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getting rubbed raw.
    The feet were the worst. For the first time in my life, I felt the cold breath of mortality. I had always thought that nothing could hurt me; the invincibility of youth—that I was untouchable, that my body was like a machine that I could push on and on. I had always felt like Superman, with unlimited youthful energy and strength. For the first time I began to understand how easily a body can just stop working; how something can go wrong and that you could get sick and maybe die.
    “You should tell the lieutenant that you want to change your boots,” Hans said, checking out the blisters on my feet.
    “Yeah—the staff sergeant said they only do exchanges on Thursdays. That’s five days away. By that time I’ll have no toenails left!” I answered, still picking moodily at my wounds.
    “I heard that the PT course is going to be extra tough for us, because they got to many troops,” said Hans, blowing a cloud of smoke into the night. “They’ve got to lose more troops than usual. There’s almost 700 here. They only need two companies. Most of these guys are going to be RTU’d back where they came from. You’ll never make the course if your feet are in bad shape. Boom! — RTU!”
    “Bullshit. I’ll make it,” I said quickly. I felt a surge of anger through me. I was angry at always having to be controlled by others. I was angry with the stupid fucking army for only doing boot exchange on Thursdays, probably costing me the chance to get into the Bats.
    “Bureaucratic bullshit,” I mumbled.
    The notorious paratrooper PT course started under bright floodlights early one dark, cold Monday morning on the frozen-hard parade ground. It consisted of two weeks of nonstop PT, all day long, from 05:30 till 17:00. The day was broken up into hour-long PT classes with a few minutes in between for a break, and was designed to “fuck you up” and to send 70 percent of us back to where we came from. Each instructor took pride in the number of troops who would quit his class and drop off the course to be RTU’d.
    One class was to run carrying your buddy across the parade ground without him touching the ground. It was impossible after the tenth time. In another class we would have to carry a 30-kilogram concrete block, called a ‘marble’, for an hour. We would have to run around the damn pakhuis, which was a 400-metre run, carrying this wretched marble, and do various horrible exercises with it, never letting it touch the ground. Another fun class involved an hour on the obstacle course, telephone-pole PT, or knocking each other’s lights out wearing boxing gloves.
    Getting up in the mornings was the worst, and the time most troops thought of quitting. Should I get up for a day of pure hell, or just lie here in bed and legally quit? It wasn’t that the PT in itself was so hard, but day after day of it with no let-up made the body weak and limp and you moved forward on pure willpower, with zero energy. Each day would end with a nine-to-15-kilometre run in boots, webbing and rifle with an ambulance driving slowly behind to pick up that day’s crop of new RTUs who’d cracked and sat down on the side of the road, beaten.
    My feet were killing me. Every step I took I could feel new skin being torn from my feet. I had tried to exchange my boots, but the hairy-faced son-of-a-bitch staff sergeant at the stores told me with a smirk that I had already made an exchange, and that we were only allowed one swop. I was too green to make a fuss and thought that I would just make do with the second pair of boots, which weren’t quite as bad as the first. I had made this mistake before. My feet had always been flat, like a SWAPO, and an odd, non-standard size between 12 and 13. Whenever I bought shoes I made the mistake of taking the smaller size 12 because they felt snug and okay. The same with the boots, which seemed to fit for the first couple of days. But after the first 15-kilometre run I started having