CHAPTER 4
I knew it was going to be a long walk as soon as I heard about the Conveyor. We had helicopters, but nowhere near enough to move all of us, and we were the poor sods sent out on Shanks’s.

A tab all the way across the top of the island, all bog and tussock-grass. Two of the lads had already been medevacced with trench foot, and I was more than happy with my non-standard boots. I was less happy with the bergen I had got from the outdoor shop. It was more comfortable to carry than the issue kit, it had two fuck-off big pockets that clipped onto the sides, but the real drawback was its capacity.

It was considerably larger than the issue, and that was the problem. Space is not the final frontier, it’s the final temptation, and I had all sorts of extra rubbish in there that I wouldn’t have been able to fit in otherwise. So it was heavy.

Thank the great big beardy bloke in the sky I wasn’t on a jimpy crew, though the NCOs had made damned sure we were all carrying some belted ammo for them.

The bulk of the Commando were half a day ahead of us, so we had to do some serious cadging to get a lift in one of the Scout helicopters that were buzzing around. We caught up with them a bloody sight quicker than we would have done on foot, and I pissed myself laughing when Stewie jumped out of the chopper and went straight down, up to his knees in clag.

Down, up, that was the order of the day. Not just the little rises, but the plunge of your leg into some wet hole full of rancid brown shit that forced its way past your gaiters and into the top of your boot to trickle down inside like some horrible damp maggot that then squelched with each step as your sopping socks oozed up between your toes.

It was raining, of course.

Part of the route was along a Landrover track, the North Camp Road, but you are being bloody stupid if you march in column when the enemy has ground attack aircraft like Pucaras available. A very good way of using up lives, that one, so we were in extended order. I knew the Hereford boys had taken a lot out on Pebble Island, but they were still flying out of Stanley, and they were vicious little sods, slow enough to loiter and pick their aim, and carrying far too many teeth. We had a Blowpipe section with us, but I held the eminently sensible view that as long as they had nothing to shoot at there would be nothing shooting at me.

I was suffering more than most in the soft going, being one of the biggest lads in the company, but it was odd. The more I walked across it, the more I started to appreciate the beauty of the place. I mean, there was the constant thump of distant shellfire, and it was pissing down with rain, but the grass and odd rock outcrops reminded me of Dartmoor, or of the ranges up around Otterburn, and I wondered if there would be the same subtle changes in colour and shade under a day of sun and cloud.

That was assuming the rain ever stopped, of course.

That is how you cope with a long tab, even when completely chinstrapped, exhausted by the grinding drag of bog and tussock and the pain as your soaked feet start to soften in the constant wetness. You move off into a sort of transcendental state where small things fascinate you, and you solve all your life’s problems in your head, only to forget how once you stop. You pick a small feature, an odd rock, a patch of shorter grass, and make that your target. Just a few more steps….then pick another.

Jet noise, and a Dagger flashed into sight from behind a hillock, and another, too quick for the Blowpipe, but their mates would be along in a second. Sure enough a section of Skyhawks popped up and the missile was off, flares burning on the tail and jinking all over the sky as the operator tried to hold it steady on target.

No luck, it impacted on a hillside as the Skyhawks vanished. The Rupert called in their passage and the NCOs started to call out, reminding us all that if we had seen the jets, they might well have seen us, even in this crap weather. Which was actually clearing. Arse. If the weather really cleared they’d be up in their vicious little twin-props and looking to give us a right beasting.

We were moving parallel to the sea now, and when I looked at the maps after it was over I realised what it was all about The Argies had their main strongpoint in the capital, Stanley, and we were squeezing its neck.

“Capital”. Makes you think of capital cities, not places no bigger than a Geordie pit village and less salubrious than Pennycomequick, but that is what Stanley was and that was our objective.

When you are on the ground, you often don’t see any picture at all, never mind the so-called “bigger” one, but sometimes it just shouts at you. Tactics follow terrain, unless your CO is either barking mad or a genius, and it was clear to me that we were going to be doing a lot more uphill attacks. There were a number of hills surrounding Port Stanley and it was clear that the enemy would have occupied the upper slopes of all of them.

It was indeed going to be another series of uphill bloody fights. I was drifting away, as we neared Teal, walking on autopilot, and Stewie as ever was on my case. He started talking about odds and sods, anything at all away from the wind and rain.

“You been giving that Emma one?”

Straight to the point

“Nice legs, but too tall for me”

“Yeah, but being such a shortarse you could shag her and still have a faceful of tit, I have to reach down”

“So you have, then”

“Go on, you would yourself if you got half a chance”

“Nah, I prefer her mate, whatsername. She’s got a proper arse to her, and you know what they say: the bigger the cushion…”

“The harder the pushin’! You mean Shelley, yeah? The fat little blonde one with the enormous personalities?”

“That’s the one!”

And with a burst of pure sexist adrenalin we were at Teal, and digging in. Stewie always let me pick a site for our hole, as he claimed I picked drier ones, but I think that was so I would do the first bit of digging, and he could hope that he had less than me to do when it came to his turn. Once again, we were soon brewing up under the poncho and I got my boots off. Going through the ritual of drying and powdering my feet, before slipping on dry socks, I reflected on our little rant.

I missed Emma, and I was beginning to realise why. It wasn’t just the sex; it was the warmth and the waking up together, the company, the sharing.

But, then again, it WAS the sex, in a way. LV was ecstatic at times, for Emma had a really deep fixation on oral sex. Sorry to be blunt, but she did, from me and to me, and she had taken to reaching up and teasing my nipples as her mouth did its work. It is probably difficult for someone outside my head to really understand this, but lying on my back while she did that, Melanie could feel she was being made love to as a woman. Even though the sensations were mostly coming from that ugly part of me, the position, her slow pace, the way I saw the top of her head and the caresses I could give back, it was all feminine. I say things like that, and realise I must be insane. I mean, I’d read Morris’ book, and as a kid the Daily Mirror had carried a whole series about April Ashley, but most of what I had read concerned dressing up.

You wanted to feel like a woman, they said, you dressed like one and “got a man in”

I couldn’t think of anything more revolting. But, there I was, having sex as heterosexual as conceivable, and yet I felt female. You should realise by now exactly how totally screwed up I was. And, of course, I fully understood that if I had been a woman, Emma would have had no interest in me at all.

Catch bloody 22.

I suppose that was the moment I decided that I really did need to speak to a psychiatrist, to find out exactly what I was, before I disappeared in a little internal explosion. Stewie prodded me with a cuppa, and I was dragged back to here and now and away from soft, warm woman. So, I could see a trick cyclist once we were back, assuming we did get back, but for now just keeping dry was tops.

We heard that there had been some dust ups between our Mountain and Arctic boys, or “Snow and Rock” as Stewie called them, and the Argies a little to the East. The Hereford lot were in there too. The SAS were doing their best to live up to their reputation, if not extend it, and I pitied the young enemy soldiers right up to the point I found out they were their own “special forces”, whose speciality I had heard was doping young Argentine protestors, putting them into helicopters and dropping them into the sea miles from shore.

They deserved the SAS.

And so it went on. We were well out of some fights, particularly the disaster caused by some stupid Guards Rupert at Bluff Cove. It seemed he had been given a direct order by one of our skippers to get his troops ashore, and fuck knows why, perhaps he liked a warm bunk, he kept them aboard and the planes came, and 48 Taffies died and another 115 were burnt to shit.

We went in twice more before the last hill was ours, and it was at night, as usual, and I really don’t want to dwell on the events. I’ve given you enough of an idea of what went on, I’m not here to write war porn. Just a few…

I can’t call them highlights. That is not a word I could ever use. I pissed myself twice, and yes, I did add more faces to that of the lad I stuck over by Darwin. But one moment, one moment.

We were assaulting yet another machine gun in yet another trench, yet another uphill rush in the darkness and our terror, as those short, sharp whistles of rounds almost too close told on us and my breath was going slower than my heart, but only just.

He was a real pro, their gunner, his bursts short, sharp and too well aimed. As we fired and moved, fired and moved, Legs was almost cut in half just as I managed to drop into the trench and bring my weapon to bear on the Argentine.

The cocky bastard just grinned and raised his hands as if it was all a fucking game, as half of my mate lay splashed all over the fucking grass, and he thought he could just keep killing us till we were eye to eye and he could fucking give up and fucking smile and Stewie came over the parapet and just stuck him six or seven fucking times and I stuck him and he stopped fucking smiling because he was fucking dead just like Legs

And I had to stop and cry my anger and shame, and Stewie just held me again until we could both become Marines, and start thinking again.

And finally, it was over, and they were running back off the hills into Stanley, and they surrendered, and were marched out before they could be shipped back to their own stupid little country.

It wasn’t as quick as that, in reality, but we were so wiped out it all started blurring into one. And then the bloody Paras beat the Juliets to Moody Brook and took the kudos.

We went in with the other lads, at the first opportunity, to find a pub, and we did, and there was the Juliet from Darwin. We toasted the Corps, and dead mates, and live ones.

“You know something?” said the Juliet. “Those lying dago bastards said they hit Moody Brook with nothing more than tear gas. Went around to collect some gear, and they trashed it. Heavy machine guns, white phosphorus marks, the lying fuckers wanted us dead”

Stewie grinned. “Good job you were off shagging that sheep then, isn’t it? Cheers!”

*Shanks's pony: on foot