Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  We stayed on the base that night, then deployed with a troop from the squadron the following morning, going out in a patrol of four Jackals. The open-top wheeled vehicles, which carry up to five soldiers, were great for speed and mobility, but offered little in terms of protection. Russ took a seat in the commander’s Jackal, second in the patrol, while Ali and I were given the choice of either the first Jackal or the third.

  “But you don’t want to go in the front vehicle,” said one of the soldiers. “That’s the one that always gets blown up.”

  He was joking, apparently, but then again he wasn’t. Ali and I squeezed into the back of the third Jackal.

  We rolled out of the front gate, straight into the traffic of Highway 1. The tarmac road was arguably the most important in Afghanistan, covering over 2,000 kilometres, connecting Kabul to Kandahar. Nearly half of the country’s population lived within fifty kilometres of it. As we sped through the town of Gereshk, we overtook countless tractors, buses and flatbed trucks. The squadron had been conducting regular patrols along a seventy-kilometre section of the route for the past five months, deterring insurgents from laying IEDs. Security incidents had dropped, and the number of road users was growing steadily.

  Two kilometres to the east of Gereshk we turned off Highway 1 and parked up alongside a building site. Dozens of Afghan males ranging from boys to elders were constructing a bazaar, laying the bricks for a series of shops. They’d only just finished the foundations, but it still gave us plenty of decent photo and filming opportunities. We all climbed out of our Jackals and patrolled through the dusty site on foot, following Lieutenant Charlie Talbot, the troop commander. He was a photo and filming opportunity in himself, his fierce eyes, sculpted cheekbones and shock of blond hair giving him the look of a soldierly Billy Idol. With the help of his Afghan interpreter, he talked to the builders as they went about their work in the morning sunshine. Russ followed him closely, recording for posterity their stilted chats about building schedules and security.

  After half an hour we left the site and headed out into the greenery of the poppy fields. We patrolled in single file (the “Afghan snake”, as we called it), careful to follow in each other’s footsteps, even when crossing through the streams. We passed the occasional farmer along the way, tending to his poppy crop, but otherwise it was quiet.

  We stayed out in the fields for an hour before returning to the Jackals. As we climbed back into our seats, we heard over the radio the ANA coming under fire about two kilometres to the south-east. They had been destroying a field of poppies – part of a programme known as Government-Led Eradication (GLE) – when they came under attack.

  GLE was not something we got involved in. The Afghan President Hamid Karzai had given the initiative his full backing, but it was hugely unpopular with the Afghan people. No compensation was offered to the farmers, many of whom were forced to grow poppy by the Taliban (who had little sympathy for farmers with destroyed crops). ISAF was highly critical of the initiative, but reluctant to intervene. Afghanistan was supposed to be governing itself, and we were supposed to be taking more of a back seat.

  Still, Charlie thought it wise to maintain a presence in the vicinity of the contact, just in case it spilt out onto Highway 1. We started up the Jackals and took off east down the road, weaving in and out of traffic for another ten minutes before arriving at an ANA checkpoint. It was a pitiful compound, right on the side of the road, with barely any shade and hundreds of flies. A handful of grim-faced Afghan soldiers watched us closely as we parked in the yard and dismounted. Charlie went inside to speak to the checkpoint commander, while the rest of us took off our boots and wrung out our socks, still wet from the earlier stream crossings. It was 1 p.m. now, and getting uncomfortably hot. I sat on a low wall in the brutal sunlight, watching the steam rise from my empty boots, trying to ignore the growing number of flies buzzing around my pale feet.

  Eventually Charlie finished his chat with the ANA commander. He emerged from the commander’s “office” – a murky room in a corner of the checkpoint’s headquarters – looking unimpressed.

  “What a miserable bastard,” he said.

  He didn’t elaborate, but I couldn’t help thinking that I’d be pretty miserable too, living in a place like this.

  We drove back to base, returning in time for an orders group with the squadron commander, Major Rupert Lewis. He was planning a short operation for the weekend, clearing through a couple of local compounds. All his officers gathered in the briefing room inside the base’s headquarters, a small concrete building that faced the squadron’s living area. I stood at the back while Russ filmed a few generic shots of Major Lewis and his men.

  “We’ve seen a fair amount of insurgent activity in this area in the last few months,” he said, pointing at a highlighted section on the map behind him. “So we can expect it to be a bit spicy.”

  I made a mental note to add “spicy” to my list of euphemisms for combat. So far on this tour I’d heard “kinetic”, “interesting”, “crunchy” and “lairy”.

  Major Lewis continued with the rest of his orders, then asked if there were any questions. One of the junior officers raised his hand.

  “What should we do about taking our vehicles through fields and destroying crops?”

  It was a sensible enough question. The compounds were in the middle of a series of fields. It was far safer to plough your Jackal through some unfortunate farmer’s crop than risk taking the obvious tracks.

  “I would rather you drove through a field of wheat,” said Major Lewis, “than a field of poppy.”

  There were puzzled looks all round, so Major Lewis explained his thinking.

  “If we destroy wheat, we’re allowed to compensate the farmer for lost earnings. But if we destroy poppy – in line with GLE – we’re not permitted to give him anything. Which means he’ll get it in the neck – quite literally – from the Taliban.”

  This was the counter-insurgency mindset. Keep the locals happy, if you want to beat the Taliban. It flew in the face of Hamid Karzai’s policy on drugs, but apparently we could live with that. It was all part of the ISAF balancing act, trying to keep all the plates spinning at once.

  The following day was a Friday, the ANA’s day off. The squadron adjusted its routine accordingly, staying on the base to work on vehicle repairs. It gave me a chance to pin down some of the more senior soldiers who’d served alongside Prince William. Army PR in Whitehall had requested interviews with anyone from D Squadron who could reminisce about the royal troop commander.

  I managed to locate four NCOs who’d known him. Each took his turn in front of the camera, recalling time spent with the prince in his cavalry heyday.

  “He was a good bloke,” said his former driver – a lanky, fair-haired corporal. “He made the brews, just like anybody else.”

  There were no earth-shattering insights, just variations on the theme of “he was one of us”. It was fluff, essentially. I even asked each of them to record a wedding-day message.

  “Have a great day, hope it all goes well,” said the corporal. “You’re now well and truly under the thumb.”

  Russ, Ali and I weren’t due to return to Bastion until the following morning, so with the Prince William interviews done, we still had plenty of time to kill. Whenever we were staying in bases like this, we’d sniff around for stories. Ali had already taken pictures of a medic from Port Talbot called Aled, who gave the ANA lessons in first aid. She said he was a good talker, and worth interviewing. Hometown stories about army medics helping the ANA were always an easy sell to local radio stations back in the UK, so I tracked him down.

  He looked exhausted when I first saw him, collapsed in one of the armchairs. “I’ve had one day off in the last six months,” he told me in his soft Welsh accent.

  “Don’t worry, this will only take a moment.”

  I sat in the chair next to him, holding up my pocket-sized MicroTrack recorder, the little stereo T-mic turned towards his gaunt face.


  “What sort of a tour have you had?”

  He took a moment to respond. “It’s been very busy. We’re out on patrol just about every day. Fortunately, I’ve only had a handful of major trauma cases, which is the way I like it, although I would prefer it if I had none.”

  “How has the area changed since you came out here?”

  “In regards to insurgent activity, it’s increased dramatically in the last two months. Certainly since the New Year there’s been a huge increase in small-arms fire in our area of operations.”

  This wasn’t what I wanted at all. I steered him towards the bigger picture, hoping for something more positive.

  “How many times have you been out here?”

  “This is my second tour. I was previously out here in the summer of 2008 with the Royal Irish. That was an extremely busy tour, very demanding, but very rewarding. We had a few tragic days that I would have given anything to change, but it was good, very good.”

  “And since then, how has the situation improved?”

  “The IED threat has increased dramatically,” he said. “Back then, it was small-arms fire, RPG fire, indirect fire. Now the IED threat has gone up significantly.”

  I tried another angle. “What about Gereshk itself? It seems quite normal.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, thrown by the apparent stupidity of my question.

  “Gereshk is a toilet in an oven,” he said.

  Despite his obvious lack of media training, I did eventually manage to get some positives out of Aled, thanks to an unexpected source.

  “What about the Afghan soldiers?” I asked. “What’s it like working with them?”

  He smiled. “The Afghan soldiers, they still got the crazy fighting spirit that I do love and admire with them. They’re still challenging to work with, but they do really enjoy the medical training: they can see the need for it. The counter-IED training, they take it or leave it, but the first aid, they enjoy. So they have progressed somewhat since 2008.”

  I ended with a few questions about his home town (“What do you miss most about Port Talbot?”), then thanked him for his time. I had about ten minutes of audio, which would take a bit of editing when I got back to the JMOC, but I knew it was good for a couple of clips.

  Towards the evening, as it got cooler, many of the soldiers gathered in the seating area outside the squadron’s modest cookhouse. At one of the trestle tables where they normally ate their dinner, a dozen of them had crowded around a laptop. They’d produced a fifteen-minute “tour video”, culled from footage off their own hand-held cameras and mobile phones. Peering over their shoulders, I watched a clip of a top-cover man blasting away on his .50 cal., the empty cases falling around his feet to the sound of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’.

  This particular clip, it turned out, was their only footage of an actual firefight. It was interesting at first, but after about a minute, the unchanging camera angle got a little boring. You couldn’t see the enemy anywhere. It could’ve been filmed on the range. Nothing appeared to be happening, short of someone firing a machine gun at a distant ridge.

  One of the soldiers turned to me. “It was much scarier at the time,” he said, almost apologetically.

  It was often the way with combat footage, regardless of who was filming it. Firefights didn’t lend themselves to “holistic viewer experiences”. You rarely saw the enemy, and you rarely saw the fall of shot. You just got a succession of images of soldiers firing their weapons at some malevolent presence off-screen. It didn’t make for a particularly balanced narrative. What did the enemy look like, exactly? What were they doing? How far away were they? Did they pose a genuine, immediate threat, or were they just dickheads taking potshots?

  * * *

  We flew back to Bastion the following morning, and got to work on our own masterpieces in the JMOC office. Russ had about eight hours of footage to edit, while Ali had taken hundreds of photographs, from which she would select the best dozen or so. I drafted a quick press release to accompany her pictures, then started listening back through my interview with Aled.

  Most of it was unusable. There was no point sending out clips of a British soldier saying that “the IED threat has increased dramatically”, for instance. Even if it was true,* what purpose would it have served? I was supposed to be putting out material that helped and supported the cause of our troops. Keeping the British public on side was a part of that cause: it was a part of the war effort. More than ever, the public wanted to know what was being achieved in Afghanistan. After ten years, they didn’t want to hear that things were getting worse.

  The issue of selective reporting was a moral quagmire, of course, requiring its own coping strategy. Without wanting to get bogged down, I told myself that as long as I was on the military’s payroll, I would do the military’s bidding. Balance and impartiality – those cornerstones of BBC journalism – were not part of my current remit. When I was no longer in uniform – i.e. when I was back to being a journalist again – then maybe I would rethink my actions. Until then, I would do the job I was being paid to do. I wasn’t being asked to kill civilians, and I wasn’t being asked to send soldiers to their deaths. I was just a little media bit player, pushing out odds and sods. Joseph Goebbels I was not.

  I polished two clips from Aled’s interview, both fifteen seconds long, wrote a cue to go with each, then emailed them off to Real Radio Wales, a commercial station based in Cardiff. The first clip was just human-interest bait, a way of hooking the News Editor. It was Aled’s answer to the generic question: “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”

  When I get home I’ll put the kettle on and go out into the garden. Look over the mountains where I live, smell the air, listen to the sheep and just enjoy the sounds of the countryside. Just peace and quiet and rest.

  It was the kind of clip that news editors love. Some could be wary about taking audio from the military, so you had to soften them up.

  I put the key messaging into the second clip. News editors would rarely take just one clip when they could have two.

  The Afghan soldiers, they still got the crazy fighting spirit that I do love and admire with them. They’re still challenging to work with, but they do really enjoy the medical training: they can see the need for it. And I try to make my lessons as interesting as possible for them.

  One of the main aims of our job was to highlight the fact that the Afghans would soon be taking over this place (and we would be getting the hell out). From a key-messaging perspective, any media content that failed to include the ANA/ANP was a missed opportunity. Wherever possible, we tried to stress that our presence on the ground was all about “partnering” and “mentoring” the Afghan forces, with a view to the withdrawal of ISAF combat troops by 2015.

  Increasingly the Afghan forces were dealing with security incidents on their own, leaving out ISAF altogether. Just that afternoon, as I was editing Aled’s interview, the rolling-news channels were full of reports about an attack on a UN compound in Balkh Province. Around two hundred demonstrators had gathered in Mazar-e-Sharif City to protest against the burning of a Koran by a US pastor. The ANP were quickly on the scene, but they did not request ISAF support. Hopelessly outnumbered, they were unable to prevent the demonstrators from storming the compound. Seven UN workers died in the resulting carnage, a number of them beheaded.*

  Later that evening, I rang home. I was going to wait until the following day – Mother’s Day – but I knew all the headlines about the UN slaughter would’ve upset my mum. She’d almost certainly assume that Mazar-e-Sharif City – a place I’d never heard of before – was right outside my tent.

  “Hello?” she said. Whenever I made my weekly call, it was always Mum who answered.

  “Hi Mum, it’s me.”

  “I knew it was going to be you!” She said this every time, her voice always a mixture of happiness and relief. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, absolutely fine.” I always tr
ied to make my voice sound as laid-back and untroubled as possible, which was generally quite easy. “How are you?”

  “Fine, we’re all fine. William is here. We’re just having dinner.” I pictured the scene: my brother sitting at the kitchen table underneath the big mirror; my father at the head, his back to the Welsh dresser; my mother at the other end, nearest the Aga; the dogs invariably sniffing around underneath the table.

  “I’ll call back in a bit.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’ll pass you round. Just say a quick hello.”

  She handed the phone to my brother first. “How’s it going?” he said, as though he’d just bumped into me in the pub. “Everything going OK out there?”

  “It’s good, all good. How’s it with you?”

  “Not good,” he said. “Bad day for Notts County. Lost two-nil at home to Oldham.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Keep your chin up.”

  He passed me over to Dad. He also lamented the Notts County defeat.

  “They were terrible,” he said. “Absolutely hopeless.”

  We chatted about Notts County’s hopes in the league – a fairly short conversation – then he handed me back to my mother. She lowered her voice.

  “That was awful, what happened at that UN place,” she said.

  “It was. Nowhere near us, though. Other side of the country.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  I let her get back to her dinner. “I’ll call again tomorrow. With it being, you know, Mother’s Day.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  I went back into the office the following morning. Sunday was normally a fairly relaxed day for the JMOC. There was just the tireless Ali at her desk, poring over her photos.

  “Could you clear my images from the Household Cavalry, boss?”

  “Sure.”

  I went through the pictures on her laptop. Our patrol in the poppy fields looked like it had been lifted straight out of a Vietnam movie. With our MK7 helmets and our multi-terrain-pattern uniform we were dead ringers for American GIs, waiting to be picked off by an unbeatable enemy against a backdrop of lush vegetation and abundant drugs (with no domestic allies in sight). Perhaps if I was truly serving the cause, I would’ve binned every single image, but I didn’t have the heart to wipe out an entire patrol: maybe censorship wasn’t my thing after all. In the end I only deleted two images, each showing a soldier in close-up without his ballistic sunglasses (he’d removed them because they’d steamed up, a common problem). Orders from the top, in keeping with our key message that the troops were well equipped.