Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper by Helen Parr

TONY GOULD Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper By Helen Parr Allen Lane £20 Oldie price £13.99 inc p&p

At first sight, The Story of a Paratrooper seems too limiting a subtitle for Helen Parr’s Our Boys. The story of her uncle Dave’s death in the Falklands War is just one thread among many running through this immensely complex and inclusive history of the Paras, seen in the context of modern war, modern Britain and the interrelationship of the military and the ‘civilian’ – a word, Parr writes, she would not have used before she started this book.

Despite the enormous amount of research that has gone into it, Our Boys is easy to read (though perhaps it should be issued with an X-rating for violence) and beautifully, as well as graphically, written. How about this for the first line of a chapter: ‘The Falklands Islands were a loose hem of Britain’s Empire [my italics].’ Would such an image have occurred to a man?

Parr was seven when her uncle died. She barely knew him and, given the brevity of his life, perhaps there wasn’t a lot to know. As a bored teenager, he got drunk with his mates and had the usual brushes with the law. Then he joined the Paras and was felled by a shell, and there was nothing left but potential – what might have been. But as a result of his death, the Parr family inevitably became part of the Para ‘family’ and, as anyone with military experience will know, that is a strong bond.

Parr has a gift for summarising tangled histories in an even-handed way, as she does here with the history of both the Paras (shameful in Northern Ireland, but redeemed in the South Atlantic) and of the Falklands (Argentina has a strong case for ownership of the islands, but Britain could claim to be defending the democratic rights of the British settlers).

Her descriptions of the battles in which the Paras were involved are riveting. Her account of the Goose Green assault, led from the front by Colonel H Jones (awarded the VC posthumously), is reminiscent of another work by a woman, Cecil Woodham-smith’s The Reason Why (1953) – and praise doesn’t come higher than that.

The outcome of both the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Goose Green assault turned on dodgy interpretations of ambivalent orders from senior officers. The former, of course, was a glorious disaster, and the latter, though a triumph, could easily have gone the other way, its successful conclusion depending on a huge bluff.

Being part of the Para ‘family’ has given Parr priceless access to all ranks, and she has made excellent use of that in personal interviews with combatants, in addition to her wide reading. The oral history of the brief but unusually ferocious – sometimes hand-to-hand – fighting in the Falklands yields some absolute gems, such as this example of the gallows humour that can be found even in the most grisly situations.

A man who has just had his leg blown off cries out, ‘I’ve lost my leg.’

A lance-corporal medic replies, ‘No, you haven’t, mate. It’s over there.’

For a moment, unspeakable reality

is transformed into a kind of Carry On Up the Khyber lark.

Adrenaline would carry the troops through the horrors of battle in what Parr calls ‘an old war in a new time’. But to have to go back and pick up the dead in cold blood after the battle was even tougher, especially in the Falklands, where sub-zero temperatures instantly froze the bodies in all the contortions of their dying agony.

No wonder then that there were rumours of misbehaviour by one or two Paras: sticking a cigarette in the mouth of an Argentinian corpse might be no more than a disrespectful prank; but cutting off and collecting the ears of the enemy dead was something else – an unpleasant reminder of the Para excesses in Northern Ireland.

The final third of the book deals with the legacy of the war, particularly the important precedent set by the repatriation of the bodies of the dead, which Parr describes as ‘a tremendous shift’. As a result of this, ‘the aftermath of war became increasingly a domestic – even a civilian – matter’ (and in the case of the Parr family, brought an unexpected revelation of the manner of Dave’s death on the last day of the war). The single-word titles of the last three chapters – ‘Grief’, ‘Trauma’ and ‘Memory’ – give a fair indication of the ground covered.

Our Boys (Thatcher’s phrase for the troops in the Falklands) is likely to become a classic, not just of that war but of war in general and of the shifting relationship between civil and military society.

Sadly, Parr has been ill-served by her publisher in one respect. Maps are not just a necessity for military commanders, but for readers, too.