UNIFORMS.

Not even first light. The chop was making my teeth rattle as the blunt bow slammed into each wave the LCU met, and a couple of the lads were already being sick. The bergen weighed far too much, but I’d managed to snaffle a Mao suit and, much to my surprise, managed to squeeze it in. We were in the second wave, and as we had heard nothing from the shore so far it looked as if we were going to be unopposed. Thank fuck my new boots had come. Too many of the lads were still in ammo boots, but I had done more than enough on Dartmoor in mine to know exactly how bad they were.

Stewie belched beside me.

“Sorry, mate” he whispered, but it was better than the sound of those being sick.

“Fucking uncivilised time of the day to be pissing about in boats. Who’d be a pusser?”

The corporal’s voice was much louder.

“Prepare for landing!”

There was a roar from the engines, and a thump. I swayed forward into the men in front, the weight of my pack nearly taking me off my feet. Stewie hauled me back just as the coxswain shouted “Down ramp!” and we were stumbling off, a couple of splashes and then up loose crap to the tide line, the pack making my whole body swing and the SLR heavy in my hands.

The NCOs were busy, and with the rest of D-coy we were marched off onto what felt just like Dartmoor: shaggy, wet grass and bog.

“Right lads, you know the drill. Two to a hole, get digging. Threat to East and South East”

We dropped our bergens and I took the first stint while Stewie watched my back. I’d managed to find a slightly higher bit of ground, so it would hopefully stay drier, but I wasn’t holding out much of that hope. This truly was a shithole, and I hadn’t even seen it yet.

We swapped roles, and in a shorter time than I expected Stewie had a hexi boiling water while I covered us with my shelter quarter. It was drizzling now. Great.

Tea. Hot, sweet, and compo. Pity about the last, but tea is tea and warm is warm, and both were needed. There was a grey light of predawn around us, and I was picking out the rest of the positions as green berets and moustaches came into view. What a cliché the average bootneck is, said neck wider than his head and a Pancho Villa comedy ‘tache over a gob usually missing one or two teeth. Thankfully, I’d kept mine, but other Marines seemed to be a bit careless with theirs, leaving them in various places, almost all involved in selling alcohol. Stewie didn’t match that, being a bit smaller than most, and wiry, hard-edged in his build. He was grabbing a few minutes in the bottom of our slit’un, snoring quietly through his broken nose.

I looked down at him fondly. If he ever knew what I was thinking he would probably kill me, or have a bloody good try.

22 years of a lie. I had done everything I could to break down my delusions, I had made myself as much of a man as possible. At 6’4” I had started with some advantages there, but the small voice inside me still kept up its little mantra.

“You’re not a man…”

Fuck off, Melanie. I may not be a man, but you’re not real. Girls don’t have moustaches, and what I felt for Stewie was just that of a good mate and comrade in arms. No more, and it would never be more. I wouldn’t let it.

A Sea Harrier from the CAP droned overhead, and a pair of RAF GR3s went past, at a level below even our lowest positions. The Rock Apes were beavering away in a zoological mishmash to get the Rapier batteries working, and I could see off to the Sound. Ships sitting there just like a target range, and the Argies should be along shortly. I cleaned up the hole, making sure my weapon was sweet, and as I prodded Stewie awake the first A4 came up over a ridge and all hell broke loose.

It popped up for arming height, and I clearly saw the bombs leave its hardpoints to splash down next to one of the frigates. Tracer was stitching the sky, and as he broke left and hit the deck a Sea Harrier came down on him. Just as the Harrier loosed his missile a Dagger came up to try his own luck.

Fuck. No plane should be able to do that.

The Harrier jinked, and the delta-winged fighter shot straight past him and out of the Sound. as the A4 hit the shoreline in flames.

“This is your early morning wake up call, Stewie”

They came over again, and again, but thankfully we saw no hits. And so it went on. Planes and rain, bombs and ratpacks. I’d dug a latrine downslope from the line, but who the hell thought of putting bogroll in a tin? Bloody compo. We shared a fruitcake, slicing it as bread to make a jam sandwich, and finally the tail boys had sorted out some bivvies and we could rotate out of line. We’d had no sign of the enemy ground forces, but their pilots were definitely busy, and they had balls.

And they succeeded at last. We saw the planes come in on the Antelope, low and fast. I heard later that two bombs hit, but all I saw was the explosion of one of the aircraft. Later she was towed to more sheltered wasters, and two days later she blew up in a spectacular fireball. Thankfully, they had almost everyone off, but the bomb disposal lads went with her.

This really was a shithole, was it worth any of their deaths?

The next day we got the news about the ship bringing the heavy-lift helicopters, sunk by missile strike.

It was going to be a long, long walk.