Pat Carey is a reserved ex-marine who does not court publicity. To this day he will still insist his role in the Battle for the Falklands was just that of `A bootneck doing the job for which I was trained'.

Trying to persuade the civil servant to open up and talk freely about the vital task 40 Commando Royal Marines carried out is rather like dealing with a hostile witness in a court room drama. But with delicate prompting he will eventually disclose details of the several times he diced with death.

He will recount the exact moment he thought he was going to die, and of his thoughts of his beloved wife Margaret who, along with all the other relatives at home, he believed were the true heroes and heroines who bore the brunt of fear and uncertainty.

Pat, 46, who works for the Ministry of Defence at Gosport and lives in Whitehill, Hampshire, had already served 16 years in the Royal Marines when the conflict flared up in the South Atlantic.

He was a 32-year-old armourer sergeant with 40 Commando Royal Marines, under the leadership of Lt/Col Malcolm Hunt, when he boarded the requisitioned luxury cruise liner, SS Canberra in Southampton on Thursday April 8, 1982.

`To be honest there was a feeling of excitement and adventure and thoughts of `Thank God something is happening' - every single one of us had the old adrenaline flowing,' he recalled.

`But we also felt we would be returning in a couple of weeks time. We listened to the BBC World Service and felt that the politicians' negotiations would stop it escalating into a war.'

Even so, there was to be no room for complacency for Pat as the giant troopship sailed further south. He was responsible for checking his company's arsenal and had long queues of men wanting sniper rifles, machine gun tripods and other weapons sorted out.

`When negotiations broke down and Margaret Thatcher in effect said 'Go, go, go', there was great excitement,' said Pat. `We had done a hell of a lot of training, getting ourselves fit and motivated, and the organisation on board was quite phenomenal - everybody knew what to do.'

One of the worst experiences of the war for Pat was to unfold on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ship Resource after he had cross-decked from Canberra on the morning of Sunday May 23, and bombs rained down nearby for several days.

`Our take cover position was in the ship's sick bay. Now it's human nature that if you are getting bombed you take cover under something. Well, we all got under the beds, but with all the ammo on board we knew that if the ship was hit it wouldn't just go up - it would disintegrate.

`Suddenly there was this massive explosion and the ship shuddered from side to side. We all thought that a bomb had hit the ship and it was about to go off. At that second I just thought of my wife Margaret and thought ``Jesus, I am going to go, and I hope to Christ she will be all right''.'

With a horrifying air of anticipation he waited. `Then over the tannoy came ``Air raid warning yellow.'' Flipping heck I thought, they've gone, I'm alive - we came through that one.'

It was felt by some that 40 Commando did not have such a dramatic part in the Falklands War as the marines would have liked - responsibility for the defence of the beachhead from Port San Carlos in the north, to Sussex Mountains in the south, San Carlos settlement in the east to Ajax Bay in the west.

Pat, whose `home' for 28 days was a trench, recounted `we were being used for a special assignment, as intelligence reports had revealed that the San Carlos beachhead was a likely target for an Argentinian paras drop.

`But at certain times, especially when we heard that ships had gone down, the morale was very low and there was a point when I thought Jesus, we're going to lose this one.'

Another particularly poignant moment taken from the diary that Pat kept of each day of the conflict, came early on the morning of Thursday May 27 as he was in the Quartermaster's Store.

`I was sitting on an aluminium box of sleeping bags, having a cup of tea, switched off to the world, when suddenly there were deafening bangs, flashes and bombs going off.

`I immediately ran out and took cover and saw two enemy Mirages going over the hill only to be blown up by our defending Rapier missiles. I went back into the store and the box I had just been sitting on had damn great shrapnel holes in the sides,' he said.

It was during that surprise enemy attack that a comrade of Pat, marine McAndrews, an equipment repairer, was fatally wounded.

`When all's said and done it was just a job that us marines had to do. It was a question of putting our intensive training into practice.

Pat added: `What we did was only for about 30 days - what the flipping heck was that? It was nothing compared to the suffering that men went through during the second world war.'

Pat Carey left the Royal Marines after 24 years service in 1990 with the rank of Warrant Officer. He now works for the MoD at Gosport and has been married to wife Margaret for nearly 22 years.

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