LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

rings up and tells my mother there is a Para company on the Malvinas and he thinks I am there. I talk to him. I didn’t know anything about the Malvinas. I can hear my parents swearing in the background: ‘milicos de mierda’ [‘fucking military’] and for the next eighteen days the house was a place of madness with me saying I knew I was going to be sent there and my parents telling me to shut up.

      ‘My mother was angry because she had lived through the revolution in Paraguay. She knew what war was. “This is madness – they are going to kill you;” she would tell me. We were glued to the television and radio watching the communiqués. I rang my regiment and they told me no orders had been received. On the 18th, when I should have reported back, I stayed on at home for a big barbecue. Eventually I decided to go back to sort out my discharge. At the railway terminus I met some guys who had deserted. They knew that the regiment would actually be going to the Malvinas within a week. I decided to ring home and tell my family. My mother began to cry: she wanted me to desert. But I knew this was my destiny.

      ‘When I get back to the camp I meet some other guys who are also late back. A first lieutenant calls us into his office and starts to give us a serious bollocking. “You’re a bunch of deserters, bad soldiers, the country is at war etc, etc.” He rages that the officers and NCOs have already gone and I start to laugh. “Chamorro, what are you laughing at,” he screams. “You are the first to go. Go. Go now. Fuck off!”’

      And so, like many others, Germán Chamorro began his journey to destiny.

       3

      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

Скачать книгу