Eye of the Storm (29 page)

I thought admiringly, You clever bastard! There were we ordinary soldiers, with no decent communications, and here’s a reporter using our equipment and, what was more, giving his story to his newspaper. The radios used by the troops on the ground in the Falklands were often unreliable or insecure in that the enemy could listen in to them. The CO’s satlink, however, allowed him instant and secure access to the people running the war back at Northwood, without his having to go through his senior officers in the Task Force. While this was a good thing for us, it undoubtedly got a good few backs up among some of the officers of the infantry and Royal Marines, as well as among the senior commanders with the Task Force.

D Squadron stayed on and around Mount Kent for a further two or three days, and by that stage the campaign had begun to move fast as preparations went ahead for the final assaults towards Port Stanley. Our task there was finished, and we deployed back to HMS
Intrepid
. The wounded Argentinian soldiers and their unwounded comrade were airlifted out from the base camp and I never saw them again. Their injuries weren’t that bad, and no doubt they were repatriated glad to be alive.

Chapter Thirteen

O
NCE
back on board
Intrepid
, I was tasked with a new mission. I was to establish an OP at Fox Bay on the east coast of West Falkland, and Captain Hamilton was to establish a similar position near the settlement at Port Howard, some twenty kilometres to the north-east on the same coast.

One of my patrol had developed conjunctivitis, and although he pleaded to be allowed to come with me, I wasn’t prepared to take him. I told him the state of his eyes made him a liability and that I might have to casevac him out, leaving us a man short. I then went to see the OC to tell that I needed a replacement. Major Delves told me to take my pick from the squadron, and I chose a big Northern Irish lad called, to no one’s surprise, Patrick. He looked rather like the comic-book character Desperate Dan, but he was an excellent soldier in the field. I took him for that reason, and also because I reckoned he’d be good to have around if there was any bother with the Argentinians, since he was extremely tough. The other two members of my patrol were Bugsy and the radio operator, Dash.

Weighed down with weapons, ammunition, bergens, radios, night-vision equipment and rations for the seven-day mission, both four-man teams went in on the same Sea King on the night of 5 June. My patrol was dropped off at Two Bussoms, about twelve kilometres from our target. Then the chopper ferried Captain Hamilton and his three men to a landing site some distance from their location.

We had been issued with a report on our area of operations compiled by a patrol from G Squadron, which had had a team at Fox Bay. When we arrived, however, we found that the report bore no resemblance to the terrain ahead of us. Something was very wrong. This is not to say that the G Squadron patrol had not been there, merely that the report did not fit the ground – in any way.

Carrying 90-pound packs, the four of us moved out. The ground was almost flat, and so barren that we were completely exposed. Yet the report I’d read had said that there was plenty of cover. It was a cloudy night, so at least the darkness concealed us, even though it made movement difficult. After walking for some hours we crossed a grassed strip, and I suddenly realized that we were on an airfield. We had walked right on to the airstrip at Fox Bay, then in Argentinian hands. We looked at our watches. They showed 0930 hours Zulu time. First light was due at 1130, which meant that we had only two hours in which to find somewhere to lie up where the enemy couldn’t see us.

Moving away from the airstrip we found a shallow, waterlogged hollow thick with reeds. It was wet, but we put down our ponchos and I said, ‘Right lads, it isn’t the Hilton but, with a bit of luck they won’t spot us.’ Settling down in the wet, we lay flat and went into our ‘hard routine’, which meant no movement, no smoking, no cooking, and no hot drinks. We just lay there, almost motionless, and waited. If we wanted a piss, we rolled on our sides, very, very slowly, and hoped the hint of steam wouldn’t give our position away to some Argentinian patrol we had failed to see or hear approaching.

It was miserably uncomfortable, but we’d had plenty of practice at being uncomfortable. We lay there, very still, until last light, then moved out. We were very stiff and cold, but we had to find a place where we could dig in, so that we could watch the enemy positions without being compromised. Eventually, just as the darkness closed in, we found a sloping bank – it must have been the only sloping bank for miles – and we began to dig a two-man trench. A half moon came up and we dug like demented badgers all through that Sunday night, camouflaging the OP with nets and tufts of grass. I went into the trench with Patrick, and Bugsy and Dash, with the radio, hid themselves in a natural dip in the ground in front of our position.

When dawn broke next morning we realized that the Argentinians were only about two hundred metres away. We were right on the edge of the forward line of their defensive position. And the beauty of it was that they had no idea that we were there. I thought, Hell, a few more feet and we’d have been sharing their trenches. I was surprised, too, that they hadn’t seen or heard us digging, although we had been pretty quiet about it. Presumably they were too busy getting their heads down to notice us, and no doubt it never crossed their minds that there were any British soldiers within thirty kilometres of them.

From the OP we had a clear view of Fox Bay. The area was bristling with enemy soldiers and their gear. They were at least a battalion strong – perhaps as many as 1,000 men – supported by artillery pieces and plenty of vehicles. There was also a lot of movement among the troops and their supporting arms. They were in defensive positions, holding Fox Bay for whatever reason they thought it was of value, and had taken over the islanders’ settlement. This was the size of a small village, and the Argentinians had requisitioned the houses for accommodation and cooking. They had also dug long trenches for the infantry, and had positioned three 105mm field guns as part of the defences.

The enemy sent out foot patrols throughout the day, and one morning we spotted one heading straight for our positions. We kept our heads down – and then one of them suddenly fired a round. Alarmed, we couldn’t work out what they were doing, for they clearly weren’t firing at us. Then there were a few more shots, and we realized that they were shooting sheep for the larder. We watched as they carried the carcasses back to their cookhouse.

They didn’t know that we were within spitting distance of their lines, and that we were radioing their positions and strength, as well as details of their equipment and movements, back to
Intrepid
. Indeed, they could hardly use the latrines without our knowing about it. Mind you, not having latrines ourselves, we had problems of our own. All we could do was roll quietly into position, crap, and then just roll away from it and live with the smell.

One night we received a radio message telling us that the enemy had surveillance equipment that could pinpoint our position by picking up and monitoring our movements. If that happened, things were going to get very interesting for us at Fox Bay. Nevertheless, we stayed in our location until Thursday night – five days in all without the enemy having discovered that we were there – and then I decided that we were overplaying our hand, taking unnecessary risks by remaining. The longer we stayed the greater the odds that we should be compromised. It could only be a matter of time before our presence was discovered by an Argentinian patrol. Since we had radioed back all the useful information that we could gather from our OP, I reckoned it was time to move out.

We left, as we had come, like thieves in the night, and walked back westwards about eight kilometres until we found a small area that was slightly higher than the surrounding land. It wasn’t big enough to accommodate the four of us in one location so we split two and two in the same formation as before – I remained with Patrick, while Dash and Bugsy took the other OP fifty metres or so away. Each night I crept forward to speak with them, listening to their reports of enemy movements, telling Dash what to send on the radio and reading any messages that had come in for me. We were carrying a Swift Scope, a powerful telescopic single-lens monocular. Through it, though we were now a fair distance away, we could still see almost every movement the enemy at Fox Bay made.

It was during this time that we heard over the radio that John Hamilton, the troop commander, had been killed at Port Howard, where he had been doing the same sort of job as ourselves. He had taken three men to establish an OP near the settlement, where there was another substantial Argentinian garrison, and report back any information they could gather. Because of the nature of the ground, they could not establish a position large enough to accommodate them all, and so, like us, they opted for the two-man split. Unlike us, however, instead of remaining in their positions, they rotated each two-man team at night to give people a break.

It was while they were in the OP that John Hamilton and a trooper named Ron were compromised by an Argentinian patrol consisting of approximately twenty men. Realizing they’d been spotted, and despite being outnumbered, they made a break for it to give the two men in the other location a chance. But in this heroic attempt to draw the enemy’s attention from their friends, John Hamilton was shot and wounded. They continued to fire back, until the troop commander told Ron to make a dash for it. Hamilton was shot again and killed, and Ron was eventually captured when he ran out of ammunition. He was taken back to Port Howard, where he was stripped and questioned. Quite what the Argentinians made of him isn’t known, but he was apparently well looked after, and was repatriated soon after the Argentinian surrender. Eventually, he joined us aboard the RFA landing ship
Sir Lancelot
. He was the only British soldier to be captured during the war after the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands and South Georgia. The other members of the Port Howard patrol managed to get away. John Hamilton was awarded a posthumous Military Cross.

Meanwhile, away to the south-west, the cold was getting to us. It was particularly bad for Dash, the radio operator. He had to encode the messages and then tap them out in Morse. This is a tricky enough task when your fingers are warm, but when they are freezing it becomes extremely difficult, and on several occasions I took over from Dash. You have to rub your fingers together inside your gloves to stop them from freezing, but the real worry is that if you make a mistake while decoding, you have to start all over again. Encoding and transmitting messages is also very time consuming, and more so when you’re freezing. If a message became garbled in transmission, we had to spend hours trying to get it right.

By Saturday, 12 June, our seven-day mission was up and we received a message which read, ‘Stay in your location. Helicopter arrival to be advised soon.’ We waited and waited, listening out for the flap-flap sound of the Sea King coming for us. I liked their idea of ‘soon’. We lay there for another five days, by which time the rations we’d brought to last us for seven days were all but exhausted.

We were down to eating the stuff in our belt-kit emergency packs – a bar of chocolate, powdered soup and tea bags – which was supposed to be enough to last for a couple of days. These and the leftovers from our original rations – boiled sweets, apple flakes and foul-tasting packet soup – had to last us five days. Patrick and I had almost come to blows over the apple flakes even before we ran out of rations. He had wanted to put them in rice pudding, but I objected because I can’t stand the horrible things. And since I was the boss, that ought to have been that – end of argument.

Actually, I bribed him not to put the apple flakes into the rice pudding. It happened to be his birthday, and I just happened to be carrying a hip flask full of rum. So I gave him a tot for his birthday, which not only made him happy, but at the same time resolved the problem over the apple flakes.

We received good news over the radio, when we were informed on 14 June that the Argentinian forces on East Falklands had surrendered that day, just before the final British assault on Port Stanley. Nevertheless, we were ordered to stay in position and to continue observing the enemy, since at the time it was not known what the Argentinian forces on West Falkland would do, and there was a chance that they might determine to go on fighting.

By 16 June our seven-day stint had stretched to twelve days, and the helicopter still hadn’t arrived. That day, however, we received a radio signal that we would be picked up at 1200 hours the following day at the landing site designated in our orders. Since it was only about a kilometre away we didn’t leave our location until 1100, arriving at 1145. Then we sat on our bergens, awaiting pick-up. Noon came and went, but still no helicopter, and by 1300 hours we were freezing. The wind-chill factor meant the temperature was around minus 10 degrees Celsius, so I told the others to get out their sleeping bags and wrap themselves up against the wind. We were chilled to the bone, and our hands felt cold enough to drop off. Much more exposure to that icy wind and we might easily have had frostnip problems.