Eye of the Storm (28 page)

With the land force safely ashore and plans well advanced for the operations that would defeat the Argentinians, headshed meetings aboard
Intrepid
sought more work and more targets for the SAS. The G Squadron OPs ashore – some of which had been in place for three weeks – were keeping a sharp eye on enemy strengths and movements, and soon reported that despite the fact that the Argentinians had invaded the islands some six weeks earlier, they had failed to occupy some of the high ground that guarded the landward approaches to Port Stanley. As a result, D Squadron was tasked to go to Mount Kent, set up an OP there and then secure the ground for the arrival of the Royal Marines and the artillery, whose gun position was to be established below the mountain.

On 25 May the squadron commander took three men and set up the OP on Mount Kent, to reconnoitre the area before the rest of the squadron arrived. Mount Kent, with Mount Challenger to the south, is the most westerly of the mountains on the direct route from the beachhead to Port Stanley. Beyond it lies Two Sisters and then Mount Tumbledown, after which the ground slopes down to the capital some five kilometres to the east.

The squadron was to rendezvous with the OC on 26 May. In the event, however, the Sea King helicopter pick-up was cancelled that night because one of the British invasion force’s main ammunition dumps had taken a direct hit from an Argentinian bomb and every helicopter was needed to ferry the injured to the field hospital at Ajax Bay, near San Carlos. Incredibly, somebody with more braid on his cap than brains in his head had sited the ammo dump right alongside the main hospital. A lot of damage was done by the Argentinian Air Force that night – there were explosions and huge fires, but by the grace of God none of the hospital patients was injured by the bombing. However, the patients all had to be ferried to other hospitals, together with the burns cases among those who had been caught in the fires when the dump went up.

There were some tremendously good and dedicated medics in the Falklands campaign. Of those injured in the ammo-dump blast, the surgeons did not lose a single man. It is a fact that during the war not one injured man, British or Argentinian, taken to a field hospital died there. No matter how horrific the injuries, the navy and army surgeons did not fail. In their treatment of trauma and gunshot wounds, and many other types of injury besides, they proved themselves to be simply the best.

Eventually, the squadron and all the equipment we needed to rendezvous with the OC and secure Mount Kent was reassembled to be lifted in by four Sea King helicopters the following night. We took off and flew low towards the landing site. As we neared the area, the lead pilot began to look out for the signal to land we had previously agreed. Whether he thought he’d seen the signal, or simply calculated that he had reached the correct location, he landed and the other three choppers followed suit. We all got out and unloaded the gear, whereupon the Sea Kings lifted off and disappeared into the night.

Watching your transport depart always leaves a lonely feeling, but what made matters worse was the fact that there was nobody there to meet us. We had been dropped in the middle of bloody nowhere, though God alone knew where. We had not the least idea where we were, and whatever the lead pilot might have thought he had seen, it quite certainly wasn’t the signal we had agreed earlier.

Almost the entire squadron was there on the ground, completely lost. The night was getting more and more misty and we could not see a thing. Wondering where the hell we were, we sent people out to different compass points to try to get a fix while I stayed on the 320 radio, desperately trying to establish Morse-code communications with the ship.

The four compass-point parties returned just as I eventually established contact. We had a meeting to decide where we were, and the men we’d sent out said that they thought – only thought, they didn’t actually know – that we were in an area which on the map was marked ‘Obscured by cloud’. This made it sound more like somewhere on a reservation for North American Indians, but the description on the map was certainly accurate, for it was extremely cloudy. It was also marshy and wet underfoot, and we didn’t know where any Argentinian positions might be.

I got through to
Intrepid
again and told them where we were, or at least where we thought we were. About four miserable, damp hours later the helicopters came back to collect us. It turned out that we were miles away from Mount Kent, and about twenty kilometres from where we should have been dropped off. The Sea Kings ferried us back to the ship, and twenty-four hours later, on the night of 28 May, we were flown to an area east of Mount Kent, to the spot where we should have been landed in the first place. The lead pilot received a severe reprimand for that cock-up, although no one ever found out why we landed where we did.

This was the day on which 2 Para won their astonishing victory at Darwin and Goose Green, after a long night-and-day battle against a much larger Argentinian force. The news, when we learned it, heartened us, although we’d never really doubted the outcome. Now there we were, finally, at the base of Mount Kent, with each troop occupying a different position round the foot of the mountain. We had no intelligence as to how many Argentinians there were in the area, and it didn’t really matter. Our job was to clear the mountain, and that was what we would do.

We moved up to the summit in troop formation, clearing the ground as we went. When we reached the top it was obvious that the enemy had been there in some strength. They had established five positions, but for some reason had abandoned them and cleared off, leaving masses of equipment behind. There were ruck-sacks, belt packs, rations and other equipment, although they had taken their weapons and ammunition. We couldn’t understand it, because their positions had occupied the most westerly high ground overlooking the plain along which our forces would have to advance.

We were reasonably certain that the four-man OP established earlier had not been compromised, so the enemy’s flight was a mystery. It is possible that they had seen the Sea King helicopters ferrying in the artillery to a position west of Mount Kent, and had assumed that there was a large British force waiting to attack. Since they were probably only young conscripts, they almost certainly decided to bug out while they still had the chance.

While we were on the summit, discussing the situation and trying to spot the Argentinian positions on Two Sisters, five kilometres to the east, we watched a Sea King with a 105mm field gun slung beneath it fly right past us. It was heading towards Two Sisters, the pilot mistakenly believing it to be Mount Kent.

Someone got on the radio and tried frantically to contact the pilot, but he flew steadily on until, suddenly, the Argentinians on Two Sisters saw the Sea King coming their way and opened fire. There were tracer rounds flying all over the place, which soon began to converge on the aircraft. Realizing that the fire was aimed at him, the pilot put his machine into a steep bank and headed back in our direction.

Amazingly, he got away with it. To manoeuvre in mid-air like that, with a heavy field gun slung underneath while dodging incoming machine-gun fire, was magnificent flying. He must have been a brilliant pilot to have dodged all that fire, but he managed it – minutes later we watched him land his cargo safely beneath us at the foot of Mount Kent. It was damned near miraculous.

Mount Kent was secure. The artillery was coming in and the Marines would soon be moving up, for on the following night K Company of 42 Commando was to be ferried to the landing site in the Task Force’s sole remaining Chinook twin-rotor transport helicopter (five other Chinooks had been lost when the container ship
Atlantic Conveyor
was sunk by an Exocet on 25 May). The rest of the commando was marching from the beachhead to join up with K Company, which they did on 4 June. It was time for us to move on.

Mountain Troop had been allocated a location to the south of Mount Kent, but because of the scant amount of ground cover the area wasn’t large enough to accommodate the whole troop. As a result, John Hamilton, the troop commander, took three men and I the remaining three. We then split up and found our own separate hiding places.

We lay up all day and into the night. Away on our flank we heard gunfire as Air Troop made contact with an Argentinian patrol. Then we suddenly heard our troop commander scream, ‘Contact!’ I wondered what was happening, because there had been no sound of firing from his position. We grabbed our belt kits and weapons and ran down the mountainside to meet him. We found him running towards the landing site where the helicopters had come in.

We carry a type of night scope known as PNGs, which stands for passive night-vision goggles. They are pretty good, although they require considerable experience in order to make sense of the green tinted, two-dimensional image you get through them. The troop commander now put them to his eyes, and immediately exclaimed, ‘Fucking hell! … There’s hundreds of them! Look at them.’ I grabbed the goggles from him and put them to my eyes, only to find that I couldn’t see anything. So I passed them to ‘Bugsy’, a member of the troop who was very short-sighted as well as extremely deaf.

Bugsy was a decent guy, with a tremendous sense of humour, and he was extremely popular in the squadron. Everyone was fond of him, and I personally liked having him in my patrol; with Bugsy around life was never dull. He put the goggles to his eyes, scanned the darkness and said he couldn’t see anything either. Given his eyesight, this was hardly surprising, but it was too much for the Boss, who grabbed Bugsy and shouted at him, ‘Are you blind, man? Are you blind? There’s hundreds of them. Look at them!’

As it turned out, however, the Boss’s hundreds of Argentinians proved to be just rocks sticking out of the ground. Yet he had thought they were enemy troops coming forward, because at the time, Air Troop had just made contact with the enemy patrol. Alerted by the noise, he had run down to the landing site, scanning the ground through the PNGs as he ran.

Anyway, after having a few words with the troop commander, we had a good laugh and went back to our location. He was a fine officer, and had simply become confused and disoriented for a few minutes. As we all knew, it can happen very easily when you have been crouched, motionless, under a rock pile for hours.

The next morning, Sunday, 30 May, we climbed on to the ridge overlooking open ground to the south of Mount Kent. We could see for miles, and almost at once spotted a four-man Argentinian patrol working its way towards us. I was leading our own four-man group, and signalled that we should crawl forward to our OP among the rocks and wait for the enemy to approach. None of us said a word. All communication between us was by hand signals. Apart from the buffeting of the wind, there was complete silence.

Through my binoculars, I watched as the Argentinians came steadily towards us. Wearing green uniforms and carrying packs on their backs, they were walking in single file at normal patrol speed, holding their weapons at the ready. When they were 100 metres away we opened fire with our M16 rifles, a far better weapon than the heavy and cumbersome 7.62mm SLR with which the rest of the British forces were armed. They immediately took cover behind a big boulder, although we knew we had hit two for certain, because we saw them go down and we could hear screaming. Somebody was in a lot of pain.

Moments later, a little bit of white cloth fluttered out from behind the boulder. I moved forward, followed by Johnny, an Irishman. We saw that we had in fact shot three of the enemy, though fortunately they were not badly wounded. They had caught the rounds in their arms, and one had also been hit in the leg. I say ‘fortunately’, because I had not wanted to kill them. They were just young conscripts, and they probably hadn’t even wanted to be there. Only eighteen or nineteen years old, they had been drafted into the Argentinian Special Forces and dispatched to these barren islands hundreds of miles from home. Apart from being hurt, they were terrified. We gave them some chocolate and, in my basic Spanish, I asked them where their radio was. They said they didn’t have one. Special Forces without a radio? I could hardly credit it, but it was true. Some Argentinian officer with a warped sense of humour had obviously led them to believe that they were Special Forces, and that belief was about as near as they had come to being the highly trained, self-sufficient troops the term implies.

We searched their packs and found that they were carrying brand-new equipment which included US-made PNGs. Their kit must have been bought from the Americans just prior to their deployment, since most of it was unused. They had little in the way of rations, however, although each of them had two or three miniature bottles of whisky in his pack. It was a brand I’d never heard of called ‘Double Breeder’, and on its label was a picture of two cows. We passed it round and everyone, including the prisoners, had a swig. It tasted fine, despite its weird name.

The young enemy soldiers, once they’d recovered from the shock of being fired on from ambush, wounded – most of them – and captured, told me they were on a reconnaissance mission aimed at gathering information about British dispositions. They didn’t seem to have gathered much, however, because they didn’t know that the area was now thick with British troops. Apparently they were on their way back to Port Stanley, having made their reconnaissance. ‘Do you realize,’ I said, ‘That between here on Mount Kent and Port Stanley there are masses of British troops?’ They shook their heads in despair, having been totally unaware that they were cut off.

Since one of the wounded Argentinians couldn’t walk we carried him on a stretcher back to the base of Mount Kent and radioed for a carry-back procedure to get medical attention for him and the two walking wounded.

Soon after that I had my first introduction to Max Hastings, who had come out to the Falklands as a war correspondent for the London
Evening Standard
. He had flown forward to Mount Kent in the Chinook with K Company of 42 Commando; the CO of 22 SAS, Mike Rose, had also flown in on the same helicopter, as had the CO of 42 Commando. Wherever Mike Rose went, Max Hastings seemed to follow, and it appeared likely that the journalist was getting good information from the CO. A day or so after we had ambushed the Argentinian patrol I was standing by the CO’s two-man command tent at the foot of Mount Kent. Mike Rose had satellite-communications equipment that allowed him direct access to high command in the UK, and I listened in astonishment as Max Hastings spoke directly to his newspaper office in London, using the satellite link with the CO’s blessing. He was dictating his story. When he had finished, I heard him say, ‘And can you ring my wife and tell her I’m OK?’