous and eventually we met up and the previous night he ran into six Mkonto Isiswe soldiers in full drag, uniforms, AK’s the works parading in

Kataturra…busy with political and showing themselves off…and so our weekend turned into six months in Windhoek …I had exactly one PT short, one jean, two shirts that I went from Ondangwa down to Windhoek. I managed to phone the headquarters down in South Africa and say listen there is some MK guys here and let’s make a plan, so we were tasked onto this job, and it was good fun. All of a sudden you are out of the bush and you are in town…so we had to operate, and that stick off ended up in quite a big operation in Namibia…or in Windhoek environment and as I said six months later we were out of there and by the time that we got back to Ondangwa the base was already half demolished…and we

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 were out of Namibia…we were moving out of Namibia. A new chapter in the history came by with urban type of operations, with more covert type of work…its actually wrong to call it covert work…because we never really in the true sense deployed this in a spy fashion, but we applied our bush tactics in urban environments doing more or less the same what we did in the bush. Finding the buggers and making plans towards actioning it. Namibia ended quite abruptly for us in 89 or early 90’s, we moved back to Phalaborwa …I got married that year,

Phalaborwa was an absolute nightmare …although we were based now in South

Africa we never spent any time there, we were onto the then Swaziland border, there was a lot of activity started happening from Swaziland…infiltrations or in came filtrations and weapons caches and what have you, and with our rural footprint, or with our bush footprint or capacity, we were the guys deployed in clandestine groupings on the border. Okay so then I got to realise that something was amiss…I ideally wanted to go to 4 Recce …water is in my blood, all sport that I participated in was water orientated.

INTERVIEWER: That was in Langebaan.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes, so I requested for a transfer to Langebaan…it was time for me to move on in my career as well, and it so happens that

Langebaan was not in the books for me …I was sent to special forces school in

Durban at 1 Recce and I was there to teach bush warfare and related subjects, and I was very annoyed at first because training is the last that any soldier wants to do as a career ….but I very quickly saw the reason in that and you know in a very short few years, in three years operators coming through the mill were not

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 having any bush experience they didn’t know what the bush was about, we never had a war, there was nothing going on and it was imperative that we have to build on experience and get some realism into training with regards to getting these guys orientated for bush warfare, but it didn’t stay with bush warfare, only we started refining on urban applications and the one nag that I had right from my Windhoek experiences were the special forces soldier must be able to operate in urban environments as well…but not in an offensive manner only which we were quite good at, at that stage but in information gathering as well because a soldier looks at a target quite differently than intelligence operative look, as at a totally different target. If you are going to attack a place, you better have a soldier gathering your information and not an intelligence prostitute, because these guys usually use second and third hand information about hearsay and whatever they gather into a semblance of information which they then sell off as intelligence and we found many a time that you deployed onto lemons or then the very wrong information, and people got killed due to negative and wrong information. So special forces already then had an initiative going with Eben Barlow who was then just retired as a senior instructor or chief instructor from the School of Intelligence and Eben and myself tied up and over the next two years we developed a series of courses, well one course with Eben where we trained operators not as intelligence operatives but as tactical intelligence gatherers and then we sat with Duncan Reikardt [?] as my commando OC at the school….we sat for months at an end and we developed about six or seven courses where we focussed or where we identified specialists

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 skills needed and then we developed course to build these skills and I am quite glad to say that he has really made a change in your modern operator…we could field these guys out into the bush, into the urban environment much more effectively than before…now also during that stage still very much experimenting with our new founded courses, developing these courses …I had six ladies allocated to me for training and I had only five months to train them in. Now they were selected by Hannes Venter from …who was at that stage still with 4 Recce and he put them through their own paces of selection and the idea was to use or deploy these ladies as, the operators like to think of them as props, but you can’t take a prop into an operational environment….

INTERVIEWER: A prop has to be able to take care of itself, not become a liability.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Exactly and you know at that stage when we were starting again to focus on deep Africa and you cannot expose yourself with taking props along so these six girls fresh from the ladies army college in

George…dumped into my hands in Durban and I must say it was an eye opener.

One or two of them were excellent operator material and I will take them anywhere in the world on any operation and I am willing to stand up and say that.

Some of them were really too young experienced in life to be deployed or utilised but that opened my eyes to yet another area of interaction or application, a new area of specialisation and we had good fun. One of the…during the urban part of it we had some culture shock experiments or culture shock exercises and with guys its easy you identify your seediest pubs around Durban and you point them

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 to go in and some of the guys you put into a very well established gay bars and you tell them to go and chat up…you send them with a mission into each of these places, they must come out. Now the gay bars were very interesting, some of our …some of the guys just couldn’t make it, some of them really flew through it hands up, hands down, came out with all the information plus, plus….that was interesting. What was very interesting to me and I didn’t realise it before …by this time we had these chicks going, using taxis in those years already to travel throughout Natal…we had them into Mozambique …the bosses didn’t know about that and they still don’t know about it, we had them all over the show infiltrating, ex-filtrating, crossing borders and doing their thing and with one of these culture shock operations or exercises we infiltrated the women also into a very seedy part of Durban…I didn’t think and we very quickly had to hit in and drag them out of there because the local prostitutes saw them as foreigners trying to transgress into their areas of or into their domains.

INTERVIEWER: Completely un-anticipated.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Totally un-anticipated and the one lady was actually, the one girl was stabbed …she was actually knifed by a prostitute…so that was a bit of an eye opener…thinking of it from a different angle…that specific lady is today a senior security manager of a big mining company, so she did quite well.

Still the girls did very well…with interrogation this one, she is …we actually used military intelligence to do interrogation exercises on them after we had the police on them, after they were actually captured with drugs and illegal weapons that was planted on them which they didn’t know about, it was very realistic and the

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 guys, two old operators cracked down under the pressures of interrogation.

INTERVIEWER: By the woman.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: By military intelligence, whereas this one specific girl, at that stage 19 years old…she actually out did everything and anything around her and look it’s a game of manipulation…she started manipulating the interrogators to such an extent that they had to call that part of the exercise off because it was three days later and she had the so called professionals eating out of her hand. It was incredible…there I saw there was a very definite application and future for women in Special Forces and I can’t wait for it to happen, its going to be great. After one spiralled down we had operations, we had such a busy time in Durban, everything happened on a Friday afternoon…all your operational tasking came in Friday one o’clock, and Friday one o’clock in

Durban is a bad time…have you ever tried to herd cats….to get your operators out of pubs and away from the beach is chaos, but Durban was fun …after

Durban there were so many things that happened I cant even start to go through it. During Durban I must say we had this 1994 thing coming up and [static] senior guys[inaudible] and planning responsibilities came to me and I was intimately involved in the transformation of planning…I was at that stage the Commander of the school and the school was tasked with integrating all the special forces from all the TBVC states and MK and Apla ….all the forces together, special forces soldiers from all these groupings. It was a very interesting exercise and we managed quite well. I think we…well we were definitely the first military organisation to stand up and say okay we have finalised our ticks on the

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 scoreboard towards integration. Unfortunately we had only TBVC states and two

Apla guys, MK never pitched at the party, unfortunately not…they had according to their definition of special forces they had twelve guys but they were intelligence orientated…now you must also realise that to be a special forces operator everybody, ourselves included, had to got through a cycle again…so its another nine months of intensive training, selection, intensive training…and if you are in the late 30’s early 40’s guys tended to shy away from that and rather went for the intelligence line of work, so I think there was a number of contributing factors but [interjected]

INTERVIEWER: But a lot of capacity was lost, a lot of experience was lost.

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Yes, it was such a pity that we missed these guys because I was really keen to meet up with these guys because I have heard so many good things and I saw some good results from the operations. During that time I was tasked …there was this operation Vula MK operation planned and I was involved in recovering some of the caches that they planted for Vula and going through the methodology that we witnessed, there was some good shit happening that side of the fence at the time of planning and preparations for this operation…now I still would love to find out a bit more of what happened there.

They had excellent operatives that we never knew about.

INTERVIEWER: Where were their operatives trained, the MK operatives?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Angola and Tanzania…big camps in Tanzania,

Europe, Eastern Europe all over. The big training bases in Angola with Western

Angola…the…I don’t think they had that many soldiers but what they had, these

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 guys were well trained, they were I think good. Those that I have actually met were excellent material but they were tired, they were tired of the war. I will get to one guy now…after returning from, also during Durban what happened then….oh yes Kwazulu Natal was six months behind the rest of the country with their votes, bringing out their votes…the situation was just too volatile in Kwazulu

Natal to bring out the votes when they did, when the rest of the country did. We ran big operations from there trying to identify the troublemakers, because it really was troublemakers it wasn’t politically inspired, this was now …we are going to touch back pockets…by taking away their political power and it came down to crookery and shanghaiing and so we had…it was queer working inside your own country 15 kilometres away from base…deploying troops in the bush…to monitor and gather information on happenings there and it was military action, I mean we came across a military base up in Venda where dissidents were training post 1994…it was queer but it was good fun. Durban I hated the period in Durban and I loved the period in Durban, it was good fun…we finished off in Durban, I was transferred to Special Forces headquarters…and just after my transfer Durban was closed down 1 Recce was closed down as part of the transformation programme…. I ended up in headquarters as a senior officer in charge of training for special forces …it was interesting and I then realised that things were going to change …for the better. One of my colleagues ….

INTERVIEWER: Okay so you had that moment of seeing the writing on the wall, or had you had that already a long time ago?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: Well the writing on the wall, I realised that too male,

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 too pale and I was at that stage 24 years old [static] I was very senior in my rank…promotional wise…I was ready to come and take this [static] Writing on the wall is maybe not the right term to use…I saw the writing on the wall in a sense that I would be, I definitely would make my next promotion which was full colonel …there was no qualm about that, and it was within the next six months to a year that I had that, but that is where I would have been stuck for the next 20 years at least and I had small kids, 2years and 3 years old at that stage and to put them through schooling and to get them going, to be stuck in one pay salary notch, promotional notch for the next twenty, thirty years maybe retiring as a

Brigadier General…I saw too much for myself in life rather than to be stuck in that groove, so it was totally a selfish, personal decision…it was definitely not the military or the way the military went or whatever, I am an eternal optimist I would have made it good for myself around where I was, so I wasn’t worried about the bigger place going to dumps. You know what I still have very good intimate contact with the regiments and yes it’s going bad but you know where these guys are Special Forces is still very much what it used to be, and it’s still going very well with the guys. I left for personal reasons, it wasn’t because of the writing on the wall, politics or anything else. As a matter of fact the deciding factor for me to leave was a very interesting offer from the new government to …which made things easier for me to take up my job into Africa…my self chosen new career as a consultant, a strategic risk orientated consultant in the mining environment in

Africa and it was good fun. I left on a high note …and I am never sorry for leaving but I do miss the guys, I do miss the environment, I had the best times of

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16 my life the time that I spent in the military…not myself nor my wife would change it for anything in the world, it was really …not only an honour it was a lifetime opportunity that we looked to the fore, it was great. Now I am here doing contract work with ….I am a director in, of all things a programme development company, an IT company, I am busy writing a strategy for SARS and I have got very exciting opportunities on the horison, so who knows where next, it’s going to be fun.

INTERVIEWER: Good. Is there anything else that you want to add, or are there any questions that you would like to ask me before we finish the interview?

SYBIE VAN DER SPUY: There are millions of things that I would like to add…and on a lighter note…this was just a brief overview of where I came from and what I did…going through my mind there is hundreds of anecdotes flickering by, but I don’t think there is time for that now. Asking you questions, no I hope you are going to write a book and I would love to have a copy one day when you publish it.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much.

END OF RECORDING

Wits University Historical Papers Sybie van der Spuy A3079/B.16

Collection Number: A3079 Collection Name: “Missing Voices” Oral History Project, 2004-2012

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