There’s no way video games will ever become a record of past events; it’s the skill of the player that defines what happens on-screen. But that ability can be manipulated: any game can be programmed so that any player, even the best, inevitably loses; by the same token, it can be ‘set up’ so that any tosser with minimal reflexes and intelligence will always beat it. But the final outcome aside, the path taken to achieve it depends on the individuaclass="underline" the storyline’s always different depending on the player. I had to shake some life into the inert corpse of history, to twist its arm without making it scream, to show it some respect without letting its fat arse park itself on my freedom of movement. In the first task I was helped by all those veterans who, like Sergio, would be forever happy with an outcome quite out of kilter with our notions of what ought to have been; in the second, by the fact that freedom and variety in games are more illusory than they seem. The stories that emerge from them aren’t really created; they all pre-exist in the computer, and the players are nothing more than pieces in the mechanism whereby the game actualises a handful of the few perfect stories it comprises.
Only one thing was certain: you couldn’t rely much on Verraco: he was even worse at war games on computers than the other kind, so I picked one of the simplest levels for him and got ready to launch Operation Rosario
On 1st April the Class 42 destroyer Santísima Trinidad, with Verraco on board — a poetic licence to indulge the customer, as he had in fact arrived by plane on the 16th — anchored a mile off the coast of Isla Soledad and successfully landed ninety-two amphibious commandos in rubber dinghies. I scanned a map of the airport and town from one of Ignacio’s magazines so that Verraco could lead his men to the marines’ barracks in Moody Brook without getting lost. I got it almost perfect. Drawing maps was what I’d most liked doing at primary schooclass="underline" once, in year six, I’d had to make a wall chart of the Islands out of cardboard and the teacher had given me ten out of ten. Her name was Mónica, and my willie started twitching in my shorts when she leaned over the map to stamp my mark in my book and her tits almost brushed the Islands: perhaps the origin of my erotic fixation with them.
Next up was the Cabo San Antonio tank transport, which, escorted by an A69-type Drummond frigate, spewed from its full belly twenty-one FMC amtracs packed with our marine infantry. The heavily armoured amphibious tanks drove up onto the beach, some heading straight for the airport, others for the town, where there was more action, and I chucked in a shoot-out between our tanks and the Royal Marines hidden along the access road. In the end Verraco’s tactical ability, the numerical superiority of his men and my uneven allocation of fire power had the marines turning tail and the Argentinian forces pouring in to occupy the town. This was where the problems began, because in my eagerness to get started I’d forgotten to give them one to occupy.
‘Cold, isn’t it.’
‘I didn’t know you reached Kuwait by boat.’
‘Look, look. Midget nuns. Let’s rape ’em.’
My Iraqis were walking about in a daze, roving over the open ground like wind-up toys, shooting at the radioactive, snow-dusted Russian weeds. Checking the menu I found one that looked like it might do: a Norwegian town on a fiord, awaiting the coming of the Germans. But I wasn’t going to get off that lightly. Almost every one of us, Verraco included, knew the town by heart and wouldn’t have a crummy substitute palmed off on him. I spread out the maps, photos and magazines around me and, mouse in hand, began touching up, erasing houses till I had the right number, shunting the public buildings around, removing the trees from the outskirts, carefully redrawing the outline of the seafront avenue. I didn’t fall into the temptation, though, of perfecting the reproduction ad infinitum the way Ignacio did; there was no need to, because in this version of the story the town was going to remain ours. And besides, now that 1st May marked the start, not of the loss of the Islands, but of their ultimate recovery, I wanted to get to it as soon as possible, to beat time itself, not by stopping it but by outrunning it. Once the barracks and town were ours, the game flashed up a Norwegian church — whose spire I’d blown away to make it look like the Governor’s house — which was instantly surrounded by the second group of amphibious commandos led by Captain Héctor P. Verraco, who riddled it with bullets until the one hundred English marines hidden inside surrendered. I was tempted to send the lot of them to their deaths — Verraco wouldn’t have given it a second’s thought — but in the actual invasion the order had been ‘not to cause unnecessary casualties among the enemy’ and I felt that by doubling the number of defeated defenders I’d given him enough satisfaction for one day. With the surrender of the English Governor to Captain Verraco (why not? the game was meant to be an all-you-can-eat buffet for him after all) the recovery of the Islands was complete: with the first light of day the Argentinian flag was once again waving against the pure blue sky of the Islands for the first time in almost one hundred and fifty years. I left it fluttering there and had a smoke while I checked back over the work so far. It looked so good it even surprised me: no veteran would be able to resist it. And what’s more, it was turning out to be unexpectedly realistic, even in the details — apart from one or two off-notes like the sabre-twirling Iraqis, the flags with Saddam’s face on them and a Kuwaiti palm tree I’d overlooked and had to chop down. I wondered then if the Iraqis really were the way they’d looked on CNN: hordes of fanatical fundamentalists hell-bent on dying for Allah and Saddam. After all, we Argentinians had shouted and grimaced in the square and burned flags, the whole damned circus; beyond our own borders we must have looked very fierce. And the faces of the Iraqi prisoners after the lightning defeat looked quite a lot like our own: slightly confused, dirty, worn out, unsure of what they were doing there and relieved to have been beaten so quickly.
My enthusiasm was blunted slightly when I checked the time: at this rate it would take me days to write the war all the way to the end, and Sr Tamerlán might start getting impatient. So I threw in a map showing how the Task Force reached the Islands and got down to the game in earnest.
The real game begins in the small hours of 1st May, when a Vulcan bomber, flying non-stop at an altitude of 10,000 feet from the British base on Ascension Island, 4,000 miles from the Malvinas, approaches its target, the airport at Puerto Argentino, and unleashes its 24,000 pound bomb load at quarter-of-a-second intervals. But this treacherous opening to the hostilities doesn’t catch the ever-vigilant Argentinian defences off guard: locating the aggressor on their AN/TPS-44 tactical surveillance radar screen on Colina del Zapador, they launch a swarm of English-made Tigercat surface-to-air missiles (a taste of their own medicine) with a range of 4,800 metres and optical guidance, and another swarm of Franco-German-made all-weather Roland missiles, range 6,000 metres, with optical or radar guidance (both luckily available on the game’s armaments menu), supported by the two or three 35mm Œrlikon cannon commanded by the two radar units of the Swiss-made Skyguard digital fire control. Even wearing baseball mitts Verraco couldn’t fail to hit the target. In the two or three trial runs I played the doomed Vulcan was, in a matter of seconds, flying through a hail of popping popcorn and, after reeling from the force of the impacts for a couple of seconds, it nose-dived towards the lower edge of the screen like a duck downed by a shotgun; and, as foreordained, the first action of the war concluded with victory for the Argentinians and humiliation for the English. But they don’t learn their lesson and, their judgement clouded by frustration, they make a second attempt: at first light, eighteen British Aerospace Sea Harrier VTOL fighters, with a range of 400 km and a top speed of 1,160 kph, equipped with 30mm cannon, machine guns and American-made air-to-air AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles, take to the air from the aircraft carriers, twelve from the Invincible and eight from the Hermes, nine of them attacking the airport at Puerto Argentino and three, the airbase at Goose Green. The airport’s air defences eventually lay waste to them all, although the speed and frequency of the planes on the screen would make it impossible for a player to stop some of them dropping their bombs and causing superficial damage to the airport and its surroundings, which in any case would be erased by the following screen. Rather than out of a desire for verisimilitude (in a video game?!), I did this so as not to detract from the game’s excitement: nothing is more boring than winning effortlessly; small defeats have to be dosed out here and there to spice up the otherwise bland taste of victory. The three at Goose Green have no better luck: alerted to their advance (you could open a window in the top right-hand corner of the game and activate a radar screen), a squadron of Pucarás takes off from the bumpy grass runway. This Argentinian-built tactical attack and support aircraft was the biggest surprise of the war for the English: equipped with two 20mm HS-804 cannon with 260 shells, and four 7.62mm Browning cannon with 900 shells, and a capacity to carry up to 1,500 kg of bombs under the wings, despite its turboprop engines and maximum speed of 520 kph (not even half the speed of the enemy planes) its excellent manœuvrability and the intrepidness of its young pilots enable it to fight the ultra-technologised Sea Harriers on an equal footing and defeat them. Like nimble bumblebees they buzz around the heavy enemy hawks, which, flown by automata relying on last-generation computers, radar and missiles, can do nothing to stop the underrated little Spic planes (actually German Stukas from WWII — you try finding a Pucará on the menu; they didn’t look a bit alike, but with what Verraco knew about planes …) The English are soon laughing on the other side of their faces: the Pucarás, which from that day forth they were forced to christen ‘the invisible ones’ out of implicit admiration, come and go as if by magic: their simple weapons are more potent than the ultra-sophisticated technology, and one by one the planes that had been the pride of NATO come crashing to the ground. But even this heroic feat is too paltry for the plucky little gaucho planes’ international baptism of fire (the only previous service they’d seen was against land-based guerrillas in the Tucumán jungle). On its own initiative, without even landing to refuel, one of them pulls off one of the greatest feats of the war: flying north-east, two metres above sea level and invisible to the radar, its props slicing the crests of the waves, it approaches the aircraft carrier Hermes, 28,000 tonnes, 1,350 crew, carrying twelve Sea Harriers, eighteen Sea King helicopters and Lynx anti-submarine helicopters, and releases its bombs into the side of the gigantic ship. Then, taking advantage of the helpless plight of the marines rushing around desperately trying to control the blaze and of the Sea Harriers crashing into each other as they struggle to take off and save themselves, it returns and strafes the deck with its cannon and machine guns, killing, among others, the Commander-in-Chief of the English forces, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward himself. Pouring smoke, the disabled Hermes sails away, while, decked in glory, the heroic Pucará returns to its base or crashes into the sea, machine-gunned in revenge by the surviving Harriers, depending on the skill of Verraco or his opponent. (Verraco had the choice of playing the computer or another player, and I could just picture his subordinates swearing under their breath every time he came out with ‘Gómez, I need you for a moment,’ and they just knew from his tone of voice that it was their turn to be the English again.) It took me another half an hour to finish the first screen: dogfights between Harriers and our planes, naval bombardments of Puerto Argentino, air attacks on English ships … By digital nightfall the English had lost a quarter of their fleet, half their helicopters and all their aircraft, and if it weren’t for the automatic renewal that the next screens would bring, they’d have had to abandon the war that day and swim back to the North Atlantic with their tails between their legs.