08 Nov Botswana — MOTH Hall

When we lived in Botswana, one of our best friends was a white South African. Back during Apartheid, Jeff had been drafted into the army and sent to Angola to fight Cubans. It was a nasty bush war, Jeff had been very good at it and became a high-ranking sergeant.

The fighting had been pretty bad and Jeff had done some things he didn’t want to talk about. Although nights around the campfire when the others had gone to their tents, he’d talk to me some. I’d spent time in Vietnam, so he and I were almost old army buddies once we got into the whiskey. Which, this being Africa, and he being Jeff, was frequent.

“We were on patrol, small-unit stuff like you Yanks, when I came across this guerilla in a little hollow in the bushes. He wasn’t very good at being a guerilla, just a kid.

“He threw his hands up and started crying and I walked over and kicked his weapon aside. I didn’t want to shoot him, but we had rules about that kind of thing. Besides, if he’d spotted me, he wouldn’t have hesitated, so it was just my good luck I was the one holding the weapon. If I let him go, he’d kill one of us next time. He wasn’t going to be caught, not again. You don’t get any better on-the-job training than having the enemy walk up on you while you’re taking a piss. He was wet down the front of his pants and trembling and I had my rifle on him and all I had to do was . . . .

“I gestured with the muzzle toward the tree line. Get the fuck out of here, Kid, and that was that. He was gone and I never saw him again.” Jeff felt bad about that because the war kept going, and his buddies kept getting killed, and he couldn’t stop thinking the kid may have had something to do with it. By the time he finished the story, it was midnight and the moon was straight north of us, dancing across endless reaches of papyrus in the Okavango.

When his time in Angola was up. He tried to settle back into normal life. But the war followed him home and he kept getting letters calling him back up. He’d had enough of the whole business by the time he was sent to Johannesburg to put down riots in one of the townships. These are my people, he thought. South Africans just like me. Instead of coming in with guns blazing, he set up a grill and began cooking meat. Then he invited the people to a braai. After that, he didn’t pay any attention to letters from the army.

When the army got tired of not hearing back from him, they sent a young draftee with orders to make sure Jeff reported for duty. The kid couldn’t have been eighteen, and he was scared. Jeff didn’t think the kid should have been called up, either, but that was the kid’s problem. Jeff took his file from the kid and told him to forget about the whole thing and go do whatever he had to do next. The kid must have done it, because Jeff never heard from the army again.

Viktor was born in Moldova back when Moldova was a Soviet Socialist Republic. He went to medical school on the Proletariat’s dime and, because he wanted out of Moldova, joined the Red Army and saw the world from the Soviet point of view. He served in Central Asia in places that, when the time came, rejoined the map as Stans. He served in the Russian far north and, for four years, in Angola. He said it was bad there, and I can see why from the things Jeff told me around the campfire at night.

I’m not sure how Viktor wound up in Botswana as a Peace Corps Medical Officer, but it must have been a long, strange journey going from Communist East Europe, to a career in the only army we in the West ever worried much about, to healing young Americans in a land that was equally foreign to him and to them.

Odd, I thought, Jeff and Viktor. One degree of separation, maybe, between a doctor from the Soviet Union patching up, or putting toe tags on, Cubans a sergeant in the South African army sent him, and me. All reminiscing about old times in different armies.

Something I don’t know for sure but I’d win money if you were fool enough to bet against, is that retired legionnaires in ancient Rome had places to get together to quaff wine and reminisce about their time in Gaul. “I was with Caesar, you know. Twelfth Legion. We were chasing a gang of Helvetii across the Rhone when this wild-looking guy in a bearskin and antlers on his head jumps out from behind a . . . .”

One of the great commonalities of human existence, the universalities shared by all men, regardless of upbringing, of race, of culture, of religion, of poverty or wealth or social standing, one of the things that shows that, no matter who else we may be, we’re brothers under the skin, is American Legion halls.

They’ve got one in Botswana. It’s called the MOTH Hall. Memorable Order of the Tin Hat, and has a photo of eight Batswana who fought in WWII to safeguard British freedom.

Modern-day Batswana don’t think highly of the military, or of people who serve in it. They’re a lot like upper-crust Americans that way and, since Botswana may be the only country in the world that never annoyed some other country, enough to get into a war, there wasn’t a new generation of veterans coming along to refresh the pool. What the place is used for now are hammed-up drawing-room comedies and, at Christmas, pantomimes.

These aren’t the kind of pantomimes you think when you think about a French guy in a stripy shirt pretending to be stuck in a glass box. These are British pantomimes: noisy, risqué, adult versions of fairy tales, for which there are endless possibilities when you put your adult mind to what really went on between Snow White and those dwarves, or to Beauty lying asleep when a handsome prince popped through her window.

The first thing we did when we attended a pantomime, before, even, finding our seats, was go to the bar and order whatever drink we think we might want during intermission. Then we returned to the theater part of the building, sat down, and watched the show. The cast were people we knew, members of the diplomatic community, mostly, and some locals. Except the roles were switched around. Men dressed like women.

And women as men.

And no matter what preconceived notions you might have held about the ability of diplomats to put on a public face and pretend to be things they aren’t, it doesn’t take long before you realize diplomats can’t act a lick. Which is pretty much the point. The shows aren’t about acting. They’re about being entertaining, and they are: in a pre-movie, pre-radio, pre-television sort of way. People yell out advice and warnings from the audience. “Look behind you, there’s a wolf.” “Don’t eat a piece of that witch’s house.”

One thing you can’t help but notice, is how small the theater is. Not so unexpected when you realize there may have been only eight MOTH’s in the whole country when the place was built and, if demographics are any guide, fewer than that, now. But the bar was enormous. You felt like they could have fitted the entire bar at Raffles Hotel in Singapore in there and had room left over for a troupe of dancing French girls.

And thinking about that . . . thinking about those eight guys who built that bar for themselves all out of proportion to anything they needed, thinking about them lifting glasses and embroidering on stories about the night they liberated the brandy from beneath the dung heap in France, or the time the mortar round landed near a herd of pigs . . . that did more to cement bonds of common feeling, at least among fellow veterans, than anything professional diplomats strutting their parts on stage in the little theater, or the big theater outside, could ever have accomplished.