LITMIR.BIZ

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left Patricia a list of questions and she tracked down four more veterans and sent me their answers and a taste of their experiences. The more Patricia dug, the more enthralled I became and it was on her research that I based the original synopsis for this book.

      Six months later I was on the streets of Lanus, just outside Buenos Aires, with Diego at the height of the rush hour to meet Jorge, this time away from the cameras and the reporters with their prying questions. He had worked tirelessly contacting other veterans of Longdon, and now he greeted me like a long-lost friend and led us through a maze of backstreets to his home for a meal with his wife and parents.

      In many ways Jorge’s home is a shrine, a living memorial to his days as a soldier. The blue and white flag of Argentina stands proudly against a wall. There are certificates, souvenirs and replica weapons hanging on the walls. Grapevines form a canopy over the table in the backyard.

      After the meal the others watched and listened quietly as Jorge and I pored over photographs and maps of Mount Longdon, pinpointing our respective positions on that fateful day in June 1982. Jorge’s polite manner to me, his former enemy, put me at ease and we both relaxed completely as the evening wore on. From time to time he would smile warmly at me across the table and as he told me his life story in his soft voice I couldn’t help thinking of this man as a friend. At the same time I felt great sympathy for him because his account of the war itself reminded me of the stories of some of my own comrades.

      The son of an Italian immigrant mother, Jorge told me: ‘These streets round here, these streets of the Monte Chingolo Estate, are my streets. These are the streets where I grew up, where I played. My mother was married before, to a policeman who was killed in the line of duty. When she marred my father she had two sons, my brothers. I have good, loving parents and brothers.

      ‘Like thousands of other kids from this area I went through primary school, but dropped out of secondary school after my first year. I just wasn’t interested. I did a short course at technical school studying radio and TV. My real love in life was martial arts. I discovered the joys of the techniques when I was fifteen or sixteen. My brother, Miguel, and I went to see all the Bruce Lee films. They just fascinated me. I was in a club, the Bandfield Club, and practised judo three times a week for two hours. Lots of other kids came to try it out, but they gave up. I stuck with it and then Chan Do Kwan, another martial art, which I did on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. In the end I was in the gym training six days a week. I won a judo competition at the Universidad de Belgrano. I was a blue belt at Chan Do Kwan and orange-belt standard at judo as well as being secretary of the judo club. I loved it. I was about to start a job as an instructor in self-defence for the police in our area, but then my number was called and I had to go to do my duty as a conscript.

      ‘I could have got out of it because I was born with a nasal problem and I could have proved to them that it had left me with a breathing difficulty, but I wanted to go in. I even fancied my chances of becoming a regular and maybe even ending up a corporal or sergeant.

      ‘I remember we all gathered to be taken to the 7th Regiment camp, expecting to go on trucks, but they made us walk. And when we got there they told us: “You’re conscript soldiers. You left your balls outside. Inside, we command everything, so don’t play the cock here.’

      ‘They gave us all green fatigues and our civvies went into a locker. I knew not to take good clothes – I went in old ones. If you take your best clothes they get nicked. Then they divided us up by height and sent us to different companies. I was sent to B Company.

      ‘My name, Altieri, caused me problems straight away. A corporal called Rios thought I was a relative of General Galtieri. He just wouldn’t have it that my name was different. So because of my name I got my first dancing lesson.

      ‘I was issued with a FAL 7.62mm rifle. Other guys were given FAPs – light machine-guns – and others got PAMs [sub-machine guns]. The main emphasis in shooting practice was making every bullet count. I was also shown how to use a bazooka, how to make and lay booby-traps, and how to navigate at night, and we went on helicopter drills, night and day attacks and ambushes. Although we got the basics of soldiering, we still spent most of the time ‘dancing’. B Company was known as the ‘dancing company’ by everyone else in the regiment.

      ‘At six o’clock every morning we would parade in front of the national flag, salute it, do close order saluting of each other, get danced everywhere, dig ‘foxholes’ or field latrines just to fill in the time. We were never given any proper tests and even on the shooting ranges we had different weapons each time so we never had a weapon we could zero properly and call it a personal weapon. It seemed a continuous punishment of running, crawling, digging and guard duty – and dancing.

      ‘Even after our forty-five days’ initial training in San Miguel del Monte the dancing continued. We were never left alone. From dawn to dusk it was dance, dance, dance. We even had to dance to the toilets. Then they decided to make B Company a special commando within the regiment. We were the ‘dancing commando’.

      ‘On 9 March 1982 I was discharged. My conscription was over and I was going to take up the job with the police. I was going to lead a normal life. I was going to be a normal civvy. I screamed: ‘I’ll never come back here again. Yeah!’

      ‘I was just relaxing back into the civilian way of life when, on 30 March 1982, there was a demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo, right by Government House in Buenos Aires. A guy called Dalmiro Flores was killed, shot by plain-clothes police. I’ll never forget it, because three days later the Malvinas were captured. I was happy we had recovered what I believed was rightfully ours, but I couldn’t help thinking that Galtieri had ordered the taking of the islands to save his position in power because the population was rising against him after the shooting.

      ‘Rumours soon began to circulate that Class of 62 – my conscript intake – would be recalled. I was in bed at 6 a.m. when the local policeman came round with my call-up papers for war. My mother said: ‘No, don’t go. I’ll hide you in a neighbour’s cellar.’

      ‘I told her: “I would much rather die defending the nation than be shot on our doorstep as a coward. I want to go.”

      ‘At 11 o’clock my father and brother took me to La Plaza to our regiment. Outside it was a madhouse, with guys screaming ‘Los vamos a reventar!’ [‘We’re going to thrash them’] and ‘Viva Argentina, viva Argentina!’ Those of us recalled gathered on one side outside the camp. I remember seeing ‘El Ruso’, the Russian, and ‘El Abuelo’ [the grandfather], so called because he was thirty years old. He was studying law and had asthma, but he still ended up in the Malvinas.

      ‘I remember thinking: These are fools. They’re not thinking what can happen.

      ‘Then the gates opened and we were greeted with the usual bollocking and shouting. We had to put our names down for a State life insurance. A guy called Massad dealt with that. Ironically he was to get killed over there.

      ‘That night, after they had assigned us to our company lines, we were all just fucking about, playing around, throwing bread at each other. Nobody was taking it seriously. That’s how it went for a few days.

      ‘Then, Class of 63 – the conscript intake after our year – returned to the regiment from their basic training. They just grabbed their weapons off them and gave them to us. You should have seen them, all dirty and rusty. They had been doing the rounds of the training units for the last four or five years. We had to strip them down and clean them thoroughly. Some of the new conscripts – remember they had just forty-five days’ training under their belts – were then drafted in with us to fill in some of the gaps in the regiment. Some of them were given new weapons, but I can also remember some really old Mauser rifles, dating back to 1909, being carried by some of the men for sniping. They were really out of date for modern warfare.

      ‘Next we got our green fatigues. That was on 13 April. Then they gave us all a pair of trainers. Trainers! I suppose they thought we could do a lot of gymnastics in the Malvinas!

      ‘Different parties of soldiers were leaving the camp at different times. Nobody had told us anything, but we just guessed

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