Falklands accounting

Press, 9 October 1982, Page 16

Falklands accounting

/ Counted Them AH Out, And I Counted Them All Back. By Brian Hanrahan and Robert Fox. 8.8. C., 1982. 139 pp. $5.95 (paperback).

It has* been reported that 14 books on the Falklands War are being prepared. The first to reach this country was published so quickly that it did not cover the end of the 10-week war. This one, the second released here, is a 8.8. C. publication and consists of the television* and radio dispatches from the Falklands during the war, of the two 8.8. C. correspondents who accompanied the troops, with additional articles analysing what happened which the reporters wrote after they returned to London following the Argentinian surrender.

Both the 8.8. C. correspondents landed the job by chance: Brian Hanrahan, who is 32. had just returned from a sailing holiday and was helping the newsroom out over a busy week-end; Robert Fox, who is 37, had been due to take up a fellowship studying local radio in Newfoundland. • The outpouring of books after the war is possibly a reflection of the frustration correspondents suffered when trying to report it as it was going on. Not only did they have to face the hazards and horror of combat with the troops, they also had to contend with the difficulties of getting

their stories back home from such a remote and inhospitable place compounded by what amounted to the sheer bloody-mindedness of the Ministry of Defence public relations officers whe vetted each story before it could be sent. In the circumstances, to get any story out was an achievement. The reports Hanrahan and Fox sept were very good indeed: taut, vivid, precise, and above all free from propaganda. Hanrahan had a reputation before he left England for his delightful turn ol phrase. To him fell the glory of composing the words that give this book its title and will probably outlive the memory of the conflict itself.

They still have the power to make the spine tingle. They were written after the first British air raid on the airstrip at Port Darwin. The Argentinians reported that they had shot down several of the Harriers that flew on the raid. Hanrahan managed to get around the censorship with one sentence that, by its quiet understatement, refuted the Argentinian claims merely because it sounded unmistakably true: "I'm not allowed to say how many planes joined the raid." he said, "but I counted them all out, and I counted them all back." Any journalist would give his eye teeth to have written that.