Without the interchapters set 20 years after the story we have followed, the narrative of Marnus Erasmus would lacks its disturbing irony and its larger moral vision. Behr juxtaposes the narrative of the 11-year old Marnus with the monologue of the adult Marnus to underscore the amorality and futility of Marnus’s decision to accept rather than resist the world of his parents.

Like the American involvement in the civil war in Vietnam in the 1960s, the South African involvement in the civil war in Angola during the 1980s is both complicated and simple. The civil war pitted numerous splinter groups within Angola, each seeking the overthrow of an entrenched government. For the international community, the growing conflict (and years of violent fighting) represented a line of defense against the threat of Soviet influence in an area rich with mineral deposits critical to nuclear weaponry production. South Africa feared the growing intrusion of foreign troops—supplied by pro-Communist governments, most notably Cuba—in the regional civil war and how those troops could determine the downfall of the government and the establishment of a Communist presence. The deployment of South African troops into southern Angola—Marnus’s detachment among them—was never officially acknowledged by the white government. The role of the South African troops was to contain Cuban troops, monitor their activity, protect essential transportation lines, and interrupt communications.

Much like South Africa’s domestic policies, its economic strategies, and its social agenda, the country’s secret military operation founders. As with most everything associated with the apartheid regime, the military operation runs on fear and paranoia. Marnus’s monologues reflect a growing frustration as the South African soldiers grow weary of the relentless marching, the constant fear of ambush, and the lack of any overarching strategy to actually win.

What is revealed, however, in these monologues is less a scathing critique of South African military ineptitude and more a painful revelation of Marnus’s continued allegiance to his parents and to their dead-end world. He is little more than what he was the last time we saw him at 11 years old: the pathetic figure of his father’s puppet dressed up in military fatigues. His father, of course, cannot communicate with him. The mother’s letter, which Marnus reads and rereads, reveals how manipulative she is, turning an apparently chatty, newsy letter into an elaborate psychological trap—a guilt trip—as she reminds her son how she pines for him when he is away, how she cries when she thinks about his “shiny blond hair” (135)  when he was a boy, and how she begged him not to return to Angola during his last furlough. The interchapters ultimately remind us not only of how the white government of South Africa would fall of its own military overreach and its stubborn belief in its own grand mission, but also that Marnus (and his generation, for that matter) was trapped by his own toxic parents into a hopeless, tragic endgame.