San Carlos Water, Ajax Bay, The Falklands.

Ye know what they say about guns? That whenever ye see one ye dinnae want to be at the wrong end of it.

Well, the Argies were at the wrong end last night when HMS Yarmouth opened up on them. Four-point-five inch bricks dropped on rock.

It turned the trench into red mist and wet gravel. But looking at the lad beside me now, I realize the point wasn’t just to kill them. It was to make the survivors blind. To make them freeze inside their own heads, like a deer in headlights. So we could take them.

We were waiting for the shells from the ship, so my boys could go further up and do the rest. I saw Jenkins use the Milan to put one more missile in the position. Whoever was left would be dazed, and then the boys could clear them out.

Nothing personal, it’s war. And if you laid down your arms you would be okay. We take prisoners.

I am nae a prisoner. But I feel like one.

Never saw the sniper. Never saw the boys go forward. Because just like that my knee was gone. Pain was everything and then I saw nothing.

Until this place.

*

It is the day after the battle and we are sitting outside the refrigeration plant at Ajax Bay—the “Red and Green Life Machine,” they call it. The whole place smells of old mutton, ammonia, and fresh blood.

It is a derelict mutton packing plant, abandoned to rot and Antarctic winds since the fifties. Inside you could see where rusting meat hooks still dangled from the ceiling rails but in the refrigeration rooms, wedged tight into the grey tangle of cooling pipes and the roof space above, slept two unexploded Argentine bombs.

The surgeons had sandbagged the walls, choosing to work in their shadow rather than leave the shelter. Jones had kindly informed me of that once I came to and shared a smoke with him outside. I thought about it for a moment, but nae long.
I’m waiting for a chopper. Any chopper. Just a lift to get me off this island and out to the hospital ship and then home.

Checking the heavy dressing packed into what’s left of my knee, I look over at the prisoner sitting on the crate next to me. He’s a young Argentine soldier with a face like a graduate student and a bloody dressing wrapped round his head. They also took him from Mount Harriet, I have found out. I guess we may even have been on the same chopper, but I was to doped up to notice anything.

He speaks a little English. The Royal Marine sentries are watching him and other wounded Argentines with a weary eye but rest assured, those muchachos won’t make trouble again. This here student is a pathetic sight.

I give him my last smoke. I ask him, quietly, if he saw any of his mates get hit by the initial fire.

He shakes his head.

“–That is a lie,” Jones quips from my right. He is leaning against a stack of ammo crates, his arm in a sling. He’s waiting for the doc to sign him off. He probably won’t be the first to get to a ship but he has good reason, too. His arm will work again. Not from my troop, but just talking this morning I feel like I’ve known him for years already.

“I saw one of them shredded by a shell,” Jones adds. “Just before my mates took him.” He nods at the student.

“So how about that?” I ask the student. “The ship did hit someone.”

He shakes his head again, staring at his boots. “I no see it.”

“Well, Jones here says it happened—right next to ye. Did ye nae see it?”
He shakes his head for the third time. I see his hands shaking as he tries to smoke.

I lean back against the corrugated iron of the shed, focusing on the numbness from the painkillers.

In a moment—or maybe an hour, or maybe tomorrow—a Sea King might have space to take me to the ship. I can finally lie down in one of them fancy beds. Clean sheets. Warmth.

While my lads spend god knows how many more nights in this freezing wind. If we push through the last ring of hills today maybe they can get a roof over their heads soon. But how many are going to lie down before that and nae get up again?

Did I tell Miller to check the radio batteries before I got shot?

Miller is a good lad, but he forgets things sometimes. I know that now. All that wonderful 80 mile trek through peat bog from here and across the island, to the fight; you get to know people better, something you never could back home. I should have been there to remind him.

Maybe he is dead.

And Cord and Flin. They would have been in front after I fell, so… maybe …

The chopper is still bringing in wounded, but I likely won’t know before I am off to the ship, who didn’t make it. And they still have to take the rest of the hills and Stanley …

Cord was supposed to have taken over the troop when I got bushwhacked by one of those teenagers with automatic rifles, but did he? I saw nothing. There was only noise.

They couldn’t move me until…

Strange. I shouldnae think of any of them. I should just get… well.

But now I will go home and be a cripple and I have nae done anything. Will my wife and child understand that?

Will Deb understand that better than if I had stayed and killed someone like the student here? The argument we had before I had to go … Well, I guess I will have to see how she feels when I get home.

I try to get up and I manage, using the makeshift crutch. I breathe in the cold air hard to clear my head, but all I smell is that sickening mix of slaughterhouse grease and antiseptic. I must get away.

“Jones!”

He grins. He looks tired, gray under the dirt, but he’s more awake than I am.

“What gives, Cal? Want me to carry you to the landing pad on my back?”

“Shut up, bawbag. Just…”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

I want to tell him about the batteries and that I wanted to check. But the words die in my throat. I’m nae my lads’ skipper anymore. I dinnae need to check on anyone anymore.

“I’m just glad … “ I start “that we got the bastards. I will celebrate by going down to the fine beach and finding myself some place to R&R until pickup.”

“You mean a trip to Costa del Peat down there?”

“Absolutely.”

I cast one last glance at the prisoners lined up on the stretchers. A medic has come to check the student’s dressing. He is covered in the same grime as the rest of us, but touches the young man’s shoulder with a gentleness that belongs to another world. The student stops smoking and nods, when the medic asks him something. They are both too young.

Just getting started with their lives, in a place like this. I got at least 10 years on each of them, maybe more.

I have a wife and my daughter waiting for me … and the pain in my knee tells me that is all there is now. Will I ever walk normally again?

I turn away, a sudden heat rising in my chest. There is nothing more for me to do.

Nothing but wait. Here on a crate by the water, useless as a spare prick at a wedding.

I turn back towards Jones, telling him calmly. “Ye know what? If he didnae see Yarmouth or our Milans make haggis of someone, then he might as well be blind.”

Jones watches me without blinking. “The chopper’s coming soon.”

I dinnae answer, just turn back towards the shoreline. Hobble on. Not very far of course. The terrain is nae made for… someone like me.

But I get enough of a distance between me and the Life Machine to get some privacy.

For a long time, I look out over San Carlos Water. I watch flocks of birds—skuas, maybe, or albatrosses—diving after fish in the gray sea. They are very high up to begin with, then they come swooping down, cold and precise, leaving misty trails over the waves.

They see everything they need to see from up there.

*

Photo by Scott Szarapka on Unsplash

*

last edited 19 Dec 2025