The Pity of War

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David Cooper was a Chaplain to one of the toughest units in the British army during a territorial war over the South Atlantic islands known to the British as the Falklands and to the Argentines as the Malvinas. Thirty-five years on Cooper tries to explain the love of God amid the suffering each side inflicted on the other. But Cooper is about to encounter his greatest challenge in an Argentine soldier, Horacio Benitez. Benitez was a young conscript during the war. He remembers with horror how he had machine-gunned advancing British soldiers. “You ask yourself how many fathers you have killed. And you ask yourself why?” That question remained with Benitez, a man of profound Catholic faith for the rest of his life. He has now made it his mission to visit Britain to seek reconciliation. As Benitez visits one of the Falklands war memorials in Britain he reads the names of the British dead. He recalls his own pain at losing comrades. But his biggest struggle is with his conscience. "I tried to find justification for what I did, that I did it for my country. But deep inside I know it was evil." Meeting for the first time these former enemies, Cooper and Benitez together try to make sense of their war experience and the questions it poses for faith. Can there ever be a higher purpose in war – and what is needed now for peace? (Photo: Mount Longdon was one of the places where Argentine and British soldiers fought during the 1982 conflict. Credit: Getty Images)