At the onset of the AIDS epidemic in Botswana, most of the officers and men who had helped establish the BDF were either gone or heading for the exit. One would regard this as a timely escape of the coming epidemic that came to ravage the young defence force. So in this case, almost all if not all the Eight Zeros, as the founding fathers were referred to managed to escape the pandemic.
In a private conversation carried between George Tlhalerwa and Shadrack Moloi who are two retired brigadiers from BDF, Tlhalerwa laments that it’s funny that they stayed in the middle of the AIDS epidemic and survived. He says it is sad that this same generation has only come to be decimated by the Corona virus. It was the first and second generation that were hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. Looking back at the mid-1990s which can be regarded as the epicentre of the epidemic, one would be grateful to be alive.
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