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Dave Parr in the Falklands with 2 Para.
‘The regiment became the means “for a man to value his reputation” among his comrades “more highly than his life”.’ Dave Parr in the Falklands with 2 Para. Photograph: © Terry Stears
‘The regiment became the means “for a man to value his reputation” among his comrades “more highly than his life”.’ Dave Parr in the Falklands with 2 Para. Photograph: © Terry Stears

Our Boys by Helen Parr review – an outstanding account of soldiers, the Falklands and masculinity

This article is more than 5 years old

The story of the author’s Uncle Dave, a paratrooper who died in battle, is broadened into a wise, moving study of men and war

Dave Parr died in action on the last day of the Falklands war in 1982 as a 19-year-old private in the Parachute Regiment. His niece, Helen Parr, who was seven at the time, recalls being woken one morning by the sound of a telephone and then her mother entering her bedroom, crying. When she went downstairs, she found the next-door neighbour sitting in the shadows of the sitting room: the curtains had been drawn against the light. After a silence – and “somewhat unexpectedly” – the neighbour said: “He is with Jesus now.”

Parr begins her outstanding study of men at arms with this quiet but calamitous memory. Two years before, Uncle Dave had lived with his mum and his black labrador in a bungalow in the Suffolk town of Oulton Broad. The family fitted no easily defined social category. Dave’s eldest brother, her father, had a Cambridge degree and a job as a teacher; Dave, by contrast, left school to work as an unskilled labourer in a pea factory. He enjoyed what a different class and generation would have called “country pursuits”: he spent a lot of time on the marshes, wildfowling and fishing and, in the author’s words, learning “the patience to move with the natural world and an acceptance of its brutality”. He and his friends liked to get drunk in Lowestoft, which could be a violent little town, and would vomit in an alley or fall asleep in the cemetery before their three-mile walk home. “Beneath that endless larking about,” Parr writes, “was a terror of boredom that could be utterly relentless, and a dim knowledge that in the world of labour they were nothing. If they did not want what their fathers were supposed to have, then life stretched ahead, long and dull and pointless.”

He applied to join the paras at the age of 17. “Youngish and a bit immature but would seem to have the ability if he gets stuck in,” wrote the recruiting officer on Parr’s index card. He was both typical and untypical of that era’s recruits. Like the rest, he had neither a degree nor A-levels and left school with two GCSEs. Unlike many of them, however, he had a background that was neither deprived nor scarred by domestic violence. He hadn’t been brought up in a children’s home, he hadn’t served time in a young offenders’ institution, he had never been in trouble with the law. What united him with the young men who had endured these things was aspiration. The paras promised adventure, certainly, but also the route to a more orderly life in an organisation that would – as many parents believed – turn feckless, wild boys into responsible, fearsome men.

‘A terror of boredom’ … Dave Parr playing in the garden aged five. Photograph: © Helen Parr

Manliness – or at least the British military’s idea of it – is the subject at the centre of this book. How was manliness to be achieved? What purpose did it serve? What happened when it failed? Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery saw the paras as “men apart – every man an emperor”, who went nerveless into battle, having already conquered their fear by the act of jumping from an aircraft thousands of feet aloft. Of course, there was – is – rather more to it than that. Parr joined a regiment founded in 1942 that had no county or regional affiliations and little by the way of heritage (and some of that, the different tragedies of Arnhem and Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, best forgotten), which put “fighting spirit” above any other quality when it came to selection and promotion. The wastage rate during initial training was high: paratroopers believed they faced the world’s toughest infantry selection tests. Those who passed – it might be as few as one in three – then entered the process described by a para lance corporal as being “broken down from what you were and rebuilt to what they want you to be”. That meant instilling in them a love for and loyalty to their regiment so that, as Parr writes, it became the means “for a man to value his reputation” among his comrades“more highly than his life”.

The entire British army is of course based on that principle, but the paras pursued it to the fiercest extreme. All armies are troubled by the question of how ready their troops are to kill and be killed: a US study went so far as to suggest that only one in four soldiers could be relied on to fire their weapon in combat, while the instincts of most people facing the real prospect of their own death are to avoid it by hiding or running away. To make men behave both cruelly and bravely, it was important to implant in them, in Parr’s words, “the deep-rooted fear of appearing frightened – of not being man enough for the job”. A man would get up and fight if he thought his mates expected him to set or follow an example. The key was group loyalty. “They stood together,’” Parr writes, “because they all comprehended their own part as representatives of the regiment, past, present and future. The coming together of the component parts, moving in harmony, in absolute trust [that] each cog would carry out its tasks to its full capability, created an almost sublime beauty. Men would become masters – emperors – overcoming their human limits of compassion and fear.”

Feelings or beliefs that ran contrary to the aggressive ideal were despised. A soldier could be called a “pansy” for using a handkerchief rather than blowing his nose direct to the floor. In the year that Dave Parr joined, a journalist asked a para sergeant what happened to vegetarians in the army. “They die, Ma’am,” he replied. Conversations in barracks divided women into two groups: they were either respectable – those you took home to mum and married – or they were “dogs”, the easy lays that could be found in towns such as Aldershot, where the paras preened themselves as the infantry’s elite. Other soldiers may be “squaddies” but a para was a “Tom” – a tomcat, promiscuous and forever on the prowl.

What enemy could withstand the assault of men such as these? On their voyage south to the Falklands in April 1982, the second and third parachute battalions, 2 Para and 3 Para, trained hard but expected weak resistance. One of Parr’s witnesses, a private in 2 Para, said: “We felt we could have been given more information [about] what kind of men we were up against … we were told they were not up to much and that they had dysentery and that.” The colour sergeant of 3 Para had the impression, before the landing, that the operation was a kind of joke: “I didn’t think the Argentinians would have any fighting spirit.”

10 June 1982. Dave Parr (left) waiting to move by helicopter from Fitzroy to Wireless Ridge with Privates Neil Turner (centre) and Terry Stears (right). Photograph: Imperial War Museum

What awaited them were the “actualities of war” – tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, inaccurate information – and intense battles fought at night at close quarters and sometimes hand-to-hand. The confident shipboard talk of “storming ashore” to give “the Argies a bloody nose” was soon dissipated by the encounter at Goose Green, where 2 Para under the command of the impetuous, stubborn Colonel “H” Jones (the H stood for Herbert, a name he disliked) took heavy casualties in a frontal attack that went ahead despite the reservations of other officers. “Don’t tell me how to run my battle,” he snapped at one of his company commanders. He had always been a loner, at Eton and elsewhere. Parr writes that his personal bravery was extraordinary – he was awarded one of the campaign’s two posthumous Victoria Crosses – but it is difficult to avoid the implication that the lives of 2 Para would have been safer under the leadership of a less troubled man.

By the brief war’s end, the Parachute Regiment accounted for 39 of the 123 soldiers who died on land (another 132 British servicemen died at sea). No other regiment had such a high death toll. It was a time of personal discovery. Hard training, battle plans, group loyalty: nothing could quite prepare them for the experience of real warfare. “It was terrible to see the deadness of the dead, hard to accept that their living had just ceased,” Parr writes. Men witnessed deaths that were vile and distressing. “If there was a characteristic emotion of battle, then it was not hatred, nor anger, nor love – it was fear.”

As for the dying, their comrades noticed that many called out to their mothers. Witnesses reasoned that to escape the noise and horror of the battlefield, the dying had sought to imagine their childhoods. Parr quotes a para, Tony Banks, who at the death of another private at Goose Green saw “a single tear run down his cheek, and he said: ‘Mum.’” But, Parr goes on to say, “it was not just the obvious sadness of the scene that upset Banks … Rather, the men became aware of a truth that they all knew but could usually ignore. At the moment of his death, [Steve] Dixon did not want his mates, his paratrooper identity: he wanted his mother … The consolations of a death for the regiment might not be quite as they had appeared, now, as life was extinguished.”

The Parachute Regiment didn’t always behave humanely or legally in the Falklands. Often, under the pressure of the battle, they behaved very badly, shooting the wounded or those trying to surrender because they saw them simply as obstacles to their speedy advance: the quicker and more complete the victory, the smaller the chance the paras had of dying. And while a Para might be moved – the sight fixed in his mind for ever – by a dying comrade calling for his mother, the same man might mock an Argentinian soldier in a similar plight calling: “Mama.” It was the same with corpses: the Paras accorded their own tremendous care and respect, searching the terrain for missing parts, but would sometimes rearrange their dead enemy to comic effect.

Killing could remain in men’s minds long after. Parr writes: “Some developed a sense of regret – not that they had killed, because they believed what they had done was right, but that they had been in the position to have to do it in the first place.” Others felt ashamed that they had participated in the horror. A medical orderly, Cpl Tom Howard, is quoted: “It began to hurt me that people could do these things to each other – for a fucking piece of dirt in the middle of the ocean.”

Many if not most deaths in war can be attributed to bad luck – the wrong place, the wrong time – but Dave Parr’s luck was exceptionally bad; to say more here would spoil the surprise in a subtle narration. Thirty-six years later, prompted by his death, his niece has published a book remarkable for its insights and wisdom – insightful not just about the Falklands and the Parachute Regiment, but also about warfare more generally and the military’s role in a state that has shed an empire.

The author is a historian by profession and her account is richly sourced and careful in its judgments: censoriousness is not her game, and Margaret Thatcher’s postwar behaviour (for example) is illuminated rather than condemned. Parr is also a gifted writer, who for the most part writes tenderly. Many passages are profoundly moving. There can be few better books about fighting men in all their bravery, terror and shame.

Our Boys: the Story of a Paratrooper is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

More on this story

More on this story

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  • Rishi Sunak criticises EU for calling Falkland Islands ‘Islas Malvinas’

  • Islas Malvinas: EU signs deal using Falklands’ Argentine name

  • UK ministers urged to unseal files on Falklands attack that killed 56

  • Falklands war art installation given ‘fitting place’ in Portsmouth

  • Argentinian Falklands veterans mark ‘day of sadness’ over torture they endured

  • Argentina invades the Falkland Islands – archive, 1982

  • Declassified files reveal British interest in Falkland Islands oil

  • British sovereignty over the Falklands is an absurd imperial hangover that must end

  • Truss says Falklands part of ‘British family’ after China backs Argentina

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