Being The First National Serviceman in BSAP Support Unit

[bredies]

I just thought I would relate an interesting story regarding the culture of the regular BSAP members and in particular their initial attitudes to the foreign invasion of National Servicemen into what they considered to be a rather elite club.
I was in the first Support Unit troop (Lima) ever to be made up solely of National Service Patrol Officers (NSPO) as stick or section leaders.
Lima troop was headed by S/O Hedley Henchie and 4 of us fresh NSPOs - all of whom attended Allan Wilson High School - we didn't want to mix with any PE thugs!
Our section leaders were myself, Ron Barnett (son of Peter Barnett who was a pilot and was killed when his plane flew into power lines while on a drop to or from Mozambique), Ken Morris and Ian McKerzie.
The black troops were made up of raw recruits who had been called up specifically to make up the planned increase in Support Unit numbers.
The only experienced black member we had (if I remember correctly) was Sgt Mkulunyelwa (Sgt. Mike for short actually because almost no-one could say his name!). We all (including Henchie who was a snew to this s we were) leaned heavily of Sarge Mike for guidance and advice as he had been seconded from some other experienced troop.
I don't think he was too happy about that but man we needed him.
Our first deployment was somewhere up north (wish I had kept a diary) and we were attached (in a way) to a regular troop. To blood us they would send us out to an existing deployment where one of the regular troops would already have done 3 of their 6 week stint.
They gave us all the crap jobs (as one would) and made sure we were sent out on regular patrols ( very scary with our lack of experience). After three weeks the regular troop would go for their R and R and would be replaced with another troop.
We would then spend the balance of our 6 weeks with this new troop.
We were always the "junior" troop and treated accordingly.
We were really looked down upon by the regular (white and black) forces and as I said often given menial tasks.
One of those tasks was to sit on Radio Duty in the Troop command center. Whenever we got a call we were asked who was speaking:
"National Service Patrol Office Bredenkamp Sir."
To which we would get:
"Can I speak to a regular detail."
As if we couldn't be trusted to relay simlpe messages!
After a while this got to us - actually from day 1 it got to us as we didn't particularly want to be there and they could get stuffed if they were going to treat us like second class citizens as far as we were concerned.
So.................
I'm not sure if we heard about this or if one of us thought it up but we did the following whenever we had to call any BSAP outfit on the radio:
"Whose speaking please?"
"This is S/O or P/O (or whatever rank it was) Joe Bloggs"
To which we would reply:
"Could I speak to a National Service detail please?".
This went on for a while and there was quite a bit of animosity from the regulars until such time as they realized we were actually on the same side.
As a footnote when we left Lima troop they went on (still with NSPO section leaders) to become one of the best and most highly decorated troops in the Black Boots.
was that because we left or because we were once part of them??
Those were sometimes hairy but still good days.

[Chingola]

Nice story and quite rightly so - well done and one for the national servicemen.i did my two years in the SADF and NS werent considered any better but we made the forces what they were.regulars reading will disagree of course ha ha..

[Echo 9]

Hi there, we are currently putting together a Nominal roll for Support Unit and have close to 700 names

We are very short on info regarding NSPO's so would be good to hear from you

Shaun

PS Also ex Allan Wilson after your time