One man with terrible burns cried: ‘I used to be handsome but I won’t look normal again’
SELFLESS and dedicated to her job, Jeune Hendy was one of about 40 female nursing staff who courageously served on SS Uganda, a hospital ship anchored in and around the Falkland Islands during the height of the war. After some of the fiercest battles, up to 160 casualties a day – from both sides – were treated on board, some suffering horrendous injuries.
‘There is no greater feeling as a nurse than doing your job to the best of your ability in challenging situations,’ she told me at her home in Exmouth, Devon. ‘But, for all of us, we realised this was going to be a very different experience.
‘We were well trained and well qualified, but when we arrived to sail to the Falklands from Gibraltar, one of our duties was to transform a passenger ship into a hospital ship. This was make-do-and-mend in the extreme. The equipment that came on board was not labelled, so we unpacked all these boxes thinking, “What’s this? What’s that?”
‘Most of us had never been to sea before, so we were a little apprehensive.’
In theory, Argentina was committed to not attacking a hospital ship, but it was a war zone and the vessel was always in danger. Hendy and the other nurses abandoned their uniforms and instead wore shirts, trousers and woollen pullovers to combat the chilly, often sub-zero temperatures.
‘As we got nearer to the Falklands, some of the inadequacies of our conditions became apparent,’ recalled Hendy. ‘For example, we didn’t have suitable footwear. So they sent out plimsolls, but the smallest shoe size was a seven – I am a five-anda-half, so my shoes were like flippers.’
She said she was never nervous about the dangers but was apprehensive as to how they would cope ‘with all the inadequacies of the ship’.
THE SS Uganda took in its first casualties on May 12, and by the end of the month there were 132 injured people on board. ‘We saw so many men in terrible pain and in shock,’ she said. ‘The hardest thing for me was seeing so many young, fit men with missing limbs, or limbs that were so badly injured that they had to be removed. In some cases we had to take their boot off still with their foot in it and throw it over the side because there was nowhere to store body parts.
‘It was very distressing. You knew life for them would never be the same and that their careers in the military were over.
‘Some of the burns were terrible, too. One man with terrible facial burns was crying and grabbed my arm and said, “I used to be handsome, but now I am never going to look normal again.”
‘The work was relentless. We worked every day, four hours on, four hours off, day and night.’
When the fighting was at its height, the medical team would take in between 40 and 70 wounded men daily. In total they treated 730 casualties, including 150 Argentine servicemen.
Hendy told me that despite the professional approach she always tried to maintain, there were occasions when she couldn’t help breaking down in floods of tears.
‘One chappie, who was Special Forces, had to have his leg amputated,’ she said. ‘But because of his medical history he couldn’t have a general anaesthetic – he had to have a local, spinal anaesthetic.
‘While surgeons were removing his leg, he was still conscious. My job was to sit and hold his hand, and this brave man said to me, “You poor nurses, I bet you don’t know what to talk to us about while men like me are having their legs chopped off.” His bravery got to me and made me tearful and he said, “Oh, don’t be upset.”
‘And I thought, this is the wrong way round – why are you reassuring me? He was such a wonderful man.’
Hendy and her colleagues treated injured enemy prisoners with the same dedication and compassion as their British patients.
‘I don’t know what they had been told about us, but some of the young Argentine soldiers seemed incredibly frightened,’ she remembered. ‘One had to have surgery done on his leg, and I went into the operating
theatre with him. He had his leg pinned and plated and then it was set in what was called “Portsmouth cement” and it sets hard. But a piece dropped to the floor, and so I made a little penguin out of it which I gave to him when he came round after his operation.
‘When, days later, he was being transferred to an Argentine ship, he was calling for me and so someone came to find me.
‘He showed me he still had the little penguin and he gave me his rosary beads, which was quite a momentous thing. I waved him off.
I kept the beads for many, many years.’
After the Argentine surrender was announced, Hendy was the first naval nurse to set foot on the Falklands after she jumped on to a landing craft taking supplies to a beach. ‘I thought, I haven’t come all this way not to set foot on the Falkland Islands,’ she said.
On the voyage home, she and the other nurses reflected on their work: ‘I am not religious, but we all went to the side of the ship and said a really deep prayer for the badly injured men. As nurses, we were all going back a little bit older, a little
Would I do it all again? 100 per cent yes, without question
bit wiser, a little bit more experienced, but there were so many chaps going back massively disfigured who would not be able to do the job they were trained for.’
Reflecting again on her service, nearly four decades later, Hendy, now 65, said: ‘If someone said, would you do it all again?, my answer would be 100 per cent yes, without question. What makes you want to be a nurse is to help people who are ill, in pain, or who have terrible injuries or who are frightened.
‘It was the experience of a lifetime and I feel privileged to have been a very tiny part of it.
‘I have always been passionate about the military, but my admiration for what they go through escalated as a result of everything I experienced and saw.’
©Michael Ashcroft, 2021 Abridged extract from Falklands War Heroes, by Michael Ashcroft, published by Biteback on
Tuesday at £25. To order a copy for £22.50, with free UK delivery, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2973 before November 28. Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is a businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For information about his work, visit lordashcroft. com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook @LordAshcroft.