A British veteran searching for the identity of an Argentine marine he killed in the Falklands War will get a chance for closure after a newspaper found the man’s family.
Tormented by the memory of bayonetting an enemy during a bloody battle at the climax of the 1982 war, Gordon Hoggan told AFP three weeks ago that he wanted to find out who the man was and return his helmet to his family.
After the interview was published on November 6, Argentine newspaper Clarin went searching for the fallen soldier’s identity.
The paper tracked down a key witness, a navy captain who was at the Battle of Mount Tumbledown that day.
After checking his account with military specialists and experts on the war, it identified the late marine as Jose Luis Galarza, a dragoon in the Fifth Marine Infantry Battalion.
It also found his father and two sisters.
“Of course I want the helmet,” Miguel Galarza, his father, said through tears.
Galarza, who lives in Duggan – a small eastern town with British immigrant roots about an hour outside Buenos Aires – was overcome with emotion when journalists interviewed him, said Clarin.
He left the talking to his daughters and did not speak of his 20-year-old son’s death on June 14, 1982.
But he clutched worn photos of his smiling son in uniform.
“I remember him like this,” he said.
Across the Atlantic, Hoggan told AFP he was planning to travel to Argentina to meet the Galarzas, though he had not yet set a date.
“The family would like to meet me, as well as the veterans’ association that the guy would have been in, his regiment,” he said.
“I’m happy. I think it’s going to be closure for me. I want to go ahead and do it, I want to beat my demons.”
Hoggan, who is now 55, told AFP earlier this month of the horrifying nightmares that still haunt him 32 years after that day.
Waging hand-to-hand combat against Argentine forces during a seven-hour battle in driving snow, Hoggan, then a member of the Scots Guards’ Second Battalion, spotted two enemy soldiers positioned in a nearby cave.
At the moment they noticed him sneaking up on them, his rifle jammed.
“I didn’t have time to take the magazine off and clear it, so I lunged forward with my bayonet, stabbed him in the neck and he never had a chance to fire. It was him or me,” he said.
It took years of nightmares and a nervous breakdown in 2001– followed by 18 months of homelessness on the streets of London and, finally, treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – to realise the episode was still tormenting him.
“I’d like to return them the helmet, for closure on my behalf,” said Hoggan, who comes from Kirkcaldy in Scotland and now lives in Derby, central England.
“They may not want it. They’d probably hate me. I killed their son, or brother,” he said. “But I would like to explain to them why it happened.”
Jose Luis Galarza, a guitar lover with a broad, easy smile, had recently graduated from high school and was completing his mandatory military service when Argentina invaded the British-held islands it calls the Malvinas on April 2, 1982, said Clarin.
He volunteered to go and turned 20 years old 10 days after arriving on the South Atlantic islands on April 7.
His death, it turns out, was a central event in a well-known war story in Argentina.
After seeing Galarza and another comrade come under attack, a petty officer named Julio Saturnino Castillo rushed out of his foxhole to defend them.
Shouting “English sons of bitches!”, he was gunned down on the spot.
The episode was widely recounted, and Castillo was posthumously awarded Argentina’s highest military honor.
A navy ship was also named after him in this country where the wounds of defeat remain fresh and the islands are still seen as Argentine.
Despite this lingering bad blood, Hoggan said he did not fear traveling to Argentina.
“The veterans’ associations say that they would keep my safety,” he said.