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.