By Sophie Arie

When Jorge Martire met his wife-to-be, Maria Laura, he omitted to mention that he had recently gone through hell in the Falklands.

The couple had three children, and Mr Martire found a job at a local government office in La Plata, south of Buenos Aires, while studying to become an architect.

Then in 1992, a decade after the end of the conflict in the Falklands, something inside him snapped.

"He got lost one day," his widow recalled. "And when he came home he couldn't recognise anybody. Not me. Not his daughter.

"He was very afraid of storms and rain and noises. His hands and feet started to get old and wrinkly. Then he lost his sight. He was looking but he couldn't see anything. He was lost."

In his hospital bed, being treated for atypical psychosis - known by veterans as "Malvinas syndrome" after the Argentine name for the islands - it all finally came flooding out.

He told me how he had been hungry and thirsty. They were terrified," Maria Laura remembered. "Under cover but always wet. And all the time it was dark. Really dark with flashes of bombs and guns."

On March 1, 1993, he slipped out of the hospital and bought a gun. Then he had a coffee in a bar, and afterwards walked into the lavatory and shot himself.