No one gets to choose when or where they are born.

No one gets to choose who their parents will be. No one gets to have a say in how they are loved as babies. No one gets to instruct God (although we do try at times) what He should have intended for us from before the beginning of time.

Paradoxically though everyone has free will!

I was born in South Africa, in October 1957, to an upper middle class family. I am quite sure that my parents did not plan for me to arrive late in 1957, specifically so that my younger age on leaving school, would make serving two years of military service a logical choice. They certainly could not have known that the Portuguese would have a revolution in 1974, resulting in a decision to grant Angola their independence in November 1975.

I doubt that mum and dad intended to divorce in 1968; a decision that would change the course of my life; and equip me for leadership training in the military in 1975. They called me Alexander Dirk after my father and grandfather.

But who could have forseen that the initials "ADB" would cause me to be first in line to complete troop tactics in October 1975. That this would have me "volunteered" to serve in Angola when an operational unit came up two leaders short?

I do not think it is possible to compute the probability of a sperm and an egg meeting in January 1957; that would result in an eye witness to what happened at Luso in 1975; then equipped as an information engineer so that the story could be shared with a global population using the social media revolution of 2016. Mathematicians; please help?

When World War One commenced, most of the planet’s attention was fixed on Europe, and many of the outlying conflicts that took place elsewhere have been either ignored or outright forgotten by history.

In 1915, South African Defense Forces invaded what was then known as German Southwest Africa. They were specifically requested to do so by the Allies in order to help cut off resource supplies to the Kaiser and his forces.