Martin, as a platoon commander, was assigned to Recruit Platoon, putting newcomers through the same miseries he had endured. He might have remained there for the rest of Three Para’s tour as penguins but for a faraway gentleman called Leopoldo Galtieri. On 2 April 1982, the Argentine dictator invaded the Falkland Islands. Three Para was told to kit up and get ready to move out.
Within a week, driven by the implacable Margaret Thatcher, a British task force was steaming south in a collection of vessels, bound for the far end of the Atlantic where a southern winter, with its roaring seas and driving rain, was waiting for them.
The journey south was on the liner Canberra with a first stop at Ascension Island, a bleak button of a place lashed by constant wind. Here there was a pause as, far away, the last diplomatic efforts were pursued to persuade Galtieri to evacuate or Margaret Thatcher to back off. Neither could dream of agreeing and surviving in office. The Canberra sailed on, shadowing the expedition’s two aircraft carrier, Hermes and Invincible.
When it became clear that invasion was inevitable, Martin and his team were ‘cross-decked’ by helicopter from Canberra to a landing craft. Gone were the civilized conditions of the liner. The same wild and stormy night that Martin and his men cross-decked in Sea King helicopters, another Sea King went down and sank, taking with her nineteen of the Special Air Service Regiment, the biggest one-night loss the SAS has ever taken.
Martin took his thirty men ashore with the rest of Three Para at the landing ground of San Carlos Water. It was miles from the main island’s capital at Port Stanley, but for that reason it was unopposed. Without a pause the Paras and the Marines began the gruelling forced march through the mud and rain east to the capital.
They carried everything in Bergen rucksacks so heavy it was like carrying another man. The appearance of an Argentine Skyhawk meant diving into the slime, but in the main the ‘Argies’ were after the ships offshore, not the men in the mud below. If the ships could be sunk, the men on shore were finished.
The real enemies were the cold, the constant freezing rain, the exhausting ‘tab’ across a landscape that could not support a single tree. Until Mount Longdon.
Pausing below the hills, Three Para set themselves up in a lonely farm called Estancia House and prepared to do what their country had sent them seven thousand miles to do. It was the night of 11/12 June.
It was supposed to be a silent night attack and remained so until Corporal Milne stepped on a mine. After that it became noisy. The Argie machine guns opened up and flares lit the hills and the valley as daylight. Three Para could either run back to cover or into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and over forty injured.
It was the first time, as bullets tore through the air around his head and men fell beside him, that Mike Martin experienced that strange, brassy taste on the tongue that is the flavour of fear.
But nothing touched him. Of his own platoon of thirty, including one sergeant and three corporals, six were dead and nine injured.
The Argentine soldiers who had held the ridge were forced recruits,
lads from the sunny pampas – the sons of the well-off could avoid military service – and wanted to go home, out of the rain, cold and mud. They had quit their bunkers and foxholes and were heading back to shelter in Port Stanley.
At dawn Mike Martin stood atop Wireless Ridge, looked east to the town and rising sun, and rediscovered the God of his fathers whom he had neglected for many years. He prayed his thanks and vowed never to forget again.
At the time the ten-year-old Mike Martin was capering round his father’s garden at Saadun, Baghdad, to the delight of the Iraqi guests, a boy was being born a thousand miles away.
West of the road from Pakistani Peshawar to Afghan Jalalabad lies the range of the Spin Ghar, the White Mountains, dominated by the towering Tora Bora.
These mountains, seen from afar, are like a great barrier between the two countries, bleak and cold, always tipped with snow and in winter wholly covered.
The Spin Ghar lies inside Afghanistan with the Safed Koh range on the Pakistani side. Running down to the rich plains around Jalalabad are myriad streams that carry the snow-melt and rain off the Spin Ghar, and these form many upland valleys where small patches of land may be planted, orchards raised and flocks of sheep and goats grazed.
Life is harsh and with the life-support system being so sparse the communities of the valleys are small and scattered. The people bred up here are the ones the old British Empire knew and feared, calling them the Pathans, now Pashtun. Back then they fought from behind their rocky fastness with long, brass-bound muskets called the jezail, with which each man was accurate as a modern sniper.
Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines:
A scrimmage in a border station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail . . .
In 1972 there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai; like all these hamlets, it was named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked and sugarless tea.
As with all the compounds, the walls were where the residences and livestock pens were built, so that all faced inwards. The fire of mulberry logs blazed as the sun dropped far to the west and darkness clothed the mountains, bringing chill even in high summer.
From the women’s quarters the cries were muted, but if one was especially loud the men would cease their jovial conversation and wait to see if news would arrive. The wife of Nuri Khan was bearing her fourth child and her husband prayed that Allah would grant him a second son. It was only right that a man should have sons to take care of the flocks when young and defend the compound when they had become men. Nuri Khan had a boy of eight and two daughters.
The darkness was complete and only the flames lit the hawk-nosed faces and black beards when a midwife came scurrying from the shadows. She whispered in the ear of the father and his mahogany face broke into a flashing smile.
‘Allahu akhbar! I have a son,’ he cried. His male relatives and neighbours rose as one and the air crackled and roared with the sound of their rifles exploding upwards into the night sky. There was much embracing and congratulations and thanks to all-merciful Allah who had granted his servant a son.
‘How will you call him?’ asked a herdsman from a nearby compound.