June 1982 and winter in the Falkland Islands: twenty-four young soldiers—deserters from the Argentine army—spend the last weeks of the conflict hiding underground in a cave. Inside their refuge, they listen to the radio, stockpile supplies, and exchange stories; outside, under cover of night, they trade with the Argentine quartermaster and with the British. Looking out over the bleak landscape, after weeks of gray skies and horizontal snow, one of them remarks that “you’d have to be English to want this.”

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