Forward into Hell

by Vince Bramley

  I felt physically sick and my stomach churned. I swallowed to fight the nausea. I didn’t feel sick because of the sights of the last thirty minutes, but through the combination of shock and exhaustion.

  Our group slumped to the ground and sat waiting. We placed the gun on its tripod facing the length and side of Mount Longdon. The gun cocked and loaded, we waited for the expected counterattack. Instead, we heard a booming sound from Stanley. The OC was sitting with Captain Mason and Lieutenant Oliver. He shouted across to our group of about ten, ‘That’s incoming, lads.’

  We all stopped what we were doing and sat looking at each other in complete silence, listening.

  Moments later the air rapidly disappeared around us, and the whistle of the shell in its final seconds of flight hit our ears. The shell cracked and exploded about six metres away. We had all thrown ourselves on top of each other in the little clearing. Another shell dropped a metre or two further to the right, then another. The bombardment that followed was much bigger than the early-morning one. The shells crept over the summit in a rolling barrage. First, we would hear the booming from Stanley, then the whistle and rush of air would tell us roughly where the shell would land. We had now become able to judge the area of impact.

  Each barrage started at the low part of the mountain, then crept up in salvoes of three or four shells. We would all prop our heads up to listen in between salvoes. Often the shells would creep past our area on to A Company’s positions further along the summit.

  We had centred our group about halfway along the mountain. The OC shouted at us to split up a bit, otherwise a direct hit would cause a heavy loss. Three or four Anti-Tank lads got up and ran to a bunker on the side of the hill as another salvo came rushing in on us. A shell crashed into the rock above the OC, sending shrapnel and rock in the opposite direction to us. He looked up at us as we all looked at him, expecting him to be dead, since the shell had landed only a few metres from us all. He shouted across, ‘Well, that was a naughty one, wasn’t it?’

  We laughed, unanimous in appreciation of his complete calm. The shells came in for over an hour. We just lay there hoping, praying, that it would end soon. I lay looking straight into Johnny’s face, who at times would poke out his tongue or do his grin again.

  The shelling stopped, as usual as suddenly as it had begun. I stood up and saw Kev Connery crouched by a rock.

  ‘Kev,’ I screamed.

  He looked over and smiled.

  ‘Get your arse over here, you twat.’

  He had started to walk towards us when two or three more shells hit home. We all flopped to the ground once more. The vibration of the explosions shook us and earth landed on our backs. We jumped up to see Kev running towards us. He jumped into our little opening.

  ‘Jesus, fuck me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a right night of it too.’

  ‘Where’s Johnny Crow and Skiddy, mate?’ I asked.

  Kev looked into my face and said, ‘Johnny’s dead, Vince, killed outright. Skiddy’s been wounded. Only me left.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. How?’

  ‘In the attack, a burst of rounds hit Johnny square in the chest. I reckon he was dead before he hit the ground,’ Kev explained.

  We carried on chatting about the situation in general. Rick Westry was brewing up for us when we heard the booming sound again from Stanley.

  ‘Incoming!’ someone screamed.

  ‘Not again!’ shouted Johnny.

  We were getting more scared with each bombardment. We hit the ground and fought to get legs, arms and bodies more comfy and secure than each other’s.

  ‘At this rate, they’ll get us. We can’t have luck on our side forever, you know,’ I shouted, as the shells exploded around us.

  I lay next to Kev. We both faced the mess tin, where a cuppa was brewing. A shell landed not three metres away, sending shrapnel and dirt in our direction. Rocks and earth fell around us, then over us, as if we were about to be buried alive. Both Kev and I automatically reached out to cover the mess tin and the water that was coming to the boil. The dirt landed on our hands and the brew was saved. Everyone burst out laughing.

  ‘Talk about in a time of crisis let’s all have a cup of tea!’ Johnny shouted.

  How in hell none of us got hit in that burst I’ll never know. We drank a brew that was worth a million pounds, our first cuppa in nearly eighteen hours. We were knackered beyond words; but so alert and hyped up that we couldn’t have slept if we’d wanted to.

  I took off my boots and socks. The sight of my feet made me think of Scott of the Antarctic: blue-cold trench foot. I held my feet in my hands like a newborn baby. I powdered them, then took out my last pair of dry socks. When I put those socks on, I felt like a new man.

  The battle was coming to an end, with rifle fire from A Company’s position. I had to do something with my feet, even if the battle was not yet over. I had had enough of banging them together! Rick was sitting on a rock facing Wireless Ridge. The second part of our objective hadn’t been taken, owing to the stubborn resistance we’d experienced all night. The enemy had put up a much fiercer fight than we had first expected, so that only Mount Longdon was captured. But Two Sisters and Mount Harriet had also been won.

  Looking across the side of the hill, Ricky shouted, ‘Here, look, there’s Argies running all over the place down there!’

  We jumped into position. I grabbed the gun, releasing the lever and locking the weapon on to the fleeing soldiers.

  ‘Hang on there, you blokes!’ some guy shouted.

  I picked up a pair of binos beside me and scanned the view.

  Bill Hayward, the battalion’s sniper, looked through his sight to double-check. ‘They’re Argies, all right – must be ten or fifteen of them.’

  I looked through my sight and saw them running. I fired twenty or thirty tracer rounds, showing a hit of some sort. The OC shouted, ‘Corporal B, there’s no need to shoot lambs at the slaughter. Have a brew. Hunting tomorrow, yeah?’

  I took his hint and sat back. Everyone grinned at me as if I was sick or something.

  ‘Look, whatever you think, they’re history now, so let’s have a brew,’ the OC insisted.

  I wasn’t callous. Tomorrow, they could be hunting us, I thought.

  16

  THE QUALITY OF MERCY

  Tony Peers walked around the corner carrying a pistol, an Argie grenade pinned to him.

  ‘Hi, John Wayne,’ shouted Tommo. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Looting goodies,’ he said, as he joined us.

  I looked at Kev and he looked back: two minds, one thought. We stood up. ‘Look, lads, I’m going for a walk now, OK? See you in about ten minutes.’

  Everyone grinned. ‘Yeah, yeah, see yer.’

  The OC shouted over to me to join him. I thought he was going to say something about the shooting, but I was wrong.

  ‘Corporal B, while you’re on your travels, see if you can find us an Argie bayonet or something.’ He grinned.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Kev and I walked up and over the hill. Ricky followed us, armed with smock order with every pocket filled with mags for our SLRs. We came to a clearing. Ricky was busy looking to one side of us when suddenly Kev and I heard moaning. We stepped up on a ledge and came face to face with a wounded Argie. Sitting beside him was his friend, who obviously wouldn’t leave him. The wounded soldier had been shot in both knees, and in his chest and arms. Blood showed on all the wounds. His face showed no pain, merely pleading. His mate stood and put his hands up. No one had seen these two until now.

  I pointed my rifle and bayonet and nodded towards the wounded guy. He started wailing and moaning, and put both hands together as if praying to me.

  Kev pulled his pistol from his belt. ‘Well, Vince, we either shoot them or help them. What will it be?’ Kev lowered his pistol and looked at me.

  I raised my rifle and framed the wounded Argie’s head in the sight. The man looked down as if he was expecting death, knowing that
he could do nothing about it. He wailed louder. I lowered my rifle. ‘Kev, he looks like my neighbour. I’ll help them, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, OK. I’ll go and find some goodies.’ He walked off.

  I motioned to his mate to sit on the other side of the wounded guy, while I placed my weapon to one side of me and went down to help. The wounded Argie’s mate shook his head, looking at my rifle. ‘Me friend, me friend, you friend, you help my friend, we all friends now,’ he pleaded.

  I looked at him and gave a small grin. He grinned back. I didn’t trust him one bit.

  The wounded guy started to cry. It was then that I felt sad, sad that I had thought of killing them and that we were all in this mess together. We had different views and different homes but there we were all together. I still hated the enemy, but just then, when that guy started to cry, I felt different. We all had to be hard, hard to the facts of what was happening to us: kill or be killed.

  I unwound a bandage that was lying about and found the chest wound, a clean hole in his upper right shoulder. I plugged the hole and wrapped the bandage around it. His mate held him up while I dressed him. About ten minutes later, I motioned to his mate to pick him up. They were like a wedding couple crossing the threshold. I pointed my bayonet in the direction I wanted them to go and we walked off the hill.

  Fifteen minutes later, we bumped into a group of A Company lads taking more prisoners down to battalion HQ. A youngster, who didn’t know me, stopped his small party. I looked at him with these guys. All the Argies, about fifteen of them, lay face down with their hands on their heads. I gestured to my two to join those on the ground. The Argie who was not wounded gently placed his mate at the feet of the others. He then pointed to his private parts. I nodded yes. As the Argie was pissing, a familiar booming came from Stanley.

  ‘Incoming!’ shouted two guys on a ledge.

  Seconds later, shells began to land further down the hill. The Argie stopped pissing and lay over his mate. I remember thinking, as I threw myself down, What a guy he must be, willing to take shrapnel and get killed to save his already dying friend.

  The shells came up the hill, exploding in waves of three or four at a time. Three Argies suddenly stood up and started screaming. I threatened them with my rifle. We were all in the same boat, with nowhere to go. They lay down again, as two shells landed about twenty metres away. Shrapnel hit one in the back of the legs. He screamed in agony but not loud enough to drown the sound of the explosions all around us.

  The next salvoes landed further on as the barrage rolled over the hill. An Argie and I leaped on the injured guy, who was wriggling in agony. The A Company lad in charge shouted at the Argies to get up and move. Some now didn’t want to move because the shells were still landing up ahead. But they did when he pointed his rifle and bayonet at them. The Argies picked up their two wounded mates and carried them towards the FAP. I stood where I was.

  My Argie was again carrying his wounded friend. He smiled at me and said, ‘Dank you.’

  They walked off the hill, away from hell itself. How ironic that their own shelling was wounding them, I thought.

  I made enquiries much later about those two Argies. The medic remembered them for sticking so close together. The wounded guy survived and went home and should be fully recovered now. I wonder if he knows how close he came to death. Could I have pulled the trigger? I’ve asked myself this question a thousand times. Still I don’t know.

  I made my way back to where our team was stationed. I got there as Rick was sitting down. The OC was busy with orders.

  ‘Vince, we’re out of water. Got any?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  Just then, Captain Mason shouted to us, ‘Have any of you seen Peter Hedicker around?’

  ‘I saw him last night, sat with Ginge and West, sir,’ I shouted. ‘Perhaps Westy will know.’

  Captain Mason looked at me with serious eyes. All the support team who were sitting there looked at Captain Mason and me. I felt something was wrong. The OC motioned me over. I got to him and crouched down.

  ‘Corporal B, Ginge McCarthy was killed and so was Phillip West. The shell was meant for your gun team.’

  A flashback of what had happened filled my mind: the smock pulled from my back, the spinning head, the deafness.

  ‘It must have missed you by inches, Corporal B. You OK?’ said the CSM.

  ‘Yeah, I’m OK. I’ll go and find Hedicker then.’

  Captain Mason came over. ‘Sir,’ he said to the OC, ‘Pete Hedicker was killed also. The bearers have now found his body.’

  I stood up and walked back to my spot. I was gutted beyond belief. Pete had always been my mate. We had spent many times together drinking in the ‘Shot. I’d met his family, too. Now he was dead. Only a short while earlier, I’d been sitting beside him. He’d said what a good spot he had. Now he was dead, killed by a shell meant for me. I will never forget that I survived, while he was killed.

  As I sat in a trance, Tommo came to sit beside me. ‘Vince, you OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘someone had to take that position you were in last night. You and Bob took a lot on. I felt bad when they had to put you in there. You can’t blame anyone, OK?’

  Tommo was right, but it didn’t ease the guilt of survival there, and it never has.

  Johnny broke in again about water. Now, this is where you either go mad or get a grip of yourself. If you don’t play, joke, laugh in times of war, you’ll go nuts. This is the only way that I can explain my next action.

  ‘Johnny, me and Rick will get some water, OK?’

  I grinned at Rick and he growled at me. I back-tracked the route we’d taken in the early-morning mist. As I rounded a corner, I came across about eight Argies laid out, being searched and beaten up by the lads. I stopped, took some photos and had a chat with Taff Hedge. He passed me a tin of peaches from an Argie ration pack, then someone shouted, ‘Grenade,’ and everyone threw themselves to the ground. There was a small ‘crack’ and we looked up to see white phosphorus falling a few metres from us. A lad was rolling and crawling towards us in frantic haste. He had turned over the body of an Argie and released a lethal booby-trap. He escaped by a hair’s breadth. The white phos’ landed at his feet, pushing him clear. Deadly stuff, it eats through anything and breathes on oxygen.

  We all scattered from the area. Rick and I ran up towards the first clearing, still back-tracking my earlier route. The hand-to-hand fighting was virtually stopped. It was a case of clearing bunkers and dealing with a few stubborn Argies.

  I was fully alert now: the sights and actions of the last hour and a half of daylight had dramatically changed me. Today, I am still very much alert to fate. Fate and luck are life’s lot. We all had narrow escapes. When you are so close to being killed, you have to switch off from the sights. The initial impact of killing someone, or just missing death, will send you either one way or the other: nuts or numb. Only in rare cases is it nuts. It is human nature to kill. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years and will carry on doing it. The main source of relief in this sort of situation is laughing and joking. Everyone becomes guilty of thinking, I’ll be OK, but I reckon Joe Bloggs will get killed.

  Ricky and I ran up to the small gap that Sergeant P had led us through. I squeezed through, followed closely by Ricky. Drained now of colour, the Argie lay as we had left him an hour and a half earlier. His face showed only shock. The blood on his chin and mouth was dark and dry. I stopped and knelt down by him, lifting his arm. He was already beginning to stiffen. I went through his pockets for ID, finding only a small picture of Mary and Jesus and a rosary. But inside his jacket there were two letters that looked as if they had been written by a child. His child? I’ll never know. I pocketed the letters and picked up his weapon, which lay at my feet. On close inspection, I discovered that he had been wounded fighting, for his weapon had a stoppage. The half-fed round in the chamber had led to his death. What would have happened if he had cl
eared the stoppage? Perhaps one of our lads would have been lying there in his place. I might have felt sorry for him. I did in a way, when I thought of his last struggle to help himself, but he had died trying to kill one of us. He had lost his fight; tomorrow it could be me.

  We left his body and came to the spot where we had spent most of the previous night, firing our GPMGs. Ricky asked why I had brought him this far back. I knelt by the bodies of Ginge and Westy. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. I simply went to their webbing and removed their water bottles and what food there was.

  Ricky looked at me and said, ‘You can’t do that, they’re our blokes.’

  ‘Why fucking not?’ I snapped at him. ‘We’re going to need everything we can get till they get supplies to us.’

  Ricky looked at me. He was a big lad but he reluctantly agreed with me.

  Once the water and food were in our pockets, we quickly turned away and ran back to our team. There was something eerie about my action and the spot where Ginge and Westy had died. I had just wanted to get out of there quickly. I sat beside Johnny and Tommo.

  ‘Where the fuck did you get this, four water bottles and two chocolate porridges?’

  ‘Ginge’s,’ I replied.

  Johnny gave me a knowing look. ‘Well, you’re right. Let’s have a brew.’

  The OC called me over. ‘Corporal B, go with Westry and find what you can of intelligence, OK?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mind the bunkers – they are still hiding and rigging traps, OK?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I called Ricky over and we went over the hill into the clearing where the bunkers lay, beneath intercrossing arcs of fire. Burning to one side of us as we came into the clearing was the body of an Argentine soldier. Phos’ had reduced him to a blackened state. He was lying face down with his arms tucked under his face, his right leg flickering with dying flames. Beside him lay some cooking pots and ladles. Was he their cook? The body was off limits to us: the phos’ was too deadly to touch even after two hours of burning and smouldering.