The Falklands campaign, captured in oil

A WINDY, damp and snowy island, where from time to time you dodge enemy planes bent on shooting you, isn't the ideal location to celebrate your 22nd birthday - as soldier Dean Regan did in June, 1982.

No-one embroiled in the Falklands conflict can have failed to have been touched by it - especially young men with their lives ahead of them. Twenty-five years on, after a military career that later took him to Northern Ireland and Bosnia, he's looking back at the South Atlantic mission through artistic eyes.

Dean is telling the story of the dispute in 25 oil paintings currently on show at Felixstowe Museum. From the sleek majesty of submarine HMS Conqueror - which would sink the ship General Belgrano - to the triumphant return to Portsmouth of HMS Hermes, the series charts the commitment, professionalism, deprivation, terror and tragedy of the short but intense campaign played out in ragged weather.

He hopes the paintings give an emotional insight that artefacts from the war - medals, maps, photographs and so on - can't offer.

“People ask if they're from photographs; and they are, of course. But the environment - the nature of the sea and the atmosphere - is really from memory and the heart: what I felt it was like.”

A painting called Striking Back, showing Sea Harriers flying just above the waves towards Port Stanley airfield, is the first oil he did. They went in to attack the airfield after a Vulcan bomber, fuelled in the air 11 times en route, had hit the runway with a 1,000lb bomb.

There's the desperate struggle to save HMS Sheffield and the survivors after a missile strike - and later the confrontation becomes more tangible and desperate: the Rapier air defence system engages Argentine aircraft at Port Pleasant; mortars of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, fire at Argentine positions during the battle for Goose Green; and The Scots Guards engage in hand-to-hand fighting on Mount Tumbledown.

The most poignant is Act of Remembrance - a stark image of a helmet atop a rifle as the sun rises on jagged Mount Longdon after the battle on June 11-12. British forces launched a night-time raid against the heavily-defended high ground around Port Stanley.

Dean says: “3 Para lost 50 or more there; real hand-to-hand fighting among the slabs of rock. What I've depicted here, the morning after, is really the desolation after the chaos of the night before: soldiers checking between the rocks, finding bodies and the wounded.”

The Act of Remembrance painting is the basis for the artwork accompanying the reworked song Brothers in Arms, re-released this week by Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler.

The use of Dean's image came about because someone he served with in San Carlos now works in PR.

Knopfler, who lost a schoofriend on a ship in the Falklands, is raising funds to help take veterans back to the Falkland Islands, which has proved effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We think if we can get 50,000 people to pay 79p during the week it will go to number one,” says Dean.

The release is available as a digital download from sites such as iTunes. There will also be a limited number of CD format singles available only from www.falklands25.com and www.sama82.org.uk.

Dean started sketching and painting seriously about 12 or 13 years ago, selling watercolours of local scenes and producing in 1997 a book of illustrations called Windmills of Suffolk.

A chance conversation just before he retired from the Army in 2000 led to him moving virtually seamlessly from his role as a flight commander at Wattisham airfield to become a civilian pilot for police helicopters.

He did that for five years but the shift arrangement didn't allow much time for other things, like art. So he semi-retired and switched to a holiday relief role. Now, he works about two days or nights on the Suffolk and Essex police helicopters. Supplementing his small military pension with 120 days of work allowed him to become a professional artist.

“I painted the Sea Harrier and my wife (Hilary) said 'That's quite a reasonable effort . . . you know it's the 25th anniversary of the Falklands next year? Why don't you do a small collection and think about raising funds for other veterans?' Of course, being me, I decided to go for 25 paintings . . .” he laughs, “so it's her fault, really!”

Producing them took about a year, with three normally on the go at any one time. “Painting is always enjoyable: sometimes it's a bit of a roller-coaster. Certainly for a technical subject, which all of these are, you've got to be technically as correct as possible. Because I am trying to tell a story, there was lots of reading, lots of research, lots of looking at photographs, so that what I've set in place is plausible.”

What's the thrill?

“It's overcoming the challenge. A 20- by 30-inch white canvas is quite an awesome prospect. After the research, I have an image of what I want the painting to look like. Sometimes it just falls off the brush; other times it's a continual grinding process of manipulating paint into what I want.

“I can do three or four days of hard work and my wife, who is my sternest critic - but always correct - will come in and say 'Best you give it a rest and start another one. Take the sander to that . . .'

“There's one I took the orbital sander to” - he gestures at a display board - “and then gave it another go. I'll never give up!” That one's called Troops Out, where 3 Commando Brigade carry out an amphibious landing at San Carlos. He planned to have two large figures in the foreground, but wasn't happy with the way it was working out - hands, facial features and stance were proving tricky - so he sanded it off and put a Sno-Cat in its place!

The paintings are available as limited-edition prints. From each sale, £5 goes to Falklands charities. The South Atlantic Medal Association (1982) sends veterans to the Falklands for a week, where islanders host them and take them to the battle sites. Another organisation aims to raise £260,000 to build its own hotel-type building in Port Stanley for returning ex-service personnel.

Dean, who lives near Felixstowe, is now painting a series of fighter aircraft for an exhibition to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Royal Air Force in 2008.

What's it been like thinking about the Falklands campaign 25 years on?

“I think I've become fairly political about the conflict. I saw it as an opportunity - it did change my life. (But) I now . . . see the bigger picture of this big grey area of party politics, and Blair/Bush and all this business.

“I didn't see (it) as a 21-year-old. I had no idea of what defence spending was all about, and alliances and allegiances to other nations. At 46, 47 years of age I can take that much bigger picture now. That gradually grew through last year.

“What I haven't mentioned is the Argentine perspective. I'm acutely aware that as well as it affecting 30,000 British, it affected the Argentinians in the same manner. Worse than that, they lost - and they still have that huge, burning, open wound; that desire to reclaim the Falklands. You know, our sovereignty claim is not set on rock . . . shaky foundations. So it's a sad thing.”

He's tried not to glorify in his paintings, or to be party-political - being aware that military decisions taken in the 1950s had a consequence for the 1982 campaign, and that the chequered history of the islands' ownership is buried deep in the past.

But it was right to go in 1982, surely, to repel aggression?

“My feeling now, based on the research I've done and veterans I've spoken to, is it should have been settled politically long, long before it got to that stage. The Argentines invaded in absolute frustration. We know they had a very weak military government at that stage, with soaring inflation, and it was an easy thing for them to think 'Well, let's deflect attention from our failings, and have a victory.' But the Thatcher Government wasn't doing hugely well at the time and it was a great diversion for the baroness.

“It shouldn't have happened if the politicians had done their job. I think it was Lord Carrington who resigned (as Foreign Secretary) after the thing blew up; but, actually, reading back through the journals, he was banging the desk for three years in Cabinet to say 'We really need to sort this out.'”

Perhaps, suggests Dean, there should have been some kind of lease-back deal struck with Argentina years earlier, buying time in which the islanders could have been gently persuaded that their economic interests lay with Argentina. But now, with the islanders understandably more fiercely British than they were 25 years ago, the opportunity has gone.

Politics and warfare . . . Dean mentions the Serious Fraud Office's dropping late last year of the corruption investigation of a defence deal with Saudi Arabia, after warnings it could damage national security.

“The poor old British service person just goes and points their weapon in the direction they're told to.

“What's happened in these 25 years, I believe, is that media coverage is so utterly complete and instant that the service person knows immediately the failings of the Government that is sending them to do these things.

“You can put as much spin on it as you like. Gulf War I, OK - Kuwait was invaded, a coalition of sorts was put together to repel them. But as soon as that was achieved it's all gone a little bit grey. We knew it was about oil and allegiances and weapon sales.

“This is just my limited statement about the Falklands. I believe the Falklands was the last 'popular' war. I don't have an expression that's better than that, unfortunately.

“What I mean is that because politics had failed there was then a wrong - we went to right it - and largely the nation stood shoulder to shoulder and said 'Yeah, that needed to be done' - with some reservations about the politics. I'm not sure we can say that about any of the conflicts since then.”

Web link: www.deanreganart.com

Dean's The Falklands 25th Anniversary Collection, at Felixstowe Museum, runs until October 28. The museum is open on Sundays and bank holidays, and on Wednesdays between June and September. Web:

www.felixstowe-museum.co.uk

FUNNY how life turns . . . Dean Regan could quite easily have missed the Falklands war.

The Commando Logistic Regiment was due to go. Then someone noticed half of it consisted of Territorials - skilled reservists - and the Government hadn't asked the Queen's permission to call up the TA. Looking around hurriedly for specialist replacements, military chiefs chose 91 Ordnance Company.

Thus it was that Dean, 21 years old and sporting the moustache then de rigueur, left Southampton on the QE II on May 12. In South Georgia he transferred to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Stromness, a small stores ship that had had 600 bunk-beds bolted into it, “and I spent four days on a very rough passage across to San Carlos”.

Dean lost about half his bodyweight. “You can imagine the conditions . . . force eight/nine gales in a flat-bottomed ship . . . soldiers who had never been to sea before. I would have taken on the Argentine forces single-handedly to get off that ship! We were angry but thin young men!”

He'd grown up in Hampshire and Dorset, and thought of becoming a surveyor, cartographer or illustrator, but his parents divorced and Dean went into foster care between the ages of 12 and 16.

At 15 he spent two weeks with the Army Cadets at Bovingdon Camp in Dorset, “and that really fired my imagination. I was acutely aware that, the moment I became 16, I was going to be homeless and jobless; and the army promised to provide both things”.

He left school in 1976 and became an apprentice soldier; and later went into the regulars, where he specialised in dealing with bulk fuel handling.

In April, 1982, when the Falklands confrontation blew up, many colleagues were asking “How dare they invade the western isles of Scotland!” before maps located these far-flung islands in the South Atlantic.

There was something of a holiday atmosphere on the QE II until it got colder. “The Sheffield and Belgrano had been sunk by that stage. By the time we reached Ascension, Coventry had been sunk and the Atlantic Conveyor had been hit.” It was, everyone realised, a real conflict.

They felt very vulnerable on the ship and were glad to land at San Carlos Water on the last day of May, and set about trying to create some sort of order from chaos. The unit pitched in, trying to get fuel ashore and putting it in gerry cans so it could be taken by helicopter to the fighting troops and to the Rapier air defence batteries on the hills. Water supplies were also crucial.

Prisoners were starting to come in by the hundreds, if not the thousands, so prison camps were set up. Dean and colleagues carried stretchers, helped casualties off helicopters as they landed, and guarded prisoners. Each evening they loaded landing craft with supplies, which were taken to the other five beaches.

The Argentines surrendered on June 14. Dean and other soldiers flew on the last remaining Chinook helicopter to Port Stanley racecourse, just as it got dark, and were told they risked being shot if they moved - the Paras, first into Stanley, had imposed a curfew. The Argentine troops, still armed, were retreating.

The next morning the British forces started to round up prisoners and disarm them. There was bit of attitude from the professionals, but most were just young, scared soldiers, Dean says. Weapons were piled up and crushed by trucks, then put into containers and dropped off the back of ships out at sea!

Within a few days order had been restored, and his task was to get any fuel installations in Stanley up and running. It was snowing frequently by that stage.

Then he was put in charge of two soldiers and the ship-to-shore refuelling at a mobile airfield, where strips of steel planking were hammered into the ground. “We spent the rest of the time in a small tent at the end of the Harrier strip, every few days connecting up to the ship-line and bringing bulk fuel up for the Harriers.” There were fears of reprisals, so the planes provided air defence.

“Most times the Harriers took off we'd have to go out with sledgehammers and knock all the planking back into place because the weight and the thrust would lift them up! We just fell into the routine of living out our lives - including trying to shoot wild geese every day to supplement their rations, and cadging what we could from aircraft that came in.”

Along came one of those light-bulb moments that changes your life. “I was a happy 22-year-old with a busy social life, fiancée, but no real plan to life. I was going to serve and take what I could get.”

Then one day a Gazelle helicopter landed nearby to get some fuel and he started chatting to the two chaps over a cup of tea. “They looked very clean and smart compared to me, because I had hair down my back at that stage and hadn't showered for two months! I thought 'That looks like a very good job.'”

Dean admits that, then, he didn't know about the Army's aviation side and thought the Gazelle might be RAF!

To cut a long story short, he liked the idea of flying, and after his return to Britain that autumn put plans into motion to train as an Army pilot. He was based in Germany for a long time - though there were stints in Northern Ireland, and trips to places such as Canada, Norway and Belize - and in 1995 moved to Wattisham airfield in Suffolk with 4 Regiment Army Air Corps. Dean was a warrant officer by this stage, instructing in electronic warfare, aerial combat and other skills.

He insists he enjoyed a charmed life during his 24 years of service.

“For me, the Falklands was slightly dangerous, but more than that it was a horrible, damp, windy, primitive place. You won't find a single tree on the 25 paintings, because they don't exist on the Falklands!”