 24 hours in in horrendous weather conditions and they've just survived because they'll survive two helicopter crashes. The Argentine forces that were on the island, we basically persuaded them to give up and they crashed again. Mick how are you shipmate? Yeah I'm good Chris, nice to meet you virtually as we do these days. No I'm good, I'm just getting on with my life you know and I'm happy. Is this 40th anniversary of the Falklands bring you any challenges? It brings me reflections Chris. I am aware of the anniversaries you know anybody who was in San Carlos on 21st of May 1982 doesn't need to set a reminder on their phone. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones following the conflict I pretty much got on with my life and it was only until many years later I started to look back at the Falklands and I hadn't realised the horrendous trauma that it had left a lot of people with them. I didn't know that there was more veterans who committed suicide than actually died in the conflict itself and I don't consciously remember saying to myself right I'm putting this behind me. The mind's a funny thing and I think it did it for me. It pricked you doesn't it if you're lucky and since then I have become aware of some of the serious messes that these lads are still in lads and I mean they're all 60 and not now but you know everyone will tell you that the Falklands war was 40 years ago but those involved it was yesterday and always will be. So no not really challenges but reflections and considerations for the impact that it's had on other people less fortunate than myself. Yes it's a tough one isn't it because there's a bit of a problem being in the forces and that is if you're not careful your identity lies in what you did 40 years ago. Yes you know a life should move on but it's sorry go on. Well I was just going to say I mean subsequent experiences that have had unconnected with the Falklands which I really don't want to go into on this podcast actually ended up leaving me with PTSD so I do have some appreciation and I'm well aware of the point that you made there about you've got to move on. If you stay rooted in the past it'll destroy you without doubt. Yes exactly it's not meant to be a criticism of anybody it's I think the problem or challenge being in the military is it very much forms a part of young men's identities and that in itself can be problematic when you overlay on top of that something as traumatic as the Falklands then it's not just you know I don't know in the Marines case reliving getting your green berry all those years ago it's actually reliving something that's going to have an awful big effect on on your life and there's nobody there after you leave the forces to explain all this to you to get to get you to move on and so you're faced with these unreal situations that the vast majority of people on this planet will never ever have to go through and then you're kind of like yeah then you're kind of like you know you can get stuck on them is what I'm trying to say. Well if you're fortunate enough to have people around you that are prepared to support you speak to you and try and understand these traumas then again you're really fortunate but you know so many of the veterans from subsequent wars they're on the street nobody cares about them and they're left on their own yeah when you leave the forces you have to go and build new skills you have to go and work out your way forward and for a lot of the veterans say they can't do that and some of them sadly take the other route out yeah and we should remember as well it's not just those that commit suicide people who drink themselves to death that doesn't get reflected in the statistics no people who go and you know put their family through domestic violence as a as a my product of their trauma that none of this gets this none of this gets mentioned and yeah war is an awful thing did you did you ever expect to be going to a war when you join the navy well before we started recording there I was talking about these aerograms that I'd written back to my mother and in one of them I actually say I didn't really expect it but it's what I was paid to do and and I you know it was always a possibility but at the time in 82 it was the middle of the Cold War and you know the Troubles and Northern Ireland so I like many of my shipmates and other members of the task force probably didn't even know where the Falklands was although it's funny when I went back down in 2019 there was a lot of material in the veterans lodge and a hell of a lot of it was about the battles fought down in the Falklands in 1914 and the First World War so I was I kind of wondered why that wasn't included in our military history we should have known about that but none of us knew where they were you very often hear the the comments all we thought they were in off the north of Scotland while our first task was South Georgia so when they mentioned you know Georgia I was thinking isn't that in America is the yanks are going to be a bit peed off about that are they not but now we were suddenly brought up to speed that that do you want me to just talk about that at the moment told you mate we can talk about what whatever we whatever we we want let I mean Antrim was a destroyer right was it were they called it county class destroyer the guided missile destroyer they were designed in the late 50s and I think Antrim was launched in 1970 they were Cold War vessels with the main armament system called C-slug and it was a long range missile which accelerated something like Mach 2 when it left the launcher and it was designed to be fired for the Cold War like for battles out at sea but it we went to South Georgia obviously but the part when we went into San Carlos it became pretty useless because you need airborne early warning you need guidance and what have you and it was surrounded by hillsides so really you were you were throwing punches all over the place but they were less than effective as far as the main missile system was concerned but we had sailed from Portsmouth in mid-March 1998 we were heading for Gibraltar along with the company of other ships such as Sheffield Coventry and Glamorgan and we were going down to do exercise spring trade we were supposed to be away about six weeks or something like that and then we were coming back to Portsmouth and then Antrim was scheduled to go to County Antrim for a ships visit I'd never been to Northern Ireland before all I knew about it was what I saw on the TV and my elder brother had done a couple of tours out there on minesweepers and we were heading back to the UK and so we were sailing north and I was morning watch and I was you know you go in the responsibilities to get the breakfast going and preparations for lunch anyway after a couple of hours I got chance to go and get a cigarette and a cup of tea and I went on the upper deck and I remember I was standing on the port side and I was watching looking at the sun and I'm thinking the sun doesn't rise in the west what's going on here and this was the morning of April 2nd so you know I went back down to the galley and I said why why are we sailing south and nobody knew at that moment in time and then shortly after that the commander came on the tannoy and he told us that the Argentines had invaded the Falkland Islands and that we were we were going to be going down there to to take them back and that's when they started mentioning South Georgia because all the pictures and the footage that you see of the task force leaving Portsmouth you see the Hermes and the invincible and what have you well they were some three days behind us and we were a couple of thousand miles ahead of them already because we were in in Gibraltar so we all peeled off and headed to Ascension Island and what happened is the the powers that be decided which ships were going down south and which ships were returning to the UK and basically the ships that were heading south cannibalized the ships that were heading north we took every ounce of food fuel armaments everything that we could get and it was a really frantic couple of days hugely physically demanding because all the stuff has to be picked up and put somewhere we had a crew of 450 but we were supplemented by a lot more marines I think they were M company four two and the helicopters were racing between the ships doing what they call Vertret which is a vertical replenishment just refers to the helicopter picking stuff what we're taking it from ship to ship and we made our way down to Ascension Island now it's important to point out as a feature of my story that is that prior to any of this happening when I joined the Navy I wanted to be an air engineering mechanic and the the recruiting office said well there aren't any spaces at the moment so why don't you join up as a chef if you want to get it now that I've since found out that's just a ruse to fill up whatever spaces they want filling up but I liked cooking anyway and I just I wanted to I wanted to get out of Stoke on Trent the the take that auditions weren't running at that time so I joined the Navy instead anyway an opportunity came up to work alongside the flight crews when you go into defense watches on a warship you basically split the crew in half and that includes the flight crew so you'll be working 12 hour shifts when you split the flight crew in half there are not sufficient numbers of them to effectively run the flight we had a Wessex 3 helicopter called Humphrey so what they do is they had a course called SMAC 19 they changed it to SMAC 22 and they would stick you on a pontoon in the middle of Portland Harbor and they would send all manner of helos out and you had to when they landed you had to strap them down you you got taught basic firefighting and although during the Fultons there was an awful lot of mission creep we spent an awful lot of our time and defense watches on the Antrim as did all the others so as a consequence of that the majority of my war was actually not in the galley but on the upper deck I've sent you a photograph taking up showing the damage on the side of the Antrim and you can see where all the shells went through the guy standing on the very far right of that photograph is me so we got down to Ascension and it later than never heard of but it's like the surface of the moon and it was massively busy there was aircraft coming in and all the time there was Hercules everywhere ships all over the place one of the other photos that I've sent you is of a Type 42 sitting off the coast of Ascension I believe that's Sheffield that's one of the things that I commented on your channel the other day was you were interviewing a guy from 4.2 and he was talking about where they'd done a speed march and then they all stripped off and jumped in the sea and then they all came screaming out one of them had a black fish attached to his backside and I commented that to my recollection they were parrotfish and you could see them because the waters off Ascension are extremely clear and you can see quite a distance down and the lads were trying to catch these parrotfish as they were trying to pull them up on these steel hooks these fish would bite straight through the hooks but that royal was lucky because below the parrotfish were the hammerhead sharks and if they come out with one of those attached to their backside it would have been a bad day anyway we the task force was approaching Ascension Island and then we were given our orders to peel off there was ourselves Plymouth Tidespring I think Brilliant as well we were told to go and head down to South Georgia and meet up with endurance I can't remember how long it took to get down there but it is quite a distance and it took quite a while the most noticeable things on the way down there was the complete change in the environment and you've got the North Atlantic which is okay and then you reach Ascension but between Ascension and South Georgia you really are heading onto the other side of the planet and amongst all the expected threats that we had from submarines the aircraft threat really wasn't too much of a problem as in bombers or fighters because of the distance because South Georgia is about 800-900 miles east of the Falklands and some marine threat was was very relevant but one of the biggest threats was the weather there were icebergs off South Georgia and I've never seen seas like them in my life that they can be flat calm and you can turn into a force 10 in a matter of half an hour it's incredible it's stunningly beautiful but it's deadly anybody who's sailed in the waters in the South Atlantic will tell you that especially of Drake's passage off South America and places like that when we left Ascension to head down there we were supplemented by I think it was D Squadron SAS and I think Plymouth maybe picked up some SPS you'll have to put an awful lot of Marines the crews on the ship were very very cramped there wasn't enough beds people were hot bunking I remember some of the SAS lads were actually sleeping in in their sleeping bags in the the gulches which is like where the away from the mess deck you've got the the bunks and then you get the gulches where the lockers are and they probably thought they was quite handy and out of the way there but they found out to the cost that when when the sounded action stations they got trampled loads of Matlos running over them I think we were probably actually quite in we were intrigued about our new guests onboard the SAS because remember this was only two years after the Iranian embassy when they'd burst out into the into the public realm you know people didn't know they were and then all of a sudden there we were sitting there watching them load the magazines I remember waking up one day when they were about to go ashore and I just think sitting on my on my stomach where they were just piling stuff out getting all the gear and it said this side towards enemy I wasn't familiar with these kinds of ordinance and that but I soon found out what it was but they were a they were a good bunch of lads anyway we we knew that there was Argentine garrisons on South Georgia and that we'd been tasked to go and sort it out basically and we were poking and prodding around the islands we knew that there was a submarine threat which turned out to be the Santa Fe I don't know if I get this one in there in there I think we took out the Santa Fe before we attempted landings our Wessex was flying around and they detected this submarine on the surface and and the navigator at the time left him and Chris tired I think and he dropped a couple of depth chairs on them and then combined links and and what were they called wasp helicopters they had as both missiles and torpedoes and essentially they they they crippled it and it limped into grip vicken but the the lads were trying to do the marines and the sas I think it was the sas first they were trying to be inserted into grip vicken not grip vicken fortune and glacier which is an extremely wild environment I do believe that they were actually advised against it but and the decision was made that they were going in and they they went in and they were sitting on the glacier for I think 24 hours and the reports were that the wind was so strong that it blew the tents away and it was like 100 mile an hour wind and at some stage they requested an extraction and we had a couple of Wessex 5 helicopters from RFA Tidespring which was a raw fleet auxiliary I can't remember if it was an oil or if it was a carried dry stores and ammunition anyway one of them flew in to try and extract them and I believe it's when it was trying to take off it was a complete white out you couldn't see anything there's a consequence of the weather down there and as it tried to take off one of its wheels clicked a rock and it just went over and I think there was 16 17 guys on board and it crashed so they requested another extraction and the other Wessex 5 went in after them and all the all the guys piled on board it and they went to take off and they crashed again so you're talking about people who've been sitting on a glacier for 24 hours in in horrendous weather conditions and they've just survived because they all survived two helicopter crashes the only helicopter left capable of picking them up was our Wessex 3 but the role of our Wessex 3 was it was an anti-submarine helicopter so therefore the the back end of the helicopter was just full of sonar equipment and I remember that they said right we've we've got to get all this stuff out now and this is part of the mission creep I suppose for myself it was just handed a spanner and you know take this off there get that out of there and we stripped the whole thing out and Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley and his co-pilot I think his name was Stuart Cooper he's a young lad from Fife they went in and tried again and they were successful they picked them all up and brought them back to the ship and it's one of the things that I remember about about them when when they got back we also picked some of them up from Gemini's that the motors had stopped and they were just bobbing around and helpless in the water the the guys in the helicopter and the guys that we rescued from the Gemini it was the most notable things went back on board and we were helping them out and some of us were saying to them there's hot food in the in the galley there's hot drinks in the galley the dock wants to see you in the sick bay every single one of them went down to the mess stripped all the weapons cleaned them looked after the gear and then they went and got something to eat and I had to admire that the not just the physical toughness but the mental toughness of these people and they were pretty impressive actually they were very very determined and I remember one of them telling me that he was making his way around the side of this mountain he came across an albatross nest and he was wearing these waterproofs which you had to wear down there because of the weather and he was quite a short fella and when he got back on board all around his groin area all his waterproofs were ripped and I says what what I'm there mate and he says it's a come across his bloody albatross and it was sitting in a nest and like a baby albatross and they're quite a size even when they're a baby and he's got this big beak and he says and I'm clinging into this this mountain and he's effing things kind of like this ripping his waterproofs and you know he was more concerned about this chick than being halfway up the side of a mountain that you could fall off into in horrendous conditions so now I was I was I remember I do remember thinking to myself well if we've got guys like this on our side then we stand a good chance here but we did eventually take South Georgia back and nobody was killed at the time. One of the casualties, the POWs that came off the Santa Fe I remember he was stretched off and he had half his leg missing. I was told at the time that some torpedo would come loose or something and and they'd ended up it landed on his leg and he'd had to have his leg out and mutated whether that was the case or not I don't know but I just remember this lad was screaming his head off as he came past. This brought the the the reality of the situation right in front of your face. Anyway what happened after that is that the Argentine forces that were on the island we basically persuaded them to give up and the way that we did this was Antrim and Plymouth laid down naval gunfire support but they did it to either side of the Argentine positions and over a period of time they basically came in closer and closer and it was really it wasn't an exercise designed to kill anybody it was an exercise designed to show the futility of their position and it worked and the Marines went and took the surrender of the main force and then later on Nastiasti, Captain Astis signed over the surrender of his forces in his part of the island on board HMS Plymouth. We took a load of prisoners from South Georgia and I don't know if I've mentioned this already I might have forgotten but nobody on a warship has one job everybody has multiple tasks and one of those tasks on Antrim that I got occasionally we were heading north with the Argentine prisoners of war on Tidespring and we had Astis on Antrim and we also had three trillion scrap metal merchants their terms of the way we held them they were civilians so there were no armed guards for them but Astis had two armed guards every time he was let out in his cabin and we had to exercise him walking around the upper deck and that fella exuded arrogance and he if you ever want to know what a Nazi looked like or the sort of arrogance that they gave off it was him and we used to have to basically march him round at gunpoint and then see him back to his cabin it was only a few years ago actually that I read an article about him that apparently I don't know if it was on Antrim or on a subsequent ship but apparently he broke off a bed spring and fashioned it into a sort of dagger you know that you could hold on to the spring and then and try to have a go at a couple of lads that were escorting him I don't know what good it would have done him on a ship in the middle of the south atlantic right I don't know where to go but he was wanted for his involvement in the murder of around 5000 people because remember at the time the Argentine junta they had a big problem but they they used to disappear their political opposition and there was around about 30 000 of them so we we took them almost up to Ascension Island and then transferred them all to other vessels and then they were going to be repatriated via Uruguay and once we'd carried this out we then joined up with the main task force and we turned south as we were going down to work on the the Falkland Islands and to try and to try and free them and I'll tell you something now that they're coming to play later on I was on the upper deck it was warm so we must have still been around at that Ascension and I remember looking up and I could see this Vulcan bomber flying overhead and I just took it it was you know part of the the task force I didn't know anything about Black Book missions or anything about that I only found out about all that later but I'll come back to that anyway we we're heading back down to the Falkland some of the ships had already been down there and had been far on Argentine positions naval gun fighters support that that sort of thing and probably insert in SF for reconnaissance or whatever but we eventually were told that we were going to escort the landings the main landings and it was going to be the 21st of May and the weather had been pretty bad but the morning of the 21st of May was actually quite nice which is exactly what you don't uh ardent led the way in and I think we were behind the ardent and and we had put some SPS into Fanning Head which is a position at the the mouth of San Carlos and we steamed into San Carlos and we were laying down some naval gunfire at Fanning Head as well and it was all it was all pretty quiet and later on because we we kept GMT so we were like four how four hours ahead I think it was all three hours ahead of the Falklands so our day was starting much much earlier but as it started to get light all you could see were ships everywhere and it was a huge amount of activity and they were trying to get the guys assure there's this massive great big ship that I later found out was the Canberra I remember looking at it and thinking you know the helpful that was a good idea because it was just a huge target um anyway I I can't remember maybe about 10 or 11 o'clock something like that the first of the air attack started and that uh that was a serious wake-up call these jets appeared from the the end there which would it be I think maybe the south end of San Carlos they would just pop up over the hill you couldn't see them coming by the time you saw them they were on you they were doing I don't know 400 miles an hour or something like that one of the photographs that I've sent you it's not I don't know it's from Andrew it's a common one shows two A4 skyhawks coming in it's either gun camera footage or it's uh from one of the missile platforms and they cut us up they they they were there were bombs everywhere the noise was unbelievable there was gunfire there was there was smoke and I had gone below uh for something there's some reason I can't remember and there was this massive crash it was just like the hit and um the sea slug weapon system we just fired one or two sea slugs just to get some lead in the air I suppose and the second the sea slug had left the launcher this bomb came straight down and smashed through the uh screen doors that open up to load the missile into the launcher and it just cut straight through it like butter and it went through several bulkheads after that the the kinetic force of this thing being dropped from a jet flying at hundreds of miles an hour was incredible and it just smashed through all these bulkheads and then it went up and it hit the flight deck from underneath and that left a bump in the flight deck and then it crashed down into the after heads the heads uh what you call the Navy it's the toilets and it just smashed into the after heads and the lads up top oh that's why I'd gone below um I've been sent down there they they they thought that there might be a fire below the flight deck and that had caused the flight deck to buckle well actually directly underneath the hangar and we were looking for firefighting equipment uh specifically a Y piece because when you fire on a on a ship you approach it with two hoses one which causes like a big fan of thin water and that's that shields you from the heat and then the other one is jet and you poke that through the fan of water I can't remember what they're calling now and you direct that the fire so we were all looking for this this fire and the firefighting equipment and we're running up and down the passageway on the port side and I was heading for it to the front end of the ship and one of the lads Alan deadmarsh he was a chef and he was running towards me and it's it's one of those things it goes in slow motion it's kind of like watching a car crash or something I could see this ray of light daylight suddenly appear on from the port side of the ship followed by another one and another one and another one and we were being strafed and the shells were coming through the side of the ship and they were exploding and we just hit the deck and Alan was running towards me and I was running towards him we both hit the deck at the same time but his legs were poking up when all the smoke had cleared we were face to face and I thought he was grinning it turned out he wasn't grinning he was grimacing this piece of shrapnel had come across and taken a big chunk out of his leg and he was bleeding quite badly and while still lying on the deck I grabbed him by his belt and we passed him in a line down to the first aid post which was down the way so that he could get treated and I stood up and as the smoke was clearing it was just unbelievable the inner bulkhead that led into the main galley was just peppered with this the shrapnel and actually I waited for it to cool down and 40 years later I still got it and you can appreciate like with the jagged edges what something like that is going to do to the human body and does do to the human body and it's actually really heavy as well I had this kind of mad notion that if I keep it safe and in my safe it can never have a go at me again there were multiple air attacks that day many of them and it's really is a sight to behold but we had to evacuate San Carlos because this bomb was sitting there in the after heads unexploded the damage that we'd taken had taken out the sea slug magazine the sea slug weapon system couldn't use it we were having problems with the sea cat short range missile systems I remember one of the operators saying he was standing on these pedals and the damn thing wouldn't it wouldn't traverse so we were left with the four exocet missiles that we had well they were anti ship the Argentine Navy had long since gone back to port we just had a four five turret which wasn't really much use than other otherwise and persuading troops to give up so we had to retreat from San Carlos and we I'll never forget as as we were sailing out of the mouth of San Carlos which is extremely narrow the was hms ardent sitting there it just had all held kicked out of it and it clearly was sinking I remember standing on the port bridge wing because as we went out it was done for and many of the ships I seem to remember Argonaut that may have beached there were bombs thrown everywhere we but they they weren't going off some of them were going off but not all of them I do remember that the BBC World Service hopefully advised that the pilots were dropping too low so that the bombs weren't actually fused you know when they when they let them go I don't suppose they needed the BBC World Service to to advise some of that and surely worked out themselves because when they came back I don't know if you've ever seen the photograph of HMS Antelope exploding is that the famous one the big white yeah the big white lighting up the sky so yeah it's taken at night I didn't see that one but having been in San Carlos being flew with the type 21 Amazon class which Antelope and Argonaut were I was down glad that I wasn't on one of those because some genius had decided to build them mainly out of aluminium so if you've got a fire on one of those I've heard stories in the subsequent years of large running along in the dark and just dropping through the decks where the decks had melted I can't even imagine that we were quite lucky on the action because they were big old sturdy ship but it depends what what hit you because you probably know what happened to our sister ship Morgan and can you tell us I get well I can only tell you second hand but when I was on the display team many years later I met up with a guy Dinger Bell and he was a chef on the boom organ and they were doing naval gunfire support suppressing the odd in time troops on I can't remember the specific mountain one of the ones around Stanley and they were they were at action station they were doing this on a nightly basis and they fell out of action stations and I remember Dinger saying to me that the chief cook had said to him when they fell out of action stations Dinger can you wet a pot of tea which for cities make a pot of tea and he said give us five chief he said I'll just drop this stuff down the mess because you had all the stuff you had to have with you like your life belt and these these are battle dressings that have still got which we used to have strapped to you your life vest and he said okay and Dinger went down to the mess and he heard a bang and he ran straight back up to the galley and they were all gone just after they fell out of actions there was a land-based exoset launched from the back of Port Stanley and I believe from the accounts that I've read that they saw it coming and tried to take evasive action but it struck where the hangar is and it blew the helicopter apart through it into the sea the hangar doors into the sea and they were quite large the hangar doors and as I said to you earlier on in the answering the galley is below the hangar well there was a put a big hole in the hangar and put a big just blew the galley apart and left a massive hole in the deck so that that's what I was told and actually when we got back to the UK we were tied up next to Glamorgan and I went on board and I saw I saw the damage and it was awful the very nearly lost the Glamorgan the Glamorgan was in serious trouble and it was say it's only the accounts that I've read of it and what Dinger has told me they were damn lucky that they didn't go down so as sturdy as the county class was if you get hit in the wrong place by their wrong piece of ordinance then you're in trouble it always makes me laugh when you hear this term non-combatants some of my shipmates that refer to themselves as non-combatants to my mind there's no such thing as a non-combatant if if you look at the certainly years ago when the first summer south Atlantic metal organization association website was set up they had a list of all the casualties and in the navy there was more chefs killed than any other branch according to their figures I think it had something to do with where the galley is placed in relation to the in relation to the superstructure of the ship we were we were all at risk from the exorcets and I remember that the boffins had sent down some design you know we all these days we want our aircraft to be stealthy our ships to be stealthy and we we try make reduce the radar picture as much as we possibly can and these boffins had sent down this this design that was to be built on the ship and it was made out of aluminium I see to remember and the idea was that you hung it underneath the helicopter and if you detected an exorcet inbound that the pilot would jump into the helo and then just go straight up as fast as you could because what this thing was was anti stealth and the idea was to trick the missile into seeking a bigger target than the ship now that's an unenviable task and I remember going into the hangar one time and I saw the two pilots and they were chatting in the corner and I can't prove it but to this day I swear they were drawing straws because who'd want that job the idea was that it would the exorcet would see the bigger picture and then would start to raise up and it would get to such an angle I believe the idea was it was supposed to tilt the gyro and then make it fall away harmlessly into the sea but it was a theory you know one that I don't really want to put to the test I think a lot I think a lot of the ground troops watched that exorcet go out did they not to Glamorgan I think in some of the literature they would have been in a position I mean I never set foot in Glamorgan until 2019 when I went back but doing the the we were guided around all the different battlefields and that and looked at the ground troops war from from their perspective and yeah I can well imagine that they would have been in a position to see that yeah when I went back in 2019 the things that struck me standing on top of like two sisters or Harriet things like that there was no cover how the hell those guys get up the side of those mountains I know a lot of it was done at night there's nowhere to hide and I had a deep respect for them you know what what they did and against the elements as well and also having to do that famous young because of the heavy lift helicopters went down on the Atlantic conveyor I think I think I think we were quite lucky actually all of us if they'd waited a couple of weeks the weather would have closed in to such an extent that it would have made the recovery of the islands impossible and that would have given them what six months to dig in further mistakes were made on both sides but ultimately you know we prevailed it's I had to go back in 2019 I hadn't carried a load of trauma around when they thought it was just his voice saying it's time to go back it's time to go back and it gave me a massive the massively different perspective because I understood that I'd seen what I'd seen but that's just one piece of a jigsaw you can't make a jigsaw one piece and I'd lost contact with everybody really off the entrant and I ended up getting getting in with a crew of veterans from HMS Intrepid which is a landing ship the bunch of great guys absolutely fantastic but even though they were only maybe half a mile away from from our ship in in San Carlos water and they were below deck they were taking on loads of prisoners their war their perspective was completely different than mine and we were on the same side off a mile apart and so when I went back down that I wanted to I wanted to fill in a lot of those blanks anyway just to go back to this unwanted guest that we had on board this was the first experience that I'd had of the power of humour in war because it was really really tense what was happening was that they got the plan to cut a hole in the flight deck and gently lift this this bomb out they weren't trying to defuse it they were just going to lift it out and drop it over the side it was resting next to the sea slug magazine if it had gone off it would have just vaporized the entrant make one second sorry so the aft end of the ship the back end of the ship was out of bounds while they were trying to remove this bomb and it took hours and hours and hours and everybody was absolutely starving and everybody was in silence as well there was over 400 men standing in one passageway you know I think that was there must have been about that many and all of a sudden somebody started laughing and then somebody else started laughing and people were looking around and saying what's happening and it was one of the leading stewards was a cartoonist and he'd been sitting there sketching this cartoon and he just stuck it up on the bulkhead and then left it there and people would look at it and they I went up and looked at it and I saw this thing and I just burst out laughing and it was a cartoon of a matlow sitting on the toilet and you know how you portray movements in a cartoon like his hat's coming off like this and he's got a cigarette in his in his mouth and in the trap next door to him are four fins sticking out of the bog and in the tannoy he'd drawn on it do you hear that captain speaking I've just completed rounds of the of the afterheads and quite frankly it looks like I fucking bombs hit it it was it was brilliant because fear paralyzes you this broke the spell and it was like this enormous sense of relief of just people laughing and I thought to myself do you know what I think sitting next to this the Cecil of magazine if that goes off we're all dead anyway you know you're not gonna you're not gonna survive on half a shit you know so I went into the game and there was a load of bread rolls and I just started cutting them out you know that horrible primula cheese spread I just I'm just gonna made trays and trays of these things and I walked out the galley in across the cross passage and up the giant's cause right that was the name of the the the corridor on it the on the entrance and I started grabbing these rolls off me as I'm hooking up there and I remember hearing this voice behind me and it said where's the effing pickle because I hadn't put any pickle in it and I turned around and I went the effing pickles and the effing galley just opposite the effing thousand and exploded bomb just carried on you know people are just snatching these things and that but it was it like I say it was the humour it snapped your back into reality but as the as time wore on I saw everybody was standing on the port side of the passageway and we were getting this running commentary and they said right we're now going to start lifting the bomb out and you know you're holding your breath and they've got this mock a-frame thing that they've put up and a little chain and hoist and stuff like that and we're getting this thing out and they said right the bomb's now on the flight deck and we're now going to lower it over the port side and without saying a word every single man in that passageway walked over to the starboard side making any difference anyway but nobody said anything it was just we're now going to be lowering it over the port side and you could hear this but we got we got rid of it apparently we got a signal immediately after saying under no circumstances to remove it but it was too late by then and it was lowered over the side and we went our way and we met up with the Stena sea spread which was a fleet maintenance group ship and we were with them for some time out at sea we're all welders and they were coming patching the ship up and they couldn't do anything for the sea slug system the wiring as I recall was too badly damaged to said so that reduced us our we were afloat but we couldn't effectively fight so we didn't really know what's for the part we were going to be taking in it and we ended up going back over to south georgia for some a bit of shelter with a fleet maintenance group at some period of south georgia the the qe2 turned up carrying a load of troops and we were taking the troops off the qe2 and I think we were transferring them to hms fearless I remember one of the guys was trying to get out of the whatever vessel he was in and get onto the antrim and as he was trying to get on he lost his footing and the boat that he was on got his foot and his knee between the antrim and he just went and the guy screaming in pain and he got him on onto the flight deck and I remember they just pumped him for morphine stuck an M on his head and he was straight back in the boat straight back on the qe2 and on his way home but we we received a couple of the argentine POWs off the uh fearless and I think it it was one of the west six fives I think of of one of the vessels anyway this thing landed on the upper deck on the flight deck and I'd been given an SLR and told cover them until we get them out of the helicopter and that and then they'd be taken away and I don't know debriefed or whatever it was they've been doing and they opened the side door and these two guys were looking at me and I remember they had uh they each had a towel in the hand and I'm pointing I'm pointing this lifelong and I'm gesturing like this you know get out so what did they do they went like that this healer was still turning and burning you know the rotor heads going and there they are holding the hands up with towels in their hand and I'm going no get down on this me anyway we got them out there wasn't a there was no incident came from that but I do recall that somebody was saying that they had been in a trench for 48 hours or something like that and all they had was a tub of margarine to eat and you know I since found out through uh visits down there that they weren't actually very well treated by their their own senior officers not that it made me feel sorry for them right because you know there's plenty of stories in that about um about how they didn't treat the island as well they they they got up to some uh nasty tricks they did uh and we then ended up basically becoming south georgia godship because that's kind of all we were fit for and we kept hearing reports about um the advances of the ground troops I do recall uh when we were a bit further away from uh south georgia a bit nearer to the um to the main task force that there was an air raid worn in red and um three super eight on doors had been launched uh the arch and time jets they're the ones they are the arch and navy and they're the ones that carried the exorcets and we were all lying in the passageway and outside this uh radio room the the guy had put it on speaking we could hear it we could hear the conversations between the the fighter control and the uh the harrier pilots I never saw a harrier in the fort ones by the way never saw one but heard them and you could hear them and it seemed to take forever and you could just hear the static and then go splash one meaning they shot one of them down and then you hear it splash two and we're waiting for splash three and I I remember I could see in front of my face a river of urine just running down the deck where it was it was that uh it was that tense people were that scared because by then you know we all knew the capabilities of the exorcet we all knew the the consequences of taking one of them things on board but splash three came and and we were okay we we were fortunate we you know we had a problems we were running out of food bad weather we we we took a fair share of hits and that but but we lived you know and as the we were getting these uh regular updates which eventually eventually we were told that uh the Argentines is surrendered and that was that but I mean you couldn't let your guard down because you didn't know if there was any straggler submarines or or what have you and we were actually down there for quite a while after the surrender but eventually we turned north and I was designated for the first leave party so when we got to Ascension uh uh I was choppered over to the airfield and I flew home and arrived at uh Bryce Norton I remember my mom and dad were there and my wife was there with my mother-in-law and obviously it was uh it was emotional but um I was living down in in Portsmouth with my first wife Mandy um we went uh sorry Gosport uh we went down to Gosport and I remember when we arrived at the house there was all these people there and these banners and you know welcome home making you know I went in the house I went straight up to my bedroom closed the door and waited for them all till they're all gone it uh I wasn't uh I was relieved but I wasn't in the move move for a party it's different yeah you you it's good to know that you've got the support uh at home but you don't just put something like that down and go to a party well I didn't so about a week later the Antrim came into uh harbour and that was an incredible sight to see uh the thousands and thousands of people it was in the summertime it was like july I think the sun was splitting the sky I remember it was very hot but the um the support of the the folk back home was amazing but um I say I I put it behind me uh and I got on with my life two years later I was on the uh display team and doing the shows at Ulce Court with the field gunners uh come 1988 I found myself in the Persian Gulf on HMS Silla uh and it was the middle in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war which preceded the first Gulf War and uh we the they used to use these Swedish power boats called bog hammers and they would be used for smuggling all all manner of stuff across the Gulf and they also used them to attack civilian shipping and they attacked the I can't remember the name with the vessel on christmas day 1987 we were actually on um Noel Edmund's show we were uh being interviewed out there not not me personally but and as soon as the show went off air uh it went straight to action stations and this this uh vessel had come under attack and we were uh pulling the folk off of that and but there was I don't know like your trainee kicks in doesn't it that's that's what it's there for um uh hopefully I think it probably doesn't always um you know wars war and some people were they not built for it um was there anybody sent home from the Falklands because you know war it's just it's not for some people and that's you know that's fine but obviously if you're in a war sorry go on I do it was a chief petty officer whose job was on our ex-asset system uh from my recollection I think he decided to become a pacifist on the way down and I think he had to be restrained and I don't know what happened to him and the part between when I left Ascension and arrived at Bryce Norton that when the Antrim was on passage from Ascension to Portsmouth I do believe that uh one of the chefs just cracked and uh he was stretched off from the back of the healer I don't know where they're talking but um yeah there were there was a couple of tense parts but you know I think again we had a Dan Goode crew who uh who did the job um yes I understand that there there are people who are not cut out for it but on the whole out of 400 plus men on our ship um we had a lot of good guys uh you know you would you would find yourself in in all manner of things that you if you'd read the small print you probably would have expected it you know they say uh educations when you read the small print experiences when you don't you know I remember seeing what uh one of the lads he was supposed to be on the first day part he would run up to the the signal deck uh because the guy manning one of the Oliken guns I think that was on the port side he'd been hit uh and when we got up there he you strap yourself into an Oliken big 20 millimeter and the aircraft there's a big leather strap goes over your back and um I won't mention his name but he was supposed to be on the first aid party we got this this lad unstrapped from the gun and uh and he took his first aid jacket off and strapped himself to the Oliken and started firing back um he's a chef I don't suppose he ever expected to find himself doing anything like that but um Mick you mentioned earlier something interesting you're talking about this this reddit culture can you can you tell us a bit more yeah I suppose that the reason that I'm talking to you today is because I look at some of the uh some of the other YouTube channels that cover cover conflicts and uh Mark Felton's one is a particularly good one and he does a lot of stuff on the Folkens he covers a range of things and I was watching the stuff about the Folkens and then you get into the comments section and you see all these guys who clearly are keyboard warriors and they they it's almost like they they think they can do something about it but it's so I invented this pseudonym and went on there and basically started started trying to calm them down a little bit and funnily enough the people who were speaking the same language as me were Argentine vets who interjecting as well uh and then you know vietnam vets uh iraq and um I just I wanted to try and uh study the ship a little bit you know if you like and we can see the consequences of that now where you've seen in a certain country that starts with a you over in Europe people going over there uh the reddit battalion isn't it you know they all talk themselves into thinking hey we can do something about this well that's the dangers of social media if you're up against a uh estate military that's that's a whole different ball game you know getting chased around the deck by a fighter jet is is no laughing matter uh and when you've got some sort of fire and forget cruise missile thing being fired from a long distance away it's going to ruin your day and these lads have found that out um to their to their cost they're dead because they egged each other on social media uh was not like that you don't you don't press replay it's for keeps but I um I mentioned about the Vulcan earlier on and I was at Scottish air show I think in 2015 and the Vulcan was on its last blunt and Martin Withers who was one of the Vulcan pilots he was the first Vulcan pilot to strive for Stanley he was standing there and folk were coming up to him all these little kids with the Scottish air show programs in the hand and getting them to to sign them and I couldn't resist it so I stood in the queue with all these kids and eventually I got to the front of the queue I didn't have a program and he kind of went like this with his pen I said I'm not here for you you're autographed I said I want an explanation he said what do you mean I said you flew up my head when I was on the Antrim I remember seeing it and he said so what and I said well I waved at you and you never waved back and he just looked and he went I was busy and when you read the accounts of the Black Book missions I mean that's another level in itself yeah we should give a shout out here um to the Vulcan missions and and it would be great to get one of the crew members on the podcast yeah um I've watched all the documentaries and I've got the book here on my shelf it was uh an incredible feat oh just the refueling plan alone is is amazing yeah and they did it several times I thought it was a one-off but well I I worked out where we were um at that time uh and I'm 99 percent sure that that was the first one anyway I I went back down in 2019 and I'm really glad that I did um because I wanted to speak to islanders I want to speak to all the veterans I said to you before like the difference between the experience and the lads and the intrepid himself only sitting a short distance apart um I also got to speak to the islanders and that the stories that they told were amazing when they when they take you around there's a Vulcan islander called Tony and he's absolutely mind of information he would really be worth interviewing but I I was invited to dinner and the woman there was telling me the stories and of where she was locked up in the goose green uh in the cattle shed I think it was there in there about 30 days and they told us that every couple of days uh they would take the men I'm only telling you what they told me they would take the men out and they would line them outside and basically form a firing squad in front of them and then they would go you know ready aim and then stop and then put them all back in a psychological torture uh you know the the soldiering and this being a subhuman you know you don't have to go around torturing folk like that but the reason that I mentioned going back is because it replaces it changes your perspective you get to see the islands at peace and they're actually quite stunning the the wildlife down there is just incredible some of the beaches that are down there are are amazing but it's kind of it brings closure even though I didn't bring an awful lot of baggage back with me I only ever had one bad reaction that wasn't no not long after we came back but uh uh I would recommend to any uh the vets out there that that haven't gone back if you've got any if you've got any still existing do you know one of the best things you can do is go back um because you you've got family down there you you'd be treated like a king your queen they then will British them we are they should um P&O or bloody one of these shipping companies should lay on a bloody cruise shouldn't they and then all the all the mat all the Matlos um and the pilots could they could get to you know to revisit from the from the what am I saying the maritime perspective rather than the the the the land side it would be I think that would be a special thing it would it would um um I mean I um I I expedition to Antarctica on a on a the the expedition ship plants the earth and I didn't know it at the time but it was one of the best experiences in my life it was just the the whole thing rocking up in Ushuaia down there in Tierra Tierra del Fuego and spending time on a southern tip of the world then you then you board your expedition ship and it's just it's just I mean I mean they do I mean in in in Venice they do expeditions to the Falklands and to South Georgia but I mean an actual veterans expedition could be that'd be quite some special thing I think probably be better than the last time I weren't down there sailing I would say it'd be better food but I'm gonna be honest big shout out to the Royal Navy and Royal Marine chefs I was on invincible for a year and the food was just incredible um you'd have to be a bit of a dick to criticize it put it that way those omelette omelette sundaes I think we used to have oh my god how much cheese chef that much I was on the illustrious uh they're damned hard work though ships damned hard work they've got all these uh conveniences to help you store ship and guarantee they break down every time when you've got to move 1400 bags of potatoes down about six decks by hand that ain't funny yeah funny enough I've done that as well what after I left the mob one joey had was loading stores onto submarines and ships in the in the dockyard military submarines and ships obviously and um used to form part of a chain gang and we would do we literally would do that just throwing sludge to each other and it was it was fascinating because I got to go on a submarine which I never I don't think I'd ever done before and um couldn't believe how tiny these things are I think on the when you watch these war films these you know dive dive dive or whatever it is so you you get this impression that these things are huge and you can play football inside them and it's it's couldn't be further from the truth they're just tiny absolutely tiny um you remind me actually that will you bring up uh submarine um I was taking statements from a guy in south wales to do with some job that we were doing and uh he he said he'd been in south george and I said to him what were you doing there and he said I was involved with this uh uh towing this old submarine out to sea and uh sinking it this Argentinian submarine I said oh all right I said well we played a part and beating it up in the first place and he said to me I've got something that you might be interested in and he goes away to the garage and he comes in you know like the big name plate that you get on the side he comes in with this big board and on the side ARA Santa Fe I said you couldn't make that up um I did say to him like the uh submarine museum at gospel would be glad to have that I've never verified that it's gone there but somebody did say to me that it was there along with an Argentine flag but what's the chances of that yes listen Mick this has been an absolutely fascinating chat thank you ever so much for coming on the show thank you for giving me the opportunity it's um yeah very good of you I appreciate what you're doing collating these stories well we're doing our best here mate you know it it all feels a bit surreal if I was honest um the whole thing I mean it was so long ago but it affected all of us you know yeah it affected us as a nation those old enough to remember and then of course to go through the marines where where the Falklands was it was it was the um you know it was the proving ground for the Royal Marines in recent years it was the kind of ideal theater of war war war for their for their skills and to come through that as well and then to actually be talking to people that were were down there um yeah it all feels a bit a bit surreal but I think we should get these stories recorded um and yeah and that's that's what we're doing that's what we're doing so anything in the on the future for you Mick anything you want to to mention are you going to just go on and live your life um we're just getting through the last couple of years um my wife started up her own coaching business and the idea is that we sell up and move to the Algarve but as I'm sure you're keenly aware uh the world's in a state of it's in a strange place at the moment and um we need to continue to fight against that verbally um and sort of kind of wake people up as to what's happening around them and you know 40 years ago we went and removed a tyrannical dictatorship and uh well I might be wrong but I see one forming up around here as well yeah you're not wrong mate you're not wrong um it's only it's a funny thing isn't it you either see it or you don't sometimes when everyone single every single institution every single piece of legislation every procedure uh policy just the the establishment circled the wagons yes yes I found out that all I just found out that all these systems are bullshit they're bullshit well they all maintain a status quo that's just not not good for any of us don't they no you know the people that do profit from it they only profit in terms of financial gain which translates to power yeah but power and financial gain is is you're never gonna you know what's it saying the scriptures it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for for a rich man to enter heaven um and this is it you know everything in our society is based around these I call them psychopaths probably sociopaths sociopaths psychopaths um all they do they're the whole day the whole life the whole brainwashing their whole schema is all about power it's all about power and screwing other people over that's their only thing nothing to do with in life nothing to do with kindness peace love empathy trying to create a better planet for us all trying to stop destroying you know the environment preventing war because it's you know there's many many many other options of no none of that and what you've experienced is that when you when you try and swim against that it becomes really painful you know it becomes really painful and I went through it with with my um drug addiction realizing that hang on this is this status quo it's fucking bullshit it's all bullshit you know where's all these wonderful kind people that are here to support me they've all just fucked off because it it's an inconvenience to them you know it's an inconvenience them to pick up the fun to me once a week or to stop off and go you're right cre you know it's just uh and and I think that that brings on mate doesn't it and then that brings on an epiphany an awakening yeah um it does it pulls the scales back from your eyes big time yeah it's hard to take at first it's because it's unbelievable at first but it happens to be true yeah exactly exactly it is it's it's insane and it it it goes really really deep glad we've touched on it mick because um you know we give faith to all those people out there that that that that understand it um and I think it's getting more and more now harder to defend for people because so many people so many people see it now so many people see it all they certainly see enough of the picture to realize we've we've all been lied to massively um oh but uh yes yeah say again mate we'll get through it yeah we will we'll win because we win our spiritual battle that's it we'll win our spiritual battle and uh and uh that that's that's all we can do and it's all we need to do yes that and turn off the mainstream media mick listen this has been a fascinating chat mate thank you so much for sharing your your your Falklands experience um uh like you said you know I think it's good we get these stories chronicled um and not not just by the BBC format but these informal chats where where I think the whole story comes out um so I would speak to my oh we've got a pause I just said that I I'm lucky with my wife's uncle he's 97 years old and he's as sharp as a tack and he tells me stories about witnessing the uh bomb in Hiroshima and the Arctic convoys and or he makes your hair curl yes I went to Hiroshima once and I stood on the the bridge in the middle of the city and I I looked at the only remaining building from from that and um I had the most bizarre feeling come over me like something I've never ever felt before and never felt since just to think that their people were it was about eight o'clock in the morning it was probably having their breakfast and suddenly the biggest atrocity ever committed on man went off and no one would have known what what the hell it was or what was happening it was yes insane insane Mick let's let's chat again at any other time you fancy coming back on the podcast um you're more than welcome and thank you very much Chris yeah and uh to everybody at home massive thank you for joining us if you could please like and subscribe that will really help us to keep getting these stories out there and we'll see you next time thank you