LITMIR.BIZ

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me, the intelligent, big-hearted hospitable man who was my enemy, and Diego, who was too young to have had to endure the craziness of those events on the Falkland Islands so long ago, which to those who were there seem like just last week or even yesterday. This man, who was once my enemy, showers me with the hospitality and respect unique to soldiers who have fought each other, who have given of their all and who now accept that the war is over and that we should be friends.

      He stubbed out the English cigarette and said: ‘Good fags, Vince.’ And the silence was broken. ‘You know, I started smoking when I was fourteen and I still can’t make my mind up whether it’s a habit or for company!’

      We laughed and his eyes swept the room. ‘I was born here, on a table in this very room at four o’clock in the afternoon on 4 May 1962, the youngest of a family of four brothers and a sister. The woman who delivered me was called the local midwife, but she wasn’t really a midwife, just a tough old woman from the neighbourhood. Unlike a lot of people my parents are true Argentinian. My mother’s father was a chief from the Guarani tribe from Corrientes, a province in the north-east of the country. When I was four or five he came to visit, to see me, his latest grandson. He had a big gaucho knife in his waistband, but he refused to sleep in the house. He slept outside because he thought the roof might fall in on his head. He was from a different culture, as were my parents, and times were different then. Hard times. But when you see what is happening in the world today it makes you wonder if things weren’t better then.

      ‘When I was five my parents split up and my mother was left with the five of us. It was hard for her, on her own having to fend for us, but we survived. You have to, don’t you? My childhood was tough, but I have no complaints. It was tough for all the other kids in this area. Under the circumstances I was happy. I wasn’t brilliant at school, but I passed through primary school and then left in the third year of secondary school. I was at school with Beto – Jorge Altieri – another veteran of the Mount Longdon battle. We knew each other because we lived in the same neighbourhood.

      ‘I got a job in a printer’s and was soon earning more money than my mother, even though she was working in three houses, looking after a couple of blind kids in one place, cleaning another and caring for an old lady in the third. My sister left home and one of my brothers got married. Another went off to the south of the country to work as a mechanic. I was able to save some money by this time. Every weekend I would go to the discos in my best clothes. I loved boots: Texan-style cowboy boots. I remember buying my first pair, the unforgettable feeling of getting something you had saved for.’

      Just before his nineteenth birthday Santiago received his summons to do national service and thus had his first experience of the chaos and confusion which reigned in the Argentinian Army at the time.

      ‘There were too many of us. I, along with four others, was surplus to requirements, so they put us on a plane and sent us to Puerto Deseado, Santa Cruz, in the south. They didn’t want us either so within seven hours we were back on a plane to La Plata to report to the 7th Regiment, which was my district regiment anyway.’

      He was sent for induction training in San Miguel del Monte and it was his tough upbringing which saw him through, particularly the ‘dancing’, or what is called ‘beasting’ in the British Army.

      ‘In San Miguel the instructors told us it would rain every day, but it didn’t and they were really disappointed that the weather held until the very last day. We learned basic soldiering, marching, saluting, fieldcraft and, of course, we had ‘dancing’ – everywhere, every time, dancing. I became good friends with a guy called Dario. We became solid mates; the sort of friendship you make in rough times.

      ‘At one time Dario was laid up for twenty-five days in a tent very ill with a swollen testicle. He couldn’t move and he wasn’t able to walk to the cookhouse for his food. I said I would take food to him. The corporal made me dance all the way every time, making me crawl; run, anything, all the time screaming in my ear: ‘Come on, you fucking faggot, take the food.’ It was exhausting, I was flat out, and they kept dancing me just because I wanted to take food to a mate.

      ‘Another day I was being danced by a corporal for no reason at all when an officer asked him why. He said it was because I had been rude. The officer asked for witnesses and the whole company backed me up. The corporal spent fifteen days under arrest. At least one of our officers had a sense of decency. He went by the book, yeah?’

      At the end of their first forty-five days of initial training. Santiago was one of a small group regarded as the best in the intake. He was rewarded with five days’ leave. So, too, was his pal Dario Gonzales, who, despite his injuries, had made the grade. Santiago was sent as a batman to a lieutenant, and Dario to a captain. For a while it was relaxing, sometimes playing chess with the officers and occasionally beating them at it.

      Santiago was intrigued to discover that almost every man in the company had the same blood group. Was that the way they decided on a military formation? He supposed it made things simpler for the medics if everybody was the same should they go to war.

      Thirty of them were selected to form a commando group within the company. Extra training followed and the days of chess with the officers were over.

      ‘We had instruction at night in all weathers. It was fucking freezing in winter. We were taught how to make and plant booby-traps, we did lots of extra shooting and had to strip and assemble weapons while blindfold. They even taught us how to stop an electric train, which was fuck-all use to us. Maybe one day I’ll go to the station and stop one!

      ‘I was still looking after my officer. He was a collector of weapons and I used to have to go to his home to clean his guns. I’ll always remember he had a beautiful original Luger. We also had to do a lot of training for a running competition which we won and they gave us medals.

      ‘One time Brigadier General Joffre, who commanded X Brigade and was also Land Forces Commander in the Malvinas, came to visit us and see something at the nearby theatre. All thirty of us were ordered to escort him and guard him. We all lost our leave to look after him. Arseholes.

      ‘On the whole, though, I had a good time. We were a good group with a good attitude and we behaved ourselves and got on with it. We got more leave than the rest and because of our behaviour I got an early discharge. I was out on 23 December, in time for Christmas, and on the way home I was the happiest man around.’

      Santiago did what many young men then liked to do as soon as they got away from the clutches of authority. He grew his hair. He was back in his old job at the printworks and happy. He had done what his country demanded of him.

      But four months later he was back in the barber’s chair on an Army base, his treasured locks on the floor, his tooled cowboy boots replaced by Army-issue ones. Santiago had been recalled and was back in the 7th Regiment. No matter what the future held, his mother, at least, would be OK. Under the law his employers were obliged to pay his wages to her while he was called up. (It was only when he returned from the war that he discovered they hadn’t sent her a solitary peso.)

      ‘We left for El Palomar for a flight to the Malvinas. The streets along the way were full of people waving and cheering. It was all very patriotic. Some guys got carried away with it all. But some other guys were thinking other things. I remember asking myself: Where the fuck are we going? What for?’

      I met Jorge Altieri on my first visit to Argentina, in June 1993, eleven years after the Falklands. I had gone there with Denzil Connick and Dominic Gray, two of my comrades from 3 Para, and Alastair McQueen of the London newspaper Today, who had covered the Falklands war for the Daily Mirror, and Ken Lennox, another Mirror veteran who was now the chief photographer on Today. The Today team was with us to cover the first meeting of veterans of the battle for Mount Longdon. That was all we had gone to do: to meet, shake hands, and talk to each other of our experiences.

      However, after meeting Jorge and another veteran, ex-Corporal Oscar Carrizo, everything changed. The meetings with these guys laid the foundation for this book. I only spoke to them for a short time through Patricia Surano and Daniel Fresco, two researchers for Argentina’s Channel 11 television network. The information from these

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