A Brief History of Argentina - Travelsur

A Conscript Describes the
War in the Malvinas, 1982
On the way there, when we were flying to the Malvinas, packed
together, one of the boys sitting near me joked: “Stop grumbling
lads, on the way back we’ll be more comfortable.” “Why?” someone
asked him. “Well, there’ll be fewer of us,” he answered and there was
a heavy silence. . . .
We finally got to our assigned place, but once there neither we nor
the officers knew how to set up our position. At first we tried to sleep in
tents and build fortifications to shoot from, foxholes, like the ones we dug
in our training in Buenos Aires Province. But the soil on the islands was
terrible; you dug a hole and within two days it was full of water. . . .
But the times our spirits were low, it was not because we were
afraid of the English but because of the lack of food. If and when they
arrived, the cold rations came in bags that had already been opened,
with the odd tin and a couple of sweets. I [Daniel Kon] never saw the
combat rations box. . . .
[O]n the final day of the English attack . . . they attacked us from all
sides, from land and from four frigates. . . . At half past ten at night, the
final shelling of our positions began. It was indescribable; about three
rounds a second. We did what we could; all we could do was to protect
ourselves and answer their fire every now and then. . . . They were boys
from Córdoba who had just arrived from Comodoro Rivadavia. They
were really terrified; they had never heard a bomb before and they’d
been put there in the middle of hell. . . .
[We were held as prisoners of the English at the former Argentine
headquarters.] And that was when we began to discover sheds and
sheds, packed to the roof with food! When we’d gone down to steal,
we’d found three or four warehouses, but it turned out there were
more than forty. They couldn’t get in, there was so much food. . . .
In the end we became quite friendly with some of the English soldiers.
When I told them in one conversation that I’d only done five
shooting tests and had fifty days’ training, they banged their heads on
the walls. They couldn’t understand it . . . All the English soldiers had
had at least three years’ training. And however much patriotism you put
in, you can’t fight that.
Source: Kon, Daniel. Los Chicos de la Guerra: The Boys of War (London:
New English Library, 1983), pp. 12, 17, 26–27, 31, 38–39.
249
THE FAILURE OF DE-PERONIZATION