Llewellyn Barracks from 14,000 ft:

I have a Google Earth Pro subscription & these are some shots.

A) Main Entrance to Llewellyn

B) The parade ground: where I spent many painful hours

C) The sports ground: with rugby posts that we often had to run around during drill on the parade ground

D) The abandoned air strip: around which we had to run most mornings before breakfast

E) The rifle range: now abandoned. You can see the butts just left of the "E"

F) Number Three Guard: where I also spent many painful hours

Llewellyn Barracks from 8,000 ft:

A) Sports field

B) Parade ground. One moring, after constantly making us run the whole time through drill, ("...by the time I count to ten I want to see the last man around the rugby posts..." etc.) one of the guys next to me collapsed just as we formed up after running. I and another guy jumped forward to help him and our commander screamed at us and told us to leave him and get back in form. He marched over to the guy, unconscious on the ground, and yelled and screamed at him and accused him of sleeping on the parade ground. When he finished his little show he orderd us to drag the guy over to the low wall on the east side and prop him up against it. When he came round one of the guys was ordered to march him over to the guard room and have him charged for "sleeping on the parade ground."

C) The cinema, an old coverted building, where I remember films on first aid & treating bullet wounds etc. At one of these rather bloody first aid films I was in sitting in the front row. The wounds depicted were so realistic I began to hear hissing in my ears and the movie screen got darker and darker until I felt like I was looking at it through a long tunnel. I realized I was on the verge of passing out. Fortunately it had been raining and, while we were formed up outside - with no rain gear which was normal for our army - we had gotten soaked. My cap was wet so I used it to wipe my face and that brought me back to being fully conscious. When the lights came on after the show, guys were on the floor all over the place, all having passed out. I remember many times too being double-timed down here for a lecture and, after getting inside people tended to cough a lot after running, especially the smokers. The corporals, sergeants and so on would storm up and down the aisles shouting, cursing and swearing telling the coughers to stop coughing.

D) The guard room. Once, when doubling to tennis for PE in our PE kit, which included shorts, takkies, vest and cap, one of the top brass, with his fancy green hat, feather etc. on his head drove past us. We did a by-the-book "eyes left" to acknowledge him and continued on our way. His car came to a sudden halt behind us and, next thing, he was screaming at us and ordered us to double to the guard room to be charged for not respecting a superior alcoholic, (oh sorry, commanding officer) because we had not saluted him. Well, we doubled over there and told the guard commander we had been ordered by this moron to go there and be charged. (We didn't use the word "moron" to the guard commander). The RP's screamed and shouted, cursed and swore, etc., etc., at us but gave us an opportunity to say a few words. I spoke up and told them we had been strictly instructed by our platoon commander that we were only permitted to execute a salute if we were wearing BOTH a belt AND head-dress and thus, in PE kit, we had head-dress but NO belt and therefore, inaccordance with our training and to the best of our knowledge, we executed a perfectly correct 'eyes left" to acknowledge the superior alcoholic (for "alcoholic" read "commanding officer" again). Well, the RP's did their little intimidating song and dance routine which, when I was 18, was rather unnerving, but released us without a charge.

E) Tennis courts where I went for PE

F) Dining room was somewhere in here

G) The platoon armouries were somewhere down here but I don't remember them being so big. I'm not sure if these buildings are new or existed when I was there in 1976

H) My barrack room, 9 Platoon. First commanded by Color Sergeant Van Den Berg & Cpl Newbold then commanded by Sergeant Mullins. My barrack room was the one immediately north of "H" or the one second to left from this one. I was in a bed about 2/3 of the way down on the south side and the entry was on the east side. The long thin buildings running between the barrack rooms were the ablution blocks.

Leon Kruger was in the bed next to me and he was an avid snake collector. We had built-in bedside lockers and I remember going to sleep one night with a cardboard box full of young puffadders just above my head on his locker... Thankfully none got out during the night. On our classical war exercise he caught a massive banded cobra that fell into someone's trench.

i) Swiming pool where we had to go and swim in the mornings after our run around the airstrip

Number 3 Guard from 7000 ft:

I remained in the infantry and we had to do regular guard at this ammunition dump. We had been told that if this place went up it would take Bulawayo with it - which seemed like nonsense to me. It was however quite an eerie sensation walking down between the bunkers at 2:00am in the morning, on your own, to replace someone in a guard tower. I remember climbing these swaying towers in raging thunder storms. Quite an experience.

A) The Guard House at the entrance: I''m a pretty placid sort of person and I generally don't let my emotions get the better of me. We had someone in our platoon who was the grandson of a former, famous Rhodesian prime minister and he carried a Bren Gun. He and I never really hit it off and one evening we were in the small courtyard between the north and south wings of the building just left of the "A" above. I can't remember why but this guy started picking on me while we were standing there. (To add some context, he was about 6ft, 180 lbs & I was 5'-10, 130 lbs). He started cursing and swaring at me and I said something back to him - which I can't remember now. I do know for certain that I did not swear at him. He came at me and hit me on my upper body with the butt of his Bren Gun, knocking me to the ground. Thankfully, other guys in our platoon were there and they grabbed him and stopped him from doing anything more to me.

B) Guard Tower:

C) Guard Tower: I remember specifically being in this tower and talking on the tower phone with John Morgan, who was over in Tower noted "E," about university.

D) Guard Tower: I was on guard in this tower when one of our guys had an accidental discharge inside the guard house "A" when he messed up unloading his FN. He was sitting on the end of the bed at the end of his shift and forgot to take the magazine off before cocking the rifle to eject the round in the chamber. When his rifle fired it barely missed one of the guys standing near him. I remember hearing a strange kind of a crack, then heard conversation strike up over the tower phone telling us there had been an accidental discharge.

E) Guard Tower:

F) Ammunition Bunkers

G) No-Man's Land: This was the killing ground between the double fences. There were lights around the inner fence that shined outwards. If any person got between the fences we were to shoot them.