Not surprisingly, given the circumstances in South Africa now, earlier today my wife and I were discussing the violence as well as the newly ordered deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). This deployment is now being carried out in several parts of the nation in response to a growing tide of violence, looting, and more general civil turmoil. What, exactly, SANDF personnel are going to do, what kind of orders and assignments will they have, what training might they have had, and how they will carry out their mission all became big questions in our conversation.
As it turns out, improbable as it may seem to some, I actually had first-hand experience (and training) in demonstrations and riot/crowd control efforts — and from both sides of the barricades. Through the early part of the 1970s, university student protests against the Vietnam conflict were becoming increasingly routine on many US campuses, and those were in addition to a series of major protest rallies in Washington, DC with hundreds of thousands of participants.