It is in such fashion that the slim volume strikes the reader as if Fogwill were actually there. Not only was he not on the scene, the book was completed before the surrender of Argentina less than 10 weeks after the conflict began. Yet what perhaps makes Malvinas Requiem most notable is that just as mundane daily events and the soldiers' feelings reflect the real, Fogwill combines it with the surreal. One of the best examples of his ability to do so is demonstrated in the course of just three pages. In those pages, Fogwill first describes training versus reality:

The army takes good soldiers, more or less trains them to shoot, run, clean their equipment and, with a bit of luck, how to stick a bayonet into a body. Then war comes along and you discover you have to fight at night, using radios, radar, infrared sights all in the dark, and you can't do the only thing you really know how to do, which is run, because behind you the engineers in your own regiment have been laying mines as you advanced. And mines are the worst of all.

Fogwill then describes a ewe stepping on a mine. Reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon, the ewe is "suspended in mid-air. She pulls in her legs, turns her head, and looks backwards, twisting her head as if she had the neck of a giraffe." Fogwill slowly transmutes this image into the real, describing the disintegration of the ewe from the explosion and the rest of its herd moving like a pinball amidst the landmines they are setting off. The conclusion of the passage brings home the grittiest reality: "The stench of sheep blown apart by a land mine is similar to that of a human being blown apart by a landmine: the smell of a slaughterhouse[.]"

In this respect, the original language of the work is irrelevant. Fogwill's exploration of how the events of war range — and change rapidly — from the mundane to the horrific speaks the universal language of soldiers in an armed conflict.