It’s the 40th anniversary of the Falklands war. I was a schoolboy at the time, a member of the Air Training Corp and full of the news that was coming from the South Atlantic. However I can also remember the moment it stopped being a news item that fired my imagination, and became a news item that opened my eyes just a little bit to the realities were taking place. The first British casualty was a pilot from the Fleet Air Arm whose aircraft had been shot down by Argentine fire. Many more would follow him.
One incident that I have only recently heard about occurred during the Battle for Goose Green, and it is a story that I think is worth hearing. Many of us will know that the commander of the 2 Para, Lt. Col. H Jones, (known to his soldiers as ‘H’), was killed in action and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery. What is less known about is that when that command passed to the then Maj. Chris Keeble, he faced quite a difficult decision. Here is an account of what happened in his own words.
‘After a long and bitter 60 hour battle, we encircled the settlement, but we had not captured it, and more importantly we had not freed the desperate [civilian population]. My own force had been severely weakened with one in ten of us either killed or wounded. We were largely out of ammunition, the temperature had dropped to minus ten degrees, and we were severely out numbered. On the other hand the Argentine enemy had taken a terrible punishment. So I did what countless Christian soldiers had done before in desperate situations, I prayed. Freezing cold, and alone in the darkness, I knelt down in a burning gulley crowded with the injured and the captured, and prayed the prayer of St Charles de Foucauld, the Prayer of Abandonment, it’s a prayer that calls for God’s will to be done without reserve, with humility and with complete resignation.
‘My Father, I abandon myself to you; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do with me, I thank you: I am ready for anything, I accept everything, provided your will is fulfilled in me, and in all creatures. I ask for nothing more my Father’.
Immediately my despair fell away, turbulence was displaced by tranquillity, stress by serenity, and gloom by determination. In place of the confusion, the indecision, and the uncertainty, arrived clarity. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, hope flourished, I felt warm happy and renewed, I felt embraced by joy. I knew exactly with blinding certainty, in perfect trust, absolute conviction what action I needed to take, I should offer the enemy the opportunity to surrender, an act of mercy. When I explained to my commanders that I would walk down through the minefield in the morning, meet the Argentine commanders and invite them to pack it in, you can imagine their response, ‘Boss you must be ******g bonkers’. When I met the enemy their first words to me were, ‘Thank God you’ve come’. They agreed to lay down their arms, so long as they could surrender with dignity. Between us we created peace’. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LI6ffrTd6E&t=376s)
One of his fellow soldiers recalled that after the surrender, ‘we saw about two hundred Argentineans emerge from the settlement, then about 20 minutes later of so, we saw literally a thousand odd soldiers pouring out of the settlement, I was thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I am glad we didn’t have to fight through this place’, it would have been a really messy do’. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0018c8n/our-falklands-war-a-frontline-story)
In the midst of it all, Chris Keeble found enough composure to be still, to pray and to discern what to do next. And his prayer and action undoubtedly saved lives. It seems to me that there is lesson in that for us all, it’s not quite Rudyard Kipling’s IF, it is that making time to be still and to pray even in the midst of our busy lives, and even in the midst of crisis, is not wasted time, I would say that it is essential.
‘Therefore my dear hearts, be faithful everyone in your particular measure of God’s gift which he has given you, and on the invisible wait in silence, and patience, and in obedience to that which opens the mystery of God and leads to the invisible God.” — Margaret Fell
Brislington Community News 