ALL ROADS LEAD TO LANDMINES – The Cow shit Landmine theory This is dedicated to all those soldiers and civilians who have been involved in landmine incidents. Some did not survive and I honour their memory, but others like myself lived to tell the tale. I still bare the scars of my injuries to this day. Some were not injured at all and once their ears stopped ringing they were physically OK again. Some reacted differently to others. Henry “Boet” Botha took a mine assisted flight and used his hands as landing gear. He said “I was sitting on the back and then I saw sky, ground, sky, trees, sky, ground, trees, sky and then ground. Talk about a #&$**&! snotty ek sê”. Mark Waring on the other hand had the war all worked out and felt that reading a Chunky comic was the best way to deal with the immediate trauma at the time. In his incident the back wheel took the blast of the cake tin (land mine) and the truck slewed to a halt and while all the troops skirmished into the bush in case the mine was accompanied by an ambush, Mark climbed off the truck, sat on the side of the road and carried on reading his Chunky comic. So many times the RLI wrecker truck would be summoned to recover the wrecks of mined vehicles and you knew just by looking at the wreckage that some unfortunate soldier had lost his life. Most certainly I believe that a driver is the worst affected by landmines. After I recovered from my landmine injuries I can remember having to overcome my fear of driving on dirt roads again. At that juncture of the war, the mine proofed vehicles were still not yet in plentiful supply. Every odd rock was suspicious and by night every shadow cast by headlights on the road’s corrugation was a potential hay maker. Twenty years later in South Africa and driving toward Johannesburg airport with my wife and daughters, a sudden burst of black smoke was thrown up by a steam engine as it passed under the freeway fifty metres to my front. My spine went absolutely cold and I swerved into the next lane, almost creating a huge stack up of cars behind me – not to mention my wife and kids being traumatized. There were, at times, discussions about how a person could identify a landmine while on the move and thereby miss it. This of course was only talk. Theory is always good but in reality, unless it had been raining and the sand covering the mine washed away, you could take it for granted that the Gooks would apply the best camouflage possible to their dirty hand work. One of these theories (and probably the most credible until you received the extended explanation) was the “Cow Shit Landmine theory”. I first came across this theory in Mukumbura while camping over at an engineers’ squadron. They were involved in road clearance work for the roads department who were upgrading the roads in the Hurricane area. This theory was scribbled on a board outside their canteen, probably so you could reflect deeply on it once you had a few beers inside you. It went like this: Soft flat fresh cow shit = NO Landmine Hard flat cow shit with upturned edges = LANDMINE Formula for theory = “Cows don’t shit twice in two feet” I was passing the evening with Corporal Hutchinson (cousin to Mickey Piert – 2 Commando) who had transferred to the Engineers squadron from the RLI . I asked him to give me the explanation of this theory which I found rather quizzical and deep to say the least. The extended explanation from Corporal Hutchinson was that you could not really count on this theory because it had a couple of flaws. One flaw was that an anti-tank mine required 400 (as I remember) pounds of pressure to set it off - yet it was quite easy for a calf to stand on it and drop a fresh pattie in place without setting the mine off, negating the first statement. If on the other hand, it was a fully grown cow that dropped the patty and first stood on the mine, the chances are that there would be no cow pat but a big hole in the ground instead. Another flaw in this theory was that if there was regular cow traffic across the path where a landmine is buried, the chances of a “heavy enough” cow stepping on the mine increases and also, cows do not discriminate where they stand - so if they don’t set off the mine, standing on old cow patties and giving them upturned edges was common – negating the second statement – and of course it would be thoughtless to exclude the fact that the greater number of cows crossing the road, the greater the chances of finding more than one cow patty within two feet of each other. (Can you believe this? There we were – drinking beers and analyzing cow shit). Anyway! We continued. The biggest flaw in this theory was that a person could not possibly scan every single cow patty to hopefully (not) find a landmine underneath it. So I asked him (what then had to be the most obvious question coming out of this conversation), “So how can you say then that the formula of the theory “Cows don’t shit twice in two feet” can be correct?” To this he replied “It can be correct if we are talking about a single cow without diarrhea”. We burst out laughing, long and loud. I then asked him “So if you can scan such long stretches of road with your ultrasound equipment, why do you still write bullshit on the board like that?” He replied again “Well, sometimes we have to examine cow shit more closely because you never know what the cows have been eating”. Confounded, I asked where the relevance was. You could see the mischievous glint in his eye when he gave his reply, “Smoke one and see”. Well that was it - we laughed for a long while. He had rolled me with this yarn so well and I almost swallowed the lot. I can imagine how many people were actually sucked in completely by this theory and they never asked for the explanation. These engineers have a sick humour. So the real truth is that there is no hard and fast theory when it comes to spotting a landmine. If the layer is very skilled at concealing his work you won’t see it in time and whether you hit or miss it is in your destiny.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 23:48:37 +0000
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