Meet Davydos

In which you learn about Davydos and the path his life took that ultimately led him to The Exclusion Zone Name: Davydos "Davy" Andries Vaitkus, South African Born: 20 March 1990 Father: Tomas Vaitkus, Lithuanian winemaker and distiller Mother: Sonja Vaitkus nee du Toit, South African Highest Education: Matric, Paarl Boys High, 2008 Military Service: Parabats and Special Forces, 2010-2024 Highest Rank: Warrant Officer, 2nd Class Security Specialist: 2024-2025 Bikes through Africa: 2025-2026 Current Occupation: Exclusion Zone Stalker Heritage Tomas Vaitkus was born and raised in Kaunas, Lithuania. After school, he was privileged to study agriculture at the Lithuanian Academy of Agriculture. Seeking work and the opportunity to gain experience in the art of winemaking and distilling, he moved to France. He served an apprenticeship on estates in Bordeaux before moving north to Segonzac. There he specialised in the making of Cognac at Martell and Courvoisier. He routinely attended the most significant international wine and spirit shows. As he walked from stand to stand at 1987’s Vinexpo, he had no idea that his life was about to change. As a Lithuanian he’d always felt like an outsider, tolerated rather than accepted, and listening to the gruff man talk about his wine and brandy, he sensed another outsider. Andries du Toit introduced himself, a winemaker from the Western Cape of South Africa. He was at the expo to find new markets for his wine and nascent brandies. The wine was excellent, but Tomas was less impressed by the brandy. Fueled by said brandy, they became engrossed in the finer points of distilling. As Tomas said his good-byes, perhaps emboldened by the brandies, Andries invited him to join him, to be his Master Distiller. Together they could make something special, promised du Toit. So it was that Tomas left France with Andries, to join him at Steenrug. He threw himself into the project, and his knowledge and experience, both in wine-making and distilling, soon bore fruit. The estate had been in the du Toit family for three generations, and remained a family business. That family included the du Toit daughter, Sonja. She worked in the office managing sales, logistics, and purchasing. Over time Tomas found he had more and more reasons to visit the office. Slowly the relationship changed from work colleagues to friends, from friends to lovers. They married in 1988 and their son, Davydos Andries Vaitkus, was born in 1990. Early Life Davydos enjoyed an idyllic childhood. From sunrise to sunset he played with the sons and daughters of the farm workers. They explored the farm, did all the things that adventurous children do. Soon he spoke isiXhosa as well as he did the English of his father and the Afrikaans of his mother. He found primary school an inconvenience, the only consolation being the introduction to various sports. As he grew older he involved himself in the activities of the farm. His bliss was disrupted as he reached high school age. Following in the footsteps of all du Toit men, he entered Paarl Boys High. A high school founded in 1868, steeped in tradition, that offered a rounded education through academic excellence, various clubs and societies, and a will to win fostered on the sports field. Like those that went before him, he was enrolled in the hostel as a weekly boarder. After initial homesickness he adapted to the routines and rhythms of the school. He was an average student in the classroom, not through lack of potential, but rather because he found lessons tedious, something to endure before sports began. There he excelled. On the track he was competitive, blending speed and endurance to post more than respectable times in the 400m and 800m races. This plus natural strength combined with an almost reckless fearlessness showed itself on the rugby field. He began to make appearances in the much-vaunted first XV from grade 10 and cemented his place as the starting open side flanker in grade 11. He captained a strong side in his matric year. Unfortunately he played in an era where Western Province was blessed with abundant talents, so never represented WP at Craven Week. Many of those contemporaries would have outstanding professional careers, a few becoming Springboks. Over weekends, when the sport permitted, he became more involved on the farm, helping out in the workshops. He displayed an aptitude for maintaining machines and loved nothing more than tinkering with his motorbike, trying to get that little bit more performance. He quietly enjoyed the regular braais. He sensed the camaraderie as the men would talk around the fire, cooking the meat. Stories from the old days — army deployments, operations half-described — that grew more animated as the brandy flowed. After matriculating he contemplated his future, with no obvious next step. He was not drawn to enrol for a university degree, nor did the study at an agricultural college appeal. He continued to work on the farm and imagined how he might become a part of the family business. Until one Sunday morning, after another long evening listening to the stories, the idea of joining the military came to him. Its esprit de corps, the physical challenge, the adventures — what could be better. Sonja was horrified, she’d hoped since the end of Apartheid and conscription that she’d not have to endure a son in the military. When Davydos could not be dissuaded, she tried, in vain, to persuade him to join the Tiffies, apply his abilities to work on vehicles. Again, Davydos had other ideas, and enrolled in the infantry corps. Military Service Davydos took to basic training like a duck to water. He led his intake in the physical training and was a good shot. Instructors noticed his natural leadership skills from the outset. He was encouraged to sign up for JLs, and when presented with options, chose to pursue the path of an NCO, wanting to be closer to the action and avoid the academic study associated with advancing through the ranks as an officer. First deployments were domestic, focused on border control and anti-poaching, before seeing action in the DRC. There he saw his first combat action in skirmishes with armed militia groups. His ability to remain cool under pressure earned him field promotion to the rank of corporal. Looking for further challenge, he volunteered for transfer to 1 Parachute Battalion. He excelled during the trials, and was accepted for service in the ‘Bats’. It was during deployment into the CAR that the reality of service finally hit home. The Battle for Bangui was fierce, and he experienced close combat, being ambushed, and seeing his fellow soldiers die in battle. Now he knew the truth, why the brandy flowed around the braai, and, despite its tongue-loosening effect, how much remained held within. Back home after deployment in Burundi, he got chatting to a stranger in the mess. The stranger was recruiting for Special Forces and at the end of the evening suggested that Davydos was just the kind of man they were looking for. Always looking for a fresh challenge, he again volunteered. Selection and training for the ‘Recces’ was grueling, matching the intensity of the US SEALs and British SAS. Again Davydos rose to the top, setting records for endurance and tactical shooting exercises. Accepted into the Recces, he rose up through the ranks, seeing action in Mozambique combatting insurgents. Often deployed behind the lines, infiltrating local communities to gather intelligence or disrupting enemies through acts of sabotage, in operations never spoken about, in places never mentioned. Weeks, sometimes months, alone in the field, before conducting operations with a small team. And it was during one such operation that Sonja’s worst nightmare came true. Caught in an ambush, he was shot in the leg. Despite the wound, his quick thinking and decisive action enabled the team to escape to an extraction point. He recovered in the hospital, regaining full fitness by normal standards. But Recce standards are not normal standards. He could no longer meet those standards. His exemplary service record — including being awarded the Army Cross, a medal only awarded to members of the SA Army who have distinguished themselves in dangerous or critical situations by exceptional courage, leadership, skill or tenacity — led to him being presented with options, either in the Recces or with the Bats. But despite the 14 years of active service having taken their toll, for Davydos, being out of active service was not service. He resigned from the army and returned to civilian life. Civilian Life Adjustment to life on civvy street was harder than he’d imagined. He returned to Steenrug where he spent hours in solitude, hiking through the mountains. The memories of Bangui, the ambush and wound, and the things done that were never spoken of, played on his mind. Work on the farm had lost its lustre. Finally the inactivity became too much, too much time to think. He left the farm and headed to Johannesburg, a place where a man of his skills and experience could find work. He flitted from job to job in the security and protection game. But for Davydos it all seemed so pointless, insignificant in comparison to the military deployments. The final straw came when assigned to serve as a bodyguard for a visiting rock star and his model girlfriend. Watching them fritter away time in endless parties, indulging in booze, drugs, and shameless sex in the back of the limousine, broke the camel’s back. He quit and, longing once more for the peace and beauty of the African bush, decided to take a bike trip from Cape Town to Cairo and then on to Lithuania. It would be an adventure and an opportunity to see where his father had grown up. He kissed Sonja goodbye at Steenrug, gave her the promises she needed to hear — he'd be careful, stay safe, and make regular phone calls — and rode out of the Jonkershoek Valley on a morning that smelled of fynbos and cold river water. He took the west coast at his own pace, no fixed itinerary, stopping when the mood took him. North of the Orange River the Namib opened up and the scale of it hit the way big landscape always does — not all at once, but in increments, as the kilometres built and the silence deepened and the road ahead stayed empty. The Skeleton Coast was something else. He spent a day at Terrace Bay with fog sitting offshore, the Atlantic grinding through the kelp beds, the bones of old wrecks visible at low tide. A coast that has never wanted to be settled and shows it. He turned inland through country he knew from a different life — Oshakati, Rundu, places he'd moved through in uniform with different concerns and different company. The same dust, the same flat heat, but the tension gone, and himself a civilian on a motorbike with no brief and no extraction plan. The Caprivi narrowed to riverine bush before the Zambezi appeared — wide, brown, unhurried. He crossed at Katima Mulilo and rode into Zambia. Victoria Falls announced itself as sound before sight — a low sustained roar from kilometres back, then the mist rising above the treeline like smoke from something that would never burn out. He stood on the bank in the afternoon with his t-shirt soaked through and watched the river tip itself into the gorge, and thought that there were some things that simply could not be anticipated. East Africa had a different texture. The roads harder in some places, softer in others — the red laterite mud of the wet season replacing the desert dust he'd grown accustomed to in Namibia. He rode through Zambia and on into Malawi, where Lake Malawi appeared suddenly over a ridge and he understood why early explorers convinced themselves they'd found an inland sea. Tanzania changed the light somehow, and by the time the road began climbing toward Moshi the air had a different quality entirely. He'd always told himself he'd do Kilimanjaro one day. He booked a guide, stashed the bike, and spent five days walking up through moorland and rockfields and finally the glacial zone to Uhuru Peak. At 5,895 metres, standing on the roof of Africa in the pre-dawn dark with frozen fingers, waiting for the light to come up over the curve of the continent below him — it was, he would tell people later, the most at peace he'd felt since leaving Steenrug. From Nairobi the landscape changed again — the road north through Kenya thinning out, the scrub growing sparser and more hostile the further he rode from the city. He crossed into Sudan at Nimule. He did not mention this part to Sonja. Technically navigable, Sudan was a country that displayed its history in plain sight — in the faces at checkpoints, in the military vehicles idling at junctions for no obvious reason, in the quality of the silence in certain towns. A Recce learns to read these things. He rode carefully, kept a low profile, and did not linger. The Nubian desert between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa was a different order of hostile to anything he'd ridden through — three hundred kilometres of dust and rock and heat that made the Namib look forgiving. He loaded the bike onto the ferry at Wadi Halfa and crossed Lake Nasser into Egypt with a relief he hadn't expected to feel quite so keenly. Cairo he gave a week. The city earned it — ancient and immense and entirely indifferent to its own chaos, operating at a frequency that took a man from the Jonkershoek Valley time to tune into. He found a guesthouse near the Khan el-Khalili, ate well, slept late, and let the noise and colour of the place do their work on him. It was the first time in months the road ahead felt less urgent than the present moment. From Cairo the route traced northeast through Jordan and into Turkey — he stopped in Cappadocia long enough to watch hot air balloons drifting over volcanic rock in the early morning light, which was worth the detour — then northwest through the Balkans and into Eastern Europe. Ukraine he had not planned on lingering in. The war had been grinding on for years and the country wore it the way a man wears a long illness — the shape still recognisable, but something essential spent. Checkpoints. Roads repaired and broken and repaired again. Towns where half the buildings were dark. At a bar outside Uman he found himself drinking coffee with a group of men who'd clearly been somewhere hard and come back changed. The kind of company Davydos had no trouble reading. One of them mentioned the Zone. Not Chernobyl — everyone knew Chernobyl. This was something that had shifted, evolved, become something else. They called them stalkers — men and women who slipped past the military perimeter for reasons ranging from the mercenary to the inexplicable. Artifacts that defied known physics. Anomalies that moved. Things in the dark that were no longer entirely the animals they'd started as. The man talking kept his voice level and his eyes on the table, the way a person does when they want you to know they aren't making it up. Davydos finished his coffee and rode on to Kaunas. The conversation came with him. He rolled into Kaunas after 14,000 kilometres carrying the particular feeling that very long journeys produce — the distance covered felt both enormous and somehow compressed, as though the weeks on the road had folded in on themselves. Tomas had left this city as a young man with a suitcase and a set of skills and built a life so thoroughly elsewhere that Lithuania had become mythology rather than memory. Davydos walked the old town for two days — the medieval castle, the churches, the long boulevard of Laisvės Alėja quiet in the autumn light — and tried to imagine his father young here, restless here, already half-gone in his mind before he'd bought the ticket to France. He understood it without difficulty. He recognised it from the inside. He spent a week. It was good. And then, as it always did, the question arrived: what now? The conversation in the bar outside Uman came back to mind. The thing about the Zone, from what he could piece together through conversations in Kaunas bars and corners of the internet that hadn't been scrubbed, was that it asked no questions. You went in with whatever you carried — skills, history, the things you'd done that didn't belong on any official record — and it used all of it. No rules of engagement, no command structure, no one handing you a bodyguard brief and expecting you to stand quietly while some idiot with money wasted it on things that didn't matter. The danger was real. Not liability-managed, not carefully bounded. Anomalies that could kill you in ways that had no name yet. Mutants. People dying out there doing things that felt like they meant something. He'd been carrying Bangui for years. He'd been carrying the Mozambique ambush. He needed somewhere to spend all of it — and if not spend it, at least stop pretending it wasn't there. The Zone would do. And so it was that he retraced his path back south. He stopped in Kyiv to have gear shipped up from Cape Town — his R4 assault rifle and a Mossberg shotgun — then rode into The Exclusion Zone. He didn't look back. If you reached this far I commend your persistence. I hope you enjoyed it. And now I'd appreciate the gift of your Twenty Claps. Every person's claps add up and hopefully eventually the total reach the number required for a credit reward to offset the cost in credits of creating the images.