Two Sides of Hell - They Spent Weeks Killing Each Other, Now Soldiers From Both Sides of The Falklands War Tell Their Story. Vince Bramley
we had cross-decked from the Canberra to HMS Intrepid, where the SAS were based, but just before the landings the SAS lost more than twenty men when a helicopter crashed into the sea. It was the most men they had ever lost at one time.
‘Many of the men killed were to have been working with 3 Para – and some were ex-Paras – so our senior call-signs filled the gaps in our area. As we had been left back I just settled down on Intrepid to wait for the “green on”.’
I interviewed the other Argentinians for this book in January 1994, but it was in June the previous year that I had met Oscar Carrizo. I was in Buenos Aires with Dom Gray and Denzil Connick to attend a press conference set up by Argentina’s magazine Gente and the television company Channel 11., and Britain’s Today newspaper. The aim of the event was to show that, despite an ongoing Scotland Yard investigation into alleged actions by British soldiers during the Falklands campaign, Argentinian and British veterans of the war could come together in friendship.
A giant of a man, six foot four tall, Oscar was a corporal but, unlike the other Argentinian soldiers in this book, was a regular soldier. He was nervous when we first met at the conference, but soon warmed as our conversation, conducted through an interpreter, progressed and we swapped photographs of the war. I was to listen to his story for an hour, away from the cameras and the lights, in the lobby of the hotel and then over a meal.
Oscar was born on 7 May 1960 and spent his twenty-second birthday on the Falklands as his country revelled in the euphoria that followed the occupation of the Islas Malvinas, the soggy cluster of wind-lashed islands housing a collection of sheep farmers and kelpers who seemed to spend their entire lives swathed in layers of woolly sweaters, bobble hats and wellies to defy the biting winds. His country had long regarded the Falklands as part of Argentina, and Oscar, one of five children of an oil worker, was as proud as any man that the blue and white flag of Argentina was now flying over Government House in Port Stanley.
At the age of seventeen he had waved goodbye to his parents, two brothers and two sisters, and turned his back on the modest family home in Mendoza, one of his country’s southern provinces snuggled in the Andes.
‘I always wanted to be a regular soldier in the Army. I was married in 1981 and my son was born in March 1982. Everything was good. I was a father and a corporal and I was excited about going home to see my son and my wife. But as soon as the Malvinas became ours all our units had their leave stopped. So, on 13 April 1982, I travelled with my unit, the 7th Infantry Regiment, to Rio Gallegos… and then straight to the Falklands.
‘All I know is that as a regular soldier I was proud to be on the islands fighting for my country and our flag. I sent a telegram to my wife in Buenos Aires and one to my parents in Mendoza. No one back home knew I had gone until they saw the stamp of the Malvinas on the envelopes.’
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