On The Lomba, 1987: The Diary of a 61 Mech Gunner

J. C. Olive 80422579 BG was conscripted into the SADF in early 1986. Some 18 months later, after his initial year’s training at the Potchefstroom Artillery School, in August 1987, he found himself as a driver with Sierra Battery, 61 Mechanised Battalion Group on the Lomba River, in southern Angola.  

In four months of continuous combat, interspersed with periods of intense ennui, Olive kept a diary. A keen observer of the life and death around him, he brings an immediacy—at times humorous, at times brutal—to the SADF’s largest operation of the Border War, Operation Moduler.  

A published military writer, a friend of the author’s, Patrick Eriksson, recently read the diary and said he thought it was worth publishing as a first-hand account of the mindless boredom of army routine, as well as the terror of coming under fire, without it being just another ‘war story’. 

J. C. Olive was born in 1964, matriculated at Maritzburg College and started his national service in 1986 after qualifying as a motor mechanic. He worked in the UK and travelled through Turkey, Greece, Italy and the 
Netherlands. After getting married he and his wife worked in a hotel in the Yorkshire Dales, on a moshav in Israel and travelled around Thailand and Malaysia. He lives in Pietermaritzburg with his wife and two children.