LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

mates: that this was just the ‘brass’ saying ‘hurry up and wait’ yet again. He still half believed this to be the case as he kissed his wife goodbye and, heavily loaded down with kit, negotiated the steep gangway of the giant P&O cruise liner SS Canberra.

      It was five years since that day when Kevin had first seen the poster of the Paratrooper. Now, as he stood on the deck, he was one. Lean, fit, and with his blond hair cropped and barely visible beneath his red beret, he was ready for anything. He had served in Germany and Canada, but his only operational soldiering had been in Northern Ireland. This was what he had joined for – if it happened. For a little voice deep down inside was still telling him that this was just like the ‘phoney war’ of 1939. Everyone was walking round armed to the teeth and saying: ‘We’ll get there, then nothing will happen.’

      Christ, he thought, why doesn’t some bastard just make his mind up and either let us get on with it or tell us to piss off back home. As the Canberra steamed away from Ascension Island, that dust-covered volcanic furnace right in the middle of the Atlantic, ‘some bastard’ had made his mind up. We were going to war. Kevin watched as the great white ship, hemmed in on all sides by other civilian merchantmen and a protective cordon of ‘grey funnel liners’, the warships of the Royal Navy, confidently negotiated the ever-heavier South Atlantic swell. Every day it became colder and the days shorter. A Royal Navy frigate gave a demonstration of its fire-power. Navy and RAF Harriers streaked past, displaying the hardware fastened under their wings. It was all meant to boost morale.

      Hercules transporters – from which Kevin had jumped many times and which had been nicknamed ‘Fat Alberts’ by the RAF – lumbered overhead, parachuting mail and more supplies to the fleet. This was when it dawned on him that something big was on and he was definitely going to be a part of it.

      It caused him to ponder what lay ahead, and a great swirl of emotions engulfed him. Misgivings and nagging doubts began to eat away at his confidence and excitement. He wasn’t the only man aboard the ship to suffer those thoughts. Most kept them to themselves. They were professional soldiers, for Christ’s sake.

      He prayed to himself: ‘What happens if I’m not the Paratrooper the training has programmed me to be? Jesus, what if I become a coward? Oh, God, I don’t want to be a coward in front of my mates.’ As the ship sailed ever southwards, Kevin, like many of the Paras, could no longer accept the luxury of his surroundings.

      The training, the programming, the traditions of how Paratroopers prepare for battle, were automatically taking over. They no longer needed the cinema – except for lectures – the well-appointed bars or the comfortable restaurant. They had served their purpose, but they were not needed for men preparing to go into battle. Paratroopers didn’t need this sort of thing any more. It was ‘hat’ kit. They didn’t need to go to war by bloody boat, either. That was for the Marines. He had always believed that if a war had happened in his time he would have parachuted into action, just like the soldier in the recruiting poster, to establish a bridgehead and hold it until the hats caught up and came to hold the line while the Paras fought through yet again to establish another forward area, while the enemy reeled from the onslaught as the ‘Red Devils’, as Hitler had named the Paras, did what they were conceived to do. It seemed undignified, somehow, to be going to war in a landing-craft which looked like a fucking floating rubbish skip.

      Like most Paratroopers, Kevin didn’t like Marines. As far as he was concerned, they were just another collection of bloody hats and the sooner he was away from them and fighting the Argies the better. But it was a manoeuvre constantly practised by the Marines which, he maintains to this day, was the scariest thing he had ever had to do since that fateful day when he stepped into that boxing ring back in Aldershot.

      The exercise is called cross-decking: stepping from a ship into a landing craft to get to another ship. And the Navy, in their wisdom, decided to carry out this manoeuvre in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic. Laden like a pack mule, Kevin joined the long line of Paras waiting to step from the wallowing ship into the dementedly bobbing landing-craft pitching under his feet for the short journey into the dock of the overcrowded assault ship HMS Intrepid. He still shivers as he recalls that step from the door of the Canberra, over the glassy black bottomless ocean below to the slippery steel bulwark of the diesel-belching landing-craft as ‘just about the limit of testing one’s nerves’. Once you’ve forced a Para to do that someone will have to pay. So there’d better be a war and it won’t be hard to guess who is going to be the winner! You don’t force Paras to behave like hats and expect to get away with it.

       2

      IT WAS TWO o’clock in the morning and we had just scoffed a huge barbecue in Felix Barreto’s garden. It’s like a compound, with a big concrete wall and picket fence to deter the prying eyes of those still prowling the rutted, bone-jarring streets outside. For three hours we had cruised the alleyways which pass for streets in the sprawling, menacing barrio, or shanty town, which surrounds Felix’s home. Thank God we had an off-road vehicle because a normal car wouldn’t have negotiated ruts and bumps which made tank tracks seem as smooth as billiard-tables. We were feeling uneasy in this alien place, watched by silent eyes as groups of young men scavenged for discarded plastic bottles to sell for a few coins. We were watched, as all strangers are watched here, with cold, blank stares. Back home it would probably be as near as dammit a no-go area at night. There were no names on the houses or the streets. Eventually someone pointed out a track which could lead us to Felix. Half an hour after midnight we found him, sitting patiently with his wife and son, showing no sign of irritation at our lateness. He welcomed us warmly and we sighed with relief – me, Diego and Longdon veteran Antonio Belmonte. At last we felt safe.

      I smiled to myself, thinking: twelve years ago I was trying to kill this guy; tonight I’m grateful to be feeling safe in his home. Sensing my unease, Felix said: ‘This neighbourhood looks after its own. You know, nobody steals from each other round here. Doors can be left open. Crime is almost nil…’

      When you look at Felix you can understand why. This is a hard area. A place where hard men live. And you believe him when he says: ‘I’ve had to fight all my life, with my fists or with words, just to survive. Outsiders don’t understand what it is like to have to fight to survive all your life, from the moment you are old enough to sit up and take notice.’

      This man with thick, dark, wavy hair and a fierce black moustache is one of those people you respect automatically. His piercing blue eyes never waver as he talks, in a quiet voice, about the lot he has been dealt in life. And you know that if you get on the wrong side of him you do so at your peril. His upbringing, like that of many soldiers in many armies throughout the world, was a harsh one.

      Felix Barreto was born on 31 March 1962, the first of six children of a father of Italian descent and a Paraguayan mother. Four sisters arrived between him and his little brother. Soon afterwards his father left the family home in Resistencia, in the northern province of Chaco.

      ‘All I can remember is having to work to survive. We all had to. My mother was left with six kids and there is no such thing here as unemployment benefit. If you are unemployed you’ve had it. We lived in poverty and the only way out of it was to work. I started work at the age of eight, selling newspapers and fruit on street corners and delivering bread while still going to school. Every penny went towards supporting the family. My schooling was OK – I was even top of my class.

      ‘Life in the barrios is hard. I never had a proper toy in my life, not even a football. I grew up in the same shanty town as the great footballer Maradona. I knew him. We kicked a ball about together, but it wasn’t footballs which ruled this place – it was guns. It was a violent place and if you didn’t stand up for yourself you didn’t survive. My mother was strict with me and I thank her for it now, although at the time I resented her punishments, such as being kept in when everyone else was out on the streets playing or working. There were certain people I wasn’t allowed to associate with. It was her strictness which meant I escaped the guns. You’d see kids of eleven with guns planning robberies and the police couldn’t even get into this place after them. I was punchy even then.

Скачать книгу