"I'm going down one"
At the age of 19, Benitez - a native of Basavilbaso, a town in the south of Entre Ríos, with about 5,000 inhabitants - was the youngest of the crew.
He had trained himself as a machine gun pointer, according to the technical name, and showed great enthusiasm about the possibility of taking action. He was like the owner of the weapon. I cleaned it every day. He was convinced he was going to knock down a Sea King helicopter, remember who his teammates were. "I'm going down one," he said.
But it was not a helicopter that was in the sights, but something much more powerful: the Sea Harrier ZA 192, of the carrier Hermes, piloted by the corvette Captain Thomas Batt, approaching by stern.
Batt did not give the willing entrerriano time. Located almost above the coast guard, 18 meters above the sea, he fired his 30mm guns and caught Benitez in the chest.
Despite not having instruction as a machine gun, Ibanez, in an attitude that defines as "instinctive and mixed with all the anger", pushed his partner away and took his place. It is very graphic in describing the scene: "I fired a curtain of fire and the plane swallowed it." Immediately ("I could hardly believe it"), he saw that the Harrier caught fire and fell into the sea, without the pilot having been able to eject himself due to his fluttering flight.
The English gave another version: that Batt had made a fatal maneuver when trying to take track in the Hermes. "They did not want to spread the embarrassment of announcing that a $ 80 million machine had been destroyed by the machine gun of a motorboat," says Olmedo. "When I was in England, I visited the cenotaph of his dead in action and saw the plaque that said that. Later, in dialogue with an English officer, I said," You know it was not like that. "" Of course. We could not tell the truth, "was the reply, and after colliding with the enemy's aircraft, the danger of sinking GC 83 increased minute by minute, and the only two rafts were unusable, so to save the crew, Olmedo ordered the There was a note of the casualties: one dead (Benítez) and three wounded: Baccaro, González and Bengoechea.
Baccaro found 72 chips. They could not get more than 11, so there are still 61 between the neck, skull, back, hip, arms and thighs. "They only bother me if there is a lot of humidity," he says. And, smiling, he adds: "They also make a lot of noise when I go through a metal detector, like in airports."
i have see after max 1000 lbs bombs same for Argentinians 500 or 1000 lbs max.
![YAV-8B_Harrier_testing_a_ski_jump[1].jpg](https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/data/attachments/30/30169-12c2e4f8b86e5d1616e483bd7d01e43e.jpg "YAV-8B_Harrier_testing_a_ski_jump[1].jpg")