También hay una referencia a Miguel Savage en el libro "3 Para Mount Longdon", donde rescatan algunas de sus vivencias, especialmente una visita que hizo al Longdon en el 2000.
Aquí transcribo algunos párrafos
HEALING THE SOUL
THE ARGENTINE PERSPECTIVE
By Michael Savage
Michael Savage belonged to C Company of the Argentine 7th Infantry
Regiment positioned on a feature just north east of longdon called
'Rough Diamond: His mortar supported Leutenant Castaneda's unit
during its counter attack along Longdon's crest and the subsequent
hand-to-hand fighting. After the Paras had cleared 'Full Back' by the
morning of the 12th, he and his comrades were trapped in meir
positions by the British artillery until dusk that evening. The rest of his
company had retreated earlier that day. Eventually he managed to
escape towards Stanley.
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The first thing we spotted from a distance was something brown and square, which turned out to be our old cooker.
And right beside it. in the same spot we had left it 18 years ago, as if
for me, was a stainless steel cauldron, with two shrapnel holes in it. I used to cook. I think we used to take it in turns, doing weekly shifts that's when we were able to get more food. But it was a terrible thing to go about serving others in the cold, so my mate Roberto Maldonado and I would fill three canteens with 'mate cocido' to use as hot water bottles and we'd have something warm to drink each morning.
At night we'd leave the cauldron just outside the tent. Field mice would often get into it and they'd freeze to death trying to get out. For meals we had 'mate cocido' in the morning, no sugar or bread: a watery soup at midday and at night a thin broth and nothing else. There was never any bread or fruit. We'd get water with our canteens from nearby ponds. We had no option but to pilfer our own provisions. The booty was hidden in empty munition cases that's how we'd fool the officers.
There were also groups of 'sheep hunters', so you could say that there was a
primitive form of bartering going on. Even so, I lost 17 kilos. I came home weighing only 55 kilos and to this day I have been unable to forgive the Argentine officers who were in charge of us.
It is still possible to make out a depression in the ground where my tent once was. The 'tent' consisted of two canvas cloths which you had to put
together to make an improvised shelter. It is impossible to imagine what it was like to be in this rickety structure in a windstorm. Several times in the night it would blow away. leaving us crying and praying in the rain out of sheer desperation.
Alan Craig, my argentine trenchmate, remembers that 'once wet, there was no way you could dry your clothes other than to keep them on and dry them with the heat of your body'.
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The bomb craters are everywhere and are really impressive. Besides, the grass doesn't grow in them. they're black and I wonder how long they will be there to remind those of us who survived how close we had been to death.
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Around three metres away was the position of Alan Craig, Adrian Gómez Scher and Sergeant Alcaide
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The base of a machine-gun was surrounded by shell holes. Anyone who had been there at the time wouldn't have survived.
We also found twO 105mm anti-tank guns. It was amazing one of them was carried by me and six other 'colimbas' (conscripts) by hand uphill from Moody Brook, four kilometres away. It took us four days to do it. Now they lie there like dinosaur skeletons: in fact, this place is like an open air museum and it's hard to believe that 50 much is still intact.
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three days before the battle at Mount Longdon the British were already very close when they saw a group of six mcn heading for an estancia beyond
the Murrell river. An officer suggested kiling thcm, but the regiment commander stopped them, because this would have alerted the Argentines and they would have lost the surprise element for the attack which was to be carried out the following day.
I was among those six men, acting as interpreter.
On the night of the 11 th June, B company of the VII Regiment La Plata was
awakened when a British soldier stepped on a mine, which gave them some time to prepare.They were on the summit of Mount Langdon; that battle was the fiercest and bloodiest. because it involved 150 men against 150 men.
Just thinking about the battle chills my blood.The English came up a very steep slope towards the Argentine positions; the British mistake was COStly and they suffered many losses. So much so that today the battle is analysed and studied in military tactics courses.
From my position I could hear shouting in English and Spanish, tracer bullets,
everything. In the confusion, C Company of the VII Regiment La Plata, where I was, fired two flares, lighting up the hills. Sub Leutenant Castaneda organised support for Company B which was under heavy attack.
Castaned .. 's support was considered by the British to have been one of the most heroic events in the ground fighting on the Malvinas, prompting Brigadier Julian Thompson to say: '" was on the point of withdrawing my paras from Longdon. We couldn't believe that these teenagers disguised as soldiers were causing us to suffer so many losses."
Alan Craig remembers that "that night B company wasn't using radars because they were trying to save batteries,"
As for me, I was there when they organised the group, but as I belonged to a mortar support group I wasn't picked. I saw 46 men leave and head straight for Longdon, of whom only 21 returned. They headed out in the dead of night straight into a bloody battle.
The heroism of these kids was incredible; those of who remained behind were
praying and I couldn't stop trembling.
The next morning as two of the 21 survivors were giving us their account of what had happened, a mortar shell fell two metres from our trench, killing one of them instantly and wounding the other while Roberto, my mate, took a shrapnel wound in the intestines.
"When the artillery started pounding on us, we jumped into this hole, dug into the peat bank.. It was constructed by a conscript that was an engineer, It was 2 metres down, and 2 metres into the bank.. During the time we were
for the attack. It was a very hard Job keeping it dry but the reward was great!
This hole saved my life. In the middle of the night the colimbas came to ask me how to say "me rindo" (I surrender) in English and they left for their dugouts repeating the words "I surrendo. I surrendo."
Some of them tried to make white flags but by then we didn't have anything left that was that colour because all our clothes were filthy, black with soot from cooking with helicopter fuel.
Saludos a todos los foristas!
