First published in 2011, The Emergency Bouzouki Player has introduced me to a world of new friends who share my views on War and the component elements that go into its creation.

The task of completing the book took some three years. Way overbudget for my expectations when I set out to achieve this authoring challenge.

I had intended to do an Audio Book at that time. But. Only those who have made an Audio book running over 17 hours will know the trouble that means.

I decided to make the audiobook after watching Putin use $1 a day conscripts, not even aware of what they were getting into in Ukraine, to remind me of my own experience of conscription. I was once in their shoes and wish I then had access to a story like ‘The Bouzouki Player’ to guide my decisions during conscription.

Thanks to Putin, since February 26th, 2022, we see 18 year old boys raping Ukrainian mothers because?
They were conscripted and the laws for conscripts are made plain. You do what you are told to do. Or else?

Because the dark history of Conscription includes serial abuse frequently engaging teenaged boys not yet capable of making ethical behavioral judgements in grotesque sexual assault, I am reminded of that time when I was 18 where I experienced the full weight of what conscription into war means.

That was 1979. I was 18. The Angolan Border War was a Cold war proxy between the USSR and the USA. 200,000 Cubans armed by Russia came to Angola financed by many supporters of Black liberation from the Colonial yoke. Gaddafi in Libya was one generous benefactor. And to a larger extent, Moscow, who provided training for the liberation groups including Mandela’s uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) – meeting on the Angolan border in a 33 year conflict, to take on the growing might of the SADF, funded by the high price of Gold, in which they controlled 85% of the worlds market at that time. An enormous resource the National Party Government elected to invest in war and not education.

As the 33 year war intensified so did the need for new boys to feed the fighting machine. The SADF. Conscription of every male born in South Africa began with nine Months. And rose to two years by the time I turned 18.

Conscription is a human rights offense. A form of forced servitude. While many South Africans welcomed this opportunity to go shoot (K word) for God and Country and cheap beer, less than 1%, by study of these metrics, did not. They objected. And their story is not one glorifying war for White supremacy the way many Afrikaner South Africans still do to this day.

That’s the version in my story. War is wrong. Racist war is worse. Conscription is kidnap of the worst kind.

The Emergency Bouzouki Player is my take of two years at war with the South African Army.

My hope is that Russian conscripts lost in a maze that will blight their lives forever will somehow listen to, or read my book.

“Living with what you believe you were forced into as a conscript is no life at all. Ask any German conscript who believed Hitlers promise in the 1941 invasion of Russia. Even the ones who survived the horrors of Stalin’s victory never survived with any life to speak of.”

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