Live ChatCaptain Malcolm Farrow retired, for the second time, from the Royal Navy in 2005, after over 35 years of service. When the British armada sailed to liberate the Falklands, he served on Admiral Woodward's staff, helping the Admiral plan and direct the ships, aircraft, sailors and aviators of the HMS Hermes Carrier Task Group.
“I joined because my father was in the Navy, and I didn't really think to do anything else, which was probably rather unimaginative of me. And I entered Dartmouth in 1962, in September, and I was 19 and a half at the time.
“I originally joined as an engineer, and after initial training at Dartmouth and the training squadron, I went to the Naval Engineering College at Manadon to do a 3-year degree. But after the first year I realised that pushing a slide rule was not, perhaps, the thing I was best at, and along with 1 or 2 others, gave up the degree course and transferred to become a seaman. And then joined up with my other colleagues who had gone back to Dartmouth to do their seamanship training, and I carried on training with them and became a seaman officer thereafter.
“I then did general seamanship jobs, navigating a minesweeper was my first job, navigated a frigate, other executive type of jobs. And then I specialised in communications and electronic warfare, and spent a year at HMS Mercury in Hampshire, learning about that.
“I was at sea as communications specialist in various ships, and also shore appointments in the same specialisation. And that's what I was doing right up until the Falkland War…”
…that's what I was doing right up until the Falkland War…
“…I had joined Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward’s staff just a few weeks before we deployed, as the Communications and Electronic Warfare specialist on his staff. So, that's what I really was up until then, a Communications EW Seaman Officer.
“Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward was the flag officer of the first flotilla, there were three flotillas at the time, first, second and third, and he was FOF1, as it was called, the others were FOF2 and FOF3. And Admiral Woodward's staff was based in Portsmouth Dockyard, the others were based elsewhere around the country. The staff consisted of the Admiral, a secretary Commander, an operations Commander, about half a dozen Lieutenant Commanders in various specialisations and about half a dozen Warrant Officers and Senior Ratings similarly specialised.
“So, we were small staff, and our purpose was to ensure the fighting efficiency of the first flotilla ships. From time to time, we would go on board one of these ships as our flagship, and then perhaps run an exercise, and in between that would go off individually or in 1s and 2s to inspect various ships, and conduct training, and things like that. Very soon after I joined, the Falkland Islands were invaded.”
…the likelihood of something happening in the South Atlantic was emerging…
“To begin with we [the Admiral’s Staff] were going to run Exercise Springtrain. Exercise Springtrain happened every year off Gibraltar, and flag officer first flotilla was put in command of this exercise in 1982. In the course of the first few days of that, there were increasing noises coming from Argentina, and the media was making much of this.
“In those days we didn't have a great deal of contact with the media, once you were at sea, you were at sea, there was no instant television or satellite TV that there is these days, and no mobile phones. But we knew what was going on, and we were getting signals from the headquarters telling us that these matters were developing.
“However, we continued to run this exercise, but as time went on, the likelihood of something happening in the South Atlantic was emerging. But we were frantically busy running the exercise, because that's a full-time task in itself, watchkeeping, and exercise planning, and so forth.
“At some point it dawned on us that, 'We might well be called to do something here,' because we were already about a quarter of the way there. We had a loosely formed group of ships worked up, trained, on the way, on the straight line. If you drew a straight line from UK to the Falkland Islands, we were on that line already.
“Having left Gibraltar and out in the exercise areas, the time very quickly came when diplomacy had failed. Margaret Thatcher had declared the Falkland Islands were to be recovered, and it was pretty obvious to us at that point that was going to be us.
“We had a significant group of ships, and we were going to need lots of ships, because the Falkland Islands are a long way off. So, we knew we were going, and instead of turning right to come home for Easter leave, which was the plan, we turned left to head south, and the obvious place to head for was Ascension Island, and when we were there, gathered our wits and set off for the real thing.”
“…we were all doing the job we'd been trained for, for 25 years…”
“…there was no time, we were frantically busy. There was the usual sort of thoughts, 'We were just about to go home for Easter leave, and that's not going to happen now.' We didn't have time to worry about anything, there was no thought, 'Oh, crikey, we're going to war, what will we do next?' That wasn't it. We were doing our job firstly, and I think it's important to realise that we were all doing the job we'd been trained for, for 25 years, and so if you've been trained for 25 years to do something, and if the training's been any good at all, you can get on and do it without letting outside influences concern you.
“We only had time to work, and just time to eat, and to sleep, and have a wash. We had no time for anything else. We certainly didn't have leisure time just to sit and chat over a cup of tea, quietly wonder what was going to, we had no time for anything like that.”
Hermes turns up and we do another flag shift…
“We started off in HMS Antrim, and as we got to heading for Ascension Island, we transferred to HMS Glamorgan, that was the first flag shift, and that was because Glamorgan was better set up to operate as a flagship. Antrim subsequently went off to South Georgia with Operation Paraquet and recovered South Georgia.
“Hermes was the obvious choice, notwithstanding she was a wartime design and build, she was big, and solid, and had the space for an admiral and his staff to squirrel themselves away without upsetting the routine of the rest of the ship. Which was extremely important, because the ship had a very important task to fulfil on its own, never mind the admiral's staff being on board.
“So, Hermes turns up and we do another flag shift, into the helicopters, off the deck across the water, land on another ship, all our bags, and baggage, and signals, and books, and all the stuff, paraphernalia that goes with us, and established ourselves in the small little ops room, admiral's ops room, it was extremely crowded.
“We needed more staff, and we needed other functions being fulfilled, which normally, in the day-to-day business of being flag officer first flotilla, we didn't need. So, we settled ourselves into Hermes, and we obviously needed somewhere to sleep, so the Hermes ship's company commander allocated us cabins wherever he could find them, and I had a cabin way down below the waterline, and I think we were all probably below the waterline.
“Hermes was built or designed at the end of the war, and it was fairly rudimentary, all the while of course, we were refining what the likely threat was from the Argentine forces, and one of the threats that was definitely possible was a submarine threat, because they did have some submarines, not very many, just a few, 4, I think.”
Had we lost Hermes, we would have lost the war…
“We never expected to come back from a war without losing ships. Had we lost Hermes, we would have lost the war, the war would have been over if Hermes had been damaged. Firstly because she was the flagship from which everything else was controlled, but mainly because she was the airfield from which half of the Harriers flew.
“Without the Harriers, we could not have defended the landing force, and without that, we could not have carried out the operation successfully. So, Hermes, and indeed Invincible, the two carriers, were essential. Therefore, we had to be absolutely sure that they were protected from any submarine attack. So, it was extremely important that even the faintest, slightest thought that there might be a submarine attack was considered.
“The first thing that the commander of Hermes decided when it became apparent that there was this potential threat from submarines was to say, 'No-one shall sleep below the waterline,' not a good place to be, below the waterline, if you get hit by a torpedo, it’s pretty bad wherever you are, but below the waterline, even worse. So we had to leave our cabins and pack all our stuff into our bags, troop up to the ops room, and there we were thinking, 'Well, now what?' We didn't know what to do, because we didn't know our way around the ship. At that point, people were making themselves hammocks and slinging them from pipes in passageways, people were getting camp beds and putting them under ladders and behind doors, people were sleeping all over the place.”
So, we shot off like rats down a drain.
“The admiral of course obviously realised what had happened to his staff, he had a cabin right up next to the ops room. He also had a very splendid palatial admiral's cabin right down aft, just above the waterline, right at the back end of the ship, at the very stern, which consisted of a large sitting room, a decent sized bedroom with a double bed in it, a bathroom, and a dining room. The admiral was never going to go into this cabin, he was going to conduct himself for the next 2 months moving 6 feet from the ops room to his tiny sea cabin, which he describes in his book as being a bit like a prison cell. So, he said to us, the staff: 'You can have my cabin down aft, because I know you've got nowhere to sleep now.' So, we shot off like rats down a drain. One of us, in fact, it was Lieutenant Commander Kim Howat, he knew the way, I think he must have been on board the ship before, the rest of us didn't know our way around the ship at all, so Kim Howat was in the lead and he was off like a shot, so we followed him fast. I was right behind him, and off we went, down many ladders, and along many passageways.
“Eventually [we] came to a door, and Kim said, 'This is it, I'm sure this is it,' so we opened the door into this room, and it was, it was a large sitting room. Kim went straight across the room, through another door at the other side, well, I was just following him, and he opened this door on the other side of the room, and there we were in the admiral's bedroom, with a bloody great double bed. Kim plonked his bag on the bed, I screeched to a halt thinking, 'God, I'm not going to share a double bed with Kim,' and turned round quickly, conscious that if I didn't do it quickly, all the people behind me would be grabbing the best places in this other room. I came back into the main room and saw a bench in the corner. In fact, it was the last accommodation area of the entire ship and I threw my bag onto this sofa bench, and everybody else was piling in behind me and looking for spaces around the room. I realised that the bench really was only about 2.5 feet wide, and about 4.5 feet long, that wasn't going to be a good place to sleep. So, I grabbed the chair and dragged it up immediately to the end of the bench and found some padding to make the chair the same height as the bench. That made the total length just long enough for me.
“So, that was my bed, for the next two months. I did have to somehow tie the chair to the bench so that they didn't creep apart in the night and I'd just fall off. The rest of my colleagues, of course, were on the deck, because they just grabbed a corner of the room. I think Hugh Cryer slept on the deck, just by the fireplace, so I had to be careful not to stand on him when I got out of my bed.
“There were about half a dozen in here, half of us were there at any one time, because we were watchkeeping 1 in 3. So, most of the time, day or night, there would be somebody sleeping there, but not all the time. It had the benefit of having this shower, so we had a place we could wash in comfort, and a place where we would be uninterrupted, because we were the very last compartment in the ship, right at the back end. I can still hear the 'bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom' of the screws going around as the ship ploughs its way through the South Atlantic, and occasionally going up and down a bit as the gales blew around us.”
…about 18 inches away from, the big strategic plot where the admiral sat and lent over it, and considered his options…
“The Lieutenant Commanders, of which I was one of a handful, were watchkeeping. I was one of the anti-submarine warfare screen coordinators for the force, and we had 2 watchkeeping routines.
“I was one of three on the Anti Submarine Warfare (ASW) screen coordinators' plotting table, which was in this little ops room I've described, and next to, about 3 feet away from, the big strategic plot where the admiral sat and lent over it, and considered his options.
“And so one in three; let's start at 8 o'clock in the morning. So, you came on at 8 o'clock in the morning, and you did 08:00 until 12:00. You were relieved by someone who did 12:00 until 16:00, then the third one was from 16:00 until 18:00, when you came on again until 2000, and your relief did from 2000–0200 and his relief from 0200-0800; so that repeated again and again for 2 months and every third night you got all night off from 2000-0800.
“You'd come off watch at 20:00 in the evening, you go and have supper, and you go to bed until 07:00 in the morning when you got up for breakfast to go on watch at 08:00. So, that was the only way you could really keep going week after week after week with no break at all, because every third night you'd get a good sleep. You have all night in, it's a holiday. After that, you're up at 01:40 in the morning to go on watch again.”
We got 176,000 signals during the period of the action, which is something like 1 every 2 minutes day and night, permanently.
“When you're up at 1:40 in the morning, you've got to go to bed as early as you can, 21:00-ish or something, it's a pretty gruesome routine. So, three of us did that on this plotting table, doing the anti-submarine screen coordination, which also included helicopter surface search for surface contacts, and we controlled both. And the other three did the same watchkeeping routine in the little planning office immediately next door, where they essentially received all the signals sent to the taskforce for the attention of the admiral, and sorted them, and made sure they got sent to the right place and were dealt with correctly, in accordance with the procedures we'd set up.
“We got 176,000 signals during the period of the action, which is something like 1 every 2 minutes day and night, permanently. And so every 2 minutes, the watchkeeping planning officer was having to decide who should see something, was it important, is this one for shaking the admiral? Is this one to give to the duty commander? Should this one go next door immediately to the plotting table, or should it just go in the file for someone to come and see the next morning?
“It was the job of two lieutenant commanders and a squadron leader doing the one in three routine in the planning office, and their job was to sort and manage all the signals that came in. There were obviously periods in the middle of the night when there might be half an hour with not very many signals. But that means there are periods during the day or at other times when there'd be a great many more than one every two minutes, they'd be piling in. And these signals varied from 'the next consignment of Brussels sprouts will be delivered by …,' whatever, to, 'Top secret Codeword Flash, admiral immediately, deal with yesterday.'
“So, this was quite a stressful as well as critically important function. So, between the six of us, we were doing all this and a day job as well. I spent a lot of time myself in that planning office. I'd come off watch after six hours, go and have a quick meal, go straight back into the planning office. So, there wasn't any time to think about grand strategic thoughts or anything, except, 'Just get on with the job.' No time to worry about anything.”
I'm sure I can remember standing astride a sleeping pilot, drinking my pint of beer while he was just sleeping on the deck…
“The bar in the wardroom of HMS Hermes was open, and so there were times, particularly if you had ‘all night in’ coming up, when it was not a bad thing to go and have a pint of beer before you had your quick meal and then went to bed. No-one could sleep below the waterline, so people sleeping above the waterline had to find somewhere to sleep and quite a lot of the air crew, chose the bar to sleep in.
“So they were lying all over the deck of the wardroom, often in their immersion suits, waiting for an emergency call to get up and fly. So, the lights were all down, it was all just dull, red lights and the light behind the bar; I'm sure I can remember standing astride a sleeping pilot, drinking my pint of beer while he was just sleeping on the deck. It was as crowded as that.
“…the food got rather more rudimentary, and it started to run a bit short. And the vegetables of course very soon got used up, so there were no fresh vegetables and they were frozen. I thought it was frozen sprouts, but… Jeremy Sanders, our Commander, thought it was frozen broccoli that we had with every meal. He said that the thought we even had frozen broccoli with custard for pudding one day. ..the biggest yearning of all was for fresh fruit and veg by this time, when you don't have it for weeks, you really, really want it.”
Sheffield's been hit. Smoke coming out of Sheffield, I'm going to investigate.
“I was on watch when Sheffield was struck…in my headphones, I had the anti-submarine warfare and surface search helicopters, which I could tell them where to go, and they could talk amongst themselves, I could hear their chatter. I heard some cry from a helicopter, something like, 'Sheffield's been hit. Smoke coming out of Sheffield, I'm going to investigate.' It didn't take very long to realise this was an Exocet, Sheffield was burning and had to be abandoned.
“…her ship's company were taken off, those who survived. And Captain Sam Salt was brought across to Hermes, and obviously the first thing for him to do was report to the admiral, having just lost his ship. He came into the admiral's ops room. Sam Salt knew me, he came though the door in his anti-flash gear and came straight over to me. He was shocked, obviously he was terribly shocked, well, we were all shocked. He spoke to me immediately and drew me a little drawing on a scrappy piece of paper, where he thought the ship had been hit. And then he went to report to the admiral. That was a bit of a shock. Well, a hell of a shock. But we were so busy we didn't have time to sit and worry about these things. This was a ship that was hit, it was sunk, we've now got 1 less ship, it means we've got to get on with it. So, we paused no more than a couple of marching paces, really, thinking, 'Ye gods, that was not good. This is terrible,' 'Right, get on with it.' And that happened with every disaster, and there were quite a few more to come.”
…our job was to make sure we protected the ships inshore as much as we could…
“After the amphibious landing took place, that was a very, very tense time, had they been attacked on the beaches, that would have been the end of it. They got ashore, with remarkable effectiveness, without being attacked.
“In Hermes' ops room, we were extremely nervous; were they going to succeed? And were they going to be attacked? And were our Harriers going to get there in time and be able to support them? Once we knew they were ashore,
“…at that time we [the navy] didn’t properly understand joint operations, the three services had not worked together anything like as much as they should have done, had we had warning of this we would have done some practicing, but we hadn't. The Navy particularly didn't understand how the Army and the Royal Marines operated once they got ashore. As days went by, we got more and more impatient, and the admiral particularly got impatient as to why weren't they getting a move on? Why were they still hanging around this beach?
“During all that time, our job was to make sure we protected the ships inshore as much as we could, and all the ships that were coming and going every night, bringing more troops, inserting special forces, taking them off again, doing all the reconnaissance. Doing the deception plans of gunfire support and other parts… it was a very tense time, yes, very tense.”
…after the Pebble Island raid, and after Goose Green, … given a fair wind, we might win this
“… the whole thing was the same level of intensity from day one of arriving until after the surrender, there was no let-up. Activity ebbed and flowed a bit in some parts of the taskforce, but it didn't let up at all for us, at all. So, after the Pebble Island raid, and after Goose Green, and so on, it was beginning to dawn on us that given a fair wind, we might win this.
“At the same time, ships were beginning to run out of steam, run out of maintenance, well, almost literally run out of steam. They were needing serious maintenance, people were very tired, stores were getting in short supply; ammunition was getting in short supply, and of course the weather was getting worse. We knew that we couldn't go on much longer, so it had to be done soon.
“There was nervousness about, 'Is this going to be it when they get to Stanley? Is this it?' Menéndez surrendered, sigh of relief, that didn't necessarily mean that Galtieri, and Lami Dozo, and Anaya in Buenos Aires had surrendered. It didn't necessarily mean that the Argentine air force had surrendered, we didn't know.”
Because the war was not declared in the first place, it was never un-declared.
“As far as we were concerned, there was no let-up in the admiral's ops room at all. The Royal Marines in Stanley could relax a bit, they had now thousands of prisoners to deal with, but they weren't actually being shot at. We didn't know whether we were going to be shot at or not, so we kept the same watches, the signals kept pouring in, our daily life was exactly the same immediately after the surrender as it had been just before it. And that went on for the best part of a couple of weeks; it was quite a while before we realised that they probably had given up and we could relax our position a bit. The two [RN] Captains who had kept on watch (six hours on six hours off) as the Admiral’s right hand men, stopped keeping the watch, the lieutenant commanders, took them over. And we kept doing that for about two further weeks until we stopped keeping watches. It was a slow reduction in activity.
“Because the war was not declared in the first place, it was never un-declared, this is the problem now. Menéndez signed in Stanley, but did he sign for the Navy? We hadn't seen, their navy could have decided to come out. It didn't, but it could have done. So, yes, it was a slow reduction.”
One of the worst bits of the whole thing was the journey home.
“One of the worst bits of the whole thing was the journey home. We [the original staff] were lifted off Hermes in the remaining Chinook; most of the Chinooks were sunk in Atlantic Conveyor. We were flown to Stanley airfield, where we landed, got out. Stanley airfield was just a complete mess; there were piles of Argentinian kit and weapons, and mess everywhere, the control tower was completely shot out, there were craters everywhere.
“We just stood there, there was no shelter and we were completely shell-shocked and shattered. This is the first time we'd seen the Falkland Islands. I think 1 or 2 staff members had had a chance to fly in and have a look at something, but most of us had never seen the place, we'd been well offshore most of the time. So, we stood on the airfield for an hour or two, waiting for a Hercules to arrive from Ascension Island. And the only thing I can recall really, there was a great pile of Argentinian kit, and I wandered over and kick around in it for a bit, and picked up a helmet, which [40 years later] is hanging outside the door painted blue, I brought it home with me in my kit bag.”
…the Portaloo was strapped down in the middle of the floor of the aircraft, right in front of the rather bigger canvas seat which they'd given the Admiral.
“I couldn't see anything else worth bringing home apart from a machine gun, I didn't really want one of those. There were 1 or 2 dejected-looking people wandering about on the horizon, who may or may not have been prisoners, or may have been Falkland Islanders. There was no sign of life, really. A Hercules arrived, we climbed on board, feeling knackered. Hercules aren't designed as passenger aircraft; there were some canvas seats in the middle for the admiral and Jeremy Sanders [the commander] and 1 or 2 senior people we had with us and canvas seats all the way down the sides for the rest of us. Pretty bloody uncomfortable. There was a Portaloo strapped down in the middle of the floor of the aircraft, right in front of the rather bigger canvas seat which they'd given the admiral. So, he had a grand view of the Portaloo right in front of him.
“I thought, 'We've got 8 or 9 hours in this bloody thing, this is not good.' And then I noticed that there was an enormous internal extra fuel tank, which had been built into this aeroplane. And it was so big that I thought, 'You could lie on top of this.' So, I scrambled up on top of this fuel tank and laid out a blanket or something, and lay down and had a snooze most of the way to Ascension Island.
“It's a fairly nerve-wracking journey if we'd thought about it, because the Hercules had to air-to-air refuel several times, but the aircraft can't go fast enough to catch up the fueling aircraft; it has to climb and then dive to get speed up. The idea is that you are going fast enough when it gets to the bottom of the dive in order to plug in. Thankfully we got to Ascension Island, and it was daylight, (I have no idea what time of day). We groggily got off this aeroplane, and somebody said, 'We'll take you to the mess and you can have breakfast.' And we sat there like zombies, and then a VC10 arrived and we were taken back to the airfield and stuck on board, and that was another long flight. I don't know how long it took.
“During this flight, our heads in the war zone, somebody, stood up and said, 'I'm afraid you've all got to go and get into your No. 1 uniforms, because-,' I don't know who, Margaret Thatcher, the commander in chief, or somebody and the press, 'Is going to be at Brize Norton when we get there and they want us to all be looking smart.'
“Well, what we should have done is to have said, 'Stuff that.’ But we were like zombies, why did we have our No. 1 uniforms with us? I don't really know, we had taken them with us for Exercise Spring Train, which meant we still had them, and they'd been wrapped up in a kit bag for the last couple of months. I can recall struggling into a collar and tie and a No. 1 uniform, in the little loo of the VC10.
“And that's how we emerged, bleary-eyed, into the English summer at Brize Norton some hours later. And then having emerged from the aeroplane, we were now in the hands of the Royal Air Force, who with customary efficiency, ushered us into a little room, told us to sit down and wait for customs clearance. Ye Gods!
“We could see through a couple of glass doors a mass of people, and realised that was our families. And I remember seeing wife and daughter through the glass door, and I thought, 'Hang on. What are they doing there?' It was like a dream. Anyway, we sat there for a little while, and it probably wasn't that long, we just got up and moved towards the door pushing the RAF fellow out of the way. We went through the door, and were then reunited with our families.
“After the obvious, the hugs, I can sort of remember the drive home a bit, and I can remember looking out of the car window thinking, 'I can't get my head round this. Because my head was in a war zone, my head was on watch in the ops room of HMS Hermes, but my body wasn't, and I couldn't put the two together. And although I didn't realise it at the time, I must have been impossible to live with, because I didn't know what was going on.
“I didn't understand what anyone was on about, and I didn't feel that anybody understood what I was trying to say for a month or two. And it wasn't probably until we went on holiday to a little cottage in Wales (a lot of people had given free holidays to the task group, and that was really brilliant of them). I went on holiday, and there was a bit of peace and quiet, countryside, fresh air and I think I probably started to calm down a bit then.”
'What's wrong with me? Why are you saying that to me? Why are you behaving like that towards me?
“I wasn't aware of it at the time, I thought, 'What's wrong with me? Why are you saying that to me? Why are you behaving like that towards me? I'm not doing anything unusual.' Well, obviously I was. I must have been a complete prat, but I didn't realise it at the time. So, yes, the coming home was bloody awful.
“What they should have done is to have given us at least a week to get home. People in the ships, of course, took two or three weeks to get home, so by the time they got home, they'd slept, they were not tired, they'd eaten decent food, and they'd relaxed a bit. We got no time for any of that, and that could have been arranged.
“If you think you need help, if you think things are not quite right, for God's sake, go and ask someone, go and talk to someone, go and get help. SSAFA is as much needed now as they ever were.
“Don't boil it up inside, don't say, 'I can deal with this, it's nothing, and I should have forgotten it by now,' that's not the case at all. There are people there who will talk to you, and listen to you, and help you. And too many still try and bottle it up inside, which is why these charities like SSAFA are so much needed. They're as much needed now as they ever were, and of course we're talking about the Falkland War, but there were wars before, and there have been wars since, and the problems that people face are essentially the same in all of these conflicts causing traumas which need to be resolved and can often only be so by someone trained to help.”
…the Falklands War restored Britain's confidence in ourselves as a nation…
“The Falklands War left a number of legacies. On the grand scale, the Falklands War restored Britain's confidence in ourselves as a nation, it restored our waning place in the world. The world looked up and said, 'This country had not gone down the tubes, it will stand up for what is right and do what is right. And my God, look, they've just done it.' It most certainly did a huge amount for that. Perhaps one of the best outcomes of the Falkland War was for Argentina, by enabling them to return to a democracy, which they still are today.
“I think the country now is much more aware of the service and sacrifice given by the Armed Forces than it was. Before the Falkland War, we'd had years and years of Cold War, it was a static situation, and the Armed Forces had rather drifted out of public recognition, apart from one day a year on Poppy Day. But I think since the Falklands War, and in a continuing development, there has been a greater awareness of the unique nature of military service and what people who take The Queen's shilling actually sign up for, and what they do, and that it has value, and that value has to be paid for. I think the country is better at looking after its servicemen now than it used to be, maybe that started way back after the Falklands War, and then it was accelerated in the wars in the Middle East, which brought their terrible toll.”