I wonder what the Argentinean equivalent of "Tommy" is.

Tomas, of course.

:)

Time passes so quickly.

My parents are from Argentina. I was born in the USA.

25 years ago I was a sailor a few months out of the US Navy bootcamp, stationed in Whidbey Island, Washington state.

War broke out between the England and Argentina, over some crappy little islands in the middle of nowhere. Most Argentineans, and virtually all British had never heard of the Falklands. But they cared, they cared beyond all reason. That is when I learned the meaning of mindless nationalism.

My mother and my aunt became militants, parading in protest in front of the British consulate in San Francisco. My aunt, a very gentle and reasonable woman, made a TV appearance on local news arguing the point that 'the Malvinas' were Argentinean. Both my mom and my aunt started knitting sweaters to send to the poor soldiers confronting the evil British.

And there I was, preparing aircraft missiles so advanced that they had not been provided to our own military yet, but were being shipped to the British. That is, until the US Navy found out that my parents were from Argentina...

Am I surprised by the abandonment of the Argentinean veterans? Not at all. After all, they 'lost' the war. The same thing happened to our Vietnam veterans, and is already happening to our Iraq veterans.

25 years already? Wow... time passes so fast... what seemed so meaningful and important back then seems like such foolishness now.

Gosh. Did I go to sleep and wake up in another country. Imagine sending men and women to fight in a war they can't win!

"...the war is considered a national humiliation..." Gee! I thought the war was to unite us behind a great cause!

"...the war hardly touched them..." A country fighting a war where the folks back home only read about it on the news; where few know any real soldiers; where no taxes are raised to pay for it? Preposterous!

Injured veterans are abandoned to their own devices?

The soldiers were illequiped?

INformation from the front is suspect?

War profiteering?

No one expected war?

Few could identify it on a map?

Where are we? Faulklands 1982 or Iraq 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...?

Being a forgotten veteran sucks, whether you are Argentinian, American, Russian, Iraqi or Iranian. Anyone who puts their life on the line for their country deserves honor, and all the help their country can give them.

Argentinians presumably care about the Malvinas because of their very old claim to the islands. Did most Argentinians really not know where they were? (Can most US citizens find Puerto Rico on an unmarked map? Heck, can they find Missouri?)

Brits "cared deeply" because the inhabitants of the Falklands are all British subjects. I suspect if Japan invaded even Guam or Samoa, Americans might get a bit upset.

I am surprised the article does not mention the General Belgrano -- over half of Argentine KIA were on an obsolete WWII cruiser that was sunk by the HMS Conqueror attack sub. Understandably, the rest of the Argentine Navy stayed out of the war afterwards.

You've got to feel for those Argentinian soldiers. This war was like two bald men fighting over a comb. From an Argentinian point of view, it achieved nothing but the deaths of a lot of Argentinian soldiers.

As a Brit, I hated the war and couldn't stand Margaret Thatcher, but you had to reluctantly accept the case for war. The Falklands was under British protection and was invaded by a foreign force. So what do you do? You can argue that, morally, the Falklands should really belong to Argentina, but the fact was that it didn't.

Britain took its eye off the ball before the war, didn't pursue the diplomatic option hard enough, sunk the Belgrano in very dubious circumstances with great loss of life, and the triumphalism afterwards was sickening. But, in the end, they had no other option but to invade.

As the article pointed out, Galtieri wanted this war for his own domestic reasons and, ultimately, paid the price for it, but so did a lot of young Argentinians. The Argentinian air force caused a lot of problems for the British but, in the end, it was a war that an ill-equipped conscript army was never going to win against a well-trained, professional army that had US support.

Pointless.

Thank you for the Der Spiegel translation of Argentina's Own Abandoned Veterans. This is one of the few journalistic pieces I have read about the subject in the twenty years I have lived in the United States.

I was living in the south of Argentina when the military Junta decided to land a group of marines in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. We knew exactly where the islands were, and what had happened in the over one hundred years of British occupation and frustrated Argentinean intents of negotiation. It was not for lack of geography that many Argentineans did not support the war, albeit did not say or write a word about it. We were immersed in a dictatorship and at that point thousand of people had disappeared and Argentina had built an external debt that would have deep consequences for decades to come.

The military provoked the conflict for their own interests, probably none of them patriotic, in view of their conduct during the war, and worsened the situation against a diplomatic return of the islands to Argentina.

The war broke on April 2, stirred patriotic feelings well manipulated by the government and when it ended in June, there was silence, misinformation and confusion. Later on, the vets were humiliated with more silence and abandonment.

It was a shameful, tragic and sad chapter in Argentina's history, downhill since 1930 when the first military coup ended the country's prominent position in the international field.

The U.K.in Argentina is just like the U.K. now :Full of people like the americans or "gringos";full of Iran ? Contra characters that want to rule the world ;This side of the Ocean does not belong to anyone but the inhabitants of that country. The U.S. of a. still belongs to THE Indian Nation . We should suffer what those people suffered since the Euro's came here ;just as we should suffer the plight of Iraqis and all the Middle East . Israel is leading us into a war so they can control their own "oily "destiny .CACI and Titan National security Solutions (aka Israel aka Herb Karr and Harry Mallovitz and Edward H. Bersoff ,celebrities in Israel )should be kicked out immediately with Bush #s 41 and 43 ,,,Zapata Engineering and his crazy group Chilean Jew,Mannie Zapata and while we are at it does Tom Franks ,remember him ,look like a Russian Jew doing Rumsfelds bidding. We should be focusing on 911 since Charlie Sheen and Rosie O'Donnell are trying to get this Republican conspiracy to rule the world out front.. Silverst(a)ein brought down WTC #7 ;Why did the Fireman consult with him (and who planted the explosives to bring it down on his orders ? This is very, very strange behavior