Memories of Falkland War battlefields
ON THE 20th anniversary of the war there, I took a documentary crew to the Falkland Islands.
As a teenager when the war took place, it affected me profoundly, not least because then my father was my age when he fought in World War Two.
My mission was to take two veterans back to Mount Tumbledown, where they had fought in the last decisive battle of the war, and record their story.
We went up the mountain four times; twice in a 4x4, once on foot and once by helicopter. On the way back down on the footsore trek, laden like a pack horse with myriad tripods, lights and lenses, I was staggered to see a pile of the detritus of war, Argentinean sleeping bags, boots, shirts and first aid kits, lying discarded.
For an instant I thought about picking something up and taking it home, a helmet perhaps, as a souvenir of a conflict which had impacted on me so much.
But I quickly thought again; men had died here. The place where these artefacts belonged was right where they had lain for a score of years; I had no business interfering with history.
These were mores not shared by the collector who has just paid more than a quarter of a million pounds for the violin case belonging to the man who played as the Titanic sank, before perishing in the aftermath.