‘A 5,000lb bomb exploded – I ran like mad to a trench’
Falklands veterans return to the islands 40 years on and open up about living with the fallout of war
Ann Woodard was cradling her baby son in her arms when the little grey man knocked on the front door. The Falklands war was over, her husband Alex, a craftsman in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, would soon travel home and Ann – visiting friends in Wales at the time – was poring over maps for the best route to collect him from RAF Brize Norton.
“It’s for you,” her husband’s friend said, returning from the front door.
“What do you mean, it’s for me? It’s not my house,” Ann replied. Then she saw his face. “I’ll never forget it – it was the most awful colour. The blood had drained away. And suddenly I thought, oh... Oh dear.
“At the door there was a little grey man – grey suit, grey hair, same grey pallor as my friend’s husband. He said ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, are you the wife of Alexander Shaw?’”
Ten o’clock on a Tuesday night and Ann, now 62, stands in the departures lounge at RAF Brize Norton and, as weary-looking men queue for cups of stewed tea from a machine, she tells her story. The man standing opposite her, a stranger until minutes ago, listens quietly. “I’d lost my husband, my home, my life. All wiped out.” Her voice cracks. “I held my son Craig to me and looked in the mirror and said, ‘What the hell do I do now?’”
The stranger nods, looking at his feet. His name is James Gillanders. While Alex Shaw was being fatally hit in the thigh by shrapnel from Argentine artillery on Mount Longdon, Gillanders, then a 17-year-old guardsman in the Scots Guards, was on his way to Mount Tumbledown, six miles away, where he would fight in the one of the final battles of the Falklands war. Decades later, unable to escape memories, he would try to take his own life. But he isn’t ready to share any of that.
Around the departures lounge, similar stories are shared while the RAF Voyager jet is prepared for a special journey. Forty years have passed since the Falklands war, but most of these 79 veterans, on their way to the islands for a six-day visit planned by the Ministry of Defence, have not returned. They have come to pay their respects to fallen friends, to face traumatic memories, to reconjure faded ones. “Oh, and because my wife wants to see the penguins.”
Are they worried it will bring back traumatic memories? “You’re never without those,” Gillanders whispers. “It’s a case of trying to file them away. Maybe this will help.”
Margaret Thatcher’s war lasted 74 days, during which 649 Argentines died in service and 255 British servicemen were killed. More than that number of British veterans are said to have taken their lives in the years to come, according to one study. Gillanders returned once before. In 2008, he and some fellow Scots Guards camped on Mount Tumbledown and drank themselves silly. It was, he reflects, too soon to return. Back in the UK afterwards, he “crashed”.
One evening, he was untangling Christmas lights in the garden and something about the wires reminded him of the cables on Tumbledown: it flooded back. He won’t say what happened next, only that eight police officers turned up at his house. He was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and kept in hospital for six weeks.
“The problem is, you don’t realise [about PTSD] for years,” says Ian Whittingham, a former Royal Marine who was in 42 Commando. “Being a marine and an alpha male, you put it to the back of your mind. You crack on, bury everything.”
On the first morning, the veterans file onto coaches at the Falkland Islands Defence Force Headquarters. The first stop is San Carlos, on the west coast. Four decades ago, it was known as Bomb Alley, where Argentine jets tried to bomb the British task force; today, San Carlos is bright and clear. There is some debate as to how different it looks. “So much bigger,” says Ian Whittingham, limping across the sand. He points at a mountain in the distance. “How the hell did we walk that far back then?”
Robert Stenhouse, a veteran, gets a bit tearful. Later, he yomps away from the group and scrambles over a fence into a field, looking for something. “Here. No, here.” He frowns. “Yes, that’s where it happened.”
In 1982, Stenhouse, then 17, was a junior marine in 40 Commando, the first wave to land. Having barely finished digging his trench, he was standing in this field when two planes flew overhead and two parachutes dropped from the sky. “I stood there thinking, what the heck are they?” he says. “Suddenly one exploded – a 5,000lb bomb. And f--- me! I turned, ran like mad to my trench, dived in headfirst.” A second explosion killed Stephen Mcandrews, a marine. Stenhouse was, he says, maybe 300 yards from being killed.
On Thursday, the coaches head to Goose Green, where a battle on May 28 took 18 lives. Ian Whittingham has been bracing himself for this – even before they are close, the hairs on his neck stand up. “I still remember marching in – loads of blokes were lying on the ground under their capes,” he says. “I tripped over one and went, ‘Sorry mate,’ thinking he was asleep, and then I realised... Dead paras.”
Today, Goose Green is full of white houses with orange-red roofs, as horses graze outside the Galley Cafe, once the galley for Argentine forces in the village. Ann Woodard is supposed to be in Goose Green too, but she has made her own way to Mount Longdon to retrace Alex’s last steps. “I saw the exact spot where his helicopter landed,” she texts me later. “It was very emotional, a bit unreal.”
Back at Stanley, the veterans file out of the coaches. Only Gillanders hangs back. He’s disappointed that the tour didn’t take in Tumbledown. “The Scots Guards won Tumbledown,” he tells me. “And that was the key to taking Stanley, to winning the war.”
He is ready to tell his story. As the other veterans disperse, Gillanders borrows a 4X4. He fires it up and we speed out of Stanley, across open roads that cut through the landscape. “This is where it happened,” he says, stopping at the foot of a long, craggy mountain. “This was my war.”
For an hour, we trudge through thigh-deep grasses and ferns. The ground is craggy, almost impossible to keep your footing – “Now imagine it’s snowy, boggy, that you’re laden with 10 stone of kit,” he says.
As the sun sets, he nods at a peak. “That’s where they died.” He points at spots, names each man who died there. “I went back up the mountain, seven times, eight times, getting casualties. After a bit I went from looking at them as people to looking at them as sums of their wounds.”
His wife Sarah will tell me he has never spoken as much about the war as he did today. But James is animated as he says: “I’m hoping I’ll finally get things straight in my head now.”
As the coach rattles past Mount Tumbledown on another day, another tour, a local guide points it out. “The site of the battle of Tumbledown,” he says. He is about to move on when Gillanders taps his shoulder. “I was on Tumbledown that day,” he says loudly. He clears his throat. “Let me tell you what happened.”