Soldier I

by Kennedy, Michael

  We returned to the Sir Lancelot. The old tub had been hit on the morning of 24 May by Skyhawks and abandoned with two unexploded bombs aboard. The bombs had crashed straight through the steel-plate decking, leaving gaping holes, and burrowed deep into the bowels of the ship like maggots through cheese. A naval bomb-disposal team had finally removed the bombs the week before the linear ambush and it now made an excellent base for an SAS QRF. Covert teams could now move at a minute's notice to locations on East or West Falkland.

  Over the next few days we undertook several clandestine, precisely targeted operations. Like acupuncture needles stimulating the flow of energy through the body, our activities quickened the pulse of war and hastened the drive for victory. Tumbledown fell. Two Sisters fell. The Gurkhas took control of Mount William. It was during one of our secret sorties that the radio burst into life: 'The white flag is flying over Port Stanley.' Endgame! The Argies had surrendered.

  We made our way to Stanley to take part in the celebrations. The first thing we saw at the airfield gates were the prisoners. Now that the big guns had fallen silent, a vast army of beaten, dejected but relieved men stood clustered around field kitchens waiting to be embarked on the Canberra, now anchored in Berkeley Sound. They were dazed, tired and starving. Their combat fatigues were thick with congealed mud that looked like the solidified dribbles of wax down the sides of restaurant candle bottles. Some were draped in rain-soaked blankets and ponchos as protection against the southerly gales blowing across the peninsula from the Antarctic.

  Huge piles of discarded weapons and helmets lay rusting in the damp air. Only the officers had been allowed to keep their 9-milly Browning pistols – to protect themselves from their own men. They needed them. Some of the officers, besides handling the battle itself with a disastrous ineptitude that had cost many lives, had shot their own men in the legs to stop them running away when fortune had turned against them in the closing stages of the war.

  I was sitting in the driving seat of an Argentinian Army four-wheeldrive Mercedes jeep on the tarmac outside Stanley airport control tower and terminal building. I had just dropped Tommy off to meet one of his contacts. Besides being a part-time poacher, Tommy, ex-Royal Engineers and a fugitive from D Squadron, was the best full-time scrounger in the Regiment. I stared through the jeep's windscreen. A blustering wind teased fibres of rain from the dirty fleece of cloud that hung low over the desolate scene before me. Over at the air terminal, the walls of the buildings were pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes and cannon-shell hits. The broken windows were boarded over against the bitter cold. Across the airfield the litter of war was strewn: ragged tents, burnt-out skeletons of vehicles, Pucará bombers upended and devastated by Harrier cannon fire. When I was a small boy, my father had told me of his experiences on the beaches at Dunkirk, and I imagined that this was what it must have looked like.

  I was just watching a glint of metal in the sky that must have been a Harrier making a return flight to one of the task force's aircraft carriers, when the sound of Tommy heaving himself into the passenger seat made me turn my head. 'Get what you came for?' I asked briefly.

  'Yep. I got the name of the ship that provides the booze.'

  'Did you get the name of the contact men?'

  'It's all arranged. We'll pick up the stuff tomorrow. I'm going to turn the Ross Road Guest House into the best-stocked drinking den in town.'

  'OK, are you hot to trot? We've got to meet Alastair in the Upland Goose in a couple of hours.' I started the Mercedes engine and engaged first gear, and the jeep leapt into motion. We drove through the chaos and shambles and out through the main gate of the airport.

  A few yards down the road, I pulled up at a huge pile of Argentinianmade 7.62mm FN rifles with folding butts. I lifted one off the pile and worked the cocking handle a few times to make sure it was clear. 'Throw it back,' said Tommy in his broad Scottish accent. 'You'll never get it past Ascension. And besides, the Argies have removed all the firing pins.'

  I quickly stripped the FN, and sure enough the firing pin was missing from the breechblock. I threw the rifle and its working parts back on the pile and we continued our three-mile journey back to Port Stanley. Driving along the metal road, we were aware of the mine problem. Every approach to Stanley and the airport was crawling with incorrectly planted minefields. Although the Argentinians had kept some basic charts and records, they were not very precise, with the result that one unit had often overlaid another unit's minefield. A few own goals had been scored in the process.

  In Stanley itself, the danger would be even more immediate. Here, the Argies had played really dirty. Grenades on one-second fuses, with their pins out, had been found hidden everywhere: under inverted teacups, jammed between bales of wool – just waiting for someone to lift the cup, to part the bales.

  We moved on past the unmistakable signs of defeat scattered on either side of the road: 7.62mm FN automatic rifles, .45 American submachine guns, .50-calibre Browning HMGs and Argentinianmade GPMGs, all piled in great heaps; hundreds of combat helmets lying where their owners had abandoned them; vast quantities of boxed ammunition awaiting disposal; abandoned artillery positions – Italian-built 105mm howitzers that could throw a 95lb shell thirteen and a half miles – carefully concealed in their turf and peat bunkers; a land-based Exocet missile, complete with launcher and generator, parked on wasteland. And all along the windswept route, groups of unarmed Argentinian prisoners could be seen huddling like refugees around burning piles of rubbish or toiling slowly along at the side of the road.

  Port Stanley. This small, neat town had, in the short space of time since the surrender, developed a massive traffic problem. Hundreds of vehicles were crammed into small streets. Land Rovers, trucks and Mercedes jeeps churned up a sea of mud. We turned right into Philomel Street and headed towards a line of brand-new French-built Panhard armoured cars. Clothes and loose ammunition lay strewn across the road. The detritus of war was visible everywhere. So was the damage of war. The demoralized Argentinians, avalanching towards defeat, had succeeded in turning the town into a disaster area. Houses had been broken into and looted, rooms left smeared with human excrement, fences chopped down for firewood. In Port Stanley West, where a seaplane hangar had been used as an Argentinian medical dressing station, amputated limbs had been tossed onto the roof of a shed inside the hangar and left to rot. Continuing on along Philomel Street, we passed shattered houses with gaping holes in their roofs, and the still-smouldering ruins of the Globe store, set on fire by rioting prisoners. We turned left into Ross Road, ignoring the large white direction arrows painted on the road – an attempt by the Argentinians to impose a drive-on-the-right policy upon the Falkland Islanders. We drove along the seafront, past houses with large red crosses on their roofs masquerading as hospital dressing stations, which had been used to stockpile ammunition.

  We pulled up outside the post office. The Falklands are famous for their stamp issues. Philatelic sales account for about 14 per cent of the islands' income. Every year they produce four or five attractively designed high-quality sets, which become much sought-after by collectors. Tommy, ever the wise old bird, had heard that a philatelic war between Argentina and Great Britain had been raging since 1936; and that on 5 April 1982, when the Argie postal staff took over the Port Stanley post office, they had taken the opportunity to give all waiting mail the Malvinas treatment. Stamps had been crossed through and envelopes marked with the special legend '9409 Islas Malvinas'. Tommy reckoned that if he could acquire some of these specially marked stamps they would be worth a fortune in years to come. A group of Gurkhas, well wrapped up against the cold, passed the jeep as Tommy jumped out of the vehicle into the mud of the street and disappeared into the post office. I watched the Gurkhas make their way down Ross Road to Government House, looking to see if I could recognize any of them from my training days in Hong Kong.

  When Tommy re-emerged from the post office, he didn't look too happy. He glanced quickly up the street, as if
looking for an escaping intruder, before wrenching the jeep door open and jumping into the passenger seat.

  'Get what you were looking for, Tommy?'

  'No chance! The Ruperts were there before me. All I could get was the standard first-day issues. Come on, let's get down to the Upland Goose.'

  As we strode confidently into the Upland Goose, Des King the proprietor, a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, looked up briefly from his defensive position behind the bar. His look blackened when he saw our green duvet jackets and ski-march boots. We ignored his verbal broadside and headed for the restaurant. Alastair McQueen, a reporter with the Daily Mirror and our host for the evening, had acquired the corner table commanding a good view of the whole restaurant, now full of Paras and Marines in camouflage clothing. Alastair was already seated with Big Fred the Fijian, Crocker, Stonker and Gary. We pushed past the drunken hacks at the bar, took our seats and awaited developments.

  Alastair was the perfect host, regaling us with stories of his days on the Mirror, while quietly emptying the wine cellar of its stocks of champagne. We troughed our way noisily through a three-course meal, reminiscing about the events of the past three months.

  Throughout the festivities, Gary remained quiet, even morose. Just as a second Drambuie arrived, he decided he had had enough of it all and curled up on the floor for a quick kip in front of the amazed hacks. Dave Norris of the Daily Mail, well tanked up by this stage and making a spectacular effort to stagger out of the restaurant, paused for a moment and gazed down on the snoring figure. 'If there's one thing I can't abide,' he hiccupped, 'it's drunks,' and he delivered a swift kick into the backside of the sleeping Gary.

  All round the room, knives and forks were quietly laid down. All conversation stopped. 'Fucking hell, Norris, you'd better leg it!' suggested Alastair helpfully to his fellow reporter.

  The advice had come too late, Gary, as a testament to his training, sprang to his feet like a coiled spring and, scowling straight at Fleet Street's finest, advanced menacingly. 'Norris didn't mean it,' pleaded Alastair, 'he's drunk.'

  'Forget it, Gary,' I shouted through the growing tension, 'he's just not worth getting upset over.'

  Gary, awake and alert, his clenched fists relaxing slightly, glanced quickly around the silent bar. 'Serves me right for kipping in a nest of vipers.' And with that he walked calmly through the door of the restaurant and past the horrified Des King – who was by now definitely having a nervous breakdown – and disappeared into the darkness of Ross Road.

  The conversation picked up again, just a murmur at first as people slowly digested the incident that had just taken place, then building into an excited babble, louder than before, as the onlookers began to work off the rush of adrenaline the scene had precipitated. But just as the festivities were getting into full swing again, I suddenly no longer felt part of the celebrations. I seemed to have stepped back from it all, as if I were in the room next door listening to the party through the walls. Twenty men lost! Twenty of the lads from D Squadron had been killed in one brief moment. It seemed so stupid and senseless – they hadn't even come under enemy fire. Engine failure? A seagull sucked into the rotor blades? What did it matter? The result was still the same. Good friends had perished. I had played rugby with Taff Jones and Paddy O'Connor; I had served in Dhofar with Sid Davidson; I had worked in Northern Ireland with Phil Curass. The sadness was rising higher and higher. I needed another drink, and quick!

  15

  Fallen Comrades

  'Two pints of bitter and a draught Guinness.' I really needed a drink, I was choked with emotion. It happened every year, the same gutwrenching feeling, the same sad thoughts that lay too deep for words. It was 1984, two years after the Falklands. As usual, I'd gone home to spend the morning with the people I respected most in my life: my father, a veteran of Dunkirk, Burma, Italy, France and Germany, now in his seventies, a man of traditional tastes and pleasures, passing his days content to look after his canaries and take his evening tot of whisky – 'Good for the heart, thins the blood' – a man who said little but missed nothing, a man of wisdom, simplicity and quiet dignity; and Archy, Boy Bugler, naval rating, submariner, holder of the Croix de Guerre – the French VC – a man of great tenderness, relentless good humour and single-minded bravery.

  Armistice Day. At this hour on this day a great tidal wave of melancholy and heavy emotion sweeps the land. The same ceremony takes place at the same time in every town throughout the nation, and has done so year after year. As I stood facing the Cenotaph, I experienced a powerful sense of history, a deep continuity of tradition. I felt part of a process going back to Agincourt, to 1066 and beyond. I was aware of a sense of duty to safeguard the nation, to safeguard my friends, my family, my son. In performing that duty, I had found a fulfilling role in life. Some people are still searching for a role, an identity, when they are forty or fifty. When you join the Army you gain an instant identity. The three of us wore our medals with pride.

  The sun was just breaking through the clouds, but a chill wind was blowing. At measured intervals, a tannoy announced each of the veterans' organizations and a representative came forward with a wreath.

  'Submariners and Old Comrades Association.'

  The sombre silence between each announcement was broken only by the persistent cough of a young child somewhere at the back of the crowd.

  'Royal Air Force Association.'

  As each wreath was laid on the Cenotaph, one by one the bearers stepped back, paused very stiffly for a few moments, saluted sharply, turned on their heels and, belying their years, marched briskly away. One of the oldest wore the thick dark glasses of the blind and had to be guided by one of his comrades, but he was none the less precise in his movements.

  As the time approached eleven, the band struck up, slightly out of time for the first few bars but quickly falling into line:

  'O God, our help in ages past,

  Our hope for years to come…'

  As the last bars played out, the officiating priest came in too early, with 'Let us remember…' The band played a ragged 'Amen' and the priest began, slightly flustered, then quickly regaining his composure, began again.

  'Let us remember before Almighty God and commend to his keeping those who have died for their country in war…'

  A baby started crying as, on the stroke of eleven, the standards dipped. A plaintive Last Post was sounded, one of the most forlorn and evocative of all sounds. Standing beside me, Archy listened intently. The priest continued:

  'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.'

  Two minutes' silence followed, and I remembered them: Laba, Tommy, Taff, Paddy, Sid, Phil and the rest who had perished. Reveille sounded and the standards rose again. I shifted my feet slightly to position the flags between myself and the winter sun to get some relief from the low-lying orb, now shining blindingly in my eyes.

  'The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore.'

  As the service drew to a close, people emerged from the crowd in ones and twos and gently laid single red poppies alongside the wreaths, symbols of their own private sorrows, grief-laden tokens for a brother, a father, a son, a husband.

  'Eyes… left! Eyes… front!'

  The band and procession of veterans marched off past the Cenotaph, the trombones momentarily seeming to blow stronger, and away down the road. The music faded along with the memories until the only sound was the regular thump of the bass drum, a distant echo of the big guns pounding Fox Bay on the night of the linear ambush.

  I drove back to Hereford in a cheerless mood. When I arrived, I felt strongly impelled towards a church a short distance down the road from camp. I hadn't been there for a long while. Why I should feel particularly drawn there this Armistice Day I didn't know. May
be all nostalgia was growing stronger with the passing of the years. All I knew was that I wanted to visit some old friends.

  St Martin's – the final RV, the last basha for the lads who didn't make it. The graveyard was to the rear of the church, enveloped in peace and tranquillity, away from the traffic grinding up the road from the city centre. It was staked out with six sturdy yew trees. Between the trees I could clearly see the square tower of Hereford Cathedral about a mile away. An air of late-autumn decay pervaded the atmosphere: flowers wilting and faded; fetid water greening in vases; urns weatherworn and chipped; a gathered pile of leaves mouldering in the corner. A helicopter clattered overhead, returning to camp, its young occupants, full of life, vigour and vitality, completely unaware of the disconsolate scene below.

  I went over to Tommy and Laba. They lay in adjacent rows beneath the trees and outside the Regimental plot. They had died before this area was set aside. They had only each other for company. I stood at the foot of Laba's grave. The mound seemed far too short. I wondered how such a small plot could possibly contain such a colossus of a man. A neat winged dagger was carved into the top of his headstone, and below it the inscription: