Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  As with most offices at Bastion, the JMOC had a tendency to induce cabin fever. The camp was an incredibly safe place – probably the safest place in Afghanistan – and if you were trapped inside its sterile confines for any length of time, you got restless. Some officers, wedged behind a desk for six months, found themselves clawing at the walls. They volunteered for all kinds of unnecessary tasks, loath to go home without at least a sniff of the Green Zone. Bored stupid, they talked about going outside the wire like it was some sort of robust leisure activity.

  Harriet was not one of them. Pink-faced and bespectacled, she was our media planner, handling the timetables for my team and the various embedded reporters who passed through Bastion. Apart from making the odd trip to the flight line, ferrying journalists in the JMOC minibus, she spent all of her time in the office, writing emails and making phone calls. She had no desire to go outside the wire. She was a quietly spoken RAF reservist who loved sudoku. The thought of going out on a Helmand safari almost certainly terrified her, but she had the good sense to keep those fears to herself.

  Our boss was a very different creature. Wing Commander Faulkner’s military record spoke for itself: as a Hercules pilot, he’d flown countless operational missions in numerous hotspots around the world. Hitting his fifties, his flying days behind him, he’d transferred into the cosseted world of Media Operations. He wanted to go on safari, absolutely, but he also had a talent for sitting in the JMOC chasing bullshit.

  “You’ll be going out quite a bit,” he told me on my first day, the two of us standing outside the office in the sunshine. “Make sure you sit down with Harriet and get your timetable sorted out.”

  “How’s it been going so far, sir?” Along with Harriet, he’d already been in theatre for two months.

  “It’s been quiet,” he said. “But I’ve managed to get outside the wire a couple of times, which helps.”

  I nodded. He clearly subscribed to the “get outside the wire, it’ll do you good” school of thought.

  “Harriet has yet to go outside,” he added, smiling. “But I’m hoping to change that.”

  Poor old Harriet. She was sitting inside the cool office, picking her way through her emails, blissfully unaware of our conversation. I tried to picture her in the middle of the Green Zone, picking her way through a field of IEDs, trying not to collapse in the life-threatening heat.

  It was difficult to imagine, to be honest.

  Later that afternoon, a handful of young soldiers from the nearby REME battalion trudged over to the JMOC for some interview training. They were about to complete their six-month tour and were due to be interviewed by the local media at their homecoming parade back in the UK. Their commanding officer had chosen them in the hope they would come across well on camera, but to a man they all looked pasty and miserable.

  “Try to look happier,” I told them, then immediately regretted it. Maybe one of their colleagues had died?

  “It’s just been a bit boring,” one of them said. “We haven’t been outside the wire once.”

  Maybe Faulkner had a point after all.

  * * *

  During our first week at Bastion, we had to complete a training package called Reception Staging and Onward Integration (RSOI). Every morning at sunrise about a hundred of us caught a fleet of buses to the desolate outskirts of the base, where the training took place in a series of tents and purpose-built compounds.* Most of it was revision, repeating the lessons we’d spent the last two months learning back in the UK. If you were staying inside the wire for the duration of your tour, you only had to complete a two-day package, but for those going out on the ground, a minimum of five days was needed. Counter-IED drills took up most of the timetable, along with first aid, all of it ramming home the blunt message: If you don’t do your drills properly, this is what could happen to you. We were shown graphic slides of double amputees and triple amputees fresh off the battlefield, their limbs reduced to bloated, crimson stumps. Our instructors even showed us close-up pictures of IED victims who’d been wearing pelvic protection alongside those who hadn’t.

  But the most memorable lesson, if “memorable” is the right word, was a talk by a skinny, unshaven corporal from the Royal Irish Regiment, days away from the end of his tour. He gave us a presentation called “Theatre Realities” inside a tent filled with nothing but wooden benches. There were no maps and no graphic slides – it was just him standing there, describing his experiences over the past six months. We sat down on the benches and listened to his lilting Irish accent for almost an hour, none of us making a sound.

  He started by talking about Ranger Steven McKee, a colleague who had been killed by an IED in Nad-e Ali just a week earlier.

  “I was with Stevie on the day he died,” he said. “He was driving a Jackal. We’d been going across this wadi all day, with no problems. He drew his vehicle alongside mine for a brief, then drove off and, about thirty metres later, he hit the IED.

  “Stevie had no chance. It took off the whole of the front of the Jackal. The top-cover man got blown onto the back of the vehicle – he got broken limbs and a burst eardrum. Miraculously, the vehicle commander just got a cut on his forehead. He got out and staggered back towards us. How he managed to walk away from it, we don’t know.”

  I glanced at some of the faces around me. Everyone was rapt, hanging on the corporal’s every word.

  “Multiple firing points have become a growing problem,” he continued. “One of our patrols went out, and they got hit from eight different points. The lead man got hit in the buttock with an armour-piercing round which exited through the front of his thigh, blowing most of it away. The fire was still coming in, so his patrol commander told him to roll into an irrigation ditch, which he did. Unfortunately, the ditch had five feet of water in it, so now he was drowning. The patrol medic then sprinted across, swallow-dived into the ditch, and saved the guy’s life.

  “In another incident,” he went on, “some of our guys came under fire, and they all jumped into a ditch for cover. One of the insurgents ran around to the end of ditch and shot down the entire length of it. Luckily, because they were staggered, he missed all of them, apart from the guys on each end who were both hit on their side-plates.”

  The stories kept coming, one after the other. It was almost hypnotic, the way he spoke.

  “Your pelvic protection can make a big difference,” he said, still going. “We had a guy from the Engineers who lost both his legs and an arm in an IED blast. First thing he said when he came round was ‘Have I still got my cock and balls?’ Fortunately, he was wearing his pelvic protection, and it did the job.”

  After the talk, we all shuffled out of the tent and collected our packed lunches. Everyone was pensive, examining the colourless sausage rolls in silence. Many of us, I suspect, were quietly recalculating the odds of getting out of this country in one piece.

  We had another Theatre Realities talk the following afternoon. This one was a bit more upbeat. A surprisingly portly captain from the Mercians stood in front of us and did his best to lift the mood.

  “You hear a lot of doom and gloom about Afghanistan, but actually it’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s ninety per cent boredom, really, and only ten per cent shitting yourself.”

  * * *

  One of our first proper jobs on camp was at the hospital, highlighting the quality of emergency care for injured troops. We’d arranged to film and interview a batch of TA medics for ITV Yorkshire. Russ and I were able to walk there from the JMOC – it was only four hundred yards away, just behind Pizza Hut and the Heroes coffee bar.

  It wasn’t the biggest hospital I’d ever seen, but it was one of the busiest. The single-storey building contained eight trauma-resuscitation bays, four operating tables, eleven intensive-care beds and thirty-five intermediate-care beds. Almost two hundred staff ran the wards, most of them from 212 (Yorkshire) Field Hospital, a TA unit based in Sheffield. British and US helicopters kept them supplied with patients around the clock
, using a helipad a short drive from the Emergency Department. They dealt with up to thirty cases of battle trauma a day, ranging from gunshot wounds to multiple amputations.

  We’d only just got there when the MERT* landed with a casualty: an Afghan soldier shot in the abdomen. He was stretchered from the Chinook into the back of a waiting ambulance, which sped from the helipad to the Emergency Department in less than a minute. The hospital staff then took over, carrying him into a vacant trauma bay, preparing him for surgery. Russ filmed the trauma team in action, careful to avoid shots of the Afghan’s face (there being strict rules on patient confidentiality). The wound was relatively straightforward – the bullet had exited through his buttock. The team cleaned him up, and he was wheeled into the operating theatre.

  Russ and I followed him into theatre, but kept our distance during the surgery. Once he had been stabilized, we did a quick interview with one of the surgeons, a colonel in her fifties from Rotherham. She chatted away happily, answering all my undemanding questions, while the Afghan was stitched up in the background.

  We managed a couple more interviews – with a nurse and a ward supervisor – before word came through that the MERT was on its way back again with another casualty. This time it was a Brit, and it was serious.

  “IED,” said one of the medics. “Triple amp.”

  We decided to stop filming. At least a dozen extra staff – most of them junior medics – had gathered around the trauma bay just to watch the casualty being brought in. It was crowded, much more crowded than it needed to be. Russ switched off the camera and we went for a coffee, walking over to Heroes without saying a word.

  What was more important? Preserving the dignity of a single soldier or showcasing the grisly consequences of an IED blast? At the time, it felt like the right thing to do, the decent thing to do, not to loom over a raw triple amputee. We didn’t need to film him – we already had enough coverage of the trauma team in action – and the footage would’ve been far too graphic for a normal audience.

  For the younger medics crowding around his bed, it was very different. By their own admission, they took in the gore whenever they could: it was part education and part desensitization. They were in the business of acting humanely, but first of all they had to detach some of that humanity from themselves and the casualty. Many of them likened themselves to mechanics, putting the various pieces of the human machine back together as best they could. It was part of their coping strategy, allowing them to function without the burden of messy emotions.

  Maybe, like the medics, I should’ve tried to desensitize myself. For a long time afterwards I wondered whether we should’ve stayed in that trauma bay and kept filming. Even if it was too much for ITV Yorkshire – and even if it was too much for him, served up on film like a piece of meat – the footage could’ve still been used by some other media outlet, somewhere along the line. Maybe in a documentary, or even just a training video.

  I didn’t say much in Heroes. Neither did Russ. We just drank our coffee and watched the RAF bomb Libya on Sky News. The rolling news channels had been all over the air campaign against Colonel Qadafi’s regime for the last week. Wherever the bombs were falling, the whole world would know about it. There was no word yet on the exact number of casualties, but none of them were British.

  Back in the JMOC I checked Ops Watch for more details on the triple amputee. He’d been on a foot patrol with 2 Para in Nahr-e Saraj. Initial reports suggested he was a member of a counter-IED team from Brimstone, a call sign made up of bomb-disposal experts and searchers who went out looking for the devices ahead of the main body of troops. He’d triggered an IED thought to contain around five kilograms of explosives. This was at the lower end of the scale for the Taliban, but it was still powerful enough to blow away both of his legs and one of his arms.

  He hadn’t died though, so aside from family and friends, no one back home would know that a British soldier had just lost three of his limbs. The JMOC wasn’t about to trumpet the news, and neither was the British media. If you wanted to make a name for yourself out here, you had to go the whole hog and get yourself killed.

  The injuries kept coming, and you took it for granted that someone somewhere was about to get blown up. The next morning another British soldier stepped on an IED, also in Nahr-e Saraj. He was more fortunate, losing just a leg below the knee. Traumatic amputations were so common in Helmand, so unremarkable, they never made the news. They were simply a part of the Afghan landscape, undeserving of a headline.

  *

  Also known as the Afghan training village.

  *

  The British-run Medical Emergency Response Team – or MERT – consisted of a doctor, two paramedics and an emergency nurse, along with a protection force of four soldiers, deploying in a Chinook helicopter. The US ran smaller medevac teams in Pave Hawk helicopters under the call sign Pedro.

  Shahzad

  Our first job outside the wire was with 3 Para in Nad-e Ali, two weeks into our tour. BBC Four had requested footage of the Paras in Afghanistan to use in their documentary series Regimental Stories, which focused on different units within the British Army, looking at their history, training and current deployments. We were flying out to 3 Para’s headquarters at Patrol Base Shahzad, driving out to one of their smaller bases, then going out on foot with one of their patrols. Ali was also coming, taking photographs that would hopefully be of interest to the British press.

  Before we left Bastion I stopped by the office to say goodbye to Sean, the outgoing Combat Camera Team leader who was about to catch his flight home. A wiry ex-Marine in his late twenties, he’d been full of advice during his handover to me, some of it useful, some of it less so. When he wasn’t in uniform, he worked for a shipping firm in Glasgow. How this qualified him for a position in Media Operations, I had no idea, but he seemed to like it out here.

  “So you all set for Nad-e Ali?” he said.

  “I think so.”

  “Make sure you put one of your dog tags in your boot.”

  “Why?” Both of my identity discs were hanging around my neck.

  “In case your legs get blown off.”

  “Seriously?”

  He looked at me sympathetically. I felt a story coming on. Like Afghanistan itself, Sean was full of them. You never had to look far to find something dramatic out here, and if Media Operations was your line of work, you were in clover. It was just a case of weeding out all the nasty stuff before you got to the telling.

  “I was on this patrol last month,” Sean began. “We came across this compound, and were about to go in and take a look around, when a friendly Afghan ran across and told us not to go in, because it was littered with IEDs. So we didn’t go in, we carried on our way. But as we were walking past one of the open doorways, we saw a soldier’s boot just lying there, still with the foot inside.”

  It wasn’t the most reassuring story I’d ever heard. Sean needed to work on his editing skills, clearly.

  “It’s not uncommon to see lumps of flesh just rotting by the side of the track,” he added. “Sometimes it’s not worth the risk, clearing it up.”

  “Sounds wonderful, Sean.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry, Julian, you’ll be fine.”

  “Julian?” I said. “It’s Christian.”

  “Christian?”

  “Yes, Christian.”

  It had seemed like a genuine mistake on Sean’s part, getting my name wrong, but it spooked me nonetheless. Julian was a fellow member of the MOG, and to my knowledge the only Combat Camera Team leader to have come to any harm out here. It had happened a year earlier. He’d been hit by shrapnel, a blast fragment skewering his hand while he was out with his cameraman.

  “I’m not great with names,” Sean said. “Sorry about that.”

  Julian had recovered OK, but it wasn’t exactly a good omen. I was feeling uneasy as it was – two Irish Guards had just been killed by an IED in the last week of their tour, and a Para who’d lost his legs a few d
ays earlier had also just died. There was a lot of death going on, and it was still only March.

  Sean then made matters worse by showing me a clip from his head cam of an IED blowing up four soldiers on a joint patrol earlier in his tour.

  “I don’t want to shit you up,” he said, opening the file on his laptop. “But I think you should see what an IED blast looks like.”

  The clip began with Sean at the back of the patrol, walking along a wide, sandy track with his cameraman a few yards in front of him. A line of about a dozen Afghan soldiers stretched out ahead of them, leading to the corner of a mud compound seventy yards away. The point man had stopped just short of it and was pondering his next move, the corners of walls being known as hotspots for IEDs. A moment later he stepped off the track and continued with the patrol, putting some extra space between himself and the wall, the soldiers behind him following in his footsteps.

  He’d only gone a few yards when the IED – buried near the foot of the wall – exploded. Sean and everybody else froze, the head cam trained on a huge cloud of smoke and dust engulfing the front of the patrol. Seconds later the head cam started to bounce violently up and down as Sean began to run, joining his cameraman in a charge towards the blast site.

  The IED had knocked down four of the Afghans. They were spread out along the side of the track, flat out in the dust. Amazingly, none of them had died, all of them showing signs of life, groaning together in bewildered unison. Sean and his cameraman set about them with field dressings and morphine, doing what they could to help. One of the Afghans had lost a big chunk of his forearm. Another had a hole like an open mouth in the side of his face.