10215/5 Captain Christopher Brown
I told the ship to engage or to lay her guns on a target that I'd selected, which was this strange object that I couldn't quite work out, that looked like a bunker and in due course the ship came back and reported ready with a time of flight of the shell. I suppose at that stage it dawned that in the sort of pressing of the press up switch on the radio and giving the order to fire, I had at my disposal, although obviously the ship wouldn't fire until the Captain gave the order, but it was up to me to fire the first rounds of the war back at the Argentineans. I sort of sat there for I suppose it seemed for quite a while, but I'm sure it wasn't and then said 'Fire' and there was a similar pause at the other end while obviously it was debated on board the ship whether they should actually engage the enemy and then the word came back 'Shot' which indicated that the ship had fired. In due course there was a puff of smoke and a big bang at the target end and I got on with engaging the target. Now that particular target turned out later to be an Argentinean helicopter which had been shot down during the initial assault on South Georgia and had turned topsy and it's belly looked like some form of artificial bunker that had been made by, it was certainly wasn't natural, anyway, I put a lot of holes in that. We then proceeded to clear the landing zone that was going to be used by the assaulting troops and to take out likely areas where we felt the Argentineans might have dug in and be a threat to us as we moved forward.