Hugh McManners - Falklands Commando

We flew in very low and fast, in spite not having night-vision goggles. As we came in over the land, the moon emerged from cloud and so, very cautiously, the pilot was able to land without using lights. I heaved a great sigh of relief, as our LS was overlooked by the prime enemy location Mount Brisbane.

The helo landed, we jumped down, and Jim and I ran away into the darkness with the TI scanner to check that the area was clear of enemy. Wally P. and a protection team took up fire positions near the aircraft and unloaded the kit. The shells from Avenger pounded down rhythmically on Mount Brisbane every time the helo appeared, and were accurate enough for our purposes. This was being timed in the ops room, by the ship firing every time the helo crossed a line on the radar that had been determined earlier by me, and stopping when the helo re-crossed on its return trip.

It took six Lynx lifts to get us in with all our kit, then the cache came in as a separate under-slung load in a large net. Jim and I moved forwards to Mount Brisbane to get a better look, but I could not really scan well enough to be certain of anything. I did not break the radio silence to the ship as the shells were accurate and also because we were close enough for the enemy’s 155-mm guns to fire at us from Stanley. We knew they had radio direction-finding equipment and I was very keen not to advertise our presence by sending HF transmissions (which travel an incredibly long way and are easily detected) unless absolutely unavoidable.

Some people did not understand this, and when the need to minimise transmissions was accompanied by meteorological difficulties that made it impossible to get through, there were further misunderstandings with gunships risking themselves steaming into exposed gun lines then not being required to fire. I was surprised, and at times angry, at the lack of understanding back in the headquarters responsible for co-ordinating this effort. Sometimes it seemed to me, the implications of being extremely isolated and vulnerable, 20 miles behind enemy lines, were not understood.

The night was very clear and very cold. FO1 formed part of the perimeter security, whilst the cache was being dug in and cammed out. We lay in the mossy grass with the ice crunching under our knees and elbows, occasionally having fits of teeth-chattering and uncontrollable shivering.

From the moment we’d clambered aboard the helo back on Avenger, every weapon had been cocked ready to fire and the safety-catch applied. But then, in the moonlit quietness, one of the blokes accidentally let off a shot, with a shocking and frightening suddenness. I ascertained that no one had been hurt, and we waited. If there was an enemy patrol nearby, they would most certainly investigate.

Also the main body of our patrol, digging in the cache, would now be at maximum alert in their fire positions, ready to deal with any movement – and we were out in front of them. If I attempted to go back and tell them what had happened, I’d probably be shot. Eventually Andy Ebbens arrived, very concerned that nobody was hurt. He’d taken a guess at what had happened, and had come forward on his own to check. The work on the cache continued.

These ‘Negligent Discharges’ as they are described in military law manuals, are very dangerous, often causing serious injuries and death. They normally lead to the culprit being charged with an offence, then punished hard. As we were going to be out for more than a week and the guilty man was not only aware of the possible implications of his error but was disgusted with himself, I immediately told him he owed me a drink and to forget about it. Under these worrying circumstances one extra worry, however small, can be one too many, and tip you over the brink. He still owes me the drink…

We spent what remained of the hours of darkness digging into the side of a peat bank, then spreading our ponchos and cam nets across the hole. With our peat walls built up and covered with turf, we disappeared into the moorscape.

The next day was bitterly cold, spent shivering and shaking in the peat bank, not being able to emerge from our cold, wet holes until after dark. Under these circumstances time passes very slowly, and having to get out of your sleeping bag to crouch in the mud every few hours as a sentry is depressingly boring.

At last light, after stand-to we packed up and moved towards Mount Brisbane. The team that was to observe the enemy position moved off up the mountain, where they would dig in so they could observe the Mount throughout the next day, before returning to us to declare it clear of enemy, or with enough information for us to mount an attack the following night.

It was even colder the next night, and at our new position the ground was completely frozen. Steve Hoyland and I tried to dig a two-man hole but it caved in, so we had to start again. It’s a completely hopeless feeling when little things go wrong under these circumstances – this failure felt pretty cataclysmic at the time. Then followed another very cold day in the peat bog.

That night we received a long coded signal from our co-ordination cell on Fearless and decided to postpone further operations until we’d decoded it. It turned out to be fresh info about the enemy in our area, and a warning not to touch any Argie kit we might find as it was likely to be booby-trapped. (Someone had presumably been blown up and this was a general warning.) The OP team moved off to a fresh position on the Mount.

2 June was another very cold day with constant rain, turning the peat bog into a riverbank. I felt like a character from The Wind in the Willows. It was now mind-sappingly boring as well as cold. We decided to send all three teams out to recce the remaining enemy locations simultaneously. With Mount Brisbane clear, we’d eliminated the key piece of ground from our operation. We hoped the Argies had been flown back into Port Stanley, leaving our area clear.

We moved our patrol HQ once more, to a position overlooking the LS for our eventual extraction. We dug very deep into the peat, and pitched a two-man mountain tent inside, covering it over with turf so you could stand beside it and not know we were there. This, with four of us crammed inside, was relatively warm and dry, and we were able to spend the long day chatting and making brews.

Inside we manned the patrol radio in case the three sections reported up with anything. The weather outside alternated between heavy driving rain and sleet, or heavy mist. The cold was constant and all pervading. At night or during periods of heavy mist we crawled out of our holes to attend the calls of nature and squat close to each other and have whispered conversations. In our four-man shelter we told stories about how we’d spent the past Christmas, where we were going to get drunk when we got home, what our most embarrassing experiences had been, and so on. I came to know every bar and pub in Middlesbrough, Steve Hoyland’s home town. I felt I could go there on my own, recognise each place and be at home there.

These wistful thoughts were the practised reminiscences of people well used to being away from home and family, conversations of pure escapism, with each person having their own say and being asked questions by the others, even reminders of details they’d left out – as we’d all heard the stories several times before, prolonging the psychological diversion. The dripping walls of the tent and the sound of the artillery fire were at times completely forgotten.

At night we listened to the World Service. The Argies jammed out the news, except for some reason at ten o’clock at night. This strange period in our lives coincided with the Task Force’s news blackout, which I later learned was imposed while combat supplies were being flown from San Carlos into the mountains in preparation for the final assault on Stanley.