“I will give you until fall to decide on a trade. Then I want an answer. Do you understand me?”
Andrew nodded. He understood his father well enough. But what could he do? He decided to clear his head by going for a run. As he jogged along the dike road and out onto the polder, he thought about what he did not want to do. He did not want to work indoors or in a garden or as a blacksmith, like his father. And he could not study further, because his education had gone only to the sixth grade, not that he wanted to study more anyway.
Andrew decided to approach the problem a different way. He asked himself what exactly he was good at. The answer came to him as he ran—stealing guns, passing on secret messages, evading Nazis, and running like the wind. But what good were those things now that the war was over? Then it struck Andrew. His thinking was far too small. The war might be over in Holland and the rest of Europe, but he had recently read how the Dutch army was having difficulty putting down a local uprising in the Dutch East Indies. Andrew’s pace quickened as he tried to recall what he had read in the newspaper.
The Dutch East Indies, as Indonesia was then called, had been under Dutch control for three hundred years, until the Japanese occupied it during the war. Now that the Japanese were gone, some people in Indonesia wanted to be free of Dutch rule as well. Of course Andrew knew that this would never happen and that the Dutch army was sending recruits to the East Indies to subdue the rebels.
As Andrew ran, he pieced together a mental checklist of why he would make a good soldier. He was fit and young, and he was looking for adventure. On the negative side, he did not have much education. But he figured that many Dutch teenagers were in the same situation. He could hardly wait to get home and tell his family what he had decided to do.
Although Andrew’s brothers and father were enthusiastic about his joining the army, his mother and sisters were not. Their reaction did not surprise Andrew, who knew that his mother wanted him to stay close to home.
The Whetstras did not think much of his decision either. “I will pray for you,” Mr. Whetstra said. “I hope you find what you are looking for, Andrew.”
Andrew did not really care what they thought. He was sure that he had found his future. He could see himself already, stationed on a tropical island, eating pineapples and drinking Javanese coffee.
Although Andrew applied to join the army right away, he was not allowed to sign up until his eighteenth birthday on May 11, 1946. The wait seemed interminable, but at last he was accepted and sent on his way to Gorkum, in the south of Holland, for training.
Andrew loved every bit of the training, from crawling around under camouflage nets to learning to fire semiautomatic weapons. It was just like being in the Resistance, only now he got paid for doing it. He also attracted a lot of female admirers, and Andrew made sure that everyone he met knew that he was training to be a soldier.
On Sundays he attended a local church, where each week he was invited to lunch by a different family. If the family had a pretty teenage girl, Andrew was sure to be extra charming and confident. “Naturally, with my talent, I’m being trained for hand-to-hand combat,” he would tell people.
What he should have told the families who invited him to eat with them was that he was not really interested in the church service or their company. What he hoped for was that they would write to him and send care packages once he was deployed. On a visit to one family, he met a particularly attractive girl named Thile. Andrew decided she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, with her jet-black hair and smooth, white skin. He made a note to himself to write to her in the first batch of letters he sent out from Indonesia.
Finally the training came to an end, and in November 1946 Andrew went home to say good-bye to his family. He felt proud wearing his crisp new uniform with its shiny brass buckle. Despite the new uniform and training, Andrew’s mother was not impressed. “Why do you always think about killing?” she asked him.
Andrew did not have a definitive answer to her question. He had lived in the midst of war since he was twelve years old, and now uniforms, guns, and combat all seemed normal to him.
Just before Andrew left for Amsterdam to join his army unit, his mother reached into her apron pocket. “Here, son, I want you to take this with you,” she said.
Andrew’s heart sank. Andrew’s mother was giving him her personal Bible. Andrew had hoped to get out of the house without any religious literature.
“Just promise me you will read it,” Mrs. van der Bijl went on.
Andrew decided not to argue. He mumbled a thank you and pushed the Bible down to the bottom of his duffel bag. As far as he was concerned, it could stay there until he got back.
After Andrew joined his unit, the men were loaded aboard the transport ship Sibajak for the trip to the East Indies. As the ship made its way to Southeast Asia, Andrew wrote his first batch of letters home to his old and new friends. During the time of his training, he had managed to collect the names of seventy-two families, and he hoped that his letters to them would reap him a good harvest of care packages containing chocolates and cheeses.
At the top of Andrew’s list of people to write to were Thile and her family. Andrew wrote to Thile about how he loved life at sea and how he could not wait to start serving his country by putting down the rebels. Like most of the letters that followed, this letter was filled with bravado and bluff. Andrew had little idea of what he was about to encounter in the Dutch East Indies.
The truth was that Andrew was not properly prepared to understand and embrace another culture. Sure, the Germans had invaded Sint Pancras, but they were Holland’s European neighbors and not too distant culturally. But as he disembarked the Sibajak in Jakarta three days before Christmas, Andrew was introduced to an entirely different way of life.
The first thing Andrew had to get used to was the heat. It had been damp and foggy, with temperatures only in the forties, when he had boarded the transport ship in Holland. But now, as he disembarked, the temperature was twice that, and the humidity was stifling. As he lugged his large duffel bag down the gangplank, beads of sweat formed on his brow.
The Dutch influence on Jakarta was immediately obvious. The waterfront was lined with neat warehouses, beyond which sat brick houses with red tile roofs. The houses lined neat streets and squares, and canals seemed to be everywhere.
As Andrew made his way through the city with his fellow soldiers, the neat, Dutch-influenced part of the city gave way to a different Jakarta. The streets narrowed and seemed to branch off at odd angles, and they teemed with native people and activity. At the side of the road, people were selling all manner of things, from fruits and vegetables, some of which Andrew had never seen before, to spices, fabrics, and clothes. The streets were also clogged with betjaks, large, brightly painted tricycles that served as taxis. The betjaks ferried around dark-skinned people who bantered excitedly in the strangest language Andrew had ever heard. How different it all was from Sint Pancras.
Soon after arriving in Jakarta, Andrew was among a group of soldiers chosen to go to one of the 13,677 islands of Indonesia to undergo special commando training. During this time the trainees were briefed on their enemy. Their enemy was not everyday Indonesians but a group of rebel guerrillas called the PNI. The group, which was led by a man named Sukarno, was fighting to oust the Dutch from Indonesia. However, the guerrillas did not fight in a “European” way. Instead they mounted lightning-fast, hit-and-run attacks against the Dutch, who, even with their superior weapons, tanks, and cannons, found it hard to defend themselves. A growing group of Communist guerrillas were also harassing the Dutch. But despite the elusive nature of their enemy, Andrew loved every minute of his commando training in the tropical jungle. The training was grueling, but with his tall, sinewy body and his long-term endurance, Andrew began to feel that he could take on any challenge. But as he soon found out, he still needed to learn a few skills.
“Soldier, can you drive a Bren carrier?” an officer asked Andrew one day as he walked out of the company headquarters.
“Yes, sir,” Andrew said with all the confidence he could muster.
“Then that one there needs to go to the motor pool for servicing. Let’s go,” the officer said, pointing to a nearby Bren carrier.
In truth Andrew had never driven one before, or any other motor vehicle, for that matter. But while he was being transported around in a carrier day after day during his training, Andrew had studied how the driver operated the vehicle and had come to the conclusion that it was not too difficult.
Bren carriers were large troop carriers mounted on tracks. They were halfway between a tank and a truck and seemed to be able to effortlessly glide over the most rugged terrain. Andrew climbed up into the driver’s seat, with the officer seated beside him. He studied the dashboard, trying to familiarize himself with the controls. The key was in the ignition, so he turned it, and the Bren’s engine throbbed to life. Now Andrew studied the pedals at his feet. Which one was the clutch? The first pedal he pushed went all the way to the floor. He decided that that was the clutch, and he slid the vehicle into gear. He hit the accelerator and pulled his foot off the clutch, as he had observed the driver do. Immediately the hulking vehicle jerked forward and began to gather speed. Andrew raced along the street, barely missing several soldiers crossing the road. The carrier went faster and faster, and when Andrew glanced at the officer sitting beside him, he saw that the officer’s knuckles were white as he gripped the sides of his seat and that his legs were braced against the floor.
The motor pool building was quickly approaching. It was then that Andrew realized that he did not really know how to stop the vehicle. He felt a tingle of panic run through him. Even with his foot off the accelerator, the Bren carrier was barreling along. Without looking, Andrew plunged his foot down on what he supposed would be the brake. Unfortunately he hit not the brake but the accelerator. The troop carrier lunged forward even faster. Andrew pulled up his foot, but it was too late. The Bren carrier plowed into the back of a row of Bren carriers waiting to be serviced at the motor pool, causing them to concertina into one another. When the Bren carrier finally came to a halt, the officer beside Andrew jumped out, ashen-faced and shaking. Meanwhile a gruff sergeant pulled open the driver’s door of the Bren and demanded to know what Andrew thought he was doing.
“Driving to the motor pool, sergeant,” Andrew said.
The sergeant glared at Andrew.
His confidence shaken, Andrew thought fast. He pointed to the ashen-faced officer standing on the other side of the Bren carrier. “He asked me if I knew how to drive one of these. But he didn’t ask me if I knew how to stop one!” he said.
The next morning Andrew needed all his confidence; he was being shipped out on a combat mission. His company was being sent to reinforce a company in which three-quarters of the men had been killed in the fighting. It was a sobering moment as Andrew tied his boots, slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, and reported for duty.
Andrew soon discovered that life on the front lines was very different from training. For one thing, the soldiers were no longer shooting at paper targets with their weapons but were shooting at real people. And despite what they had been told about how they were not fighting ordinary Indonesian people but were fighting Communists and PNI guerrillas, in the field it was hard to tell who was who. Any suspicious-looking person was likely to be shot on sight.
Andrew also learned that firepower was everything. Any unusual sound or situation was met with a hail of gunfire and a barrage of hand grenades. Andrew loved to feel the kick of his machine gun as clip after clip of ammunition burst from its muzzle. And afterward he would take pride in the damage his weapon had inflicted as he walked around dead bodies and destroyed villages. This was the excitement he had been looking for.
