Surgeon-Commander Rick Jolly commanded the Medical Squadron of the
Royal Marines' Commando Logistic Regiment during the Falklands War, in
charge of the joint Army, Navy and Marine field hospital at Ajax Bay.
This is his memoir of the conflict and the years afterwards. An
earlier edition was published as The Red and Green Life Machine.
The tale is told in chronological order from the early morning
alert phone call to the veterans' visits twenty years later, with
occasional flashes forward and back (I'd known him when we were at X,
or in a few days I'd see this friend's corpse). Much as with
Woodward's One Hundred Days, the abiding impression I take away from
this is one of logistics: put the right people and equipment in the
right place and they can do their job, and that's better for morale
than cutting a few percentage points off the casualty figures. They're
soldiers; they're expecting to fight and die. They're not expecting to
have to fight their own side in order to get the basic supplies to do
their jobs.
The overall mood is one of competent people doing an extremely
difficult job very well, in spite of everything their own side (and
occasionally the enemy) could do to stop them; but the secondary
impression is a tremendous sense of waste of people and material, for
all that the troops felt enthusiasm for the war at the time.
The newer material, dealing with Jolly's activities after the war, is
necessarily less engaging, though still worth reading, and includes
something I rarely meet in the UK, perspectives on the Argentinian
side of the conflict in later years.
Some particular points I found of interest:
-
In order to comply with Red Cross rules, the hospital ship Uganda
could have no military equipment—which included military radios,
meaning that there was no way for the medics on the ground to talk
to them even when they were close by. (And the main field hospital
couldn't be Red Cross-marked, because there wasn't enough room to
separate it from valid military targets.)
-
The nature of high-velocity gunshot wounds is such as to leave a
significant amount of necrotic tissue inside the wound cavity as
well as any foreign matter which may have been near the entry site
and drawn in by pressure differential; the traditional technique of
sewing up the wound and giving oral antibiotics doesn't do anything
to reduce the growth of anaerobic infections in the area which is no
longer being perfused. So instead the preferred technique is to
clean the wound but leave it open to the air at first.
-
After the conflict, the Paras were mostly flown home and reunited
with their families straight away, while the Marines had several
weeks aboard ship when they could talk things through with other
people who'd been there; and the Marines had rather fewer
psychological problems later. (I gather that this kind of
decompression phase has now become standard.)
-
The people who had actual experience of major military action were
all getting on a bit. Belfast just wasn't the same.