1976, a corrugated gravel track in Ovamboland, northern South-West Africa, 200 km from the Angolan border. A group of South African Defence Force officers stood in the dust and midday heat, arms folded, watching a prototype vehicle sit motionless above a buried anti-tank mine. Nobody moved toward it.
Inside the vehicle, strapped to the driver’s seat, was a sedated baboon. The blast came without warning. The mine detonated. The vehicle lurched sideways, steel plates warped, dust and smoke billowed into the afternoon sky. When the cloud cleared, the baboon was alive. The animal had a cut lip.
It had survived a Soviet anti-tank mine detonation with a cut lip. The officers uncrossed their arms. The vehicle looked absurd. It sat high off the ground on an ungainly suspension. Its hull angled sharply underneath in a way that looked nothing like a proper armored vehicle. It looked like something assembled in a farm workshop, not a defense plant.
Skeptics called it primitive. Military traditionalists dismissed the entire philosophy behind it. The idea that you could defeat a buried mine simply by shaping the floor of a vehicle at an angle seemed too simple to be serious. They were wrong. The vehicle’s direct descendants would serve in over 20 nations, survive hundreds of IED strikes that would have vaporized a Humvee, and force the most powerful military force in the world to spend $4 billion acquiring vehicles built around the same principle. Its designation was the RG-31
Nyala, and it was the vehicle that carried Africa’s hardest-won lesson into the wars of the 21st century. To understand why the RG-31 existed, you need to understand what the South African Defence Force had been fighting since 1966. The Border War, waged across northern South-West Africa, southern Angola, and the Caprivi Strip, was not fought with tanks or massed artillery.
It was fought with buried metal. Soviet-supplied anti-tank mines, principally the TM-46 and the heavier TM-57, were planted in their thousands beneath the gravel roads of Ovamboland. South African soldiers and police riding in Bedford trucks and standard military vehicles were being killed by them regularly.
The conventional answer, copying Western armored vehicle designs, was not working. Flat floors and low ground clearance turned vehicles into pressure plates. When a mine detonated beneath a flat hull, there was only one direction for the energy to go, upward, through the crew compartment, through the men inside.
The engineer who ended that was Dr. Vernon Joynt, working at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. Joynt’s logic was elegant and unforgiving. A V-shaped hull, angled sharply from the center line outward and downward, redirects blast energy to the sides rather than channeling it vertically through the floor.
Combined with maximum ground clearance, which attenuates the shock wave before it reaches the hull at all, the principle could convert a lethal mine strike into a survivable one. A third principle followed naturally from the embargo South Africa was operating under. All replacement parts had to be commercially available.
No military supply chain, no specialist components that could be denied by sanctions. The 1976 Baboon Test was proof of concept made theatrical for the benefit of skeptical generals. It worked. Joynt’s team had already produced the Hyena and the Hippo before settling on the Buffel in 1978, a Unimog-based mine-protected troop carrier.
The Buffel was followed by the Casspir in 1979. Then, as South Africa’s arms industry matured and evolved through the embargo years, smaller and more refined designs emerged for export and multi-role operations. The RG-31 Nyala was the mature expression of that entire lineage. First produced in 1996 by TFM Industries and later by Reumech OMC, Vickers OMC, Alvis OMC, and ultimately BAE Systems Land Systems South Africa, all at the same factory in Benoni, Gauteng, the Nyala carried the same core philosophy that had been tested on baboons and
refined in blood across 20 years of border war. The vehicle itself was built around an uncompromising set of priorities. The Mark 5 variant, which became the dominant export and operational model, was powered by a Cummins QSB 6.7 L 6-cylinder turbocharged diesel producing 275 horsepower coupled to an Allison automatic transmission with six forward ratios.
The drivetrain was entirely commercial. A soldier did not need specialist knowledge or a military supply chain to keep it running. In wars where logistics chains snap under pressure, that is not a minor detail. It is the difference between a vehicle that fights and a vehicle that sits at a forward operating base waiting for parts.
The combat weight in the Mark 5 configuration was approximately 12 metric tons. Top speed on paved road reached 105 km/h. The operational range approached 900 km. The hull carried 10 occupants, driver plus nine passengers in combat configuration. A pintle-mounted machine gun sat on the roof by default. Canadian vehicles were fitted with the Kongsberg Protector remote weapon station, allowing the gunner to engage targets from inside the sealed hull without exposing his body above the armor line.
The number that defined the vehicle, the number that explained why two dozen nations wanted it, was buried in the protection specification. The RG31 was designed to withstand the simultaneous detonation of 14 kg of TNT under any wheel. That is two Soviet TM-57 anti-tank mines, the precise weapons that had been killing soldiers in Ovamboland for two decades.
Under the belly, it could absorb 7 kg at the center. The hull was sealed, the floor angled, and the seats internally damped to absorb residual blast impulse. The vehicle was not designed to look formidable. It was designed to make the mine irrelevant. Now, before we get into where the Nyala fought and what it endured, if you are finding this worthwhile, subscribe now.
It costs nothing. It takes 1 second, and it helps the channel keep going. The first NATO military to acquire the RG31 was Canada, and the decision was not made in a procurement review. It was made after two men died. On the 2nd of October, 2003, Sergeant Robert Short and Corporal Robbie Beerenfenger were killed when their Iltis light vehicle struck a land mine on a road in the Kabul region of Afghanistan.
The Iltis was a small utility Jeep with no mine protection whatsoever. The deaths provoked public and parliamentary outrage. In November 2005, Canada contracted General Dynamics Land Systems Canada for 50 RG-31 Mark IIs, 60 million Canadian dollars with an option for 25 more that was exercised the following May.
75 vehicles arrived in Kandahar by early 2006, fitted with the Kongsberg remote weapon station, replacing the lightly armored G Wagons that had filled the gap after the Iltis disaster. Through most of 2006, Canadian troops patrolling the roads around Kandahar climbed out of their Nyalas after IED strikes with minor or no injuries. In September 2006, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle directly into a Canadian RG-31.
The hull was damaged. All four soldiers inside walked away. Then came the 4th of July 2007. A patrol from the 3rd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was moving on a gravel road southwest of Kandahar City. The IED buried beneath it was, by the engineering assessment of the specialists who examined the scene, the largest improvised explosive device the Canadians had encountered in the entire Afghan campaign.
Six soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were killed. Among the dead were Captain Matthew Jonathan Dawe, Master Corporal Colin Bason, Corporal Cole Bartsch, and Private Lane Watkins. The wreckage of the vehicle was photographed by dozens of journalists and distributed globally. There are two ways to read that event. One reading concludes that the Nyala had failed.
The other reads the engineering correctly. The RG-31 was designed to withstand 14 kg of TNT under a wheel. The July 2007 device was orders of magnitude beyond that specification. No light patrol vehicle in any army’s inventory would have offered more. The vehicle did not fail. It met its design limits precisely, consistently, right up to the moment someone buried something categorically beyond them in the ground.
The United States arrived at the RG-31 through a different and longer route. In Anbar province in 2004 and 2005, Marine Corps commanders had been recording a pattern that demanded tension. In over 300 IED strikes on a different mine protected vehicle, the Cougar, built by Force Protection Industries in South Carolina, not one Marine had been killed inside the hull.
A formal urgent universal need statement from Brigadier General Dennis Hejlik traveled up the chain of command. Congress authorized $4 billion in May 2007 for an emergency mine resistant ambush protected vehicle procurement. The RG-31 was among the first qualifying designs in production and ready for delivery.
In October 2006, the US Army had already ordered 60 RG-31 Mark V’s, raised almost immediately to 94 vehicles. January 2007 brought a further order for 169. By August 2007, the US Marine Corps awarded a $338 million contract for 600 Category 1 RG-31’s. In July 2008, a further $550 million contract covered 773 Mark V-E vehicles for the Marines.
When the procurement cycle closed, the United States Army, US Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command collectively operated over 2,000 RG-31 variants across Iraq and Afghanistan. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the vehicles had absorbed hits that would have killed soldiers and Marines in unarmored Humvees.
By mid-2008, the reduction in roadside bomb fatalities among US forces had reached approximately 90% from their peak years. Spain fielded 150 RG-31 Mark V-E’s in Lebanon under UNIFIL and in Afghanistan under ISAF. On the 18th of June 2011, a Spanish Nyala struck an EED in Afghanistan.
Spanish Defense Minister Carme Chacón said publicly that the armored vehicle had prevented a far greater catastrophe. She was not using diplomatic language. The comparison vehicle in that situation, a flat-bottomed light patrol truck, would not have left survivors. The Niala did. The United Arab Emirates acquired 253 customized Mark 5 variants, including the Agrab mortar carrier mounting a 120-mm breech-loaded system.
UAE Nialas have been in continuous operational use in the Yemen conflict since 2015. On paper, the RG-31 competed against American vehicles that appeared far more capable. The Cougar, built by Force Protection Industries in South Carolina, was heavier, larger, and offered marginally more hull volume and blast protection headroom.
Britain chose the Cougar, acquiring it as the Mastiff and Ridgeback, citing its protection ceiling. The United States bought approximately 4,000 Cougars. Both the Cougar and the RG-31 owe their existence to the same engineering lineage. Dr. Vernon Joynt, the man who built the Buffalo and the Casspir, and conceived the V-hull philosophy, became a consultant to Force Protection Industries in 2004.
He carried across the Atlantic the logic that the South African Defense Force had paid for in blood across the 1970s and 1980s. The South African mine protection tradition did not merely influence the MRAP program. It fathered it. The International MaxxPro, built by Navistar Defense with armor from Israel’s Plasan Sasa, became the most numerous MRAP in American service with 7,474 units ordered.
It was faster to produce and cheaper per unit. It was also top-heavy, and in the broken terrain of Helmand Province, rollovers became a secondary threat. The first American MRAP combat fatality, in January 2008, occurred when a MaxxPro rolled after a massive detonation and killed the exposed turret gunner. The three crew sealed inside the hull survived.
Against the Humvee, there was no comparison to make. The high mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle was never designed for mine survivability. Its flat hull sat low, its belly plates offered minimal standoff, and its crew compartment was built for mobility, not blast attenuation. Improvised explosive devices accounted for over 70% of United States combat deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2007.
No armor kit bolted to a Humvee’s doors solved that problem because the problem was beneath the vehicle, not beside it. Approximately 2,500 RG-31 Nyalas were built across all marks and operators. The vehicle remains in active service with Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the South African National Defense Force, and several UN peacekeeping missions.
Canada retired its fleet around 2016. The United States Army retains an upgraded fleet for route clearance, refurbished at Letterkenny Army Depot with 300 horsepower engines, independent suspension, and improved gunner protection. Scheduled to remain operational through the coming decade, 1976. The dust settled. The baboon had a cut lip.
The RG-31 Nyala was not elegant. It was not fast across broken ground. Its height and weight demanded constant driver skill in the mountains of Helmand. It had no integrated offensive armament. Its baseline ballistic protection was adequate, but not exceptional. Against the very largest buried devices, it could not protect the men inside, and yet it worked.
It worked on the gravel roads of Kandahar. It worked in the streets of Ramadi and Fallujah. It worked in southern Lebanon and in the dust of the Caprivi Strip. It worked because Dr. Vernon Joynt understood, four decades before the Pentagon did, that the most dangerous ground in a counterinsurgency is not in front of the vehicle.
It is underneath it. That is not an accident. That is the South African Border War, written in angled steel and driven to war on four wheels.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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