Chapter 29: Boiling a Frog

Waiting is hard, but it is the soldier's lot. We all knew how to do it. I decided to follow my earlier thoughts and allowed Cpl Maseka to run the ambush. I knew I would have to work hard to suppress my instinct to interfere though so I decided to find a place that would allow me to watch what was happening without interfering too much. Once I had settled myself into a dark shadow at the corner of the building, I took another look around.

The parking lot had a lot less cars than it would have had during the day; a quick count told me there were sixteen. I guessed that the nine or so parked under shade-cloth were Doctors and other staff. From what I had seen of the people waiting in the Emergency Room, I guessed that most of the patients at this time of night had arrived either by foot or by taxi. That reminded me of one of the vulnerabilities that we had, The last thing we needed was more civilians getting caught up in this. Cpl Maseka had positioned some of his soldiers so that they should be able to warn off anyone who got in the way, but it nagged at me as a blind spot. I didn't like having any variables that I couldn't control.

I glanced across at the Land Rover, which was parked just around the corner from where I was standing. It was positioned so that it would be out of any potential line of fire. Alina was sitting in the driver's seat where she could watch me. She wouldn't be able to see what was happening out in front of the hospital; her job was simply to start the Land Rover on my signal and then scoot out of the seat to allow me to jump in. I peered over and saw a vague blob through the window, so I gave her a reassuring wave.

I had long since learnt how to keep awake and alert at night, and my particular trick was to make sure that I was on my feet. For some reason, when the pre-combat nervousness hit me, I would fall asleep. Just drop off with no warning or nodding, and it happened irrespective of any of the normal tricks. Being cold or uncomfortable was no help. The only thing that worked was being on my feet and making my brain work on all the angles. Thinking about all the possible variations of what could happen so that when something did happen, and the plan went awry, I would have already thought through a whole slew of variations from which I could pick and choose in the middle of the chaos.

This was something that it was extremely difficult to teach young leaders; NO plan survives contact with the enemy. Not even close. My own theory about the 'Fog of War' was that it was a mental fog. The battlefield smoke and noise did contribute of course, but an agile brain could deal with that simply enough by knowing where all the elements were and constantly updating that mental map as the battle progressed, both from radio reports and from knowing the terrain and the expected actions of the unit. This presupposed that the unit had drilled sufficiently in training that they would follow the standard operating procedures by instinct. The radio reports, in a good unit, should be simply to update the commander on variations on those drills.

The real fog was the natural reaction of most people to being confronted with combat, especially in a leadership role. Their brains would refuse to process the information in coherent way. I had seen it too often to doubt it. It was something that we could only guess at by making training as realistic as possible, but the reality often overwhelmed even those who did well in training. There were some who operated well in those situations. I had discovered I was one of them and I expended extraordinary effort to identify others that were the same. These were people who didn't block out the sensory over-load, but who thrived in the input; who were able to take it all in and process it in split seconds to form a coherent picture of what was going on, and then were able make decisions based on that information and convey those decisions as orders to their subordinates in a clear and concise manner so that they were understood. The few exceptional ones were the ones that got obeyed, instantly and without question, in the middle of the battle. There was something in the voice or attitude of those that conveyed itself almost magically to the soldiers around them and under their command.

Sgt Major Dhlamini was not such a leader. He was a very, very good senior NCO, but not what I looked for in this context. Cpl Maseka was. I had my eye on him for a commission. The regulation was that he had to be promoted to full Sergeant though before he could be sent on Officer's Formative training, but that was, as far as I was concerned, a formality. I was just waiting for the signal from Army HQ confirming his promotion so that I could send him to start the process of gaining a commission.