Title: Buried in the Sky
Author: Rick Andrew
Genre: War memories
Publisher: Penguin Books South Africa
Cape Town, South Africa 2006
ISBN 9780141003047 / ISBN 978-0-14-100304-7
Softcover, 13 x 20 cm, 207 pages, several b/w photographs
Set both in the present and in the dust-laden reaches of Angola in 1976, Buried in the Sky is an album of stories about men and women and the border war in North Namibia and Angola. To the strains of the music of Bob Dylan and in long periods of boredom and inactivity, South Africa's soldiers tried to make sense of a war they could not see. Rick Andrew, himself a SADF conscript at that time, allows his comrades to tell their stories. We get to know Manie Dippenaar, whose hunting trip threatened to turn into an international incident; Private Smith, the boy from the Bluff who had Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles and chose a novel way to roast a chicken as his means of revenge on a bad tempered major; Morphine Sister, who handled a gun like a mamba; and Spek, the surfer-boy who dreamed only of catching the next big wave. Poignant, funny and dramatic, Buried in the Sky will strike a chord with anyone whose life has been tarnished by war and especially those who found themselves on 'the border'.
Rick Andrew was born in 1947 in Johannesburg, moved to KwaZulu Natal in 1966 and has lived there ever since.