Sheltered No Longer

The Falkland Islands conflict is not a televised war, and almost the only real sense of the scene must come from the dispatches of British correspondents with the troops and the recollections of expatriate islanders. Here is a summary sketch of Port San Carlos before British troops moved out, derived from press reports and from interviews with Falklanders now in England.

It is early winter now. The daytime temperature hovers in the 30s, and at night the frost shades the windows of the few white wooden houses. When the wind doesn't roar, it howls in the rolling hills. Seagulls loop and cry above the harbor. If this were a normal season, there would be the slight scent of peat in the air, and the residents of the settlement would be going about the business of putting the rams out to the ewes. There are late potatoes and winter cabbage in the family vegetable gardens. The sheep dogs would either be working or be still.

Instead, the sheep dogs are pent up and yelp like continuous gunfire at the expanded human traffic; the hillsides are punctured with slit trenches; the sea birds are watching the boats slice through the kelp; helicopters panic the ducks; mines are planted far out near the gorse and heather. This is what war does to a landscape. The place that was a few weeks ago a vast serenity with marvelously fresh air is now "a major bridgehead," home to Scorpion light tanks and Rapier surface-to-air missiles and all the other accouterments of the most advanced mayhem.

There are some 50 Falklanders living in Port San Carlos. The population is up from an original 30, thanks to recent refugees from Port Stanley. Villagers watch the bombs and antiaircraft fire from their doorways like spectators. But they have adapted to the new conditions, having dug trenches covered with corrugated iron, with 2 ft. of turf over that. Digging is a principal activity in Port San Carlos these days, and it is not always easy going. The earth is spongy. Dig down deeper than 2 ft. in certain areas and you'll have carved yourself a well. Still, there are places where you can go down 5 ft. and have a fine dry foxhole. One British correspondent wrote that his most vivid memory of the first 48 hours was "the digging, the terrible digging. From the moment that we reached the company positions, every man dug ceaselessly, from dawn to dusk and into the night again, interrupted only by the constant air-raid warnings. But deep dugouts make troops almost immune to all but direct hits, and deep dugouts we have dug." Another correspondent was given a piece of corrugated iron by a friendly Falklander to cover his foxhole, along with a sheepskin rug to lie on.

On the surface, the picture is that of any liberated town in France or Belgium during the late days of World War II, though the comparison ought not to be exaggerated. The Argentine soldiers have evidently conducted themselves quite decently during their occupation. A sheep farmer in San Carlos said, "The Argies used to give sweets to the kids and ask them if there were British soldiers in the area." He also reports that the Argentine soldiers told the citizens that henceforth Port Stanley was to be called Porto Argentina, and the settlement of Darwin, Belgrano, after the sunk cruiser. That was about the extent of their impositions. Still, there was some passive resistance to the Argentines by the residents. No one would tell the invaders, for instance, how to turn on the water for the toilet in the new school hostel.

British correspondents on the scene quote a young Argentine soldier taken prisoner on the first day as saying, "We did not think we would have to fight when we went to the Malvinas. I was given only a rifle and six bullets. I did not know why I was sent there."

The British soldiers, who know perfectly well why they were sent there, have been given tender care by the Port San Carlos citizens while awaiting orders to move out. Falklanders are generous enough to offer the troops mutton broth, but are probably considerate enough not to offer them sheep's brains fritters, an island specialty and clearly an acquired taste. There was a widely distributed picture in Britain of Regimental Sergeant Major Laurie Ashbridge sipping from a mug of hot tea handed him by some smiling San Carlos women and children, shown leaning on a fence. When Ashbridge's wife Mandy saw the picture at her home in Tidworth, Hampshire, she remarked, "He never says no to a nice cuppa. "Tractors and Land Rovers have been offered freely to the troops to lug equipment to nearby hills. An 18-year-old boy used his father's tractor to haul gear from the shore. Another boy told the soldiers, "If you want to borrow my Suzuki, go right ahead."

Where the soldiers are headed, however, a motorbike would not be of much help. Parts of the "road tracks" running from Port San Carlos to Port Stanley are treacherously soft. The route runs over open moorland. You either ford streams in a Land Rover, water up to the wheels, or go across small bridges. Residents know the best way to Stanley is to proceed south, over the Sussex Mountains (about 900 ft. high), and the British forces have shown they know it too. The road is boggy on the tops of the hills, but once over, the clay track is solid. Then down toward Darwin and to the larger Goose Green, which in normal times consists of some 103,000 sheep and 100 people.

But these are not normal times, and in spite of an atmosphere of insistent confidence and cheer after the British landing, it is hard to get a sense of the true feelings involved. Removed from modernity for most of their lives, the Falklanders have suddenly been invaded by it, and while they have shown an ability to adjust to their revisions, it is impossible to tell how much trepidation remains. As for the British troops, they are merely passing through town on the way to what threatens to be the bloodiest theater of an already too bloody conflict. When they depart, the people and animals of Port San Carlos will undoubtedly resume their quiet routines, but nothing will ever again be the same. Carol Miller, a former Port San Carlos resident now living in England, who guided the British military in their plans for the landing, described her home thus: "To the north there are rocks; to the south is a hillock. It's sufficient to shroud the houses from any view, from sea or air. The whole place is absolutely sheltered." No longer.

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