Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
that a relieving local force from Aden would attack to produce a link-up with Zinjibar. Unfortunately, the relieving brigade sat on its haunches. The Americans became exasperated and after a number of days of Yemeni inactivity decided they would not waste their time resupplying the garrison for a second time. So it was left to a neighbouring friendly country’s air force, who were slightly more concerned with the situation than were the Americans, but with less technological know-how and capability to drop (among other commodities) 6,000 pounds of frozen chickens – along with sweet edible dates, because it was Ramadan – and other essentials such as bullets, fuel and water to help relieve the garrison.
Those not acquainted with military matters may have visions of frozen chickens with individual parachutes drifting towards terra firma. I can put your mind, and imagination, to rest on this account: these were palletised. Most of the chickens landed in the hands of the enemy from a spectacular miss-drop, well away from the intended objective.
I came across equipment woes early in my service. A certain Private Arpino of B Company 2 PARA in the Falklands War thought he was carrying the excellent Carl Gustav 84mm Anti-Tank weapon system. This was known more popularly as the ‘Charlie Gee’, except that the Charlie Gee was not popular, being apparently invented with the specific purpose of being the most difficult man-portable (a very loose use of that term) weapon system ever invented. It had a spongy and slightly elasticised carrying strap that made 33-plus pounds of metal bounce incessantly. It was the least-favoured weapon to be forced to carry on a company run and had to be rotated frequently to preclude it being tossed into the Aldershot Canal in times of peace. But we were now at war, and the Charlie Gee might come in useful against the limited number of Argentinian armoured vehicles scattered around the Falklands.
Arpino carried the Charlie Gee throughout the entire conflict. He had not had the chance to fire it in anger until an opportunity presented itself at the Battle of Wireless Ridge. The sun broke after the night attack, and so had the enemy. Their will to fight had collapsed. From the ridgeline, one could see Argentinian soldiers fleeing the hills surrounding Port Stanley. It was just about the end of the Falklands War. And there in the valley at Moody Brook lay a lone and docile abandoned helicopter. Arpino gave a pleading puppy dog look to the company commander, who needed to do no more than slightly acknowledge and nod his head to signify that Arpino deserved his moment to finally use his weapon system. The Charlie Gee required a loader for its rounds. Here is what happened.
Arpino: ‘Load.’
The Loader: ‘Load’ (repeated by the loader to indicate he had understood and would comply with the instruction from the firer) followed by ‘Loaded’ when the system was ‘bombed up’.
Arpino: ‘Firing now’… Click… Pause… ‘Misfire’… Click again. ‘Misfire, unload.’
The drill was repeated and repeated with nothing happening. The firing pin was replaced… and still nothing happened. Arpino had been carrying a lump of useless metal rather than a functioning weapon system.
But we rarely broke out the live rounds during the era of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the way that the USA and UK did in the subsequent decades that followed from the 1990s onwards. Well, the UK might have broken out the live ammunition in the Falklands in 1982, and the Americans in Nicaragua and Grenada in 1983, but these were sideshows in the stable era of the Cold War.
But sideshows can have a dramatic influence on individual lives. It is when ordinary men can do extraordinary things – and some pay with their lives. One of those who died in the Falklands was Corporal Steve Prior. Twenty-eight years later I was asked to attend a 2 PARA Goose Green lunch at Colchester. The guest of honour was a frail Margaret (Baroness) Thatcher. One of the men serving in 2 PARA was the nephew of Steve Prior. He asked to meet me. He was subsequently killed in action in Afghanistan in 2011 at the same age, 27, as his uncle. His wife had given birth only some weeks before.
I had the privilege – and I use that word advisedly – to attend the funeral of Corporal Mark Wright in 2006. It does not matter if the following story is not 100 per cent accurate, for as the famous line in John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tells us, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ In military circles that is amplified more than most – think Melville and Coghill saving the Colours at Isandlwana in 1879 prior to the defence of Rorke’s Drift, best known from the film Zulu. We do not know what really happened, but for their troubles, and following a tireless campaign by Mrs Coghill, both were – perhaps slightly extraordinarily – awarded the Victoria Cross 29 years after they were killed.
The Mark Wright story goes something as follows. Corporal Mark Wright had joined the army because he was in awe of his uncle Andy, who was originally in 3 Para. Wright was a Mortar Fire Controller (MFC) on a hillside in Afghanistan when a number of his fellow paratroopers were caught and wounded in a Soviet era minefield. When the personnel were ‘hit’, Mark Wright left his position and prodded in to rescue the first man. He then rescued the second. He was rescuing the third when, the story goes, a Chinook helicopter hovered above and the downdraft set off a number of ‘sympathetic’ explosions (a totally inappropriate but technical phrase in the military). Mark Wright was badly wounded. The paratrooper he was rescuing at the time (who had lost a leg) said, ‘You’re going to be OK; you’re going to be OK.’
‘I’m not,’ Wright replied. ‘It’s 45 degrees out here and I’m f***ing freezing, I’m dying, but before I die I want you to pass on two messages. First, tell my fiancée Gillian that I love her, and secondly, tell my Uncle Alex that I died a professional soldier.’
It is men like this that I had the privilege to serve with – the good and the bad, but all committed to each other, with an innate sense of ‘mate-hood’. Sergeant Barry Norman of 2 PARA (Lieutenant Colonel H Jones’ bodyguard in the Falklands) summed this up a few years after the Falklands War when he said of the men in that conflict: ‘It was the blokes… It was the section commanders and Toms who went forward and took the enemy positions. They didn’t do it for the government; they didn’t do it for the Falkland Islanders; they didn’t even do it for Maggie Thatcher. They did it for each other.’
The first battle honour for the Parachute Regiment was the Bruneval Raid in France in February 1942. At a time when Britain was on the strategic, operational, and tactical defensive, Churchill demanded an active raiding policy designed to keep the spirit of the offence alive. In February 1982, 2 PARA celebrated the 40th anniversary of that battle with the living veterans. The CO of 2 PARA at the time, H Jones, gave the after-dinner speech pleading that if we, the modern 2 PARA, were ever committed to battle, then he hoped that we could live up to the deeds of those who had come before. He could not have predicted that only four months later, on 28 May 1982, he would be leading a charge at Goose Green that would lead to his own death. Nevertheless, the spirit lived on. He was not merely the CO, he was the custodian of all those great officers and paratroopers who had come before. For the Parachute Regiment, the spirit of our early defining Battle of Arnhem lived and still lives on. In General Eisenhower’s letter to the defeated General Urquhart of 1st Airborne Division, dated 8 October 1944, Ike said, ‘Your officers and men were magnificent. Pressed from every side, without relief, reinforcement or respite, they inflicted such losses on the Nazis that his infantry dared not close with them. In an unremitting hail of steel from German snipers, machine guns, mortars, rockets, cannon of all calibres and self-propelled and tank artillery, they never flinched, never wavered. They held steadfastly.’
The British army is still like that. About 25 years ago we rediscovered the military philosopher, Clausewitz. What that great Prussian said some two centuries ago is still applicable today, as the British army continues to campaign in trying circumstances, sometimes akin to Arnhem in its current fights in Afghanistan. The steadfastness that Clausewitz spoke of resonates wider. It is summed up in his words, and is as applicable to individuals, units and the wider army. It is this: ‘An army that maintains its cohesion under the most murderous fire; that cannot be shaken by imaginary fears and resists well-found ones with all its might; whose physical power like the muscles of an athlete, have been steeled by training in privation and effort; that is mindful of all these duties and qualities by virtue of the single powerful idea of the