STEPHEN LEWIS talks to a war hero who is ready to move on.

THERE are times when Simon Weston begins to sound like one of those motivational gurus who insist all you need to do to turn your life around is think positive.

"For every negative, there is a positive," he says. "Nothing we do is pain-free, or suffering-free. It is what you put into life that determines what you will get out of it. It is not what happens in your life that counts; it is what you do about it."

H'mm, you think. And then you remember who Simon Weston is, and his words are lifted out of the realm of clich and acquire significance. Because this man has lived through the worst that life could throw at him. He has earned the right to say what he says.

In 1982, Simon was a young Welsh Guardsman whose life was blown apart when Argentinian planes bombed the British supply ship Sir Galahad during the Falklands war.

Many of his friends died in the blast and fire that followed. Simon himself survived - but with horrific burns to his face and body that needed more than 70 operations to repair.

His face, which to this day bears the scars of that reconstructive surgery, has come almost to symbolise the waste and horror of war. His life has been an inspiration to many, not least because of the unflinching honesty with which he has spoken about the dark times he passed through on the road to recovery.

It was not just physical scars he had to overcome, but mental and emotional ones too. His fiancee at the time of the Falklands war left him, unable to cope with what had happened to the man she loved. And he went through years of post-traumatic stress, which manifested itself as severe depression.

"It creeps up on you, beats you around the head," he says, speaking by telephone from his home in Cardiff. "I nearly killed myself physically, and nearly killed myself with alcohol." The Ministry of Defence, in time-honoured fashion, refused to acknowledge the plight of Simon or others like him. "We were given no treatment," he says. "The MoD knew but chose to do nothing about it."

Somehow, he came out of it all. Eight years after suffering such terrible injuries, he met Lucy, the woman who was to become his wife. Now married, they have three children, James, Stuart and Caitlin.

Simon wrote about his war experiences, his long road to recovery, travelling back to the Falklands and meeting the Argentinian pilot who bombed the Sir Galahad in the first two volumes of his autobiography.

His new book, Moving On - which he will discuss at Borders in York tomorrow - deals with what he has made of his life in the past 12 years.

The choice of title was deliberate. "You get to the point where you want to move away from all of that and try to concentrate on all the other things I'm doing, rather than just being stuck in the past."

There is plenty to write about. He has a career as a writer and speaker, and was awarded the OBE for charity work. The charity he set up, Weston Spirit, aims to promote the "personal and social development of socially excluded and disaffected young people" and he works tirelessly on its behalf, fund-raising and attending charity dinners.

He is not bothered at being put forward as a role model for the younger generation. "Young people tend to feel sorry for themselves," he says bluntly. "That is understandable. But it is hard for them to do that when they are around me. They can't turn around to me and say that I don't know what it is like to have to pull myself up by the bootstraps!"

As a Falklands veteran, Simon naturally has views on Britain's involvement in subsequent wars. Anger creeps into his voice when he talks of this year's Iraq war. He is no conscientious objector, he stresses. War can be justified if it is for the right reason. He had no problems with Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan - or even Iraq, the first time around.

But the second Gulf war, he says, was unjustified. "Twelve hundred weapons inspectors went into the Gulf with carte blanche to go anywhere they wanted, protected by the whole army," he says. "They found nothing."

Using Saddam's monstrousness as a reason to justify invasion doesn't wash either, he adds. "No country can invade another country on the grounds they want regime change. That is illegal."

What angers him most about Iraq, however, is what he calls the 'fake sincerity' of politicians - and that, months after the war supposedly ended, British soldiers are still out there, still in the firing line.

"Tony Blair doesn't give a sod about our boys and girls", he says. "He turned around and said 'history will forgive me'. If he didn't do anything wrong, we'd have nothing to forgive him for."

Updated: 08:49 Wednesday, October 08, 2003