Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  “How long for?” she said eventually.

  “Four months.”

  More tears. I think that for a second she’d been hoping it might have been some short journalistic assignment, lasting just a few days or weeks. The fact was, it could’ve been worse – it could’ve been six months. I’d requested a shorter tour, and luckily I’d got it.

  “Are they making you go?” asked my father. He wasn’t crying, but he did have his “serious” face on, eyeing me carefully over the top of his reading glasses.

  “They asked me if I wanted to go, and I said I did.” This was sort of true, insofar as the MOG was always asking for volunteers. “I think it’ll be good for me.”

  “What will you be doing?” my mother asked.

  “I’ll be running a camera team.” Already I was omitting the word “combat”. “There’ll be myself, a cameraman and a photographer.”

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  I considered telling an outright lie to this question, claiming my job was entirely office-bound, but I wasn’t sure it would wash. My mother was pretty good at detecting bullshit; if she thought I was trying to protect her from the truth, it could make things even worse.

  “It shouldn’t be too bad,” I said. “We might have to go out on the odd patrol.”

  She looked unconvinced, her cheeks still wet with tears. I gave her a hug.

  “It’s going to be OK,” I said. “If it was that dangerous, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

  To be honest, I had no idea how dangerous it was going to be. I only knew that I didn’t want to get hurt. If the Taliban had seen fit to publish a “Forecast of Events”, then maybe I could’ve made an informed decision. Sadly, they had no media planner to keep us journalists informed about their future movements. They just did what they did on a seemingly random basis, attacking coalition troops whenever it took their fancy, terrorizing all our mothers in the process.

  * * *

  My colleagues at BBC Radio Leicester reacted to the news of my departure in a slightly different manner to that of my mother. They threw me a leaving party at a lap-dancing club. Remarkably, all the girls in the newsroom came as well. I think they looked upon the excursion as a kind of anthropological field trip, an opportunity to peer under the rock where drunk and/or lonely men go to stare at naked women.

  I enjoyed it, anyway. We all drank an incredible amount of vodka, then everyone chipped in for a lap dance, buying me ten minutes with a peroxide blonde who’d squeezed herself and her Hindenburg breasts into a Stars and Stripes Lycra dress. I had just a short moment to contemplate the significance of our special relationship with the US, then the dress came off and the Hindenburgs were in my face, threatening to crash-land onto my forehead before veering back up again, floating around in a dreamlike sequence that was over all too quickly.

  Two days later I started my pre-deployment training at Chetwynd Barracks in Chilwell, just down the road from my home. My hangover had just about cleared by then, so I was ready for all the inglorious demands of mobilization: filling in forms, pissing into test tubes, getting injected, practising battlefield casualty drills and shooting on the range in the freezing January rain. I was a full-time soldier again, on the regular payroll until my scheduled return to BBC Radio Leicester in September. It felt good – the pay was much better, and there was plenty of leave to look forward to, in between all the military stuff. I had a sporadic timetable of training up until mid-March, then I’d fly out and do my thing in the desert for four months, before flying back in time for the tail end of the English summer. Already I was imagining myself in my garden, sitting on the patio in the undemanding August sunlight, sipping a gin-and-tonic, the war safely behind me.

  Some volunteer for war because they want to fight, and some volunteer because they want to come back. No prizes for guessing which group I belonged to.

  I had a lot of time to prepare for my deployment on 10th March, but in the end it all turned into a mad rush. I left my packing until the last day, which is never a good idea. By the time I’d stuffed all my kit into my issued black holdall and my Bergen rucksack, there was barely any room left for personal items. Even the books I was hoping to take had to stay behind. I made a desperate last-minute attempt to force Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon into the holdall, but it refused to go.

  My woeful lack of personal organization meant there was little time for goodbyes, which was probably a blessing. I bolted down a final meal at my parents’ house – beef stir fry, a favourite of mine – before giving my teary-eyed mother a farewell hug, promising I would “keep my head down”. The two dogs, Monty and Trudie, got a quick pat and a scratch, then I had to go.

  My father gave me a lift to Chetwynd Barracks, where I had to pick up my rifle and pistol before taking the military transport down to Brize Norton. We didn’t say much on the way there: we just listened to the radio, making occasional small talk. Neither of us had any desire to chat about Afghanistan, but what else was there?

  Only when we were saying goodbye did my father give me some advice. He parked outside the armoury at Chetwynd Barracks, helped me with my bags, then shook my hand and hugged me.

  “Look after number one,” he said.

  Look after number one. It was pretty good advice, to be fair. Probably some of the best he’s ever given me.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t really in a position to follow it.

  The Combat Camera Team

  I’d arranged to meet up with my cameraman Russ and my photographer Ali later that evening. The two of them were making their own way to Brize Norton from their homes in Devon and the West Midlands. Our flight wasn’t due to leave until seven o’clock the following morning, so there was no rush. In keeping with the military’s favourite dictum – “hurry up and wait” – we’d been told to get to the airport the night before.

  Having said goodbye to my father, I drew my SA80 rifle and Browning pistol from the armoury, then installed myself in the back of the “military transport” – a white minibus – with the rest of my kit. The only other passenger was a young signaller who was listening to his iPod and gazing out of the window. We had a two-hour drive to Brize Norton ahead of us, with a restless night in the airport’s transit accommodation to come. I fashioned a pillow from my spare combat jacket and tried to get some sleep.

  As it turned out, the journey to Brize Norton took little more than ninety minutes. Our driver, a deeply suntanned corporal, completed it in record time, ruling out any possibility of sleep.

  “I’ve had to cancel an hour with a prostitute in Mansfield to take you two,” he complained at one point, his foot hard on the accelerator. The whole minibus was shaking. I looked over his shoulder at the speedometer – we were doing ninety miles an hour.

  I thought about telling him to slow down, then decided not to bother. What was the point? Far greater dangers lay ahead of me, so it was probably a good idea to start getting comfortable with the whole concept of death. If I couldn’t overcome my fears in a speeding minibus on the M1, what chance did I have in Afghanistan?

  “I normally do the pick-ups,” he said. “I get to see you guys come off the plane, your eyes full of trauma.” He chuckled. “From all the horrors you’ve seen.”

  I looked across at the signaller. Thankfully, he was still staring out of the window, lost in the sounds of his iPod.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as you think.” The corporal was looking back at me now, still doing 90 mph. “I’ve done two tours myself. You’ll be OK.”

  Strangely, I started worrying about getting killed in four months’ time, on the return journey. What if this guy was driving me then? Dying on the way to Afghanistan didn’t seem so bad, but getting killed on the way back, in a minibus with this clown, seemed unbearably tragic.

  We managed to get to Brize Norton without incident. The corporal dropped us off outside the main entrance to the Departures terminal, wishing us a safe tour before he left.

  “See you in fo
ur months, sir.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, unenthusiastically.

  I loaded my kit onto a luggage trolley – just like I was going on holiday – and made my way into the near-empty terminal. I had been expecting to find hundreds of soldiers milling about, but there was just one shaven-headed sergeant, fast asleep across a row of seats, oblivious to the BBC News 24 headlines pumping out of the large television above him. I handed over my baggage and weapons to a bored-looking woman on the check-in desk, just as the newsreader announced that another soldier had been killed in Afghanistan.

  I parted company with the signaller, wishing him a safe tour (“Have a safe tour” was practically a mantra) before heading over to the bar. Like the main terminal, it was virtually deserted. Russ and Ali were sitting on a sofa in the corner, watching television. They stood up when I walked in, and we exchanged handshakes and greetings.

  “Hi boss,” they both said.

  I’d met the two of them for the first time on a week-long Combat Camera Team course a month earlier. Within hours they’d taken to calling me “boss” rather than “sir”, a more informal term of address which I didn’t mind in the least. Despite all my pre-deployment training, I still saw myself as a civilian who was being allowed to wear a military uniform and go on an awfully big adventure. Most of my standing as “the boss” came from my BBC credentials: my military experience, ranked alongside that of Russ and Ali, was pretty limited.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked them.

  Ali had a glass of red wine, while Russ opted for a pint. We stood at the empty bar, chatting about potential stories, the two of them sipping at their drinks like a pair of designated drivers, clearly intent on an early night. Keen to set the right example, I followed suit, nursing my pint like an alcoholic who knows he’s not going to have another beer for four months.

  One of the possible stories we discussed was a profile on Ali herself trying her hand as a war photographer. Ordinarily she worked as a civilian freelancer, photographing all manner of domestic stories for the British press. She’d only just signed up for the Media Operations Group a few months earlier, having previously completed twelve years’ service in the regulars, joining the RAF as a policewoman in 1995. She didn’t look like someone who could wrestle a drunken pilot to the ground and slap on the cuffs – she was only about 5’5” – but she was a tough character nonetheless, and could draw on a lot of operational experience, having served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq.

  Russ had also seen a fair bit of the world. Unlike Ali and me, he was a serving soldier, based in the Media and Communications team at the British Army’s headquarters in Andover. He’d joined the army in 1994, serving as a tank mechanic in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) for ten years, before transferring into the Royal Logistics Corps to become a photographer (the RLC ran the army’s stable of photographers) and then a cameraman. He’d already completed two short tours of Afghanistan, and had previously served in Iraq and Kosovo.

  We discussed a couple of other potential stories – sniffer dogs, Afghan pilots – then made our way over to the transit accommodation. It was quite civilized, as it turned out, each of us getting our own room. I thought that maybe I would get a reasonable amount of sleep, but in the end I lay awake in my single bed for over an hour, thinking about Russ and Ali, and whether I was the right man to lead them.

  It was better than worrying about getting blown up, I guess.

  I managed to get about four hours’ sleep before a woman’s voice, piped into my room through a speaker over my bed, informed me that it was 03.15, which meant that it was time to get up. They didn’t like oversleepers here, for obvious reasons. I shaved and dressed, and then made my way over to the canteen. It was full of soldiers, but the atmosphere was subdued. I made small talk with Russ and Ali while we ate our cereal and toast. They were both pretty quiet too.

  After breakfast we all sat in the Departures terminal for two and a half hours. We were finally herded onto our Tristar at 06.30. It felt crowded on board – the flight was almost fully booked, and we all had to carry on our helmets and flak jackets – but the three of us managed to get a row of seats together, with Russ in the middle.

  The eight-hour flight went fairly quickly, broken up by a stopover in Akrotiri. Ali spent most of the time reading on her Kindle, while Russ played his favourite video game, Angry Birds. Despite being in his early thirties, I’d noticed that his cultural preferences tended towards the adolescent: he was a big fan of Star Wars, and he couldn’t get enough of conspiracy theories. After he’d managed to complete an Angry Birds level (whatever that involved), he talked to me at some length about the Apollo moon landings.

  “There are no stars in the pictures,” he said. “Those photographs were taken in a studio at Area 51.”

  I thought he was talking rubbish, but I humoured him, keen to hear his so-called evidence.

  “They were using Hasselblad cameras. Why would they use Hasselblad cameras? You’d never take them up to the moon with you.”

  “Why not?” I’d never heard of Hasselblad cameras.

  “They’re difficult to use. They had no viewfinders. They couldn’t have produced all those photos.”

  Russ continued in this vein for some time, all of his evidence coming back to the photographs. I wasn’t in the least bit convinced by his argument, but it did make me realize how much he loved photography. I knew he could handle his P2 video camera, but I was beginning to suspect he’d much rather have Ali’s Nikon D3S in his hands instead.

  He went back to his Angry Birds, while I mulled over the apparent lure of photography over moving imagery. Plainly, stills came with a sense of authorship that was often lacking in video footage. Russ’s output, when broadcast on national television, would be cut from his rushes by various editors and come with a little caption saying “MoD Footage”. Ali’s work, on the other hand, would appear untouched in national papers with her name credited right underneath. Every generation produces a handful of famous war photographers, but cameramen in conflicts go largely unknown.

  Both Russ and Ali wanted to be recognized as talented individuals, which sounded great, but had the potential to cause me a few problems. I was supposed to be steering their material in the general direction of our key messages: we were in the process of handing over to the Afghan forces, we were helping to rebuild the country, things were getting better, we’d soon be out of here. We were content providers for the military’s Media Operations machine, producing footage and imagery that served the interests of the British mission in Afghanistan. To that end, the message took precedence over the execution. Naturally we had to distribute a quality product, otherwise no media outlets would touch it, but there was no point marketing something that failed to support our messages. That didn’t always sit easily with individual expression, and certain journalistic tendencies would have to be kept in check until our return.

  We entered Afghan airspace about half an hour before we were due to land. The pilot switched off the cabin lights and told us to put on our helmets and flak jackets. We sat in silence, all of us alone in our thoughts, the silhouettes of our helmets making us look like rows of mushrooms in the half-darkness.

  I couldn’t help but think of the old line about soldiers and mushrooms being kept in the dark and fed on shit. This was slightly different, however, in that I found myself wondering whether I’d be doing any of the shit-feeding myself.

  PART TWO

  Inside the Wire

  Camp Bastion rose out of the wastes of the Afghan desert like a mirage, rich with the promise of doughnuts and air-conditioning. The size of Reading, its sprawling arrangement of tents, offices and hangars catered to the needs of thousands of British and American troops. Canteens as big as warehouses kept us fed and watered, chilly gymnasiums with long rows of cardiovascular machines kept us fit, and Portakabin ablution blocks with priceless hot showers kept us clean. Save for the occasional sandstorm, you could’ve seen out a six-m
onth tour here and not even known you were in the desert. Generators across the camp chugged and hummed in a pleasing, reassuring manner, bringing us two of the essentials for a stress-free military occupation: electricity and climate control. Had the Taliban worked out a way to knock out our power supply, we’d have left this sun-ruined part of the world years ago – but they hadn’t, so we were sticking around for a bit.

  In the heart of this temporary but probably permanent monument to Western overstretch was the JMOC, my official base for the next four months. My colleagues and I lived out of two six-man tents, our “rooms” divided by sheets that hung all the way down from the canvas ceiling to the plastic matting on the floor. Privacy of any kind was a rare operational commodity, so this was indeed a privileged arrangement, although you couldn’t so much as scratch your balls without someone hearing you.

  There was a third tent, just for the visiting media. It sat between the two staff tents, doubling as an office for the journalists. A trestle table surrounded by fold-up chairs took up one half of the tent, while ten bunk beds crowded up the other half. When it was full, it was unbearable – even the most docile battery hens would’ve struggled to get a good night’s sleep in there – but that was entirely the point. We didn’t want anyone from the media getting too comfortable right on our doorstep.

  Less than ten yards from our tents was the JMOC itself. A glorified Portakabin, it housed an open-plan office with half a dozen desks, each boasting a telephone and a computer. A flatscreen television hung in the centre of the far wall, invariably tuned to one of the rolling news channels. Beneath it a printer churned out the latest Afghan-related headlines from the newspapers back home – they were sourced online and stuck to a cuttings board by the door. The rest of the wall space was given over to a spread of maps, whiteboards and day planners, all of them daubed in black and blue non-permanent scribble. Cables ran across the floor from every corner of the room, stuck down with lengths of gaffer tape. A clutch of them ran through the near wall and out onto a gravel pathway to our very own disproportionately large satellite dish, covered in dust and pointing towards the heavens, reminding us all that Bastion really was in the middle of nowhere.