Following the success of Troepie: From Call-up to Camps, Cameron Blake’s new book looks at National Service from a number of different angles. The book contains seven in-depth accounts from a diverse selection of former conscripts – a recce, a dog handler, a mortarist, a parabat, a gunner, a loadmaster, a military policeman and a marine – who take you through their entire military careers and provide detailed insider’s information on each role. A number of frank and often humorous letters home from a soldier to his fiancée are also included in the book, and there are interviews with women – mothers, sisters, wives and girlfriends – who talk about how National Service affected them and their men. And, finally, former soldiers look back at their time in the army and reveal the powerful and lasting effects it has had on them and how they view it from the perspective of the present.

CAMERON BLAKE was born in 1969 in Johannesburg where he grew up. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1991, with a Diploma in Graphic Design. In 1992, still liable for compulsory national service—albeit in the early ’90s when most conscripts were not heeding their call-ups—he cleared in at Voortrekkerhoogte, a large military base outside Pretoria. After doing his basic training in the Technical Services Corps, he transferred to the Ordnance Services Corps in Cape Town, completing his service in the media department. After a decade of varying careers in creative media fields, he finally teamed up with a long-time friend to open a small shop in Cape Town. The shop specializes in coins, medals and surplus militaria: his true passions. It was here that he began networking with veterans and collecting their stories, in line with his interest in southern African military history. His first book, Troepie: From Call-up to Camps, was published in 2009, and the sequel, From Soldier to Civvy, in 2010.