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 9

DENZIL CONNICK is a Welshman and proud of it. He was born in Tredegar in 1956, the eldest of four sons of Ernie Connick, a hard-working miner, and his wife Carol. Denzil played happily with the other miners’ children, and as they grew up together he was forever winding them up with his practical jokes and incredibly tall stories.

While Denzil was still a child the changes which began to shake the world in the 1960s began to find their way to South Wales, where, far below ground, his father toiled at the coalface. Ernie sensed the wind of change and shrewdly switched jobs to another industry which formed another part of the economic backbone of Wales: steel. He moved Carol and the four boys up the road to Chepstow, just on the Welsh side of the Severn Bridge, and worked hard until his retirement.

It was this down-to-earth working-class background which fashioned young Denzil. It taught him to face adversity with courage, to meet life’s challenges head on, to work hard and to try even harder and ‘to never let the bastards grind you down’. He was fifteen at the beginning of the 1970s and had decided he wanted to join the RAF. However, his academic record fell short of the nine CSEs the RAF demanded for his trade, so he decided on the Parachute Regiment. It seemed the next best thing!

The whole family turned out on the platform of Newport Station to see young Denzil off on the long journey to Aldershot, the traditional home of the British Army, and of its toughest unit, the Paras.

At just fifteen and a half Denzil Connick joined the other school leavers on the first great adventure of his young life on that day in 1972 when he joined Junior Para. For eighteen months he underwent the rigorous and often brutal training needed to win the coveted red beret and prized blue wings of a Paratrooper, one of the finest breed of soldiers Britain could produce.

In January 1974, his chest bursting with pride, his Welsh heart flooded with emotion, his head in the clouds but his feet firmly marching on the ground, Denzil and the boys of 400 Platoon became the men of the Parachute Regiment. He’d made it.

By the time the Falklands emergency began Denzil was already a seasoned soldier, a lance-corporal who had become what the Army calls ‘a trusted and reliable asset to his battalion’. He was a radio operator with the anti-tank platoon in Support Company, the old sweats of the battalion. He had become a popular character with the officers and men and was famous for his singing, which had cheered many a heart – and upset many a landlord – in pubs in Aldershot and everywhere else in the world 3 Para served. As a pal says: ‘If the lads were bored, you could count on Denzil to have everyone singing by closing time.’

In April 1982, when the battalion embarked for the Falklands, Denzil had served ten years in the ranks. He was one of the few junior soldiers who had experienced being shot at for real. He had also been able to shoot back. It happened in Northern Ireland, where he had already done three tours of duty. Here was a man who knew the exhilaration and fear of action, who had faced the stark reality of kill or be killed, who had seen a comrade mortally wounded and who knew that the truth of the battlefield was much different from the bar-room bravado of the young, inexperienced toms thirsting for action.

Six years earlier he had been helicoptered into Crossmaglen, south Armagh, the heart of what the media loved to call ‘Bandit Country’, an area where the security forces had seemed to have given up aggressive action in favour of containment. It was an area the IRA dominated, filtering across the border from Co. Monaghan, which thrusts up like a huge club from the Republic into the soft underbelly of Ulster. The local IRA boyos paraded the streets of Crossmaglen and the lonely lanes surrounding it quite openly, picking likely ambush sites and forcing the British Army and the RUC to enter and leave the base by helicopter.

The men of 3 Para were to change this. Denzil flew in with the rest of 2 Platoon, A Company. And soon they were out looking for the Provo gunmen, faces blackened with camouflage cream, bergens full of kit on their backs, weapons loaded and ready, and putting themselves on offer.

They didn’t have long to wait for their first contact, which came with a savage suddenness as the four-man patrol of paratroopers crossed open ground near Drumacaval right beside the ill-defined border. Four Provisional IRA gunmen started firing at them with an American Second World War Garand semi-automatic rifle, firing armour-piercing bullets, and three Armalite rifles.

‘They opened up from a small copse two to three hundred metres away, catching us fifty metres from the nearest cover, a drystone wall,’ Denzil recalls. ‘There was a hail of bullets coming at us, but we managed to gain the cover of the wall after a hectic dash. That was when we discovered they were using armour-piercing rounds… because they punched their way through the wall we were sheltering behind.

‘The only reason none of us was hit was because they opened up on us too early. If they had just waited they could have got us, but we quickly spotted their four firing positions. Kev, our patrol commander, gave us a fire order. We didn’t need to be told twice. Kev, Geordie Melling and Geordie Snowdon and me blasted back at them. I reckon we each fired forty or fifty rounds back at them. Our fire control orders were good, and we had practised, and it worked. We fired and moved and fired and moved and soon they stopped firing. We advanced on them and got into the copse. During the fire-fight Geordie Snowdon’s rifle was actually hit by a bullet which rendered it useless. But we still got on top of the bastards.

‘We found their firing positions in the copse with the spent cartridge cases on the ground and we found blood. We knew we had hit at least one – if not killing him, wounding him. We could see their getaway car driving off, but because it was on the other side of the border we couldn’t “hot-pursuit” them or shoot at the car because they weren’t shooting at us from it.

‘We radioed in, then had a reorganization and debrief and waited for a chopper to arrive with an ammunition resupply and a new weapon for Geordie. Then we carried on with the patrol for another two days.’

As well as gunmen targeting them from across the border, soldiers in south Armagh are also at risk from what the senior officer level in the security forces in Northern Ireland refer to as IEDs, Improvised Explosive Devices. To the man in the street and the soldier on the ground they are bombs or booby-traps, and the Provos had laid so many in this area that it was littered with them. They were just lying there, hidden and waiting to be activated by remote control.

These are nasty weapons designed by cowards and used in a cowardly fashion. The soldiers were always wary of them, always on the lookout for the tell-tale signs, always seeking a likely detonation point. Many a Paratrooper and craphat would dearly have loved to have had the opportunity to get his hands on one of the bombmakers, tie him to his handiwork and set it off underneath him.

Although Denzil had been both frightened and exhilarated by his baptism under fire, he began to realize that he was quietly confident about confronting the faceless terrorists who haunted his battalion’s operational area. The brief but fierce contact had concentrated his mind, and now he was ever alert to the lurking dangers, his senses honed to an incredible sharpness. In later analysis of the action he realized he had gone through everything he had been taught about reaction. He had done it automatically: weapon drills, target location and identification and returning fire. It worked and it showed that the discipline and training drilled into him since he joined the regiment was second to none. And deep in his inner self was the glow of contentment that when the crunch had come he had not failed. He had not let himself down under fire, nor had he failed his three comrades. All four of them had responded to the challenge as they had been trained.

In south Armagh danger is ever-present. Every minute of every hour of every day a soldier is there he is in danger. Later in the tour of duty the same patrol was positioned round a landing zone for a helicopter. It was a good spot for a rendezvous and the Paras thought it had not been used for some time. They had been taught not to be predictable or to betray an observable pattern in their patrols.

‘We didn’t know at the time, but it had been well used. I remember the occasion well. We were all spread out in defensive positions about a hundred yards apart along a hedgerow. A bomb had been planted, but obviously we didn’t know. As the patrol radio operator I was the furthest away. Suddenly there was this huge bang and Geordie Snowdon took the force of the blast. He was barely alive, but we managed to resuscitate him. He slipped into a coma. In hospital they put him on a life-support machine. He was bad and we all knew it. He was in a coma for two weeks. His parents were at his bedside. Eventually they gave permission for the machine to be turned off and our Geordie died. He never regained consciousness.’

The death of Geordie Snowdon hurt and angered his patrol. Long into the night, they went over the ambush again and again. They thirsted for the chance to avenge Geordie: and when it came, Sod’s Law took over.

‘We had a contact with an IRA sniper shooting at us from just on or just over the border – it doesn’t matter. But we got him in our sights and our GPMG [General Purpose Machine Gun] gunner was lined up on him. All the time we had been complaining about the condition of the link ammunition we had been issued for the gun. It was old and bent. We were really browned off about it and when the gunner, Ian Long, opened up, the bloody thing only fired one round. Every time we had asked for replacement ammo we had been ignored. Now we were really pissed off with everyone ourselves. Of course, as soon as this happened they gave us new ammo. A lot of good it did us then.’

To Denzil, the authorities’ response to the question of the ammunition was a perfect example of their approach, both political and military, to dealing with the running sore that is Northern Ireland.

‘It’s too namby-pamby. They say we can’t be too aggressive and that we should adopt a hearts-and-minds policy. The IRA have never relented, never given an inch, never reacted to our nice behaviour and I doubt if they ever will. The Army should be allowed to patrol much more aggressively.

‘You never forget some of the sights I have seen. I remember another of the lads being blown up. I remember them putting what was left of him in polythene bags before they put him into a body bag. Maybe if the politicians saw this sort of sight they might change their minds. It is the soldiers on the ground who pay the price for the shiny-assed Whitehall penny-pinchers.’

Six years on, Denzil, like many of his comrades, freely admitted he didn’t know much about the Falklands or even where they really were. ‘They sound a bit Scottish to me,’ he would say in his distinctive Welsh accent with the ever-present twinkle in his eye. You couldn’t be sure if he was being serious or not. Denzil was no thick soldier.

The whole idea of going to war – a full-scale shooting war with normal rules, not the yellow-card-governed, kid-glove stuff of Ulster – didn’t worry him at first because he simply didn’t believe it would happen. It just seemed like yet another exercise. It had to be. After all, who ever heard of Paratroopers going to war on a luxury liner? Who ever heard of Paratroopers being seen off by hundreds of relatives with the band blasting out the regimental march, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’? Someone was taking the piss, surely?

Paratroopers normally slip away ‘to some secluded airfield in the dead of night and drop on to the battlefield before the enemy even knows he’s left camp. But if that was what the bosses wanted, who was he, a lance-corporal, to argue?

As the Canberra slipped her moorings and was gently coaxed out into the middle of the Solent shipping lanes by the bustling tugs for the long journey south on that Good Friday night, Denzil decided he would settle in for a little pampering and enjoy the luxuries on offer. He joined his mates in the bar assigned to the junior ranks of 3 Para. Being Denzil, he soon got to know many people, and soon re-established contact with an old schoolfriend, Greg Quigley, a Canberra crewman. And what could have been more natural than for Denzil and his old mate to reminisce about their youth over a gallon or two.

They regaled each other and everyone else in the drinking school with their escapades, particularly about the days they bunked off school together. They would meet in the crew bar, away from the gaze of the officers and senior NCOs, where the hospitality of Greg’s fellow crewmen knew no bounds. But being there was against the military rules and out of bounds for Denzil and every other soldier on the gigantic ship. To this day Denzil doesn’t accept that he was doing anything wrong. As far as he is concerned his only ‘crime’ was in being caught.

On the first occasion the commanding officer gave him a warning, on the second he was fined £300. He couldn’t believe such a heavy fine – a fortnight’s wages – for such a minor misdemeanour. However, he returned to 3 Para’s bar at the stem of the ship, overlooking one of the swimming pools, to sup the regulation two cans per man every evening until he received orders that the Battalion was, in fact, going to land on the islands.

We had been sitting round Luis Leccese’s table, in his spacious and attractively furnished flat, for at least three hours, chatting and eating our way through a memorable dinner. The talk was interesting and light-hearted, relaxed and friendly. Luis was not only keen to learn about the British Paras, but was also very curious about Britain and how we live. Would he be welcome in our homes, like I was in his? That evening, his whole attitude, like that of each of the other Argentinians I met, made me rethink what so many of us in Britain have been led to believe about Luis’s fellow-countrymen. They’re not hot-headed, rude or impetuous. In short, every one of the veterans I interviewed was a perfect ambassador for his country.

Alberto Carbone, another Mount Longdon veteran, and long-time friend of Luis, was there, too. There was lots of laughter as they poked fun at each other, the sort of banter you come across in any English pub when mates meet up for a few beers on a Saturday night.

We studied battlefield maps and photographs together, and Luis pinpointed the position he occupied on Mount Longdon on one of the maps I had brought with me. Then, when I showed him pictures of prisoners of war and asked if he knew any of them, he almost froze with shock. His eyes filled with tears, and, pointing to the haunted face of one of the POWs, he said: ‘Me.’ There he was, sitting among a group of captured Argentinians, a sad figure of a man, only nineteen or twenty years old. Everyone was silent as he asked: ‘My God, did I really look like that?’

There was a powerful feeling in the room – you could feel it, almost taste it – as Luis passed the picture to his wife and the memories came flooding back to all of us. Now, after twelve years, he was looking deep into a painful past. He drew long and hard on his Marlboro, exhaled the blue-grey smoke, and let the emotion of the moment ebb.

We were in Bandfield, a twenty-minute drive from the centre of Buenos Aires with its smart boulevards, bumper-to-bumper traffic, bustling pavement cafés and non-stop wailing of ambulance sirens. It is not what you expect a South American city to be – it is more European, more Italian than Spanish.

Like many Argentinians, Luis is from Italian stock. Both his parents are Italian, and arrived in Buenos Aires after the Second World War.

‘My father is from northern Italy, but I don’t know much about his background there because he never talks about it. I know he was in the Second World War, but he has never said what he did or even whose side he was on. I have four brothers, the eldest of whom was born in Italy, but he came here as a baby. We didn’t have a deprived upbringing, but we certainly weren’t well off. Yes, there were times when we had to go without, but so did nearly everybody else in this area. This is where I grew up, this is where I played as a child, in these streets round here.

‘After I had been at school a while I became a real handful. To be honest, I developed into a right oaf. I used to skip school more than I attended because it was too much like hard work. There was a gang of us and we used to laze round the streets all day. Even when I did go to school I would get out on the street as soon as possible, skipping homework and even meals. Despite it all I didn’t have to repeat anything at school. I don’t know how I managed that. When the time came for secondary school I found it really hard and that was when I was caught out by my lack of work at primary school. I went instead to technical school for a year to study comercial de noche – bookkeeping and accountancy – and as soon as that was over I left school. I was fourteen.

‘My parents laid down the law: if I wasn’t prepared to go to school then I’d better get out and work. I worked with my middle brother in his shoe shop until it went bust. Then he opened a small factory making kitchen worktops and I joined him there for a year. My eldest brother also had a small factory making clothes and next I went to work for him. Life was good… I was fifteen, earning money and still living at home and able to buy my own clothes and still have enough left over to go to the local discos.

‘We spoke a mixture of Spanish and Italian. Father was a true Italian, but as time went on he learned to speak castellano [Castilian Spanish]. In March 1981 I was called to Colimba. I wasn’t exactly mad about doing my military service, but if I had to do it then do it I would. It was the only way to look at it.

‘I remember we had to do two medicals. The first I can’t remember a thing about, but the second, well, I was put into a room, we were all put into a room, loads of us, and we were then told to strip naked and then they made us open up our rear so they could inspect us. They looked right up our backsides. The medical man then came and told me to stand up straight and he looked at my feet. Then he made me show him the soles of my feet and do turns and more turns and then he walked away. Back he comes with a much higher-ranking medical officer and I did the same for him and the pair of them stood there humming and hawing and the senior one said: “Send him anyway.”

‘You see, I have flat feet and should have failed the Army medical there and then. But I was in and they gave me inoculations, a uniform, kitbag, boots and a rifle and put me on a bus with all the others for the journey to San Miguel del Monte. The two months I spent there on basic training felt more like six. I can honestly say the instruction I received there was the most stupid I have ever heard or experienced in my entire life.

‘We used to be up at 6 a.m., wash and parade and then go into the field for training. One exercise we had to do called target identification, which had us kneeling or lying on the ground using our thumbs or fists up before our eyes to try to locate where an enemy was sniping at us, still makes me giggle. It always seemed to me that by the time I had gone through all this stupid thumb and fist business I’d be fucking dead.

‘Night training was just the same as orienteering, copping messages left at checkpoints. We would also have to stand facing a partner saluting and shouting… Jesus, you felt like a bunch of complete arseholes standing there shouting and saluting each other. It was unbelievable nonsense. Another piece of bullshit they made us do was called area cleaning. This was bullshit of the highest order. We would form a line and walk across a field holding a blanket, collecting everything to make it tidy, even the smallest twig. That fucking field was clean enough to eat off by the time we’d finished with it.

‘After a month of this crap we went for shooting lessons. The range was basic and so was the instruction. They taught us how to hold the weapon, how to breathe when shooting, and then the target would pop up and we would go ping! Once we had done that we would advance towards the target firing from the waist. That was all we learned: how to fire a rifle and 9mm pistol. I wasn’t to fire a weapon again for a year… and then it was to be in a war.

‘Towards the end of this training period they began to ask us what we knew and what we could do, like driving or working as a mechanic or any trade. I could drive, so I was sent to the vehicle depot. Anyone who couldn’t do anything the Army regarded as useful stayed in the infantry. They spent the rest of their time guarding everything and jumping around like arseholes.

‘The “dirty war” which spread fear throughout our country was coming to an end at that time. There appeared to be less tension about. A lot of guys were going AWOL, just disappearing when on guard duty. When the corporals went to inspect the guard positions all they would find would be a guy’s helmet and rifle. The guy himself had vanished, never to be seen again.

‘It wasn’t hard to see why guys went. We were supposed to be paid a monthly wage, but they always found ways of getting our money, fining us for so-called lost kit and other stupid things. If I was lucky I would finish up with about fifty pesos at the end of the month. The regiment had several exercises during the year, but I missed all the firing because I was in the Service Company, looking after and driving the trucks. When they went on exercise I was used to drive the food to them in a truck.

‘By March 1982 the next conscripts were arriving and we were waiting for them to fill our places so we could go home. I remember I was really looking forward to Civvy Street. I had just a week left to do when they told us to prepare for something. They didn’t tell us what it was, but I had a suspicion it was to be the Malvinas.

‘One minute I’m sitting there dreaming of freedom and home and the next I’ve drawn my rifle – the same one I’ve only ever fired once – and I’m on a Boeing 707 with no seats, flying out across the South Atlantic to the Malvinas. I couldn’t take it all in. I never dreamt for a moment I would ever be fighting in a real war.’

Jerry Phillips comes from a background shared by thousands of other British soldiers, the ever-on-the-move Service family. His dad, Michael, was a highly skilled RAF technician whose work was maintaining the flight simulators in which the jet-jockeys of the Air Force kept up the skills needed for flying the multimillion-pound planes with their sophisticated systems and hardware. Jerry was born in Singapore, where his father, then a corporal, was stationed. Every couple of years the Phillips family was on the move, with a posting back to Britain and then back to exotic Singapore again.

Young Jerry loved Singapore and the lifestyle, boosting his pocket money by prowling the jungle fringes collecting brilliantly coloured butterflies and tropical fish, which he sold to American servicemen on leave from the carnage of Vietnam. Later he branched out, catching snakes and reptiles, which he sold to the locals, who used the skins to make handbags and wallets for the tourists. At school, too, things were going well. By the time he was eight, young Jerry was such a good runner that he won a place in the Singapore Schools’ Junior Team.

The earliest drama Jerry can recall was when a poisonous snake chased his big sister. As she ran for her life Jerry leapt into action with a stick and clubbed it to death. ‘I’ll always remember that bloody snake,’ he says. ‘It would have killed my sister with one bite. It was my first frightening experience in life.’

His next followed quite quickly when, in 1968, just before he was nine, his parents’ marriage broke down. For a time Jerry’s life fell apart. Peggie Phillips and her four kids were now just surplus baggage as far as the RAF was concerned and they were shipped back to Britain to a rundown Second World War camp where broken families were temporarily housed. Life was hard for Peggie and her brood, and the RAF didn’t care. Soon, they were on the move again, this time to Ilfracombe, in Devon, where Peggie had a friend who let her and the children crowd into a one-bedroom flat. For a further two years they lived on top of each other until Peggie got a job as a school dinner lady.

‘Life was still hard,’ recalls Jerry. ‘Dinner ladies are very poorly paid and she had us four kids to support. We couldn’t compete with the other kids at school with their new bikes and smart clothes.’

To compensate, Jerry took on a poorly paid paper round, before discovering that thieving paid better. At night he would slip off, do a burglary and then sell the proceeds.

Living in Devon also sparked another passion in Jerry: sea fishing. Sometimes he would spend all night fishing in Ilfracombe Bay – an activity frowned upon by the local social services department. ‘Time and again the nosy bastards summoned us to their offices and said I was disorderly because I chose to fish all night. I never skipped school to go fishing. Their attitude really annoyed me.’

By the time he was fifteen Jerry had had enough of life in Devon and decided to join the Army. The Parachute Regiment was the place for him, he decided, because another of his hobbies was making model soldiers and he liked the ones of the Paras! He sailed through the tests at the local recruiting office and was sent to the reception centre at Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire. Shortly after arriving he was interviewed by another recruiting officer, who had seen his test results and tried to persuade him to join another arm of the service.

‘My mind was made up even more firmly as the interview began because a Para officer walked past. There was something different about him. The red beret was the first thing to catch my eye, but it was the way he walked: so confident, so macho. Give the recruiting officer his due: he tried for over an hour to get me to change my mind, but it was made up.’

Jerry returned home to await the summons to Browning Barracks, Aldershot, to join the Paras. When it came he packed his belongings – including some stolen goods – into a holdall and set off. He had just arrived at the camp and was being allocated his accommodation when the police arrived and arrested him. A court sent him to a detention centre and he did five weeks’ ‘hard labour’ on a farm. Again his life was in ruins, but, like many a veteran fallen on hard times, he insists: ‘The Parachute Regiment is the toughest, but the most forgiving unit in the British Army.’

As soon as he had served his sentence the Paras accepted him back. It had all happened before he joined and as far as they were concerned he had repaid his debt to society. Now he was about to risk his life for his country and if he was prepared to do that he could hold his head up.

In 1975, at the age of sixteen, he joined the Junior Parachute Regiment, the toughest junior soldiering in Britain. ‘For eighteen months I had the shit kicked out of me. They trained me and made me into a professional soldier. They won because I wanted to be won.’

He was sent to 2 Platoon, A Company, 3 Para, based in Osnabruck, West Germany, and realized right away that the hard training in Junior Para was only a preparation for life with the seniors at battalion level.

‘It was a hard, hard, hard way of life. Those guys in my first platoon were hard bastards and, being a ‘crow’, I was always being picked on for the dirty jobs. That’s the way it is. It happens to everybody. But I couldn’t imagine that the so-called hardest prisons could hold harder men than the ones I was serving with. I remember reflecting back on my life… In Singapore we had had two servants, then no father, then poverty and now this. Jesus. But I’ll tell you something: 3 Para gave me a family back. At first I was a loner, but I soon made friends and established very strong bonds with other guys who came from a similar back ground to me.

‘The next two years just flew by. Militarily, the training was hard because that is the only way to be professional: train hard and fight hard. Paras always train hard and fight even bloody harder because that’s the way we are. Socially, it was different. Jesus, did we have some scraps with the craphats in any pub or disco anywhere in Germany we could find them. Some had balls and scrapped back, good hard fist fights nearly every weekend. The Paras trained me correctly – play hard, work hard – and moulded me. The only thing they have failed to do is mould the rest of the world yet, but hopefully that will come!’

During this time Jerry also did a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, but because he was still seventeen he was not allowed to patrol the streets until he was eighteen. When he was allowed out on to the hostile streets he found the whole thing frustrating and boring. A lot of the work was ineffective because of what he regarded as flaws in the command structure. Remember, Jerry Phillips had been marked down right from the beginning as a bright boy and the recruiting officers had wanted to steer him away from the infantry towards what they regarded as ‘more brain-taxing’ soldiering. The only way to change things was to go for promotion.

Back in Osnabruck, Jerry’s platoon commander singled out the young soldier for a promotion course which he passed at the same time as he swept the board in every race he entered during the battalion’s sports week. Then he was sent on a physical training instructors’ course which, again, he passed and was posted to D Company, the specialist long-range patrolling and behind-enemy lines surveillance experts. This was the big league, the company where only the best and most experienced soldiers served. Jerry was thrilled, learning new skills and having more freedom to develop his own techniques. At nineteen he was a full corporal, one of the youngest around, a tribute to his old platoon commander’s vision. More courses followed, all ending in passes, including one of the most demanding of all, the LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) course in Germany run by the SAS. Here special forces soldiers from all of NATO come to test their skills. To Jerry Phillips and every other Para who ever attended the course the others were all there to be beaten: Paras come second to no one. He was quietly taken aside by a man in the distinctive sand-coloured beret with its coveted winged-dagger badge and told to go for SAS selection as soon as possible. He was the type of soldier they wanted.

Jerry was proud he had been approached to join the ‘Ultimate Soldiers’, but another Northern Ireland tour was on the cards, with a chance of some action, and that had to come first. At the end of 1981 he applied to go on SAS selection and was accepted. All he had to do now was wait for a slot on the first available course. To while away the time he went on a sniper course at Warminster in Wiltshire, the home of the School of Infantry, and regarded by many as the finest sniper course in the world. Some of the finest marksmen in the British Army form the instruction cadre and pass on the skills, learned over many years, of concealment, movement, marksmanship and target identification. As soon as Jerry became familiar with the L-42 bolt-action 7.62mm sniper rifle it became a part of him. Every time he squeezed the trigger the target fell or had a hole in it. He drank in everything they had to teach him, every little hint a man must absorb to be a professional sniper. He passed, of course, and returned to the battalion, now based in Tidworth, to await the next challenge: SAS selection.

But it wasn’t to be. General Galtieri saw to that by invading the Falklands.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Jerry says. ‘I had just travelled all the way from Tidworth to Cambridge, where my mum had settled, to see her for Easter when there was a news flash on TV and film showing the notice-boards at the stations saying all 3 Para personnel had to return to camp. I managed to get a lift, travelling most of the night, and when I got back the atmosphere was so unreal, so quiet. There were just a couple of guys walking about. There was no war-in-the-air feeling or any of the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome.’

As the Canberra slipped her moorings in Southampton, Jerry had a deep inner glow. He couldn’t help but feel that for once in his life he was in the right job, in the right place at the right time. As for everyone else aboard, it was his first experience of sailing to war and the dedicated, professional soldier in him didn’t like a lot of what was going on around him.

‘The routine on the ship wasn’t like anything I would have expected and there was too much bickering. Units were bickering over who was in charge and there was bickering in almost every company, platoon and section over training, over equipment and over personnel. Senior personnel in our own company picked the people they wanted and it finished up, as far as I’m concerned, a divided company. Allocated weapons were changed around. I loved the GPMG, and that was taken from me because of battalion shortages. I was really pissed off no end about that, but I did accept that as I was one of the few trained snipers in the battalion I could undertake that role. We had what I labelled senior call-signs and junior call-signs and I was one of the latter.

‘We had been briefed that our objective on landing was to be Port San Carlos. As D Company our role would be long-range patrols deep into enemy territory, observation posts and standing-listening patrols, all sending intelligence back to battalion HQ. We would report all enemy positions and movements back. But because of the earlier carve-up it was the senior call-signs who got to work closely with the SAS while the rest of us junior call-signs were left back with the battalion. By this time we had cross-decked from the Canberra to HMS Intrepid, where the SAS were based, but just before the landings the SAS lost more than twenty men when a helicopter crashed into the sea. It was the most men they had ever lost at one time.

‘Many of the men killed were to have been working with 3 Para – and some were ex-Paras – so our senior call-signs filled the gaps in our area. As we had been left back I just settled down on Intrepid to wait for the “green on”.’

I interviewed the other Argentinians for this book in January 1994, but it was in June the previous year that I had met Oscar Carrizo. I was in Buenos Aires with Dom Gray and Denzil Connick to attend a press conference set up by Argentina’s magazine Gente and the television company Channel 11., and Britain’s Today newspaper. The aim of the event was to show that, despite an ongoing Scotland Yard investigation into alleged actions by British soldiers during the Falklands campaign, Argentinian and British veterans of the war could come together in friendship.

A giant of a man, six foot four tall, Oscar was a corporal but, unlike the other Argentinian soldiers in this book, was a regular soldier. He was nervous when we first met at the conference, but soon warmed as our conversation, conducted through an interpreter, progressed and we swapped photographs of the war. I was to listen to his story for an hour, away from the cameras and the lights, in the lobby of the hotel and then over a meal.

Oscar was born on 7 May 1960 and spent his twenty-second birthday on the Falklands as his country revelled in the euphoria that followed the occupation of the Islas Malvinas, the soggy cluster of wind-lashed islands housing a collection of sheep farmers and kelpers who seemed to spend their entire lives swathed in layers of woolly sweaters, bobble hats and wellies to defy the biting winds. His country had long regarded the Falklands as part of Argentina, and Oscar, one of five children of an oil worker, was as proud as any man that the blue and white flag of Argentina was now flying over Government House in Port Stanley.

At the age of seventeen he had waved goodbye to his parents, two brothers and two sisters, and turned his back on the modest family home in Mendoza, one of his country’s southern provinces snuggled in the Andes.

‘I always wanted to be a regular soldier in the Army. I was married in 1981 and my son was born in March 1982. Everything was good. I was a father and a corporal and I was excited about going home to see my son and my wife. But as soon as the Malvinas became ours all our units had their leave stopped. So, on 13 April 1982, I travelled with my unit, the 7th Infantry Regiment, to Rio Gallegos… and then straight to the Falklands.

‘All I know is that as a regular soldier I was proud to be on the islands fighting for my country and our flag. I sent a telegram to my wife in Buenos Aires and one to my parents in Mendoza. No one back home knew I had gone until they saw the stamp of the Malvinas on the envelopes.’