Читать книгу Two Sides of Hell - They Spent Weeks Killing Each Other, Now Soldiers From Both Sides of The Falklands War Tell Their Story - Vince Bramley - Страница 8

IT WAS TWO o’clock in the morning and we had just scoffed a huge barbecue in Felix Barreto’s garden. It’s like a compound, with a big concrete wall and picket fence to deter the prying eyes of those still prowling the rutted, bone-jarring streets outside. For three hours we had cruised the alleyways which pass for streets in the sprawling, menacing barrio, or shanty town, which surrounds Felix’s home. Thank God we had an off-road vehicle because a normal car wouldn’t have negotiated ruts and bumps which made tank tracks seem as smooth as billiard-tables. We were feeling uneasy in this alien place, watched by silent eyes as groups of young men scavenged for discarded plastic bottles to sell for a few coins. We were watched, as all strangers are watched here, with cold, blank stares. Back home it would probably be as near as dammit a no-go area at night. There were no names on the houses or the streets. Eventually someone pointed out a track which could lead us to Felix. Half an hour after midnight we found him, sitting patiently with his wife and son, showing no sign of irritation at our lateness. He welcomed us warmly and we sighed with relief – me, Diego and Longdon veteran Antonio Belmonte. At last we felt safe.

I smiled to myself, thinking: twelve years ago I was trying to kill this guy; tonight I’m grateful to be feeling safe in his home. Sensing my unease, Felix said: ‘This neighbourhood looks after its own. You know, nobody steals from each other round here. Doors can be left open. Crime is almost nil…’

When you look at Felix you can understand why. This is a hard area. A place where hard men live. And you believe him when he says: ‘I’ve had to fight all my life, with my fists or with words, just to survive. Outsiders don’t understand what it is like to have to fight to survive all your life, from the moment you are old enough to sit up and take notice.’

This man with thick, dark, wavy hair and a fierce black moustache is one of those people you respect automatically. His piercing blue eyes never waver as he talks, in a quiet voice, about the lot he has been dealt in life. And you know that if you get on the wrong side of him you do so at your peril. His upbringing, like that of many soldiers in many armies throughout the world, was a harsh one.

Felix Barreto was born on 31 March 1962, the first of six children of a father of Italian descent and a Paraguayan mother. Four sisters arrived between him and his little brother. Soon afterwards his father left the family home in Resistencia, in the northern province of Chaco.

‘All I can remember is having to work to survive. We all had to. My mother was left with six kids and there is no such thing here as unemployment benefit. If you are unemployed you’ve had it. We lived in poverty and the only way out of it was to work. I started work at the age of eight, selling newspapers and fruit on street corners and delivering bread while still going to school. Every penny went towards supporting the family. My schooling was OK – I was even top of my class.

‘Life in the barrios is hard. I never had a proper toy in my life, not even a football. I grew up in the same shanty town as the great footballer Maradona. I knew him. We kicked a ball about together, but it wasn’t footballs which ruled this place – it was guns. It was a violent place and if you didn’t stand up for yourself you didn’t survive. My mother was strict with me and I thank her for it now, although at the time I resented her punishments, such as being kept in when everyone else was out on the streets playing or working. There were certain people I wasn’t allowed to associate with. It was her strictness which meant I escaped the guns. You’d see kids of eleven with guns planning robberies and the police couldn’t even get into this place after them. I was punchy even then. I took no crap from anyone. If you didn’t fight people walked all over you, but I didn’t steal. That is one of my merits: I have never stolen anything from anyone.

‘When I was about twelve I came south to live near Buenos Aires to get better work with more money. I got labouring work on building sites, which was really hard for a kid of my age. I was determined to better myself and my family. Then I got work in a factory, making shoes. It was a big factory and the machines made so much noise you could hardly think, let alone work. It was called the Delgado factory and I worked there every morning. In the afternoons I worked in a plastic workshop. I used to sleep on the floor there. Then I feared I would lose the job if I was caught so I slept out in the open in one of the squares in Buenos Aires. Some of my workmates saw me and realized I was having a rough time, so they spoke to the boss and the owner said I could sleep in the factory until I got my wages at the end of the first month. As soon as I got my wages I went and rented a small house then went for my mother, little brother and sisters.

‘My mother got work as a mucama [maid] in a clinic and in family homes. But we weren’t getting on. Mother had tremendous pressures on her. I was back at school as well as working, but the system was different in Buenos Aires. What we had done in the second year up north they didn’t do until the sixth year. I was having to do everything all over again. I was having quarrels and fights almost daily. There was no reason for the rowing. I was hot-blooded and it was second nature for me to fight, but I don’t know why I did it so much. Anyway, they kicked me out of school. There were more rows at home so I left. I never went back, not until the day before I was sent to the Malvinas.

‘I rented a room in a small pensión near Bandfield, in Lanus, and managed to support myself.. I organized my life. I met my wife-to-be then, when I was just fourteen, and we’ve been together ever since. On Saturdays and Sundays we went out dancing in the discos and it was back to work on Monday with no sleep. I did my own washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning. I have always kept myself and my place spotless. I settled into a rhythm, working hard in the shoe and plastic factories and dancing at weekends. At sixteen I was hanging around with guys twice my age. They taught me how to survive on the streets. One of my friends had a truck and taught me how to drive it. I did deliveries for him in my spare time.

‘I got my call-up papers when I was nineteen. I wasn’t annoyed about it because it was something which had to be done. I looked on the bright side – it could have its advantages! By law I had to receive seventy-five per cent of my wages from work and my job had to be kept open for me. So off I went to the Army.

‘I felt sure I would like the Army, but straight away I discovered that the system was very unjust. I accept that military systems are all about discipline, but we were treated badly right from the start. They had this thing about superiority. I mean, they wanted us to bow to the guys with rank. All that sort of thing simply wasn’t me. I’ve never bowed to anyone. They really wanted to humiliate us. We were called Class of 62 because that was the year we were born.

‘I was having run-ins with a corporal who had taken a dislike to me. One day I wanted to phone my girlfriend during our lunch break. The corporal started throwing a fit. He was going to “dance” me: press-ups, sit-ups, jumping on the spot, etc. I had had enough of his continual harassment and dancing. So I refused to dance for him. I told him I wasn’t going to do it any more. I was going to fight him. Then an officer who had been passing got involved. He told the corporal he was wrong and danced him. He was furious, but you can imagine things didn’t get any better for me after that.

‘But I found a way to get even. Every time we went to the canteen I would get a burger and a Coke on the corporal’s chit and falsify his signature. Ha! I can’t remember how many burgers and Cokes I had before they caught me. I was obviously heading for the calabozo [jail] and that was after they had danced me. What a dance. They danced me all day long, but I avoided jail because we were scheduled to go on a big exercise the next day and they wanted every man there.

‘But just when I thought I had done my punishment they came for me. There was this corporal and a Lieutenant Baldini. They took me to the shower room and hung me over the shower pipes with handcuffs. I can’t remember how long they left me hanging there, but afterwards Baldini said I’d go nowhere in his army. Deep down I had wanted to stay in the Army after conscription, but now I could see no future in it for me.

‘You know, looking back on it now, Baldini was wrong. He was a military man through and through and a good one, but as a person he was useless. He wasn’t interested in relationships with his soldiers or treating them decently.

‘In March 1982 Class of 63 was arriving at the barracks and I had four days left to do – and the Malvinas were taken. I sensed right away that I wasn’t going to be discharged. With just two days of my time remaining 1 was sent out to help round up the guys who had been discharged. They didn’t tell us anything-it was all uncertainty. We weren’t told if we were going to the Malvinas or if we were going to cover for a regiment in the south which had already been sent. It seemed more likely we would be covering for another regiment, guarding their camp and the like, because even though they had issued us with all the gear to travel we still had our old training weapons. We couldn’t be going to war with them, could we?

‘I dashed home to my bedsit and gathered all my belongings together and took them to my mother’s house for safe keeping. It was the first time I had been home for years, but I didn’t tell her anything. I really didn’t know anything.

‘Back at barracks the feeling grew that we were going to guard a camp down south. We boarded a Hercules C-130 at Rio Gallegos and took off, but we were turned back because of bad weather. It was only then that we found out we had been flying to the Malvinas. If the weather hadn’t forced us back we wouldn’t have known where we were going until we landed:’

To Dominic Gray, life was a challenge to endure and to enjoy-right from the moment the midwife smacked his backside when he came into the world on 12 October 1960, in Brighton, West Sussex. Dom’s father, Peter, was an engineer and a dealer in Harley-Davidson motorbikes. As Britain shrugged off the last of the austerity brought about by the Second World War people were able to afford cars. Motorbikes were becoming less popular, so dealing in expensive imported American machines was a hard business.

Peter, who had been a prisoner of the Germans in occupied Jersey in the Channel Islands, was thirty when he met the girl who was to be Dom’s mother, and married her when she was just eighteen. It was a match on which the gods did not smile kindly. Dom arrived in a world where his dad was working every hour he could to sell and repair the motorbikes and where his mother wanted more than rock ‘n’ roll, motorbikes and being cooped up with a demanding baby in a small flat above the workshop. The marriage was rocky. Dom’s mum started to go out on the town at night, and he remembers arguments and loud, violent rows. Even the birth of his brother, Daniel, failed to heal the scarred union. ‘One day she just upped and left. I’ve never seen her since,’ Dom recalls.

Dom and baby Daniel went to stay with their maternal grandmother. She had a drink problem and Peter believed the boys were being mistreated. They moved to London to stay with their Aunt Barbara for six months before Peter decided to move them to his sister Joan’s care in northern France, where Joan had married a Frenchman called Jean. Peter was doing a lot of business there and would be able to visit his boys more regularly.

‘I was very happy with Auntie Barbara, but France was idyllic,’ Dom says. ‘Daniel and I were there for four or five years and we started to go to school there. We learned French. It became our first language. The happiest days of my life were living with Aunt Joan. The house was by woods and a big lake and near a farm. When we were told dad was coming to visit, Daniel and I would dash to a bench beside the road and listen for the roar of his motorbike. I can still hear that roar as he came round the bends to this day. The joy of seeing him was indescribable. It made me feel like I was part of a family again.’

But Dom’s joy was short-lived. His father decided he should return to England ‘for a short holiday’. In reality he wanted his elder son to be educated in England and the boys were parted. Daniel was to stay in France.

‘Joan would never have agreed to allow me to go to England if she had known the full story. She would never have willingly allowed us to be split. She had virtually adopted us as her own. I had never been away from Daniel before. I missed him – it was if we were one person, we were bonded so close. I stayed in a terraced house in London Street, Worthing, with my father’s parents. I was totally bewildered. Uncle Jean took me to my grandparents’ house, then left. I sat in the corner of the room totally confused and bewildered. I had thought I was being taken back to France to Daniel and Joan. But I was left there, with new keepers, and speaking French.’

His grandmother, although in her seventies, had love aplenty for the bright-eyed but sad little boy. She had Victorian values and a very keen sense of duty towards her little grandson. Dom quickly became very fond of her, but the pain of the separation from his younger brother was still eating away at his insides. He managed to see Daniel again at holiday times, but they were growing apart as they were raised by different, but very kind people, in different environments.

Dom’s parents eventually divorced in the mid-1960s and it was then he made the first of several court appearances. This one was to decide where he and Daniel should live, in whose care they should be placed. His father won custody of the boys, with whom he had been abandoned. Soon he would remarry and have two more children. Dom saw him only at weekends as he built another thriving business in Second World War vehicles.

Peter’s collection became one of the biggest in England and the business began to make him fairly well off, if not rich. In addition, it soon kindled an interest in things military for young Dom, especially as he now travelled with his father at weekends to shows and saw the collectors there, dressed in their Second World War uniforms and creating their make-believe world. Dom enjoyed these adventures with his dad as any boy would. He missed him when he wasn’t around, but his devoted grandparents provided a good home and emotional stability for him.

Like everything else in Dom’s life it was all too good to last. His grandfather, Bill, died and his grandmother was now too old to cope with the boy on her own. She went off to live in London and Peter moved his new wife and family into Gran’s house.

‘At first it was great, but the novelty of being allowed beans on toast whenever I liked instead of proper food and being allowed to stay up late to watch TV – things Gran would never have allowed – soon wore off. Things were going rapidly downhill between my stepmother and me. I was at secondary school and I didn’t realize at first that she knew dad was so successful he was really going places. Her plans were made and there was no place for me in those plans. As far as she was concerned the only family going places with him was her own family and not the previous one.’

Things went from bad to worse. Returning from school, Dom would find there were no meals for him. He fought and squabbled daily with his stepbrother and stepsister. His father was always working and when he came home he heard only one side of the story.

‘I was a teenager by this time and teenagers don’t really talk to adults about their problems. I started hanging round with kids who, I thought, were similar to me. Not bad, just adventurous. I became a burglar, breaking into shops and selling the goods. I worked on my own. I would nick cars and bikes. I was eventually caught and it was the perfect lever for my stepmother to be rid of me.’

Dom was put in court and faced a sentence in a detention centre, but West Sussex County Council’s Social Services Department was pursuing a new policy aimed at keeping thirteen- and fourteen-year olds out of detention. He was fostered with a couple who were former social workers and who ran a small bed-and-breakfast hotel. He left his troubles behind him. He knew he had to keep his nose clean because one wrong step would see him back in court and the detention order enforced. He knew, too, his chances of joining the Army were slim and any more trouble would put the kibosh on them completely.

‘I left school at sixteen and went to work on the local building sites. I grafted, really grafted, and stayed out of trouble as much as I could. I went to the recruiting office to suss out how I could join the Army, but my conviction was against me. When my review came up I went back to court and everyone agreed, police, social workers, foster parents, everyone, that joining the Army was the best solution.’

So the slightly built, not very tall, teenager fighting the world and ‘the system’ every day of his life took himself off to the local recruiting office in Worthing, and saw the same poster that Kevin had seen on the wall of his local recruiting office, as soon as he walked through the door, showing a Paratrooper landing ready for action. That’s for me, Dom told himself. But he reckoned wrong. The recruiting sergeant took one look at the teenager before him and soon disabused him of any notion of becoming a Para. He’d seen too many Paras in his time and this little fellow had as much chance of becoming one as the time-served sergeant had of walking in space. He was too short, too skinny and too underweight.

For Dom it was just another challenge. He had decided he would be a Para and that old bastard wouldn’t stand in his way. After all he had been outwitting people like him – pillars of the system – all his short life. The answer was simple. He visited his doctor, who put him on a special diet to help him gain weight. What he lacked in physique, he more than made up for in determination. And determination is what every man who wants to be a Paratrooper has to have by the barrow-load. Dom Gray has determination by the lorry-load.

As he left the courtroom for the recruiting office he could sense the relief of the local police and welfare agencies. Hopefully, they had seen the last of him. Let the little bastard go off and get up to his tricks in the Army and they would sort him out. They won’t take any shit from him. Dom, with his mat of thick, dark hair and ever-twinkling eyes, was genuinely more high-spirited than bad, someone who had taken too many knocks in such a short life, a little fellow who needed a channel for his limitless energy and aggression, a kid who needed the ‘family’ the Army had provided for thousands of youngsters like him down the centuries.

The dreaded P Company was just the thing for a lad like Dom. It would knacker him, teach him, give him a sense of achievement, a sense of direction and – equally important – a feeling of belonging. Dominic Michael Gray was going to be a Paratrooper come hell or high water and bollocks to the recruiting sergeant. He was only an old hat anyway, a Fusilier with a hackle on his beret which looked like a fucking ugly budgie.

By the time the Falklands drama erupted in April 1982 Dom was twenty-one and had four years’ hard soldiering under his belt. He had served in Germany, Canada, Northern Ireland and Oman, that secretive and backward desert sultanate in the Middle East where the SAS had fought a bitter little war against communist insurgents. They had taken the battle to the Moscow-trained terrorists and, using their own tactics, had beaten them. Not only had communism through the barrel of a Kalashnikov been stopped in its tracks; it had also been sent into full, undignified retreat. The Paras at that time were being courted by the SAS, most of whom had begun their soldiering careers at Aldershot. They wanted the Paras as their ever-ready backup, men used to moving at a moment’s notice, soldiers discreet enough to simply vanish from their barracks in Britain and pop up again on the faraway battlefield, men used to operating unsupported far behind enemy lines in small groups or larger formations, men who could easily adapt to any hostile situation, and men who relished the prospect of a good scrap, the opportunity to put into practice everything they had been trained to do. In other words, soldiers they knew were as professional as them and in whom they could place their trust.

As Dom and his mates in B Company lined the decks of the Canberra watching the bustle of last-minute loading, he struggled to take it all in. Here they were being swept along on the massive tidal wave of publicity. The TV cameras, the photographers, the reporters all there to see them off – it was all a far cry from the way Paras had been brought up to go to war, slipping away quietly from some secluded, sealed-off airfield. As he watched the dockers load stores and kept out of the way of senior NCOs and their apoplectic rages, he became impatient to be under way. He wanted to get there, to get to grips with the enemy before some silly bastard called it all off. This was going to be his big chance, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove his soldiering ability, his big chance to show the knocking bastards back home who had written him off as another bad lot that when men had to stand up and be counted he would be among them, not skulking in the corner of a boozer with a copy of the Sun and cheering when the news came on TV.

A much-liked lad, Dom had acquired a lot of skill. He had worked closely and hard with the rest of the company in training and was desperately keen to see how well they could do together in the real thing. He had never thought the British Army would fight a conventional war in his time and this was an opportunity too good to be thrown away. After all there were hats doing twenty-two years who would never see action, never even serve in Northern Ireland.

As the Canberra slipped down Southampton Water, Dom was alone in the crowd with his personal thoughts. He had managed to say a fond farewell to his dad – whom he still adored – in the departure lounge. He had climbed back on board as the military bands prepared to play them off. Despite the publicity he was proud to be British and soon, God willing, he would prove just how good the modern generation of Paratroopers was, just how entitled they were to carry the mantle of their glorious predecessors. He would prove to his friends, his nation and to himself that he was one of Britain’s finest.

Yet even as he sailed off to war Dom couldn’t help but reflect how things could have been different for him if he had been allowed to stay in France with his Aunt Joan and brother. It is a thought which still haunts him, because in 1990 – eight years after the Falklands – Daniel was found murdered in a backstreet in Paris and since then Dom has always wondered whether, if they had been left together, his younger brother would have died so tragically.

On the long voyage south the training schedule was at times hectic, but it didn’t sap all the energy which coursed through Dom and his mates. They soon planned unofficial extensions to their military training – ‘special missions’.

‘A few of us would ambush Marines on the ship for a good punch-up. We were pissed off with all the hassle we were getting from them, so we gave them some back. Although we were supposed to be on the same side the rivalry between us was intense. (I remember after the war a few of us were talking about them and we decided that their toms [private soldiers] were not unlike us in their professional outlook, but their top brass were complete arseholes.)

‘But at that time they were fair game. Our corporal, Stewart McLaughlin, was a real hard Scouser. He was anti everything non-Para. His word was law. He was all Para through and through, straight out of a war comic. The ultimate warrior. He didn’t stand any messing or any fuss. You either did what he said and you did it immediately and properly, or you suffered. That was it: instant punishment on the spot. We respected him and felt at ease being led by him, but sometimes it was all a bit too much.

‘So, one night, we decided to give him some of his own medicine. We decided we would ambush him and give him a going-over. We told him we had beer in our cabin, which was illegal, and he took the bait. We were a very close-knit bunch because that was the way Stewart wanted it. We were his toms and nobody else could fuck us about or pick on us. All we wanted to do was point out in the way he would best understand that the toms had rights and should be able to voice an opinion at times. Anyway, he arrived and we jumped him. He sorted the lot of us out. We all finished up with bloody noses, fat lips and black eyes. I had two black eyes for weeks. Stewart really enjoyed himself punching the crap out of us. But, in true Para style, he was proud of us because we had given him a work-out.

‘We prowled the Canberra together in search of beer with Stewart, as befits a corporal, in command. One night we were in one of the crew bars on the Canberra – a place which was out of bounds to us – when one of the crew started to get stroppy with us and, in particular, Stewart. It was a silly thing to do and Stewart responded by ‘lumping’ him and then attempting to force him out through a porthole. This caused a fairly serious shoulder injury to the guy and the MPs were called and we were nicked. We were all marched in before the CO on disciplinary charges.

‘I’ll always remember being marched in front of him and the shock when my eyes took in the luxury of his cabin. I couldn’t believe his spacious living quarters compared with our cramped accommodation below. I was still eyeing up his cabin when we all got hit with a £200 fine and extra duties. The fine didn’t bother any of us because we were going to war and if we weren’t around at the end of it we wouldn’t have to pay. It was as simple as that, but the extra duties did hurt.

‘We then cross-decked to the Intrepid and were crammed into the corridors and bulkheads. The ship was jammed solid with sailors and soldiers absolutely jam-packed with Paras and Marines all awaiting the green light to go, and then they told us to report to the galley to begin our extra duties punishment. There we were, all rammed and ammoed up, cleaning the dixies they carted the food around in. We all had our sleeves rolled up and were scrubbing away – and there was some scrubbing because of the number of people on board. There was pile after pile of pots and pans and dixies. Stewart had flames coming out of his nostrils. What made us even madder was being told to go to the hotplates and start serving breakfasts to the fucking Marines. That really was taking the piss. Anyone who gave us a look or made a stupid comment had piping hot beans ladled over their hands.

‘We were still cleaning dixies and serving food as the Intrepid sailed into Falkland Sound for the landings. We dashed straight from the galley to the landing-craft. I have a sneaking suspicion that the top brass delayed the landings to make sure we had cleaned all the dixies…’

I climbed from our car to greet Germán Chamorro. This meeting was to be different from the others in that, like me, Germán was an ex-Para. He had been in control of a 120mm mortar and artillery on Mount Longdon, and I knew his onslaught had proved a hellish experience for 3 Para during the battle. His handshake was firm and he gave me a reassuringly warm smile as I said hello.

We all went quietly into his house and as we settled down around the kitchen table there was a slight nervousness in the air. Diego relieved the tension by getting Germán to speak of his apprehension about meeting a British soldier after the war. This made him feel relaxed enough to grin at me and admit: ‘You know, the English language has given me some bad memories, but this project that you’re doing is good. After all, it’s the common soldier that always suffers, not the government officials.’ Within five minutes we were all laughing – largely because this stocky, jovial man has a wonderful sense of humour, ironically very much like that of my close friend Denzil Connick.

Germán always knew he would be involved in a war. He had always been fascinated by soldiers, war and the history of conflict. It was, he believed, his destiny, ever since the days when he had played soldiers in the streets of Adrogue, the Buenos Aires suburb where he grew up with his parents and three sisters. His parents emigrated from Paraguay, where his father had learned his trade as a builder. Work in Argentina was plentiful and he was able to provide his growing family with a good lifestyle.

In those days Adrogue was a good neighbourhood and the young Chamorros were well off compared with many other kids of their generation. Germán, born on 12 August 1962, returned to the area after the Falklands war and lived there until four years ago. He had been to primary school locally and enjoyed it, rushing home afterwards to play soccer or cops-and-robbers or soldiers on the safe streets. But secondary school was different.

‘It was difficult,’ he recalls. ‘Very difficult. I even failed break time! Eventually my parents gave me an ultimatum: “Study – or work.”

‘I chose the easy one: work. Earning my own money really suited me. I was a teenager and the world for me was all discos, clubs, drinking and women. I tried re-education at one stage – you can do that here – because I regretted leaving school at fourteen. I worked on the building sites with my father for a time then became an odd-job boy for one of my elder sisters. I did that right up until I was called up for the Army. Times have changed a lot in Argentina since those days.

‘Do you know, when we went to discos sometimes we were absolutely shit-scared if there was a razia – a police raid. It was a real risk being there, because if drugs or something like that were found you could become an NN [missing person, one of the “Disappeared Ones”] and just for being there you got an automatic two months in jail. Sometimes, when I look around the streets today, I miss the strict order that ruled in those days. We still had a good time and I remember the parties to celebrate when Argentina won the World Cup in 1978.

‘My call-up came in August 1980 and I went to La Plata and volunteered for the Parachute Regiment. I was sent to Córdoba in the north central province. There were about fifty of us lined up for a medical and they gave us all an injection with the same needle. There was no AIDS about then. Because I was going for the Paras the service was longer. My friends all thought I was mad losing up to two years of my life to the Army. I went to the 4th Artillery Parachute Regiment near La Calera and straight away I knew I was into something different. I knew then I was away from my home and family.

‘Suddenly, at the age of nineteen, I am just a piece of crap, a nobody. It was the hard discipline that hit me: eat, sleep, fart only when the military tell you. That first week of induction was a big shock to the system. Two hundred of us were posted within the regiment. I was sent to C Battery, which was broken down into two companies. My boss was Lieutenant Suárez and he was a good officer and was to prove it later. He had golden balls.

‘Training was “dancing” from the start. Reveille was at 5 a.m. and dress in a minute flat. In our dormitory huts things were so cramped half of us dressed while the others washed and then we changed over. Then it was inspection followed by a dance around for three or four hours, marching, saluting, running, anything. Basically, they were just fucking us around. For forty-five days I had this and what I missed most was home. Apart from five days on the ranges and weapons training it was always the same. The food was bad – and I mean bad. There were no tables and we all sat back to back to eat. I remember red insects floating in my food. Tasty! Everyone had the shits, all sitting there on the latrines in a row without any toilet paper. I lost six or seven kilos there.

‘Some guys deserted. Those who were caught went to the calabozo. After our forty-five days of basic training I could march, salute and shoot. They gave us four days’ leave, but my first day was spent travelling home and my last day travelling back, so I spent the other two days eating, sleeping and drinking as much as I could. My haircut made me stand out from everybody else.

‘On my return I had to do another forty-five days of parachute and continuation training. Two mates of mine deserted while on leave. We always had to stand in formation for raising the flag in the morning, then they gave us a pep talk. The parachute training area was two kilometres from our barracks and we had to run there and back every day with our helmets on. We did all our ground exercises and one day they brought out a Hercules C-130, the traditional parachuting aircraft. Three days before our first actual jump we all boarded in jumping order and the plane went round and round the field without actually taking off, but we all had to fall out the doors and roll on the field as if we were actually parachuting.

‘I’ll always remember my first jump. Every Para does. There I am in the aircraft with my balls up to my throat with thinking about it. We’re ordered to get ready, hook up, double-check equipment, tap the helmet of the guy in front to signal everything is OK. We are all standing there staring at the red light, knowing that seconds later it will go green and we’re going to go. My heart was doing overtime; I could hear it pounding inside me. Suddenly it’s “green on” and guys are disappearing out the doors. I’m shuffling to the door. I get there and find myself pushing against the dispatcher’s arm. He’s holding me back. “What the fuck,” I scream at him.

‘It turns out I’m the last one out and we’ve overshot the DZ [drop zone]. Everyone is going to think I’ve lost my bottle. I pleaded with the Air Force sergeant. Here I was, all hyped up and ready to jump, and this bastard has stopped me. On the next pass I got out, falling for three seconds in the slipstream and then I’m in another world: peace, a real sense of peace, just floating down. Unreal.

‘We have a tradition after your first successful jump in which you choose a godfather and everyone baptizes you with cider and flour. I’m a fairly chubby guy so they nicknamed me Yogi Bear. I chose Lieutenant Suárez as my godfather. Once you have done three jumps you get your red beret at a ceremony. I did ten!

‘At the end of this forty-five days of training we are only two thirds of the way through. Normal conscripts do a total of about forty-five days. Because we are Para-artillery we do ninety. But we got fifteen days’ leave before the heavy artillery training and then it was working with howitzers and mortars. As soon as we had done that we went on manoeuvres, firing shells and moving from position to position with the guns, just like they do in a real war, to deal with the enemy changing position.

‘Everything was going well until I accidentally dropped my rifle on our gunpowder bags in a ditch. Apart from feeling like an arsehole, I lost my next leave and was danced by being forced to crawl through thistle and thorn bushes. I was confined to barracks while the rest of them went on leave. I was really pissed off, I can tell you.

‘After all that they made me a clerk in charge of the leave and guard-duty rosters. It wasn’t a bad number and I soon had a good trade going in bribes for changing duties. Everyone hated the 2-4 a.m. duty. A guy nicknamed Dracula used to bribe me with cigarettes and food to cook the duty book. Cigarettes are currency and I could exchange them for anything I wanted. That’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Looking back, it wasn’t a bad number.

‘From time to time we had to do a razia, patrolling the streets near the barracks. It was hard, boring work. At that time in 1981 the terrorists just weren’t around any more – they had gone to ground. We were out, fully armed, in the local square, stopping cars and checking on the drivers and occupants. Sometimes we’d demand a few fags. If a bird was driving we’d irritate the locals – the Cordobezes, we’d call them – by chatting up their women. The rest of our patrol was spent killing time and doing fuck all.

‘We had a guy on attachment to us, a big tough commando from 601 Regiment. One day in the office I forgot to introduce myself – “Parachute soldier Class of 62 Chamorro” – when I was looking for the regiment’s orders. He danced me around his office and then told me to carry on. As soon as my back was turned he sneaked up behind me and put a knife to my throat, saying: “Never drop your guard, soldier. Always be alert.”

‘The bastard ran away during the fighting at Darwin. Ha! There was a story doing the rounds about him at the time that he had killed and gutted a snake and made his soldiers eat it, telling them that when at war a soldier must eat what he can find. Now that is a cruel irony when you bear in mind what happened to us later for trying to eat what we could find on the Malvinas.

‘They began to discharge my intake just before Christmas 1981. Sixty guys went and I was awaiting my turn. Then, on 22 December, orders came through for a parachute jump. Nobody wanted to do it. Lieutenant Suárez was going mad. We jumped from a Fokker on the 23rd and then he began dancing us. He said anyone who fell would stay in camp for Christmas. We crawled through thistle bushes, through mud, ran, jumped – you name it and we did it. I was one of ten guys left on their feet, all covered in dirt and dust. In the end, he gave us two days’ leave.

‘Leave was precious and didn’t come round often enough. One time some of us scored with some girls on a train and arranged to meet them another time. We had to slip out of camp and hitch a ride to their place. We went absent for three days, but my sergeant was delighted we had got our ends away and fined me a coffee and three croissants.

‘Another time the MPs spotted us on a train. We had no leave papers, so we got off at the next station. They chased and chased us. You have to remember that the bastards got a bounty of more leave for every absentee they caught. Anyway, some people hid us in their house and then some Japanese tourists gave us a lift into Buenos Aires in their camper.

‘At the beginning of 1982 we did absolutely fuck all as we waited for discharge. Class of 63, our replacements, began arriving in February. I was told I would be discharged on 30 March, so I went home on leave before returning to the regiment on the 30th. On that day there was a big quilombo [disturbance] in the capital. It was a clear symbol of the unrest which was growing in the country. The Central Union of Workers had organized a protest rally against the government. One of the demonstrators, Dalmiro Flores, was shot dead by the police. I wasn’t really aware of this.

‘Next day, 31 March, I’m still in camp and still in the Army. I went to see my boss and he gave me another eighteen days’ leave. I went back home, where it was quiet and peaceful.

‘Suddenly, about 6 a.m. next morning, my father has the radio on and we hear: ‘Hemos recuperado Las Malvinas.’ [‘We have recovered the Malvinas’]. Then there was marching music. Things didn’t add up until I began to realize the government had ordered the action to divert people’s thoughts from the unrest at home.

‘Then a friend rings up and tells my mother there is a Para company on the Malvinas and he thinks I am there. I talk to him. I didn’t know anything about the Malvinas. I can hear my parents swearing in the background: ‘milicos de mierda’ [‘fucking military’] and for the next eighteen days the house was a place of madness with me saying I knew I was going to be sent there and my parents telling me to shut up.

‘My mother was angry because she had lived through the revolution in Paraguay. She knew what war was. “This is madness – they are going to kill you;” she would tell me. We were glued to the television and radio watching the communiqués. I rang my regiment and they told me no orders had been received. On the 18th, when I should have reported back, I stayed on at home for a big barbecue. Eventually I decided to go back to sort out my discharge. At the railway terminus I met some guys who had deserted. They knew that the regiment would actually be going to the Malvinas within a week. I decided to ring home and tell my family. My mother began to cry: she wanted me to desert. But I knew this was my destiny.

‘When I get back to the camp I meet some other guys who are also late back. A first lieutenant calls us into his office and starts to give us a serious bollocking. “You’re a bunch of deserters, bad soldiers, the country is at war etc, etc.” He rages that the officers and NCOs have already gone and I start to laugh. “Chamorro, what are you laughing at,” he screams. “You are the first to go. Go. Go now. Fuck off!”’

And so, like many others, Germán Chamorro began his journey to destiny.