38 — Pistol-Packin’ Chaplain (Salisbury: March 1977)

One of the problems with having free reign over my chaplain’s duties was that I was new to everything:  the country, the Army, the ministry, the chaplaincy—I had no practical ideas about what I could or should do.  The Chaplain General, LtCol Norman Wood, was rarely in his office.  He and the other chaplain officers, were constantly on the go. 

The only person who seemed to take an interest in my development was another chaplain-sergeant who would occasionally stop by the office during one of his call-ups. Stan Hannan, (now a Baptist pastor in Florida), took on the difficult task of my chaplaincy education and development.  

As assistant chaplains with only the rank of sergeant, we were rarely called upon for the serious casualty notifications.  That was the sad duty of the officers who were ordained and, in theory, prepared for counseling in time of tragedy.  As assistant chaplains, we delivered the casualty notifications of illnesses and minor injuries that were unlikely to be life threatening.

Before venturing out on my own, I accompanied Stan for a casualty notification.  I remember riding out to the Hatfield suburb of Salisbury and standing at Stan’s side as he knocked on the door at the home of a soldier who had come down with some sort of food poisoning.  We knew that we were not bringing tragic news, but when the soldier’s wife saw us at the door with our purple and black “stable belts” (4-inch wide colored belts that signified different units), the blood drained from her terrified face.  We quickly assured her that her reservist husband’s condition was not life threatening, but it took a cup of tea and a 30-minute conversation to help her regain her equilibrium.

As we drove back to our office, Stan told me of how he had accompanied Col Wood for a casualty notification.  The woman had the front gate to her home locked and when she saw the purple and black belts on Col Wood and Stan, she passed out.  They could not reach her because of the locked gate.  The moral of the story:  You never know what to expect when you show up at someone’s door as a chaplain.

One thing that I was encouraged to do was to make hospital visits.  I made a few of these visits, but I was very timid about this.  I don’t know if I was intimidated by the protocol of the hospital itself, not knowing what to say to these wounded soldiers, or my own feeling of failure for not having completed my training and serving in combat.  I suspect it was the latter that held me back, but I rarely found time to visit.  To this day, I feel shame and regret about that one simple thing that I could of and did not do often enough.

Strangely, I didn’t mind the casualty notifications.  Maybe it was because I could masquerade as a “real” soldier when visiting family, but knew that my disguise would not work with wounded soldiers.

I covered up my own weakness and failure to push through the pain of my ankle injury by affecting a tough persona.  I talked the talk of soldiers, something I had picked up at Berachah Church, cursing so freely that Col Wood had to ask me to tone it down! 

Jeff, I know that in America you have some cigar-smoking, gruff-talking Christians.  But, the other chaplains here are not accustomed to that type of behavior.  If you could watch the language when you are in the office, that would be best.  It is alright for you to speak like that when with the RLI troopers, but tone it down here please.

I agreed to moderate my language, but there was more than language to my act!  Of course, all of the chaplains carried weapons.  This was a war that exempted no one.  I was issued a 9mm semi-auto pistol which I sometimes tucked into my stable belt as well as an “Uzi” submachine gun.  I was quite a sight on my camo-painted Army-issued Yamaha motorcycle, especially with  the Uzi strapped across my back.  I used to practice swinging my Uzi into action with one arm while controlling the clutch and throttle of my motorcycle with the other arm.  The Uzi had a really short barrel.  Good luck with hitting anything I was aiming at while riding!  My new RP corporal buddy at RLI named me “The Pistol-packin’ Chaplain.” 

    With only casualty notifications to keep me occupied during the day, I was getting bored.  I couldn’t just sit around the office all day reading my Bible or getting in theological debates with the other chaplain assistants doing their national service.  So, I began to reach out to those I had met who seemed to show an interest in bible doctrine.

I am not sure how we first contacted Dave and Kinny Phelps, but they had discovered Thieme’s books and tapes. They invited Pegi and me to their home for dinners and teas where we would talk about bible doctrine and Rhodesian politics. 

Kinny’s brother was a Member of Parliament (MP) and a founding member of the Rhodesian Action Party (RAP).  RAP positioned itself as the opposition to Prime Minister Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front.  However, they were the conservative opposition to a conservative leader.  We quickly learned that there was no viable liberal opposition in Rhodesia.  The RAP saw Smith’s drift toward conciliation with the blacks as a departure from the standards by which he was elected and led the country to UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) in 1964. 

Initially, Pegi and I found ourselves in sympathy with the more conservative stance of the RAP.  This was the first time we began to question the direction of the Smith government.  Although we were questioning his government from the “right,” questions led to more questions as we began to examine the assumptions that we had made in coming to Rhodesia in the first place.  We began to be disillusioned with the waning resolve and what we saw as compromising positions of the government and many of the Rhodesian people.

But, because questions lead to questions, this would eventually cause us to wonder about the entire Rhodesian endeavor, especially as we began to see evidence of real discrimination against the black African population.

Next:  39 — The Return of the "Wondering" Wanderer (Salisbury:  April 1977)

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28 -- The Convoy (Rhodesia: Dec 1976)

 

The following morning, we left the judge’s home for Bulawayo, Wankie and Victoria Falls.  This would be the “dangerous” part of our trip as there was daytime terrorist activity on the road to Victoria Falls.  About 90 minutes outside of Bulawayo, we would travel in “convoy” the rest of the way. Traveling in convoys of vehicles escorted by soldiers reduced the likelihood of a terrorist ambush.  

The “freedom fighters” did not take on well-armed targets.  Rather, they preyed on unarmed and defenseless civilians.  The last thing the “Terrs” wanted was to run into some of the well-trained citizen soldiers of the Rhodesian armed services.

It was really an adventure now!  We roared down the two lane highway, trucks and cars alike at top speed, ignoring posted speed limits.  In front and at the rear of our small convoy of 20 vehicles, were camo-painted trucks with four or five soldiers armed with their Fabrique Nationale 7.62 mm automatic weapons and a 30 caliber machine gun on a mount where the canvas roof had been removed.  

In addition, each car was also armed.  I had my Colt 45 automatic that I had brought from Texas. The other vehicles had an assortment of handguns, locally manufactured Uzi submachine guns and R1 rifles (FNs of South Africa manufacture). 

No Terr in his right mind was going to take on a convoy like this!  Needless to say, we arrived at our hotel in Wankie without incident.

 

The hotel looked like something out of Disneyworld.  It had obviously been built with the tourist trade in mind just before the onset of sanctions in 1964.  It was several miles inside the game preserve and elephants and giraffes would graze a few hundred yards from the balcony in your room.  The 1976 tourist season had not gone well and the events that we had planned such as a camera safari had been cancelled.  The man to lead the safari had been called up by the BSAP to chase some Terrs who had attacked a rural village just outside the preserve.  Since there really wasn’t anything we could do there, we decided to go on to Vic Falls the following morning. 

The next morning another convoy took us to the town of Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Rhodesia.  In past decades, Zambia had been known as Northern Rhodesia. 

When the short-lived Federation of Northern Rhodesia (1953-1963), Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland broke up with independence coming to Northern Rhodesia as Zambia and Nyasaland as Malawi.  Southern Rhodesia became known simply as Rhodesia—still a British colony.  It was not much later that Rhodesia broke away from the British who refused to allow them independence.  In 1964, Rhodesia made its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).  The United Kingdom would then lead the UN in declaring trade sanctions against the newly formed republic.

The issue that kept Rhodesia in a colonial status was the number of European and African members of any future Rhodesian Parliament.  Rhodesia’s European Prime Minister, Ian Smith, was not opposed to African participation in government.  It was the proportion of European Rhodesians and African Rhodesians and the timetable for power sharing that led to the eventual break between Rhodesia and the UK.

After UDI, Smith would harden his stance against African participation, often saying that African rule would come “over my dead body.”  But, to me as a newly-minted conservative American, steeped in the soaring idealism of Texas-style Christianity propounded by RB Thieme, Rhodesia’s UDI was analogous to our own American Declaration in 1776.  And, I saw the issue of African power analogous to our own history with Native Americans.  Indeed, the Rhodesians were much more progressively minded toward Africans than we had ever been toward Native Americans.

For all its detractors, the Rhodesian Army was composed of Europeans and Africans alike, united against a common Communist foe—the terrorist forces under Mugabe, Sithole and Nkomo.  In the short time I had been in Rhodesia, I had learned that the volunteer regular army was composed of about 3000 Europeans.  There were thousands more African volunteers in the BSAP and the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR).  This “all African” force of volunteers was more feared than any other unit of the Rhodesian Army.  These were highly motivated African soldiers who were determined to drive the terrorists out of their country.  Just after our arrival in Rhodesia, the RAR commissioned its first African officers. 

There were also the Selous Scouts, an elite all volunteer mixed race unit.   A Selous Scouts force of 70 men had just carried out a raid in Nyadzonya, Mozambique where they had killed a thousand terrorists in less than an hour with no loss of life to themselves.  [Many years later, Gen Edgar Tekere who was Mugabe’s defeated commander of these forces, said that Mugabe was so disheartened by this series of raids that he had considered giving up the armed struggle.  This explicit interview contains his interview along with Lt Col Reid Daley, the Scouts’ commander.]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs7V_IBQcDg  3/3/26 Note:  Unfortunately, this video this is no longer available on YouTube.

The “territorial” forces were similar to what our American National Guard used to be before the Bush administration re-tasked them as frontline combat troops.  The Territorial Regiments were composed of draftees.  These draftees were all white Rhodesians.  Not a single African was ever conscripted into the Rhodesian Army.  [By the end of 1977, as many as 100 Africans were volunteering for duty with the Security Forces every day.]  

The only African “conscripts” were those who were stolen from their villages and force-marched across the border to Mozambique and Zambia.  These schoolboys were co-opted as terrorists, indoctrinated and trained by Chinese, Soviet and North Korean soldiers.  Then they were set loose on their own people to rape, pillage and plunder.

The only analogy to these terrorists in American history at the time was to be found in our recent experience with the Viet Cong.  In fact, the similarities were striking between the training and tactics of the Viet Cong and the Mugabe/Sithole/Nkomo “freedom fighters.”

Since I had missed my chance to fight the Communist Viet Cong, it made sense to me that fighting these African terrorists was really the same enemy—just a different continent.

Next:  29 — No Umbrella for the Rain Forest (Victoria Falls, Rhodesia:  Dec 1976)

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