Читать книгу Battle Scarred - Anthony Feinstein - Страница 7

2

An introduction to psychiatry

I am the property of the State: 68504194BG. That is me, a number. It comes before my name.

I step off the plane in Johannesburg, kiss my mom and dad and sister, shave off all my hair, and, with thousands of other recruits, climb onto a train heading west to Klipdrif. For three months we run, jump, crawl and climb to the accompaniment of men screaming into our ears about how fucking useless we are. Lower than snake shit – that is what one corporal calls us. I will hear it many times during my period in uniform.

Oh, those days in officers’ school. One day we are coming off the parade ground after three hours of endless marching, the warm winter sun low on the horizon, the rays mingling with clouds of dust thrown up by a thousand marching feet, the air a burnished gold.

No doubt we are poor foot soldiers, slow to respond to the shrill screams and exhortations of the drill instructors: left turn, right turn, halt, forward march, left wheel, right wheel, attention, stand easy, up and down, down and up, on and on and on to the point of dehydrated insensibility that is disconnected, almost other worldly.

It is in this state of torpor that our platoon limps past her – a female corporal and member of the standing army. She is attractive, albeit in a butch way, but it is the sneer on her face that holds our attention, top lip curled insolently as she spits out her contempt for what she has just witnessed: ‘Julle dril so swak, dit maak my poeshare krul’ (Your marching is so poor it makes my cunt hairs curl).

No one responds. Not one of us well-educated doctors can fashion a reply. So complete is her damnation it stymies a quick comeback. All we can do when the full weight of her words have sunk in is laugh and shake our heads in disbelief. Until then, I never knew there were women who could talk like this.

This kind of madcap thinking is everywhere, it is like a virus. After our basic training we are each given a piece of paper and told to write down our name and pick a specialty. The army will do its best to accommodate you, we are told to barely concealed snickers. So, I put down plastic surgery.

I have some vague notions of wanting to be a plastic surgeon because the aesthetics appeal to me. You take a tuber and turn it into the cutest little nose, and then stand back and watch the person enjoy a new life. And it sure pays the mortgage. That last bit of advice was given conspiratorially by one of my lecturers at medical school.

So I choose plastic surgery as my contribution to the nation, but what does the nation give me? Psychiatry. There must be a mistake, I think, but it turns out there is not. Plastic surgery has a couple of slots only and they are filled in no time. So, what comes next?

‘Psychiatry of course, stupid.’ This is explained to me by a very pock-marked, extremely irritable sergeant. ‘Shit,’ he yells, ‘don’t you know your alphabet? PS comes after PL. Now fuck off.’

The army decides that I am to be a psychiatrist. There’s nothing I can do about it – I am lower than snake shit. I have my orders and off I go.

The army’s main medical centre is in Pretoria. A brand-new hospital has been built up on a hill, where it sits like a gleaming trophy. One Military Hospital is the official name, but everyone calls it 1 MIL. Nothing has been spared, no expense too great, state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. The old 1 MIL is at the bottom of the hill, a hodgepodge of decrepit, ramshackle wards and offices – and it is here that the mentally unwell are admitted.

Day one and I say good morning to my new boss, a pint-sized colonel with an exotic name, at least by SADF standards – Ronaldo de Jager. His smallness is disconcerting at first, all those sartorial trappings of power, the glinting epaulettes and stiff-peaked cap with orange band, the works sitting awkwardly on so petite a frame. The nurses tell me he is very experienced and has been dealing in mental illness for years. That may be, but first impressions are jarring. All his movements are jerky, twitchy, like a marionette, and he is asthmatic too. Within minutes of meeting him, I hear a wheeze. Out comes his puffer and up to his mouth it goes, but oh my goodness the coordination is dreadful. The first squirt misses completely. Spray shoots by his cheek and past his ear. Perhaps that was a practice run? No, not at all. He caps the inhaler and pockets it. The wheezing stops.

Playing my violin at Klipdrif.

The psychiatry unit is a large one and to manage the clinical load another conscript, a colleague of mine from medical school, is seconded with me. David is a delight, a real charmer and a connoisseur of women. Listening to him describe the unique characteristics of some beauty who has caught his eye is like taking a university course in art appreciation. Even women whose looks tend towards the ordinary arouse him to extraordinary levels of fantasy, anchored in a stellar record of seduction and an almost clairvoyant understanding of what women find erotic.

Less appealing is the personality of a third conscript, who has been in the unit for six months already. Both David and I remember him well from medical school. But this short, dumpy man with a formerly laid-back, benign temperament has morphed unrecognisably into a bossy, officious fellow. He scurries here and there ordering us about, admonishing us, and yes, even occasionally complimenting us, puffed up as he is with a bogus seniority. At first we are amused by his antics, but there is spite in his bombast and within weeks we tire of him, give him the nickname ‘Warthog’ and avoid him as much as we can.

To my surprise I find the work fascinating. I know very little, but I am eager to learn. The last psychiatric patient I saw was three years back, during a six-week block of psychiatry as a medical student. That has been the sum total of my training. Now, in a blink, I am given a lot of authority for very sick patients.

Severe mental illnesses – the schizophrenias and the bipolar disorders – present for the first time in the late teens and early twenties. Just about the time the envelope with that dreaded postmark arrives. Coincidence, I am sure, but the demographics keep us very busy. My days are awash in psychosis: boys talking to the stars, or howling like wolves, or convinced they are being poisoned, or claiming to be Jesus. Lads with plans to make billions, cure cancer or turn corn chips into gold, young men so depressed they beg for death and go looking for it with a rope or a bottle of pills or, worst of all, a gun. No shortage of those, of course. State-subsidised suicide.

Two months into the asylum work and I don’t hanker after plastic surgery any more. A wounded mind is now of more interest than some nip and tuck, or mammeries that nature has short-changed. And it is not just the delusions and hallucinations that hold my attention. It’s the pathos of lives that have come off the rails. There is a world of sadness wrapped up in these walls. The psychotic patients, floundering in another dimension, are unaware of their plight. Their families see it all, though. When Mom and Dad arrive at the gates to pick up their lost son, their worry lines run deep, shoulders slump and anxiety makes their eyes dart like pinballs. The army knows there is no way back for these boys. Damaged goods must be returned.

At times I flounder, for some patients’ problems are complicated and I am a novice. Do I know what I am doing? I am given a man’s mind to work with and I worry that I am in breach of Hippocrates’ sacrosanct principle taught to us in medical school: Primum non nocere — First, do no harm. Implicit is the cautionary advice that we as doctors should desist from risky decisions of which the consequences are hard to predict. To offset my deficits I read furiously. Textbooks, journals and classification manuals stack up on my desk and bedside table, shunting aside the Comédie humaine I have hauled back from Paris.

Thankfully, my work is supervised. Colonel de Jager is a kind man, no doubting that, but some of his views are very questionable.

‘I am of the old school,’ he tells me proudly. And he wears his years of service like the red badge of courage. He is a big fan of electroconvulsive therapy. ‘No muscle relaxant, mind you,’ he admonishes me. ‘That is the way to get a big convulsion.’ Here he pumps his fist for added effect. ‘Bigger the better’ is the cornerstone of his therapeutics. To stop the patient convulsing right off the bed, ‘simply apply a little weight to his chest,’ he advises. ‘It’s basic mechanics, really.’

He looks pleased with himself, but the anaesthetists are outraged. ‘You can fracture vertebrae without the relaxant,’ they chorus.

‘Bullshit,’ responds my boss. ‘That nonsense is in the small print.’

He has never seen it, not once in thirty-five years, but the anaesthetists will not budge. No muscle relaxant, no anaesthetic. The colonel is forced to concede. ‘Anti-psychiatry blackmail,’ he fumes.

The Colonel has two subordinates I can turn to, if need be: Commandant Yin and Commandant Yang. Where Yang is swarthy, short, portly and tone deaf, Yin is fair, tall, lean and musical. In theory they are supposed to be alternately available, but Yang is always going away on courses. ‘To improve myself,’ he tell us, or to get his Iron Man certificate. He returns as mean as before – and with a limp and a hobble, an arm in a sling, a leg in a splint and a mouth with razor-thin lips spewing a thousand excuses for failure. Which we all have to listen to because he is second in command and we are nothing, less than nothing. Lower than snake shit, to be precise.

The point is this. The clinical problems are often complex and I am out of my depth. Sometimes I get stuck and I ask Yin and Yang for help, but they can get stuck too. So we turn to Colonel de Jager. We find him chatting up a secretary half his age and double his height. He takes the interruption well, given he is hell-bent on scoring. I present the case. Yin chimes in. Yang takes issue with Yin. They argue. The Colonel says nothing. His thoughts are elsewhere.

Six months into the job, the relentless flow of soldiers in distress has become a blur, the faces of the patients less distinct, their names overlapping.

Paranoia is endemic, the common denominator that underpins three quarters of what I see. But paranoia has many faces, from the simple garden variety – ‘The Sergeant is plotting to harm me’ – to the more complex, ornate kind – ‘My sperm is being controlled by men in Saudi Arabia’. Sometimes the more bizarre delusions are remembered, but when you are assessing eight to ten patients a day, the details are more often lost.

It is soon clear to me that we have to practise a very different kind of medicine. What is good for the State is not always good for the patient. Take the anxious soldier, for example – and by anxiety I am not referring to a few butterflies in the stomach. The kind of anxiety that flows our way is incapacitating, accompanied by sweating, tremors, palpitations, a knot in the stomach, diarrhoea, light-headedness and a feeling so intense it becomes a conviction on the part of the troopie that he is dying. He doesn’t die, of course, but these waves of angst hit him relentlessly and it is just a matter of time before he makes his way to us with a furrowed brow, sweaty palms and a heart full of fear.

What now? His history usually reveals an anxious temperament to begin with, the neurosis present since childhood, but manageable. A worrier by nature, a poor sleeper under stress, a nail-biter perhaps, uncomfortable in crowds, a little self-conscious, functions best in small groups and among people he is familiar with, a few close friends and a loving family.

Well, all that is gone now, blown away overnight, replaced by screaming corporals, furious sergeants, apoplectic commandants, 04:00 wake-ups, bellyaching hunger, toilets that are blocked solid, men twice your size rubbing shoulders with you in vast communal showers while you stand naked waiting for your jet of cold water … but what are you to do? And everything has to be done in double time: ‘Hurry up, hurry the fuck up, you useless piece of shit.’

You don’t need six years of medical school to see why long-standing, low-grade anxiety quickly balloons into symptoms far more troubling. And the solution is just as easy to identify: Send the soldier home. Discharge him back into the predictable routine of his suburban life where he can once more find comfort in the quietness of his bedroom and the warm embrace of a doting family. But that won’t do, not at all, not here in the engine room of the Republic. With an approach like that, the sickbays would be overrun with the anxious – real, imagined or simulated. Lower the threshold for medical discharge to a diagnosis of anxiety and the whole show would grind to a halt.

An army cannot reach a compromise with neurosis. So we are instructed to treat these men – boys, really – with the express aim of returning them to their units. And it can be a very uncomfortable thing to do because as I dole out therapy, be it pill or talk, as I follow the SADF’s orders like the good soldier I am, using whatever rudimentary skills I have, I hear the admonishing whisper of Hippocrates in my ear. Therein lays the tension of military psychiatry. The army comes first. The State trumps the mental state.

There are, however, times when even military necessity must bow to the power of a mind gone awry. One case in particular exposes the curious juxtaposition of a madness that obeys no rules and an iron discipline that is uncompromisingly rule bound. A seventeen-year-old infantryman, Private Jardine, is sent for assessment, straight from the detention barracks. The Major who makes the referral has been with the military police for years.

‘Never seen a case like this before,’ he confides. ‘At first, we thought it was gross insubordination, a wise guy taking the piss, but it seems to be much more than that. No amount of punishment can make Private Jardine see sense. He’s like an effing parrot.’

The story unfolds piecemeal. Jardine has been in the military for three months. He was called up the same time that I was and sent to the 4th SA Infantry Base in Middleburg. Everything starts off reasonably well. No warning signs, just another conscript, one of thousands passing through the system. Three months in, Jardine reports to the doc, claiming a Corporal Smits is picking on him. He is advised to get over it fast and told the corporals are paid to pick on people because that is what they are good at. ‘It will make a man of you,’ is the doc’s parting advice. Nothing more is heard of Jardine until one early-spring morning when the platoon is drilling on the parade ground.

‘Halt,’ yells Corporal Smits, the very same Smits Jardine had complained about.

‘Halt,’ echoes a reply from deep in the ranks.

Smits starts. Has he misheard? Has a soldier shouted halt as well? Impossible. Who would dare do such a thing, let alone in an infantry unit? I must be hearing things, reasons Smits. Must be the wind playing with my voice. He looks about him. It is certainly gusting. Mini sandstorms swirl around the feet of the platoon. His men stand immobile before him. Dead still, not a flicker from one of them. Three months of drill and just look at them! Lean and mean! Fifty synchronised men marching as one, just where he wants them. Oh well, I better get on with it, he thinks. Time enough for kudos later.

‘Forward march,’ he bellows.

‘Forward march,’ bounces back the reply.

A ripple of unease runs through the marching men. Smits hears a stifled laugh. No mistaking it. And no mistaking the echo this time either.

‘Halt!’ he screams.

‘Halt!’ bounces right back.

‘What the fuck … ?’ is the best Smits can muster as he ploughs into the ranks looking for the wise guy. And sure enough, a duplicate ‘What the fuck … ?’ leads him straight to Jardine.

Faced with such outrageous behaviour, Smits is at something of a loss. Private Jardine stands before him, ramrod straight, face impassive, staring straight ahead.

‘What did you just say?’ roars Smits.

‘What did you just say?’ yells expressionless Private Jardine.

Some of the men can’t contain themselves any longer. The whoops of laughter are like a slap in the face for Corporal Smits. All he can muster is a strangled: ‘Silence, you baboons.’ To which Private Jardine responds in kind.

All discipline in Smits’s platoon dissolves. The men are laughing so hard, the neat lines they have held waver and break. Amidst the general mayhem, the only person not laughing is Private Jardine. That small detail is not lost on befuddled Corporal Smits.

The scene that plays out next is like some madcap, off-kilter comedy.

‘Silence!’ bellows Smits.

‘Silence!’ responds Jardine.

‘Button it!!’

‘You’ll be sorry!!!’

‘This is your last chance!!!’

‘Jeez!’

‘Grrrnngg!!!’

And so it goes. Until Corporal Smits, marshalling his rising anger, realises that the only way he will bring this debacle to an end is to have Jardine arrested, which he does, ordering four of the men to seize him and march him off to detention.

‘Left, right, left right.’ The rhythm is barked by an exasperated Smits, with Jardine as resolute as ever providing that infuriating echo.

If ever there was the suspicion that Private Jardine was deliberately mocking Corporal Smits, it is quickly dispelled in detention. Whatever the military police verbally hurl at him is flung right back and even when Jardine is roughed up a bit – you know, to teach him a little respect – the repetitions continue, despite a thick lip.

The Jardine who eventually arrives in the psychiatry department is very psychotic. His paranoid delusions are unremarkable in their content, if one has the time to tease them out between replies that rebound with a conversation-crippling consistency. The Colonel takes a keen interest in the case. ‘What you are witnessing,’ he informs us, ‘is a florid example of echolalia, a sign of thought disorder and part of Jardine’s schizophrenia. Is it not fascinating?’

Indeed it is, Colonel. But fascination with psychosis is only part of the equation here. The other part is the context in which it appears. The nature of life in the military, with the strictures that come with rank and the individual’s preordained place in an unyielding hierarchy, leaves no space for wiggle room. When the cogs slip the results are more often than not extraordinary. Jardine’s psychosis, his textbook echolalia, is transformed into gross pantomime. Not a month passes without further tragicomic variations in the patients that come my way. How can it be otherwise? Madness and the military, what a combustible mix!

My bulging casebook delivers another example. The army loves a sportsman. Play sport, any sport, and you are cut a lot of slack. So one morning when a new patient is admitted a ripple of excitement runs through the ward. Just about everybody knows Jacques. Rugby and athletics are his twin specialties, but rumour has it he can hit a great golf ball too. What is he doing on a psychiatry ward? The referral details are vague. Apparently all had been well until our sporting hero returned from a brief trip to the operational area of South West Arica. He comes back an altered man. Gone is the gregarious, fun-loving, ball-thumping extrovert, replaced by an aloof individual, quiet, not so much sombre as disconnected, difficult to relate to on a personal level. Most strikingly, he has lost all interest in sport. He gives up training, appears sluggish behind the scrum, is indifferent when the coach benches him, and when told his team has lost an important match simply shrugs as if to say who cares anyway? It is his apathy to life in general that sparks the referral.

Has something traumatic happened in South West Africa? No one can say, least of all Jacques. He claims he can remember very little of his time there. The few weeks he spent are a blur, the details fuzzy, timelines imprecise. He has not been on a combat mission. His commanding officer in an infantry unit confirms this, but can tell us little more. He is as nonplussed as the rest of Jacques’ fan club.

Jacques has been on the unit for a couple of weeks now. It is all very mysterious – he is becoming more elusive by the day, slipping further away from any diagnostic formulation. He denies feeling anxious, depressed or suicidal. He has not lost touch with reality like poor Jardine, so psychosis is ruled out. But all is clearly not well. His indifference and his patchy memory of his trip up north are the telltale signs.

The Colonel calls us together. He is very animated. ‘What you are seeing is an excellent example of la belle indifference, the patient seemingly indifferent to his malady,’ he tells us. ‘It is a sign that all is not well in the unconscious. We need to unlock this man’s unconscious if he is to heal.’

The Colonel has a plan. He has the key to the lock. It is called narco-analysis.

There is a long history to this procedure, I learn. Essentially it involves relaxing the patient with a strong sedative, hence the ‘narco’ part, putting him into a state of reduced consciousness and in the process lessening the inhibitions that are impeding the recall of repressed memories. It turns out our unit has access to a man who has reportedly done more narco-analyses than any other in the entire world. Whether there is any truth to this extravagant claim is impossible to judge, but there is no doubt that Dr. Nothnagel is very experienced in the procedure. He is a large man, a natty dresser with a fine, clipped moustache, à la Errol Flynn. He chain smokes and even when between cigarettes he has a mannerism that involves inhaling as though a phantom cigarette is still plastered to his lips.

Nothnagel is not in the military, but consults to them once a week. He is the all-action psychiatrist. Women love him. I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is just as enamoured, for he is liberal in dishing out medications. The Noah’s Ark prescription, we call it, two of everything – anxiolytics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticholinergics, mood stabilisers and hypnotics, and all in large doses. The prescriptions are passed on to the pharmacists who scurry around filling bottles of pills which are handed over in large brown bags to patients who cannot seem to get enough of these concoctions.

Dr. Nothnagel’s speciality, however, is running concurrent narco-analyses and he is one slick operator. This is how it goes: He books patients simultaneously. They are all women and each has her own private cubicle with a comfortable bed. Nothnagel inserts an intravenous line after each woman has laid down, and gradually starts infusing a large dose of Valium. The drip is timed to run over forty-five minutes. The women are encouraged to relax, let the sedative work its magic, and free associate. ‘Give voice to whatever comes to mind,’ Nothnagel urges. ‘Let it all come out.’

He starts a tape recorder. There are three women and three tape recorders running simultaneously in three cubicles. The women start babbling, pouring out their hidden, unconscious feelings, while our resident world-expert narco-analyser pops outside for a Camel Plain.

I am instructed to sound out Dr. Nothnagel on how to relax a patient for this procedure. The narco-analysis king is very obliging. He gives me a tour of one of his cubicles. He tiptoes in and motions for me to follow, no matter that one of the women is halfway through her analysis. She is lying on her back and appears to be dozing. Nothnagel ignores her and points to the 500cc of saline slowly running into a neatly prepped vein. He draws my attention to the three empty 10mgm vials of Valium and motions that he has added them to the saline. He stealthily fiddles with the drip rate, silently mouthing ‘Forty-five minutes’ to me. ‘And that’s that,’ he lets me know, ‘nothing to it really.’ Time for another Camel.

My training with Nothnagel is now complete and we are ready for Jacques. By ‘we’, I mean Colonel de Jager and Jacques’ CO, Colonel Willem Vermeulen, with a couple aides-de-camp who have been invited along to witness the revelations that are confidently expected to flow once I have injected the Valium.

The room chosen for the procedure is small so it is pretty tight by the time Jacques is led in by one of our nurses. A look of alarm crosses his face – he had not anticipated meeting his CO under these circumstances. Neither had I and I cannot help wondering about the wisdom of such an invitation. If, as anticipated, a troubled young man is going to spill his emotional guts and allow access to his innermost psyche, we should surely allow him to do it away from the voyeuristic stares of others. But such is our colonel’s faith in the magic worked weekly by Dr. Nothnagel on his legion of female admirers that Jacques’ colonel, a tough-looking critter shoehorned into immaculate ‘browns’, is an invitee. And so we confront another of those unique military situations. Jacques has no say in what is to unfold. Out on Civvy Street he could tell his shrink and the assembled spectators to take a hike at what is really a blurring of the professional boundaries. But not here. No, sir.

If Jacques has up until now shown nothing but a casual indifference to his plight, this has quickly changed. As I get him comfortable on the examining couch he keeps shooting his colonel worried glances, his trepidation manifest. I too am feeling a tad anxious, but for completely different reasons. I am quietly praying that Jacques has good veins. I don’t want to botch the IV insertion in a tiny room filled with two colonels and assorted brass. I ask Jacques to roll up his sleeve. Instant relief. He has hosepipes for veins.

The fluid begins to flow and with it the ampoules of Valium. Colonel de Jager reaches over and flips on the tape recorder borrowed from the world’s most experienced narco-analyser. I adjust the flow rate of the IV and glance at the Colonel. He puts his finger to his lips. An expectant silence settles over the room. I am suddenly aware of how warm it is in the windowless chamber. Fifteen minutes or so pass and Jacques appears to be dozing. Suddenly, the Colonel jerks forward. He taps Jacques lightly on the arm.

‘Don’t fall sleep, hey,’ he gently admonishes. ‘We need to talk.’

Jacques does not respond. The Colonel seems quite unperturbed. He taps Jacques again, this time more forcefully. Jacques dozes on.

‘Perhaps you squirted in too much of the stuff,’ the Colonel whispers, looking accusingly at me.

I don’t really know what to say. I am sure I have followed Dr. Nothnagel’s lady-slaying formula, but then again, Jacques is no lady and for the briefest of moments I have the absurd thought that our resident World Expert has passed on the incorrect gender-specific information to me.

My fears are allayed when Jacques suddenly comes to life. He opens one eye. It takes him a moment or two to focus it and then his monocular gaze settles on his colonel. The most idiotic grin spreads over his face.

‘Hello, Willie, good to see you,’ Jacques says as he gives Colonel Vermeulen the thumbs up.

Colonel Willem Vermeulen does not look amused. Such familiarity is absolutely taboo, but if the infantry colonel is upset, our psychiatry colonel seems encouraged by this unexpected turn.

‘The medication is working nicely,’ he whispers to no one in particular, but before he can share any more insights he is interrupted by Jacques. The foolish grin has not budged.

‘Hey,’ he chortles, ‘I have a problem for you to solve.’ He waves cheerfully at his CO as if to signal the onus is on him to come up with the solution. Colonel Vermeulen glares back. Jacques, blind to the daggers directed at him, blunders right in.

‘Hey, Willie,’ he calls out, ‘what is the difference between the army and a circus?’

There is a stunned silence. Even Colonel de Jager is aware, medical exigencies notwithstanding, that a line is dangerously close to being crossed. The only one in the room oblivious to the shambles unfolding is the patient himself, who with a great guffaw gives us the answer.

‘The army has more tents!’

I want to laugh, but have the good sense not too. Jacques, on the other hand, nicely topped up with thirty-plus milligrams of relaxing Valium finds his joke uproariously funny.

‘Do you get it, do you get it?’ he wheezes, slapping his thigh so hard he threatens to dislodge my carefully placed IV line. ‘The fuckin’ army has more tents!!’

No one is sure what to do next. Jacques is rolling around laughing. We look at Colonel de Jager for guidance. He appears panic-stricken.

‘Give him some more of the stuff,’ he commands.

I break open another vial but it only makes things worse. Jacques is completely disinhibited and I cannot quieten him down. He has moved on from his army-circus joke to a list of the women he has slept with and their various charms and drawbacks. It makes for interesting listening and one cannot help but be impressed by his success and the wide range of his appetite.

Jacques is in full voice now. His other eye has opened and he is ticking off his exploits one by one, including an early conquest when barely out of puberty. I have heard many stories, a few no doubt apocryphal, about the sexual successes of sporting jocks. Thanks to Nothnagel’s formula the truth is being revealed.

‘Turn it off!’ hisses Colonel Vermeulen. ‘Turn off that fucking tape machine.’

The sexual shenanigans are the final straw. Vermeulen reaches over to me. ‘Give me the cassette,’ he orders. Pocketing the salacious material, he rises and without so much as a ‘goodbye’ or a ‘thank you’ storms out, followed by his minions. Colonel de Jager hurries after him, leaving me and a deliriously happy Jacques.

I shut off the IV line and sit back, waiting for his reminiscences to run their course. They soon do. All that Valium cannot be indefinitely resisted. Soon Jacques sleeps, his daft grin giving way to a gentle, contented smile. Thank goodness he will not know what has just passed. Among Valium’s many attributes is the tendency to induce amnesia for events that take place while under the influence.

Yet again, a fairly routine medical procedure – commonplace by Dr. Nothnagel’s experience – had been transformed into high farce by the unique circumstances of a military setting. I dined out on that circus joke for years. But what of Jacques? He surfaced from analysis and within a day was sent back to his unit to work out of site in the stores, packing boxes. The glory days on the rugger field were over. It had been a very quick fall from grace.

We never did work out what his problem was.

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