by John Nichol
There had been no time for the lengthy process of putting on an immersion suit, and the numbing cold went through him the moment he hit the water. The doctor in him recognized dangerous symptoms: his heart was slowing, his peripheral vision dimming, the retinas of his eyes clouding. ‘But the desperate look on the man’s face, his frantic thrashings and punctured life jacket spurred me on, and a fresh adrenalin surge kicked in.’ The helicopter towed him across the water until his outstretched fingers were in touching distance of the man. They grasped hands, Jolly spun the man round and gripped him in a fierce bear hug as the Wessex lifted up slowly, pulling them clear of the water. Then the winch slowly wound them in. The doctor clung on, ‘begging my shoulder muscles not to weaken in this moment of crisis’. He was in pain, the tendons in his arms screaming. He was already exhausted and drained. ‘But I knew that if I let go he would die. I just kept telling myself not to give up, to keep going. I used every ounce of my strength and will in those few moments.’
Finally, they were up at the level of the helicopter and being hauled into the cabin. ‘The blood flowed back into my arms and shoulders as I collapsed beside the survivor on the floor.’ The doctor leaned over and pummelled the man’s chest, and a stream of sea water erupted from his mouth. His eyes opened. He would live. Jolly grinned. The helicopter winchman grinned back, then pointed down. There was another man in the water. The doctor would have to do it all over again. Jolly remembered feeling despair. He had no strength left. Even if he got to the man, would he be able to cling on to him? Should he even try? Hadn’t he done enough? And that was when Jolly learned the hardest lesson of military medicine – there is no such thing as enough when a life is at stake. ‘I looked into my soul and I realized that I was prepared to risk my own life for another human being. I prayed for inspiration to be able to do it.’
He dropped into the sea again, but with a dangerous plan in mind. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hang on to the man while they were winched up together, so he would take off the harness and put it round the drowning man for him to be pulled to safety first. Jolly would then tread ice-cold water until the man was in the helicopter and the line could be sent back down for him. The odds, he knew, were not great. There was a very real chance he himself could now collapse from exhaustion and cold, and drown. But if he didn’t take this gamble with his own life, the man in the water would have no chance at all. And, as he could see as he hit the water, that man was in considerable distress, bobbing in the swell, arms outstretched, blood oozing from amputated fingers and a head wound. ‘He was watching me with uncomprehending eyes. He later told me that he could not see the winch wire I was suspended from and he thought I was the Archangel Gabriel coming to collect him!’
Heaven could wait. Floundering in the waves, the doctor suddenly realized he need not take off his harness and hand it over after all. Instead, he hooked the end of the line on to the sailor’s life jacket, which meant they could be hauled up in tandem without the fast-weakening Jolly having to take the strain of holding on to him. ‘It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and together we were lifted up to the safety of the helicopter’s cabin, my jaw rattling with cold.’ As they headed for the Canberra, the pilot nodded in Jolly’s direction. ‘Well done, Doc,’ he said. ‘Bloody marvellous.’ Jolly would later receive an OBE for his work in the Falklands, but the respect he earned that day from his comrades on the helicopter meant more than any medal. The medic had won his spurs.
*
It was now time for Jolly to go onshore himself, to take charge of the bare-bones field hospital shaping up in the cold and dusty hangar of a building at Ajax Bay. Sheep droppings had to be cleared from the floor, which was ankle-deep in rusting rubbish and tie-on meat labels from the days when the building had been used to package joints of Falkland Island lamb. The ‘Red and Green Life Machine’, as it came to be called – red for the berets of the Paras and green for the Marine commandos, whose medics shared the use of it – was in business. Air raids were remorseless, and frightening in the extreme, even for combat veterans. Few had experienced, let alone been on the receiving end of, the speed and awesome destructive power of modern war planes. The Spitfires and Stukas of the Second World War were as much relics of history as medieval knights with lances. Rockets, wire-guided missiles and rapid-fire cannon were in a new league of lethality.
Lookouts posted around the hospital would spot the Mirage jets and nifty Pucaras coming low out of the hills, and six blasts on a whistle would send the medical teams racing for cover. Not everyone went. If they had patients on the table, the surgeons and theatre staff continued to operate, though sense and survival might have prompted them to seek shelter. But Jolly realized their courage had risks attached to it. He had to ensure that some medical expertise remained, even if the whole of Ajax Bay were blown apart. So he instituted a routine whereby, when the alarm whistle blew, half would work on and half would hide. The decision of who stayed and who ran for cover was his, and he took to standing at the main entrance of the Life Machine peering out through the massive double doors, big enough to take a whale carcase, for signs of trouble.
From there he saw across the bay to where HMS Antelope was anchored, her communication mast leaning at an angle and a gaping hole in her side. Below decks, disposal experts were huddled round an Argentinian bomb which had failed to explode. Suddenly, it blew. ‘The fire took hold and, gradually, like some dreadful cancer eating into the heart of the ship, the flames spread along her hull. She burned down towards the waterline and then, in a huge shower of sparks, the aft missile magazine exploded. We watched in silence. Seeing a ship die like this was agony.’ One of the bomb-disposal squad was helicoptered in and was on the table. A steel hatch had flown through the air and severed his left arm. Jolly put a hospital apron on over his regulation Navy shirt and took up his scalpel to complete the amputation.
The next day he had his first patient from the other side. Lieutenant Ricardo Lucero’s Skyhawk was downed by a Rapier missile, and Jolly, watching from the door, saw him eject and his parachute open just yards from the water. The pilot’s left knee was shattered, the cap shifted four inches from its customary spot. Now he lay in great pain in the Ajax Bay triage area, the orange silk of his Buenos Aires squadron still knotted at his neck. ‘My boys crowded around him, trying to get their first look at the enemy, before I shooed them away.’ The doctor assured the Argentinian that he would be looked after, but the terrified look on the man’s face indicated he did not believe this. At the very least, he must have thought they were going to hack off his injured leg. Not until he came round from the surgery, reached down and found that the limb was not only intact but repaired did he relax.
While the enemy pilot was under the knife, his squadron was in the air and had sunk HMS Coventry, survivors of which were even now arriving at Ajax Bay in a clatter of helicopter blades. The speed with which Coventry was destroyed was astonishing. Her captain’s last recollection was of directing operations from his command centre, when the banks of consoles and screens around him disintegrated in front of his face. ‘My headset and microphone had disappeared – burnt off me without a trace. So too had my anti-flash hood and gloves. I saw a sheet of orange flame envelop a man as he attempted to get away. He had nearly reached the top of the ladder, and someone stretched towards him and tried to catch his hand, but the fire consumed him, and he fell back with a despairing cry. Through the thick black smoke, I saw the dim shapes of people with their clothes alight, human torches. One of my officers was beating out the flames on his own head where his headset melted into his scalp.’24
Some of those who had been pulled out of the sea were brought into the hospital, soaked, flash-burned and shivering with cold and pain. Gentle hands cut off their clothes, their burns were smothered with a pain-killing antiseptic cream, and they were laid down on cool white sheets. One of them, a young stoker, whose red-raw hands were swaddled in protective plastic bags, spotted the sleeping Argentinian pilot and became ag
gressive. ‘The fire that had burned his hands,’ Jolly later wrote in his diary, ‘now burned in his soul, and he simply could not understand our respect and friendliness for this colleague of the two pilots who killed his ship.’ The doctor’s Hippocratic principles were vindicated when the pilot woke up and saw the smashed bodies around him. He took off the blankets covering him and, with tears in his eyes, passed them to the wounded Britons around him.
Outside, the noise of battle was still thundering, and Mick Jennings made the mistake of going outside to look and listen. He could hear the crump of bombs, the half-muffled blast of compressed air, in the distance. San Carlos, a couple of miles away, was getting it, he thought. ‘Just then, small arms started going off, and I knew, I just knew, that there was a plane behind me and it was coming straight for me.’ He heard the howl of a jet on his shoulder and threw himself into a drainage drift on his left. Another man piled in on top of him. Everywhere, people were diving for cover.
A massive explosion rocked the base as a bomb struck ammunition and fuel dumps. Debris, dirt and stones cascaded down from a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke billowing upwards into the sky. Phosphorous shells exploded, drenching the whole area in a bright white light. Jennings half-expected to see Argentinian troops come marching through the smoke in a follow-up attack. The danger passed, the dust settled, the fires were put out, but there were casualties, including two dead in a trench. The medics went back to work, although there was an unexploded bomb lying in the back of the building, embedded in ancient pipework. Just a room and two walls separated this 800lb monster from the operating tables.
The medics carried on regardless, despite being urged by the ordnance experts to evacuate the entire area. Jolly refused to move. He gave the order to sandbag the bomb and shore up the walls around it. But he did this not out of bravado or foolhardiness. It might be dangerous to stay, but there was an even greater risk in leaving and attempting to set up shop elsewhere in a hurry. He was privy to top-secret information: the next day, 2 Para were to move out from the hillside above the landing beaches and advance across the wildest of country to take the strategic hamlet of Goose Green. It was bound to be bloody. ‘Even if the Paras were both tactically clever and really lucky, there would be a butcher’s bill to pay.’ He and his cutters and stitchers had serious work to do, on which many lives would depend, and he was not going to let the small matter of a UXB get in their way.
9. Battle Stations
As he advanced behind his battalion along a muddy, pitted track towards the tiny hamlet of Goose Green, enemy mortar shells exploding around him, 2 Para medical officer Captain Steven Hughes desperately wanted to be on some other enterprise. ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ he muttered into the constant cold drizzle, recoiling as a round from a sniper’s rifle whistled over his head. Phosphorous artillery shells stabbed the darkness of the night. ‘Take me back to the NHS and I will work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,’ he pledged, ‘because this is not what I spent all those years at medical school for.’1 Action like this, however, was why, as a military doctor, he had chosen to join the Paras rather than any other regiment – though the intensity of the brutal ground war they were now embroiled in was giving him second thoughts. He and his medical team were right up in the killing zone. Theoretically, they should have been coming in behind the fighting and picking up casualties left by the side of the track. But the advance had stalled, a firefight was in full swing and the medics were caught in the middle. To Lance Corporal Bill ‘Basher’ Bentley, a medic working under Hughes, incoming artillery shells sounded like express trains flying overhead.
Hughes hung back, knowing he had to let his medics be the ones who went forward. With his expertise, he couldn’t take as many risks as they did. If he was killed or wounded, not only would the guys on the ground be left without a doctor but the entire Task Force medical team would be impaired. In this long-distance campaign, flying in replacements swiftly from the UK was not an option. ‘I had to think of myself as an asset.’ In his aid post, he listened in to the battle on the radio net and heard the first, urgent call for a medic. Two soldiers were down, and Hughes instantly ignored his advice to himself to stay out of trouble. He scampered forward in the dark, taking cover as best he could, and examined them as they lay on the peat with not even a poncho underneath to protect them from the damp. The rain was ceaseless, like sharp needles in their faces. One had what looked like a fractured pelvis, the other a bullet lodged in his navel. It had ripped into the webbing of his uniform and through his belt before coming to rest, miraculously without causing any damage, except to the young lad’s nerves. Hughes made the two of them as comfortable as he could, until they could be lifted out by helicopter at first light. Then, stumbling forward again, he came on his first fatalities, lying by the side of the track. A shaken Bill Bentley had brought one of them back from the battlefield. ‘He was a good friend of mine, and his brains had been blown out. As I carried him, his head kept banging against my knee and giving off a hollow sound.’2 It was something he would never be able to forget. The two dead soldiers had been yards from an enemy machine gun when the first was hit. The other was kneeling down putting a dressing on him when they were both riddled with bullets from close range. ‘God knows how many rounds went through them,’ said Bentley. ‘When I tried to pick one of them up, his arm came off.’
Hughes also knew them both and, like Bentley, he felt gutted, the objectivity that doctors are supposed to bring to their work deserting him. Detachment might be possible in a hospital back home but, here on the peat, looking at a dead man who was a mate, it was hard to be clinical and objective. One of them, he knew, had just become a father. The child was now orphaned. ‘You try and suppress those feelings, but it wasn’t always possible.’ There was no time for reverie and regret, however, as more shells came crashing in. Too close for comfort and, though they missed him, he was acutely aware of the narrow gap that separated living from dying. ‘I don’t understand people who say they were not afraid,’ he reflected later. ‘Courage is all about the fear and then still doing what you have to do despite it.’
Just ahead of him, the fighting was remarkably fierce, and the enemy were having the better of it. No one had ever expected the recapture of the islands to be a walkover, but the degree of resistance the British troops were encountering was a surprise. The Paras had advanced in the dark in eight-man sections, over-running enemy trenches and foxholes, taking casualties but pressing on as ordered. But then the steam-roller had stopped. For hours, withering fire from well-dug-in machine-gun and sniper nests in the hilly, open ground ahead pinned them down. The supporting naval bombardment from out in the Sound had ceased. Harrier strike planes intended to take out the enemy position were grounded by fog. The troops were on their own, and running out of mortars, their only hope of dislodging the Argentinians. Things looked sticky, Hughes recalled, the men huddling in gullies and scrapes in the featureless terrain, and casualties mounting by the minute.
He set up his aid post in a gully at a place known as Coronation Point, though there was nothing remotely regal about it. Smoke billowed over it from burning gorse, and with that and the incessant rain it seemed as dark and primitive a place as some ancient field of slaughter where Roman legions slugged it out with barbarian tribes in the mists of Germania. But on this moorland there was no shelter, not a single tree and scarcely a bush. Hughes sent his medics to forage the captured Argentinian trenches for corrugated-iron sheeting, and blankets and parkas to put over the casualties. The only certain way to warm up those chilled to the marrow was to cuddle them, man to man passing on body heat and restoring life. Hughes, scissors dangling on a cord around his neck, cut away bandages and clothes to get to wounds and took cannulas from the pencil pocket on the arm of his smock to insert drips. ‘We were all covered with blood – on our hands, our clothes, boots and equipment, and on the ground. We didn’t have enough water to drink, let alone to wash anything, so we were completely filthy. Blood-stained dressings
lay everywhere.’ Discarded packaging and empty cartons of medical supplies littered the floor. The smell of cordite was acrid in the air.
To an uninformed observer, the aid post would have looked like a bunch of blokes just standing out in the rain, but there was method amid the madness. One man was the triage medic, sorting out the seriously wounded from those with minor injuries. The rest worked in two teams, with Hughes moving between them, dressing injuries and administering fluids, morphine and antibiotics. There wasn’t much screaming or shouting. ‘Everyone was pretty calm, although we were under artillery fire constantly, with shells landing in the peat at the top of the gully or sailing over and exploding behind. There was a lot of firing about a hundred metres ahead where the battle was being fought.’
Bentley, medical pack on his back and Sterling sub-machine gun slung on his shoulder, was pressing forward into the heart of this battle, looking for more casualties to bring back. ‘I was already absolutely knackered, but you’re driven on by the thought that your mates are out there, dying and injured.’ He sought cover in a trench, leapt in and felt something, someone, beneath a tarpaulin under his feet, ‘as if I had jumped on to a water bed with lumps in it’. The soldier in him outweighed the medic – this was no time to be careless. Instinctively, his finger tightened on the trigger of the Sterling, and he fired a burst of bullets into the bundle. Then, in another trench, he came upon a dying Argentinian soldier. Though the man was unconscious, Bentley knew he could not risk going forward again to treat battalion casualties, leaving an enemy soldier, who could wake at any minute, behind him. He didn’t want to use his rifle again, for fear of drawing attention to his presence, ‘so I finished this poor soul off with my bayonet’.