Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  The sense of going into the unknown settled over everyone. In the Canberra’s first-class section, Captain John Burgess, 3 Para’s medical officer, swapped ideas and cases with all the other doctors on board and realized that, between them, they had virtually no experience of operational warfare. ‘I’d been in hospitals, I’d put up drips, I’d seen people die, but that had been in a hospital setting. I’d done a bit in Northern Ireland, but I had no concept of what we were facing. I certainly didn’t visualize losing colleagues and friends, which was what happened.’17

  Anxiety levels increased as they steamed closer and closer to their destination and there was still no prospect of a settlement, for all the frantic talks at the United Nations. The likelihood of a peaceful outcome diminished further when a British submarine sank the Argentine battleship Belgrano with the loss of 323 lives. ‘No more Mr Nice Guy,’ Rick Jolly noted. ‘Game on!’ But whatever ‘Gotcha’ joy there was over that military success, it lasted less than forty-eight hours. The destroyer HMS Sheffield was out ahead of the flotilla on picket duty protecting the aircraft carriers Hermes and Invincible when an Exocet missile from an Argentine jet tore a gash in her side and set her ablaze. Twenty-one sailors died in the flames and twenty-four were badly wounded. With these first casualties, all pretence was over. One senior officer wrote home to his wife: ‘There are two envelopes in the drawers of my desk addressed to you. They tell you how much money you get if I fail to return. Thought I had better mention it!’18

  The fate of the Belgrano and the Sheffield – the deaths of ‘real people’ –made everyone sombre. This was going to be a bloody business. A silence settled over the messes and living quarters as men struggled to overcome their feelings and fears, and the padre was suddenly the most popular figure on board. In the chapel on the Canberra, Burgess joined in the singing of ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ with added vigour. The shift in atmosphere, the rise in tension, was palpable. ‘Things had changed. We could be fighting – and dying – soon.’ How soon, he was able to calculate when he was given orders to top up the blood bank. Donors were called for, and a thousand pints of ‘high-quality red stuff’, as Jolly called it, were taken. The timing was crucial. The blood had to be as fresh as possible, but the donors had to be given time to recover their full strength. That meant they must be just days away from going ashore.

  Now there were regular air-raid drills, sirens sounding and everyone dashing to their emergency stations. At night, portholes were blacked out and the lights inside dimmed. Overhead, Argentine planes were seeking out the flotilla, and their presence sent the crews to their guns and the troops to seek cover in case of attack. In their cramped quarters, Lance Corporal Mick Jennings and fellow medic Jim Pearson sat playing chess on the bunk they shared. It wasn’t the safest place to be. ‘We were below the water line, and we knew that if the ship was hit we would be totally stuffed.’ He remembered telling himself he would be all right, that he was bullet proof. Others were not so sure and were writing wills and their last letters home.

  There was a noticeable gloom when news filtered from man to man that a Sea King helicopter had plunged into the sea while ferrying SAS troopers from the aircraft carrier Hermes to the assault ship Intrepid. The troopers were an advance party, who had already been on the Falklands to neutralize an enemy air strip. They had been preparing to go in again, to set up observation and sniper positions and create diversions for the main landing. Eighteen of them were dead. An albatross, that traditional fateful omen of the sea, was the cause, rather than the Argentinians. The bird had crashed into the helicopter, bringing it down.

  It was a sign of how stretched this whole operation was in these remote waters, and how flimsy the prospect of success or even survival. ‘How many more of us might end up lying in some unknown, unmarked grave?’ Rick Jolly asked himself. 3 Para private Mark Eyles-Thomas, with some basic training in first aid, was detailed to help with survivors. Some had been in the freezing water for fifteen minutes, and he bathed one of them, semi-conscious, blue with cold and shivering uncontrollably, in warm water to revive him. It was a testing baptism. But what most shocked the 3 Para private – at seventeen, one of the youngest in the Task Force – was the sight of those beyond help, their bodies laid out on tables in the ship’s galley.19

  On the night before the islands came into view, the general apprehension was such that even the non-believers turned up for evening prayers on the Norland. ‘Welcome, Corporal,’ the padre greeted John Geddes. ‘Nice to see you. Come to collect some insurance, have you?’ Geddes and his mates nodded. At times like this, a man would take whatever comfort was going. Soon, live ammunition was being doled out to the troops, and Steven Hughes issued them with their half-litres of intravenous fluid. Each man also got a syrette of morphine, taped to the inside of his helmet so it wouldn’t be smashed, or to the identity ‘dog tag’ around his neck. D-Day had come – 21 May 1982.

  *

  They came off the ships in the dark, down into the flat-bottomed landing craft that pitched in the stormy waters of the Sound, the ten-mile-wide passage splitting the islands of West Falkland and East Falkland that would soon earn the nickname ‘Bomb Alley’. The fog that had masked the armada’s entrance into the Sound twenty-four hours earlier had lifted, and the southern cross glittered, brightest of all, in the starry sky above. Faces were blacked up with camouflage cream, rifles cocked, grenades primed.

  Mick Jennings, packed in with his mates, side by side and standing upright like penguins, had newsreel visions of the Normandy landings going through his mind. Would he be wading through water to get on to the beaches? Would they be mined? Would he be running into a hail of bullets? Medical officer Steven Hughes fully expected to have ‘customers’ immediately. But the landings on the beaches at San Carlos Bay went unopposed, which was both a surprise and a blessing. Stretcher-bearer Tom Onions was weighed down with so much kit he could barely move. ‘I had all my medical stuff, a stretcher, 600 rounds of ammunition for the machine guns and two mortar rounds. When the ramp went down, there was none of this Iwo Jima stuff running on to the beach in light order. If there’d been resistance, we’d have been cut to pieces. We were struggling.’

  But, though ashore in one piece, many of the men were wet. Hughes’s craft beached on a sandbar ten yards from the shore and the men had to wade through the icy water of the South Atlantic to get to dry land. They were soaked through before they had even begun.

  This was the start of a major and long-term problem. Many would never get their feet properly dry again. In the coming weeks, ‘trench foot’, that debilitating ailment of water-logged First World War trenches, would cripple more soldiers than bullets or bombs did. Awash with streams and bogs, the island’s terrain gave almost no respite from the damp, and standard Army-issue boots were no help, because they let the water in and, once soaked, were almost impossible to dry out. Soggy skin wrinkled, cracked and festered. It was agony to walk20 – which made what these men were about to achieve in conquering the Falklands on foot even more spectacular.

  Hughes marched off the beach at the rear of his battalion, ready to scoop up any casualties left by the column snaking out ahead of him into the countryside. He found his first – a young Para who stumbled in the dark and knocked himself out on the Blowpipe surface-to-air missile he was carrying. The soldier was unconscious, and had to be carried the rest of the way to safe ground. From the start, Hughes could see the conditions take a terrible toll on even the Paras’ fit young bodies. Everything – weapons, ammunition, food, stores – had to be manhandled across pitted, impossible terrain. On that first exhausting march, he lost count of the number of times he tumbled into the peat and then, helpless as a sheep on its back with the weight he was carrying, had to be dragged back up to plod on. Packs were too heavy, the loads too great. A fully loaded Bergen rucksack alone weighed in at 50lbs, a single Blowpipe missile at 48lbs. Festoons of machine-gun belts dragged down necks and backs.

  Some men were toting mor
e than 140lbs in all, almost their own bodyweight. The pace slowed, and the schedules worked out by the planners were already meaningless. ‘Knackered barely does justice to the way we felt,’ Hughes recalled. As the sun rose on that first morning, he heard the dawn chorus of hundreds of weary men muttering, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’, the air as blue as their bruised shins. It was to prove most people’s favourite word for the entire campaign, he reckoned, ‘and we meant it every time we said it!’

  With the morning too came the first Mirage and Skyhawk jets, screaming overhead and letting fly with rockets and cannon. The men went down on their knees for what, after cross-country marching with heavy equipment (or ‘yomping’ and ‘tabbing’, as this was called),21 would be the second most frequent Falklands activity – namely, digging in. As the Toms scraped away at the mud and shale, the doctor set up his regimental aid post behind a large rock, forming a lean-to shelter from three stretchers and nylon camouflage sheets. He piled blocks of peat around it for protection. As he surveyed his new, damp and draughty domain, it was hard to believe how recently he had been a warm, dry surgical locum moonlighting in an overheated NHS hospital in London.

  John Burgess, MO of 3 Para, at least had a proper roof over his head as he and his medical team bedded in at the handful of sea-front houses that comprised the San Carlos Settlement. He had been scared coming ashore, especially since he came in a later wave and it was already light as they crossed the water. As he waded on to the beach, Pucaras, twin-prop Argentine fighter planes, came screaming in, strafing the invading troops.

  The Argentine occupiers of the settlement had fled, but not before shooting down two Gazelle helicopters from 3 Commando, which had been escorting a Sea King as it ferried supplies inland in an under-slung cargo net. One of the Gazelles lay on a hillside with its back broken and its tail boom bent back on itself. The contents of the cockpit were strewn over the grass, along with the bodies of the pilot and the air gunner, their flying suits stained with blood. The second Gazelle had landed in the sea and its pilot had survived the crash, only for the Argentine defenders to machine-gun him to death as he tried to swim to shore. The manner of his death shocked the Toms. How dirty was this war going to get? Onions was marching towards the settlement when a Land Rover, with an islander at the wheel, stopped beside him. Lying in the back underneath a blanket was the body of the Gazelle pilot shot in the water. He shuddered at the sight. It was the first dead person the cook-turned-stretcher-bearer had ever seen. ‘I thought, “Fuck, this is real.” ’

  The medical team at San Carlos had hardly had time to settle in when they were faced with a major incident. Out in the countryside, eight Paras were badly injured, two of them with gunshot wounds to the head. Burgess climbed aboard a Sea King to fly to the scene. He gazed out through the open door as they travelled fast and low over this sparse, strange landscape, hugging the contours of the hillside to avoid detection. As they crested a hill and spotted the casualties on the ground below, there was an incredible bang from the rear and the helicopter shook violently. The terrified men on board thought an enemy missile had struck them. In fact, the tail had caught the rising ground behind, sending the helicopter into an uncontrollable spin, twisting in the air and tumbling, before smashing into the peat. The soft, springy turf was a life-saver. ‘If we’d come down on rock, we’d have been dead,’ Burgess recalled.

  Shaken, but in one piece, he and the others scrambled from the wreckage and went to work on the casualties they had flown here to treat, his first on the island. This was also the first time he’d ever had to deal with gunshot wounds. Any doubts he had were put aside. ‘You just get down and do your job.’ In the biting wind, he knelt on the hillside, inserted drips and dressed the most serious head wound, the bullet still deeply embedded, as best he could. Another helicopter flew in, and they were soon back at Port San Carlos. The doctor was surprised by how straightforward his initiation into battlefield military medicine had been. Even the helicopter crash had been a soft landing. But was it always going to be this easy?

  Any such hopes were dispelled when it emerged that the Argentinians had had no part at all in this carnage. The incident had been one of so-called ‘friendly fire’. Through misreading the map, two Para patrols had strayed into each other’s line of fire, and one had shot up the other accidentally. It was a sign of how jumpy everyone was. In that unforgiving landscape, lessons were being learned the hard way, and it was the medics who would have to pick up the pieces when mistakes were made.

  *

  Those lessons came thick and fast in those first few hours and days of landing on the Falklands. Mick Jennings came ashore at the scenic Ajax Bay, where a warehouse of cavernous proportions – a former whaling station, refrigeration plant and slaughterhouse for sheep – had been designated as the site for the campaign’s field hospital. Crews got to work installing a generator, digging defensive trenches outside and setting up operating theatres – in reality, just two collapsible tables – and nursing stations inside. Enemy planes were overhead, being chased off by Rapier missiles and small-arms fire from the ground, and by Harrier fighters winging in from the aircraft carriers out in the Atlantic. He could see the inshore fleet in Bomb Alley come under air attack, deliberately drawing enemy fire away from the troops trying to establish positions on land.

  Two Mirages picked out HMS Antrim and flew in low together at just below the speed of sound, one on either side, to rake her decks with 40mm cannon. Parallel lines of shells fizzed through the flat water before hitting home. Chief Petty Officer Terry Bullingham threw himself down and curled into a ball, but it was too late. He felt a sickening thud to his face, ‘and that was the last I saw – ever!’22 Blood streamed from his eye sockets. A piece of shrapnel had taken out his left eyeball, and the concussion of a shell hitting the bulkhead nearby had burst the right. His helmet was pitted with shards of shrapnel. If he hadn’t been wearing it, his entire head would have been shredded. As it was, he was blinded. The medics now at his side tried to reassure him. ‘I can’t see,’ he told them, and one said he just had a pair of black eyes. ‘But I knew they were lying. They were just wondering how to tell a guy that his eyes had gone.’

  The frigate HMS Ardent also took a terrible pounding, hit by dozens of bombs and rockets until she was alight from funnel to stern. Bodies littered her deck. The ship’s doctor was killed. Casualties were flown in to Ajax Bay, and Jennings lifted a bomb-shattered body on to a stretcher. ‘I held his arm, and it was like holding a bag of crisps. All the bones in it were pulverized.’

  In the sky above the burning Ardent, Rick Jolly had an even closer brush with the horrors of war. In a Wessex helicopter, he had been out collecting casualties, buzzing around the battle as it escalated from small skirmishes to a full-on air attack. He had picked up the Para in Steven Hughes’s outfit who had knocked himself out on the missile he was carrying and brought in the bodies of the downed Gazelle crew. Now, perched on a clifftop to shelter from marauding enemy fighters, he looked out over the thin grey naval picket line in Falkland Sound and the ships of the Landing Force strung out behind. ‘I was watching history in the making, but also history repeating itself.’ Here was a group of Royal Navy warships protecting troop ships from a well-orchestrated enemy air force – just as the Navy had done to save the British Army that escaped under fire from Crete in 1941. This perspective reassured him. ‘I felt very calm – and very proud.’

  But those fears of letting people down which had so haunted him on the voyage from England now re-surfaced, as one of the Argentinian planes dodging and weaving around the fleet turned in the direction of his exposed helicopter. ‘I could see it getting bigger as it headed towards us; it was a truly terrifying sight.’ Far from calm now, his heart was pounding, he could taste the fear in his mouth, ‘and I just broke and ran.’ Jolly dived out of the cabin and into a ditch, expecting the helicopter to erupt into flames behind him as the enemy pressed home the attack. Nothing happened. The fighter plane went past, ignoring the h
elicopter and its three-man crew, who had remained strapped onboard. A full quarter of a century later, he would still own up to the enduring shame of that moment. ‘Chicken shit, really.’23 As he sheepishly climbed into the cabin, he was greeted by the pilot. ‘Oh, you back with us then, Doc?’ The sarcasm was withering, and he wondered if he would ever live it down.

  Moments later, word came over the radio about HMS Ardent, and they were on their way to help, flying out over the water, through palls of black smoke, until the Wessex was hovering thirty feet above the swell just off Ardent’s port bow. Jolly was stunned by what he was seeing. ‘I could feel the heat and smell the acrid fumes. Here was a modern warship mortally injured. I’d seen nothing like this before, nor had anything prepared me for such a sight. There were flames, explosions, smoke, people dying. She looked as though someone had torn her deck open with a can-opener and the fires of hell were burning inside.’ On the upper deck of the listing ship, sailors in orange survival suits were preparing to scramble down on to the deck of the frigate HMS Yarmouth, whose captain had, with tremendous skill, nudged her stern next to Ardent’s bows.

  But other survivors were in the water and struggling. Dunked in the freezing South Atlantic, they might have only minutes to live. The rescue harness was lowered to one of them but, amid the furious spray whipped up by the rotor blades, he was unable to grab it and, even if he had, he was almost certainly too weak to hold on. Jolly crawled over to the door and stared down in disbelief. Below him was a comrade in arms, and he was drowning. ‘I could see the agonized expression on his face as he floundered helplessly. If I didn’t do something, then who else could? I had to go and get him. He would die if I didn’t.’ Perhaps, the doctor remembered thinking, this was his chance to atone for his earlier funk when he ran from the helicopter. There was hurried whispering on their intercoms between the crew as they debated whether to let Jolly go to the rescue. The winchman had his doubts, but the pilot gave the go-ahead. The rescue harness was thrust over the doctor’s head and under his arms. ‘Seconds later, I was descending towards the surface of the sea.’