Author: Dr Richard Knight, Retired Anaesthetist, archives@rcoa.ac.uk
In April 1982, I was grinding through a locum session in a Swedish regional hospital when my wife telephoned me to tell me that the duty officer in my UK medical unit has asked her to say a single word to me – the super-secret word designating the necessity to report immediately to the unit.
This was my initiation into Mrs Thatcher's plan to recapture the Falkland Islands.
Most men in the unit knew where Argentina could be found in an atlas, mainly because of the forthcoming football tournament starring Maradona. This had not been the situation when Dr David Owen as Foreign Secretary, had put the unit on stand-by to repel invading Guatemalans from entering British Honduras. Then, the staff sergeant was compelled to send his wife to the NAAFI to buy an atlas.
After days of packing and repacking equipment, the unit was trucked to Southampton to join 2 Para on board a North Sea car ferry. Cabins were allocated, in the best military tradition, by rank, but in reality were all the same tiered bunks. The major in the overhead bunk was to read and reread his copy of Herodotus, in Greek.