Scimitar into Stanley: One Soldier's Falklands War

Chapter 1

Queen Elizabeth 2. Southampton Docks, 12 May 1982

‘Rush to wait. Wait to rush.’ (Officer mutilation of the proud motto of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst: ‘Serve to Lead’)

—‘Berets On. Berets Off.’ (All ranks variant of the above)

Today’s the day. It’s finally here. After weeks of ‘Will I? Won’t I?’ I definitely will. Sail to the Falklands, that is. Whether I get to fight is another matter.

It’s 9.00 am when the bus that brought us from Aldershot pulls up on the QE’s quay at Southampton docks. The ship sails at 4.00 pm and there’ll be a full-on send-off: families, politicians, top brass, press, what have you. I watched the TV as the SS Canberra left Southampton on 9 April, so I have some idea what a jamboree it will be. Right now it’s deep focus and all business.

Gather kit; make sure I leave nothing behind. This is a pedantic exercise, obsessive almost. I’ve got a lot of kit: canvas webbing with my fighting stuff in it; SMG (Stirling sub machine gun); large mountaineering rucksack (Bergen) with second-line kit; suitcase and ‘kit bag’ with third-line spares for the boat, and for the six months we’ve been told we can expect to garrison the Islands.

I’ve been packing and repacking for days now. Leave something out, leave something on the bus, and nobody is coming along to give it to me tomorrow. The QE2 isn’t making any U-turns.

Bergen and webbing on back, a bulging case in each hand, shooter across my shoulder, I struggle across the quay and join the Scots Guards filing up the main gangplank.

In front and looming above us, the QE2 is so large that she fills the dock. Like a floating block of flats laid on its side. There’s lots of the expected bravado and ‘couldn’t-care-less-ness’ from the soldiers. They josh and joke with one another, just as countless generations of secretly fearful soldiers have doubtless done before us, standing on quays, waiting to board ships to take them to distant shores to fight brutal wars. Whilst it makes me feel part of a continuum, it does not console. History also teaches that many of those tough, trained, joshing, joking young warriors never came home.

Fortune has smiled. A fellow Brigade watchkeeper is a chum of mine, Nick Schrayne of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars. We’ve been on the bus together, chatting away, making light of what is coming. We join the queue together. I also have chums amongst the Scots and Welsh Guards who will be on the ship. This could turn into quite a jolly trip, as long as we ignore what is at the other end of it.

Step off the concrete of the quay and on to the wooden gangplank. I try to memorize the exact moment I step from the hard, safe, solidity of land to the slight movement of the sea; the actual point of no return. I look suitably stern and soldier-like, not least because there are already a few photographers about and I don’t want my photo in tomorrow’s newspapers looking as if I’m struggling to carry all this stuff. My family would forgive and forget; my regiment would not. Anyway, I’ve been a soldier for eight years now and am well-practised at looking suitably officer-like.

Up the broad gangplank.

Standing at the very top, checking each of his guardsmen on board, making sure they are all fully equipped and looking fit for purpose, is the impeccably tailored, genuinely grim and soldierly-looking Regimental Sergeant Major Mackenzie, Scots Guards. ‘Ronnie’ Mackenzie was my company sergeant major when I was training to be an officer at Sandhurst. He very soon rumbled me as one of the less, shall we say, reverential and more exuberant cadets. I’ve been on the wrong end of a bawling-out from him more than once. And here he is, as good as being forced to welcome me on board as I’m mixed in with his soldiers.

I look at him. He looks at me.

‘Good morning, Mister Mackenzie,’ says I, keen to overcome any awkwardness – RSMs are always called ‘Mister’; a genuine sign of respect used by officers of all ranks for those few who reach the top of the NCO (non-commissioned officer) tree.

He hesitates. ‘Oooh nooo,’ he says in his thick, slow Scottish burr. ‘Now I’ve seen it all …’

My warrior’s façade is well and truly punctured.

Step into the ship. We are allocated a room number and deck. Nick and I are sharing. Good.

There is a note for us. We are to report to the Brigade Ops Room on the Quarter Deck when we are settled in. All very efficient.

We are directed up the stairs and not down into the bowels of the ship, where I feared we, as mere radio ‘watchkeepers’ and not full-time members of the brigade staff, might find ourselves. I lead the way, Nick following. Up more stairs, then down a corridor covered with taped-down hardboard, doubtless to stop us vulgar lot ruining the expensive carpet underneath.

I open the door of our cabin. Hallelujah! I can scarcely believe it. A full-on stateroom.

It takes a nanosecond for me, blocking the door, to sweep the room and evaluate. Two large, luxurious-looking queen- (as it turns out) sized beds. Two narrow, fold-up cot-type beds set up on the floor. Far double bed, the best one, nearest the windows, already with a mountain of kit on it. Taken. But no kit on the near double.

Advance. Sit on bed. Add suitcases. Mine.

Poor old Nick, one step behind, will spend the next three weeks on a camp bed. His only solace is that he gets to choose which one. Julian Stanley, Royal Marines, the fourth to join us in the room, ends up with the one nearest the door; the one we will bash into when we enter the cabin late and in the dark. That’s the army way. First come, first served, and no whingeing

With nothing else to do I tell Nick I have a plan. Down we go to the main lounge deck, where I seek out the rather frazzled Chief Steward.

‘What’s the booze situation?’ I ask him.

Answer: red and white wine, champagne and beer. These will be charged to us at little or no profit, much as if we were in our own officer’s mess.

‘Spirits?’

No, they have all been unloaded.

‘Mixers? Like tomato juice?’

They, too, have been removed, for some strange reason.

We thank him and let him get back to his proper job. We are on the QE2, one of, if not the greatest luxury liner afloat. We have the perfect set-up with our cabin, plus outside private balcony with seating area and sun loungers, plus all-important fitted fridge. The tropics demand cocktails.

As the rest of 5th Infantry Brigade continue to troop across the quay to the gangplank, Nick and I slip furtively – we do not want to be questioned by some humourless high-up who might get it into his head that we are deserting, or some such stupidity – down to the bottom, bow end of the ship where, the Chief Steward has told us, there’s a narrow, crew-only gangplank. Down it we go. Stride purposefully back across the dock and out through a side gate. Taxi to the nearest Oddbins, and £80 each later – quite a lot of money back then – we emerge with boxes full of vodka, Galliano, malt whisky and champagne, plus cocktail mixers: orange and tomato juice, and consommé (for Bullshots – upgraded Bloody Marys, the consommé being particularly good for hangovers).

Back to the ship. Back up the crew gangplank. Stock fridge. We are tropics-ready.

We meet our other two cabin mates: Adam Drummond, a Grenadier Guard, and Julian Stanley, the Royal Marine. He certainly looks the part; green beret, impressive moustache and gives the impression of one who enjoys eating a glass as an after-dinner party trick. Outwardly at least, he’s a hairy-arsed ‘bootneck’. In contrast, Adam and I are Household Division, Nick is ‘line’ cavalry. We are clean-shaven, use glasses to drink from – elaborate cocktails as Julian will discover – and wear blue berets. To a marine that makes us ‘crap hats’, because the colour of the hats (berets) we wear are, to him, ‘crap’ compared to his treasured green. We blue-beret wearers could not give a stuff about this beret colour fixation and just ignore it. But, we soon discover, Julian’s a happy soul who fits in admirably. He’s just relieved to have made the trip – most of his fellow Marines are on the first wave – and he doesn’t want to miss out, even if he did end up with the worst bed in the room.

There are two other watchkeepers, making us six in all. Their names, to my utter shame, now elude me, although it is probably because they are in another cabin and I see very much less of them. But, sitting here in our glorious stateroom that first day – £56,000 per person to hire for a 3-month voyage, we are told – surrounded by a happy gang of like-minded campers, were it not for the fact that we are heading towards a war in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, I’d say that everything in the garden is looking peachy.

And now the big moment is here: leave-taking. The offices and buildings opposite have been filling with families and top brass. The gangplank is empty of soldiers. I’d have dearly liked a girlfriend here to wave me off; someone to write to and think about over the long months to come. However, my love life has been more than chaotic of late – a long-term relationship that ran into the sands not that long ago. Lengthy overseas postings have an evil reputation for exposing fault lines, especially when you are young and intent on living life to the utmost. Unexpectedly asked at the eleventh hour if I’d like to ‘go down south’, a new, gently blossoming relationship found itself with only days to flower. Or not. A last night in London with her, which I had had high hopes for, descended instead into ‘Will I? Won’t I?’ confusion until, with time running out in the early hours, I had to say goodbye and hightail it back to Windsor before I missed my transport to Southampton this morning. Not exactly the romantic send-off for the bold, departing warrior that every soldier shipping out to war hopes for; but then again, real life is rarely a happy Hollywood movie.

Not that I blame her for her confusion. Were I her friend, and had she come to me for relationship advice, I’d have cautioned her strongly against a new relationship with someone heading 8,000 miles into a combat zone. And for how long? If, indeed – and this is not beyond the bounds of possibility – he ever comes back.

My mother might like to recount how, when my father shipped out to North Africa in 1941/2, he said to her on getting the news; ‘You will wait for me, won’t you?’

To which she as good as replied, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

So, they married. Which was lucky for him as he didn’t make it home until 1945. But that was then, and all the bold young men were shipping out to war. And this is now, and only the tiniest handful of us are heading off.

At least my parents are coming to wave me off. I told them they didn’t need to, but they insisted. I am secretly delighted, although I’m already wondering how I will spot them in the ever-growing crowds, and it is close to cast-off time.

In the sort of move that only the British regimental system can dream up, the band of the Scots Guards are at one end of the quay and the band of the Welsh Guards – both bands in their finest parade scarlet – at the other; each facing their own men on board. Each band is giving it welly, playing their own medley of music, seemingly determined to drown out the other; Men of Harlech versus Scotland the Brave; Welsh drums beating, Scottish pipes wailing, the British regimental system at its very competitive worst. A dog’s dinner of competing noise where our cabin is located, roughly in the middle.

My diary describes what happens next: ‘What a send off; tremendous cheering, the soldiers being their normal delightfully crude selves. Sadly officers cannot shout ‘Drop ’em’ to the enthusiastic girl who constantly waggles her rather superb boobs much to everybody’s delight, even her husband’s. Nott (the Minister for Defence) appears. Silence.

I remark that if only his Press Secretary were to get the wife to waggle her boobs as he waves, the resultant cheer might just save his obviously faltering political career. The man looks like a loser.’

Then, mere minutes before we are about to sail, I spot my parents. We wave to one another. Rather formally, as if it is the first day of term and we are standing outside school surrounded by fellow pupils and parents, all equally scared to show any spontaneity or affection lest it expose us to future ridicule. No wonder ‘foreigners’ think we Brits are so buttoned-up and cold as a nation, when in fact we’re just trying not to appear weak and emotional. Then again, I suspect we will be needing lashings of British ‘stiff upper lip’ before this jaunt is over.

As I wave, and then wonder what to do next, everything changes. Up until now it has all been surface bombast and gaiety, going through the motions as we laugh at and cheer the girl who removes her bra and gestures to a crane driver to swing it over to her delighted husband on the ship. This, however, is the reality of going to war. Waving goodbye to the people you love. Who love you. They knowing, you knowing, that this may be for the final time. I am totally deflated. Depressed even. ‘Let’s go. Everybody wants off. Finally we do.’

Now the gangplank is removed. Then dock workers start lifting the massive mooring ropes, each as thick as a man’s thigh, and, as if by magic, the two bands combine, note-perfect. Their music soars up from below. Whether they play Rule Britannia before Land of Hope and Glory, or the other way round, I do not remember. I do remember us all singing our lungs out as water begins to appear between the boat and the quay and we pull away. My parents shrink to mere dots in moments, their faces a blur in the crowd. When I say there is hardly a dry eye on the ship I mean it. No one acknowledges it. We do not look at each other. Far too embarrassing. But we are all feeling it now. Grown warriors in their battle kit? With tears in their eyes as they sing? I still cannot hear those two songs, usually on television at the Last Night of the Proms, without those same tears, the ones that are in my eyes now, welling up from the Lord alone knows where even as I write this.

And, my diary tells me, just how jingoistic, nationalistic, all this is: ‘What a send off, it really makes one incredibly proud to be English.’

That send-off – the bands playing, the crowds cheering, the gurning politicians and generals but, more importantly, the concern and love of my already-disappearing-into-the-distance parents – is no different from archive footage I have seen of previous generations of British soldiers being waved off to war; bands playing, families waving, soldiers proud to be going.

And what is wrong with that? Far better than, and the polar opposite to, the experience of a five-years-older-than-me generation of American teenagers forced to go to war in Vietnam, many – probably most – wondering why they were going; taunted by shouts of ‘Baby-killers!’ and furious that Uncle Sam was stealing what should have been their golden years, their youth.

But not 5th Infantry Brigade. We volunteered to join our army. ‘Suddenly there is a realisation that must have been felt by countless generations of soldiers going to do battle that there is more than just you in this, there is a nation who count on you and wishes you well … for the first time, I understand what is meant by England expects.’

Determined to be gay – in the old fashioned, military sense of the word – Nick and I pop the cork on that bottle of champagne we bought at Oddbins and ‘the sadness is gone. My parents are no longer visible, just a cheering throng. Hoots and whistles from the other ships in the dock. All around me laugh joyously as QE2 thunderously replies.’

And then something extraordinary; something that I’ve never heard remarked on before. It affected me deeply at the time and does to this day. Champagne drunk – a bottle does not last long between six thirsty soldiers – the others drift back into the cabin and start unpacking, getting to know one another; only Nick and I have met before. I stay outside. I have a small sailing boat and know the Solent shoreline well, but I can barely believe what I am seeing. ‘The beaches are thronged for miles. Fifteen minutes later and the beaches are still full of people; distant speck as we must be to them.’

The sheer number of people needed to form this unbroken black line along the shore, people who have come to wave us off knowing that we will not be able to see them but have made the pilgrimage in any event, is beyond my calculation. And still we sail and still the line snakes along the beaches. It is truly humbling. ‘The send-off at the dock was a very personal thing; this is almost more impressive in its way … Truly we are carrying Britain’s hopes.’

It is only when our well-wishers merge into the warm afternoon murk and we turn due south and head out to sea that I finally go back inside.

We were told when we boarded to make ourselves known at the Brigade HQ Ops room, and now the time has come. This will be our first proper meeting with HQ 5 Brigade and, I’m guessing, given the need for us watchkeepers to get up to high military speed from a standing start – none of us have worked with 5 Brigade before – they will have a brutal induction programme ready for us and, doubtless, a mass of jobs needing doing. I anticipate being kept very busy on the journey south.

The Ops Room, the Brigade’s communications centre, is still being set up in what used to be the Card Room on the Quarter Deck. There’s lots of activity, soldiers toing and froing, but of what they are up to we have no idea. When we enquire we are told that there are no instructions for us. Yet.

So, with nothing better to occupy us we tune in, as soldiers are wont to do, to the already churning rumour machine. The news is not particularly encouraging. Our glorious departure was, we are shocked to discover, an exercise in smoke and mirrors. Only one of QE2’s three steam turbines is working. They plan to get the second running overnight and then fix number three on the voyage south. We will heave to, out of sight of land, while the engineers get their spanners out. If they cannot fix whatever is wrong, tomorrow may see us limping back into Southampton for repairs. Also, another downer, some numpty has turned a stopcock in the wrong direction and a load of brown effluent has disgorged itself into the indoor swimming pool rather than out to sea. So, adios to lounging by the pool – although I recently read that ‘they’ got it cleaned pretty quick-sticks. Not that they told us. They clearly didn’t want to share the pool with 3,000 swim-happy soldiers. Bastards.

It’s not all bad news. We officers will be eating extremely well in the Queen’s Grill, the First Class restaurant, and there’s to be a film tonight. I’ve had it fixed in my mind for decades now that it was the 1953 film, The Cruel Sea, they screened that first night; a Second World War tale of submarine sinkings and death beneath huge, icy seas on the murderous North Atlantic convoys. Just what someone with a suitably gallows sense of humour would show a ship full of soldiers heading to war in the South Atlantic; spine-stiffening, sphincter-loosening stuff.

However, my diary tells me I’m wrong: ‘We had an excellent dinner with a good red wine, followed by the only hint of war to date – a film called Enter the Ninja. Plenty of death there, also a bouncy Susan George slinking around to the cheers of the boys.’

Perhaps they showed us The Cruel Sea on another occasion. I hope so.

Chapter 2

QE2 – Sailing

‘Bullshit baffles brains’ – another much loved army saying.

On QE2 that first morning I awake and stretch in my luxury queen-sized bed in our luxury cabin. I note the lift and roll of the ship. We are poling along at a fair old lick. Up. Look out of the window. No land to be seen. The grease monkeys have sorted out the problem and, in the words of Rod Stewart, ‘We are sailing.’

I can guess at what time I awoke that first morning as I have a copy of ‘Daily Routine Orders, Operation Corporate’ (the formal military name for the re-invasion of the Falkland Islands). This tells me that each shipboard day works as follows:

First works parade 0830 hrs (this, in my regiment, is called ‘first parade’ and takes place on the vehicle park. Soldiers, and officers, are first all checked off as being present, outwardly sober and correct and are then given their tasks for the day. On QE2, with no parade square or vehicle park to assemble on, each regiment or sub-unit has its own assembly point. For us watchkeepers it is the Brigade Ops room.)

Second Works parade 1345 hrs. Note the leisurely 45-minute gap between the end of lunch and starting work for the afternoon; plenty of time for a quick bit of ‘Egyptian PT’ (sleep).

1900–2000 hrs Offrs (Officers). I have no idea how it works today but, back then, the soldiers liked to eat a whole lot earlier than us officer lot. They call their large evening meal ‘tea’. We call ours dinner.

There is a logic behind the name. I started my army career as a trooper in basic training and know for a gnawing-hole-in-my-stomach fact that by 10.00 pm we squaddies were desperate for a second meal, or dinner; this explains the timeless proliferation of fast-food outlets near military bases. Tea in the cookhouse was ‘dry’ and, as the name implies, there was always a large steel urn of tea steaming away.

Bar Facilities (I kid you not) 1830–2300 hrs. In other words, and rather wonderfully, a full four and a half hours of Brigade-sanctioned drinking time.

These timings, taken from this Daily Routine sheet, tell me that on 13 May I leap from my bed, all keenness and determination, at about 0740 hrs.

This for me is a lie-in. At Windsor, where I am stationed, I need to be up between 0600 and