LITMIR.BIZ

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underneath him.

      Although Denzil had been both frightened and exhilarated by his baptism under fire, he began to realize that he was quietly confident about confronting the faceless terrorists who haunted his battalion’s operational area. The brief but fierce contact had concentrated his mind, and now he was ever alert to the lurking dangers, his senses honed to an incredible sharpness. In later analysis of the action he realized he had gone through everything he had been taught about reaction. He had done it automatically: weapon drills, target location and identification and returning fire. It worked and it showed that the discipline and training drilled into him since he joined the regiment was second to none. And deep in his inner self was the glow of contentment that when the crunch had come he had not failed. He had not let himself down under fire, nor had he failed his three comrades. All four of them had responded to the challenge as they had been trained.

      In south Armagh danger is ever-present. Every minute of every hour of every day a soldier is there he is in danger. Later in the tour of duty the same patrol was positioned round a landing zone for a helicopter. It was a good spot for a rendezvous and the Paras thought it had not been used for some time. They had been taught not to be predictable or to betray an observable pattern in their patrols.

      ‘We didn’t know at the time, but it had been well used. I remember the occasion well. We were all spread out in defensive positions about a hundred yards apart along a hedgerow. A bomb had been planted, but obviously we didn’t know. As the patrol radio operator I was the furthest away. Suddenly there was this huge bang and Geordie Snowdon took the force of the blast. He was barely alive, but we managed to resuscitate him. He slipped into a coma. In hospital they put him on a life-support machine. He was bad and we all knew it. He was in a coma for two weeks. His parents were at his bedside. Eventually they gave permission for the machine to be turned off and our Geordie died. He never regained consciousness.’

      The death of Geordie Snowdon hurt and angered his patrol. Long into the night, they went over the ambush again and again. They thirsted for the chance to avenge Geordie: and when it came, Sod’s Law took over.

      ‘We had a contact with an IRA sniper shooting at us from just on or just over the border – it doesn’t matter. But we got him in our sights and our GPMG [General Purpose Machine Gun] gunner was lined up on him. All the time we had been complaining about the condition of the link ammunition we had been issued for the gun. It was old and bent. We were really browned off about it and when the gunner, Ian Long, opened up, the bloody thing only fired one round. Every time we had asked for replacement ammo we had been ignored. Now we were really pissed off with everyone ourselves. Of course, as soon as this happened they gave us new ammo. A lot of good it did us then.’

      To Denzil, the authorities’ response to the question of the ammunition was a perfect example of their approach, both political and military, to dealing with the running sore that is Northern Ireland.

      ‘It’s too namby-pamby. They say we can’t be too aggressive and that we should adopt a hearts-and-minds policy. The IRA have never relented, never given an inch, never reacted to our nice behaviour and I doubt if they ever will. The Army should be allowed to patrol much more aggressively.

      ‘You never forget some of the sights I have seen. I remember another of the lads being blown up. I remember them putting what was left of him in polythene bags before they put him into a body bag. Maybe if the politicians saw this sort of sight they might change their minds. It is the soldiers on the ground who pay the price for the shiny-assed Whitehall penny-pinchers.’

      Six years on, Denzil, like many of his comrades, freely admitted he didn’t know much about the Falklands or even where they really were. ‘They sound a bit Scottish to me,’ he would say in his distinctive Welsh accent with the ever-present twinkle in his eye. You couldn’t be sure if he was being serious or not. Denzil was no thick soldier.

      The whole idea of going to war – a full-scale shooting war with normal rules, not the yellow-card-governed, kid-glove stuff of Ulster – didn’t worry him at first because he simply didn’t believe it would happen. It just seemed like yet another exercise. It had to be. After all, who ever heard of Paratroopers going to war on a luxury liner? Who ever heard of Paratroopers being seen off by hundreds of relatives with the band blasting out the regimental march, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’? Someone was taking the piss, surely?

      Paratroopers normally slip away ‘to some secluded airfield in the dead of night and drop on to the battlefield before the enemy even knows he’s left camp. But if that was what the bosses wanted, who was he, a lance-corporal, to argue?

      As the Canberra slipped her moorings and was gently coaxed out into the middle of the Solent shipping lanes by the bustling tugs for the long journey south on that Good Friday night, Denzil decided he would settle in for a little pampering and enjoy the luxuries on offer. He joined his mates in the bar assigned to the junior ranks of 3 Para. Being Denzil, he soon got to know many people, and soon re-established contact with an old schoolfriend, Greg Quigley, a Canberra crewman. And what could have been more natural than for Denzil and his old mate to reminisce about their youth over a gallon or two.

      They regaled each other and everyone else in the drinking school with their escapades, particularly about the days they bunked off school together. They would meet in the crew bar, away from the gaze of the officers and senior NCOs, where the hospitality of Greg’s fellow crewmen knew no bounds. But being there was against the military rules and out of bounds for Denzil and every other soldier on the gigantic ship. To this day Denzil doesn’t accept that he was doing anything wrong. As far as he is concerned his only ‘crime’ was in being caught.

      On the first occasion the commanding officer gave him a warning, on the second he was fined £300. He couldn’t believe such a heavy fine – a fortnight’s wages – for such a minor misdemeanour. However, he returned to 3 Para’s bar at the stem of the ship, overlooking one of the swimming pools, to sup the regulation two cans per man every evening until he received orders that the Battalion was, in fact, going to land on the islands.

      We had been sitting round Luis Leccese’s table, in his spacious and attractively furnished flat, for at least three hours, chatting and eating our way through a memorable dinner. The talk was interesting and light-hearted, relaxed and friendly. Luis was not only keen to learn about the British Paras, but was also very curious about Britain and how we live. Would he be welcome in our homes, like I was in his? That evening, his whole attitude, like that of each of the other Argentinians I met, made me rethink what so many of us in Britain have been led to believe about Luis’s fellow-countrymen. They’re not hot-headed, rude or impetuous. In short, every one of the veterans I interviewed was a perfect ambassador for his country.

      Alberto Carbone, another Mount Longdon veteran, and long-time friend of Luis, was there, too. There was lots of laughter as they poked fun at each other, the sort of banter you come across in any English pub when mates meet up for a few beers on a Saturday night.

      We studied battlefield maps and photographs together, and Luis pinpointed the position he occupied on Mount Longdon on one of the maps I had brought with me. Then, when I showed him pictures of prisoners of war and asked if he knew any of them, he almost froze with shock. His eyes filled with tears, and, pointing to the haunted face of one of the POWs, he said: ‘Me.’ There he was, sitting among a group of captured Argentinians, a sad figure of a man, only nineteen or twenty years old. Everyone was silent as he asked: ‘My God, did I really look like that?’

      There was a powerful feeling in the room – you could feel it, almost taste it – as Luis passed the picture to his wife and the memories came flooding back to all of us. Now, after twelve years, he was looking deep into a painful past. He drew long and hard on his Marlboro, exhaled the blue-grey smoke, and let the emotion of the moment ebb.

      We were in Bandfield, a twenty-minute drive from the centre of Buenos Aires with its smart boulevards, bumper-to-bumper traffic, bustling pavement cafés and non-stop wailing of ambulance sirens. It is not what you expect a South American city to be – it is more European, more Italian than Spanish.

      Like many Argentinians, Luis is from Italian stock. Both his parents are Italian, and arrived in Buenos

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