Beautiful Moments

Written by Deborah Jordaan

Good day, beautiful souls of our universe. Hopefully, the ether has been blessing you abundantly. Today I am writing about the beautiful moments of the war, yes there are moments but people are not aware as the soldiers never really talk about it.

This is a true story of a young soldier at the ripe age of eighteen in Angola in nineteen seventy-eight. His unit would patrol a different area every week by foot.

They came upon a village and they planned on being there for three days. They camped next to the river near the village and this is where our soldier was approached by a little lad of four years old-short pants, a scruffy shirt and no shoes.

As the dialect was not the same they battled to communicate but eventually, the soldier convinced the little one to fill his three canteens of water by the river.

On the lad’s return with the heavy canteens which he had been dragging behind himself to the soldier, the soldier, in turn, rewarded him. The soldier gave him one sweet and peanut bar from his rat pack. You must realise the soldier only had a bit of ration so what he gave the little lad was a lot of his own ration.

As the day went by the little lad had not gone back to the village yet and the sun was already setting. His mother eventually came looking for him and the little lad did not want to leave. The soldier asked the local person that understood the uvambo language, why the little one did not want to leave?

The person relayed back to the soldier that the mother had said he had never had any sugar or sweets since the little one’s birth. He came back every day for sweeties but unfortunately, the soldiers left a few days later and the little one cried while waving goodbye.

On his travels, he met a little girl aged eight in a POW camp while he was waiting to fly out of Angola. He befriended her from the other side of the fence as he could not get into the camp. She could not speak English. She understood when he gave her some of his condensed milk called a pikkie and a vitamin c sweet that he was not an enemy but a friend.

After a few days, he had to leave. On the day of departure, she handed him a piece of paper with Portuguese wording which he could not understand. He could only have it translated when he got back to his initial base camp. The note said, `I do not know who you are, but I love you.’

The experience of meeting the little lad and sharing the rations with him made him feel happy that he made a difference in the little lad’s life for just a moment, but the memory will last a lifetime for the little one. The little girl in the camp brought out his brotherly feelings as he had a little sister at home.

He felt that he hopefully made the moments they shared memorable so that she did not think that all soldiers were bad.

Be blessed and always make memories with little humans that will stay with them. Those two little people will tell their children about the soldier that brightened their dark moments with a sweetie.