Two Sides of Hell - They Spent Weeks Killing Each Other, Now Soldiers From Both Sides of The Falklands War Tell Their Story. Vince Bramley
my merits: I have never stolen anything from anyone.
‘When I was about twelve I came south to live near Buenos Aires to get better work with more money. I got labouring work on building sites, which was really hard for a kid of my age. I was determined to better myself and my family. Then I got work in a factory, making shoes. It was a big factory and the machines made so much noise you could hardly think, let alone work. It was called the Delgado factory and I worked there every morning. In the afternoons I worked in a plastic workshop. I used to sleep on the floor there. Then I feared I would lose the job if I was caught so I slept out in the open in one of the squares in Buenos Aires. Some of my workmates saw me and realized I was having a rough time, so they spoke to the boss and the owner said I could sleep in the factory until I got my wages at the end of the first month. As soon as I got my wages I went and rented a small house then went for my mother, little brother and sisters.
‘My mother got work as a mucama [maid] in a clinic and in family homes. But we weren’t getting on. Mother had tremendous pressures on her. I was back at school as well as working, but the system was different in Buenos Aires. What we had done in the second year up north they didn’t do until the sixth year. I was having to do everything all over again. I was having quarrels and fights almost daily. There was no reason for the rowing. I was hot-blooded and it was second nature for me to fight, but I don’t know why I did it so much. Anyway, they kicked me out of school. There were more rows at home so I left. I never went back, not until the day before I was sent to the Malvinas.
‘I rented a room in a small pensión near Bandfield, in Lanus, and managed to support myself.. I organized my life. I met my wife-to-be then, when I was just fourteen, and we’ve been together ever since. On Saturdays and Sundays we went out dancing in the discos and it was back to work on Monday with no sleep. I did my own washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning. I have always kept myself and my place spotless. I settled into a rhythm, working hard in the shoe and plastic factories and dancing at weekends. At sixteen I was hanging around with guys twice my age. They taught me how to survive on the streets. One of my friends had a truck and taught me how to drive it. I did deliveries for him in my spare time.
‘I got my call-up papers when I was nineteen. I wasn’t annoyed about it because it was something which had to be done. I looked on the bright side – it could have its advantages! By law I had to receive seventy-five per cent of my wages from work and my job had to be kept open for me. So off I went to the Army.
‘I felt sure I would like the Army, but straight away I discovered that the system was very unjust. I accept that military systems are all about discipline, but we were treated badly right from the start. They had this thing about superiority. I mean, they wanted us to bow to the guys with rank. All that sort of thing simply wasn’t me. I’ve never bowed to anyone. They really wanted to humiliate us. We were called Class of 62 because that was the year we were born.
‘I was having run-ins with a corporal who had taken a dislike to me. One day I wanted to phone my girlfriend during our lunch break. The corporal started throwing a fit. He was going to “dance” me: press-ups, sit-ups, jumping on the spot, etc. I had had enough of his continual harassment and dancing. So I refused to dance for him. I told him I wasn’t going to do it any more. I was going to fight him. Then an officer who had been passing got involved. He told the corporal he was wrong and danced him. He was furious, but you can imagine things didn’t get any better for me after that.
‘But I found a way to get even. Every time we went to the canteen I would get a burger and a Coke on the corporal’s chit and falsify his signature. Ha! I can’t remember how many burgers and Cokes I had before they caught me. I was obviously heading for the calabozo [jail] and that was after they had danced me. What a dance. They danced me all day long, but I avoided jail because we were scheduled to go on a big exercise the next day and they wanted every man there.
‘But just when I thought I had done my punishment they came for me. There was this corporal and a Lieutenant Baldini. They took me to the shower room and hung me over the shower pipes with handcuffs. I can’t remember how long they left me hanging there, but afterwards Baldini said I’d go nowhere in his army. Deep down I had wanted to stay in the Army after conscription, but now I could see no future in it for me.
‘You know, looking back on it now, Baldini was wrong. He was a military man through and through and a good one, but as a person he was useless. He wasn’t interested in relationships with his soldiers or treating them decently.
‘In March 1982 Class of 63 was arriving at the barracks and I had four days left to do – and the Malvinas were taken. I sensed right away that I wasn’t going to be discharged. With just two days of my time remaining 1 was sent out to help round up the guys who had been discharged. They didn’t tell us anything-it was all uncertainty. We weren’t told if we were going to the Malvinas or if we were going to cover for a regiment in the south which had already been sent. It seemed more likely we would be covering for another regiment, guarding their camp and the like, because even though they had issued us with all the gear to travel we still had our old training weapons. We couldn’t be going to war with them, could we?
‘I dashed home to my bedsit and gathered all my belongings together and took them to my mother’s house for safe keeping. It was the first time I had been home for years, but I didn’t tell her anything. I really didn’t know anything.
‘Back at barracks the feeling grew that we were going to guard a camp down south. We boarded a Hercules C-130 at Rio Gallegos and took off, but we were turned back because of bad weather. It was only then that we found out we had been flying to the Malvinas. If the weather hadn’t forced us back we wouldn’t have known where we were going until we landed:’
To Dominic Gray, life was a challenge to endure and to enjoy-right from the moment the midwife smacked his backside when he came into the world on 12 October 1960, in Brighton, West Sussex. Dom’s father, Peter, was an engineer and a dealer in Harley-Davidson motorbikes. As Britain shrugged off the last of the austerity brought about by the Second World War people were able to afford cars. Motorbikes were becoming less popular, so dealing in expensive imported American machines was a hard business.
Peter, who had been a prisoner of the Germans in occupied Jersey in the Channel Islands, was thirty when he met the girl who was to be Dom’s mother, and married her when she was just eighteen. It was a match on which the gods did not smile kindly. Dom arrived in a world where his dad was working every hour he could to sell and repair the motorbikes and where his mother wanted more than rock ‘n’ roll, motorbikes and being cooped up with a demanding baby in a small flat above the workshop. The marriage was rocky. Dom’s mum started to go out on the town at night, and he remembers arguments and loud, violent rows. Even the birth of his brother, Daniel, failed to heal the scarred union. ‘One day she just upped and left. I’ve never seen her since,’ Dom recalls.
Dom and baby Daniel went to stay with their maternal grandmother. She had a drink problem and Peter believed the boys were being mistreated. They moved to London to stay with their Aunt Barbara for six months before Peter decided to move them to his sister Joan’s care in northern France, where Joan had married a Frenchman called Jean. Peter was doing a lot of business there and would be able to visit his boys more regularly.
‘I was very happy with Auntie Barbara, but France was idyllic,’ Dom says. ‘Daniel and I were there for four or five years and we started to go to school there. We learned French. It became our first language. The happiest days of my life were living with Aunt Joan. The house was by woods and a big lake and near a farm. When we were told dad was coming to visit, Daniel and I would dash to a bench beside the road and listen for the roar of his motorbike. I can still hear that roar as he came round the bends to this day. The joy of seeing him was indescribable. It made me feel like I was part of a family again.’
But Dom’s joy was short-lived. His father decided he should return to England ‘for a short holiday’. In reality he wanted his elder son to be educated in England and the boys were parted. Daniel was to stay in France.
‘Joan would never have agreed to allow me to go to England if she had known the full story. She would never have willingly allowed us to be split. She had