Combat Camera
Page 12
“He doesn’t like doing interviews,” said Ali, who’d managed to have a couple of normal conversations with him. “He thinks of it as grandstanding.”
In the end I interviewed Paul’s boss back at Lashkar Gah, Lieutenant Colonel Fraser Rea. We met him outside the Gurkha temple (more of a tent, really) next to the TFH office, just after its inaugural service. He had a red dot in the middle of his forehead and a purple flower behind his ear, but they soon came off. The notion of grandstanding was not a concern, and he was happy to answer a few questions.
* * *
Back at Bastion, we learnt that the Checkpoint Blue 25 inquest had again been put on hold. It would now take place later in the month. Regardless, Russ still edited his footage, Ali still collated the best of her photographs, and I still wrote up a couple of press releases for national and regional media in the UK (Lieutenant Colonel Rea was originally from Scotland). TFH had said they would now be responsible for marketing the content, so once we’d done all the cutting and polishing we sent it over to them for distribution.
With all that done, we had a couple of empty days in our schedule. This meant loitering in Bastion, waiting for our next job. Consequently I spent a fair few hours at my desk, trying to look busy. This was no easy task, and the time would drag, but it was worth hanging around just to marvel at some of the characters that occasionally strayed into the office.
At one point a rather large, matronly naval officer walked in, returning a camera she’d borrowed from Ali. She was a practice nurse from the hospital’s Primary Healthcare Department. In her spare time she would visit Bastion’s handling facility for detainees,* giving our guests there some moral support. She wrote poems about them, and had tried – and failed – to get permission to photograph them.
“Some of them are not very pleasant people,” she said. “But some of them are quite chatty.”
As for the war itself, that seemed to be on hold. Evidently the insurgents were still preoccupied with the opium crop. The main item in Faulkner’s brief that evening concerned our food supplies.
“You may have noticed a lack of choice in the cookhouse recently,” he told us. “It’s because half a delivery of protein – in other words, meat – and pudding went bad in transit. So two planes carrying 150 tonnes of pudding and protein are being lined up. Until then, we may have to use some US supplies, so expect lobster tails.”
The following day was equally slow. I went to the gym in the morning, returning to the JMOC after lunch. Time seemed to stand still at about 3 p.m., so with no interesting characters coming into the office, I offered to drop off some paperwork at the hospital.
Walking over to the hospital’s reception, I passed the entrance to the Emergency Department. One of the Afghan cleaners was hosing down a gurney on the concourse, sending a stream of blood into the nearby drain. So much for a lull in the war. I dropped off the paperwork at the front desk in reception and then walked over to Heroes. My predecessor Sean had advised me to take a moment for myself every now and again, just to collect my thoughts (this was surprisingly erudite, coming from Sean). With so much time on my hands, I’d started thinking about Omid Haft, the big operation that was coming up at the end of the month. It was making me a little nervous, so now I wanted a distraction.
In Heroes I bought a can of Diet Coke and a glazed doughnut, handing over two dollars to the bored American at the till.
“Bad for you, those doughnuts,” he said.
“I’ll sweat it off.”
I sat down at a table in the corner. There were about half a dozen soldiers in the room, all of them sitting in silence, captivated by a television infomercial for sports bras. A line of blondes were parading across the screen in just their underwear. The camera kept zooming in to each model’s chest, highlighting the bra in all its glory.
The advert was over all too soon, replaced by some crappy action movie. I drank my Diet Coke and ate my doughnut, feeling pretty distracted.
I toyed with the idea of another doughnut, but thought better of it. I had to stay in some sort of shape. Omid Haft promised to be a hard slog. We’d be out on the ground for at least a week. I couldn’t afford to be carrying any excess weight.
There I was, thinking about Omid Haft again. I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. It would only lead to thoughts of death and horror. Actual death and horror, as opposed to the hysterical antics being played out on the television.
I left Heroes and went for a piss, using one of the Portaloos near the cookhouse. I could’ve walked back to the JMOC and used the Portakabin toilets – they were a hundred times cleaner and more civilized – but I didn’t want to go back towards the office just yet. That would only lead to introspection, which would lead to the dark side. I wanted to do something else, something different, so I decided to give the Portaloo experience a try. How bad could it be?
It was like stepping into an oven that baked nothing but loaves of shit. Apart from the fact that it stank, the heat was ridiculous – almost comical. I started to sweat within seconds of closing the plastic door. This was no longer a time-killing distraction – this was a very real form of acclimatization training. I flicked up the toilet seat with my boot and had my piss as quickly as I could, taking in the graffiti-covered walls as I relieved myself.
The graffiti fell into two categories: soldiers slagging each other off, and soldiers crowing about their imminent departure. On my right, there was a whole chain of messages from the former, most of them centred on the great Paras-versus-Craphats debate:
– All Paras are dumb fucks
– Fuck you, craphats! Dumb? I’m a Tom with a degree and what the other lads lack in Quols make up for with common sense and tactical awareness. Craphats are solid!
– Fuck off, you cocky set of pricks
– U all envy us Paras
– TO ALL PARAS. Your not special! I did a jump once. 25 ft out of your mums bedroom window
And so on. At the foot of it all, someone had settled the debate with:
– Ross Kemp is harder than all you wankers!
As for the graffiti on my left, there were a couple of messages that caught my eye:
– I’m outta here in less than 7 hours
– Are you flying home tonight for end of tour? No, must be me! Enjoy this shithole…
I finished my piss and wandered back to the JMOC, wondering what it would be like to be one of those soldiers going home. I was now almost halfway through my tour, with another ten weeks to push. It wasn’t a long time on paper, but in my head it seemed like an eternity.
At the brief that evening, Faulkner said it had been another quiet day. In lieu of any major incidents, he gave us another round of intelligence updates and parish notices.
“The Taliban have finally worked out what the balloons in the sky are for,”* he said. “So they’ve started moving more at night to avoid the cameras. They’re also telling the locals that we’re using the cameras to spy on women.”
As propaganda went, it wasn’t a bad line from the Taliban.
“One more thing,” Faulkner said. “The Dog Section has put out a call for volunteers to go over there and help walk the dogs. Apparently they need a hand keeping them exercised.”
Naturally I volunteered. What else was I going to do? Stay in the office and go mad?
I walked over to the Dog Section the next morning. It was not difficult to find. A giant paw carved out of wood hung on the metal fence outside the office. I went inside and introduced myself to the sergeant major behind the desk. He was a short, intense man who took his job very seriously.
“You mustn’t let the dog misbehave,” he said. “They can’t afford to pick up bad habits.”
I’d always been totally pathetic with dogs, allowing them to get away with anything. This was going to be a new experience.
He led me outside to the kennels. Dozens of dogs – springers, Labradors, Belgian shepherds – sat in wire cages, barking at us.
“Which one do you fancy?�
�� he asked.
“I’ve always been rather partial to springers.”
The sergeant major showed me a small black springer who was very lively, bouncing around inside his kennel, barking his head off.
“This is Dave,” he said.
“Good name.”
I took Dave out alongside a handler who was exercising a Belgian shepherd. We walked out of the kennels onto a long stretch of enclosed desert, barren except for the odd bit of scrub every twenty yards or so. Dave was straining on his lead like a dog possessed, trying to chase down some invisible entity just beyond his nose. The temptation to let him go was enormous – I felt sorry for him – but I knew that would be wildly inappropriate. Instead I kept jerking him back on his lead, trying to get him to heel.
Dave only ever paused for breath when we passed a bit of scrub. Then he would go into his urination routine: he would cock his leg and pee on the scrub from one angle, then he would turn around, cock his other leg and pee on it from a different side. Then he would turn around again and pee on it for a third time from the original angle.
I began to wonder whether Dave had obsessive-compulsive disorder. He repeated this routine at least a dozen times during our thirty-minute walk. Then to cap it all off, he did a very runny shit on the last bit of scrub before we got back into the kennels.
Even in a war zone, you were supposed to pick up the dog poo. The sergeant major had given me a little plastic bag just before we set off. I looked down at Dave’s mess, dripping off the scrub. It was an impossible task.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the handler. “You’ll have to let that one go.”
I was worried about Dave – he seemed stressed. I could recognize the symptoms. I wasn’t urinating in a weird way just yet (OK, apart from the Portaloo episode), but I could relate to his situation: sitting in an office/kennel all day, thinking/barking for hours on end, then going out into a hostile environment for an uncertain spell, before coming back and repeating the process all over again.
Man or beast, it was always going to make you go a little bit strange.
*
Daily Telegraph (online), 4th April 2010: ‘Murder at Blue 25: British Soldier Speaks of Betrayal in Afghanistan’.
*
Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of illiteracy in the world. According to figures released in May 2011 by Dr Jack Kem, the deputy to the commander of the US-led NATO Training Mission and Combined Security Transition in Afghanistan, 86 per cent of new ANA/ANP recruits were unable to read, write and recognize numbers – US Department of Defense news briefing (online), 23rd May 2011. †
†
NATO (online), 28th November 2009: ‘Afghan National Security Forces Announce Pay Increases’.
‡
These emails emerged following a Freedom of Information Act request put in by a BBC journalist to the Foreign Office – BBC News (online), 18th February 2009: ‘Drug Abuse Hampers Afghan Police’.
*
Oxford Mail (online), 7th October 2010.
†
Heart Oxfordshire (online), 6th October 2010.
‡
Daily Record (online), 15th September 2010.
§
Paisley Daily Express (online), 6th October 2010.
¶
Generally we regarded the Scottish, Welsh and Irish media as regional, rather than national, given the smaller population sizes.
*
Curved Nepalese knives, worn in miniature on the Gurkhas’ cap badge.
*
Nowzad was a UK animal charity set up in May 2007, named after a stray dog that Royal Marines from 42 Commando saved during a deployment in the town of Now Zad. The charity’s main aim was to improve life for animals in Afghanistan, especially dogs. A lot of its donations were directed towards the rescue of stray dogs that had been befriended by British troops, helping them to find homes in the UK. The charity had also started to promote the use of humane options for dealing with out-of-control stray-dog populations.
*
Reporters at News International’s soon-to-be-defunct News of the World having been found to have accessed the voicemail accounts of hundreds of celebrities and politicians. Later it was revealed they’d also hacked into mobile phones belonging to the relatives of British soldiers killed in action.
*
I.e. the camp prison. The detainees were mostly suspected Taliban.
*
Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems, like the one at Shahzad. Most of the larger bases had them.
Embeds
Reporters came through the JMOC all the time, but the start of the summer brought with it a larger than usual influx of journalists and producers. Eighteen of them were due to arrive at Bastion on the evening of 19th May, the most high-profile being Ross Kemp and the Sun’s Defence Editor Virginia Wheeler.
Ordinarily, they would’ve all completed an RSOI training package upon arriving in theatre, but the powers that be back in the UK (the JMOC answered to Permanent Joint Headquarters – or PJHQ – based at Northwood) had decided that was no longer necessary. It was considered too time-consuming, with the package for those deploying outside the wire lasting five days. If a reporter was only in theatre for two weeks, it meant almost half their embedment was taken up with training.
“Instead they’ll get a day-long ad-hoc safety brief from some corporal,” Faulkner complained. “It’s all wrong. There are huge issues with safety. We can’t just send them out there without the proper training.”
It wasn’t just a question of training, either. The need for acclimatization was becoming increasingly evident. The daily highs in Helmand were now in excess of 40°C. On 14th May, Op Minimize was called for a heat injury – a British soldier had collapsed while out on patrol. It was lifted again a few hours later, but it showed that bullets and bombs weren’t the only things that could hurt us.
More heat casualties were flown into the hospital at Bastion the following day. Three members of 4 Scots had gone down in Nahr-e Saraj. They were brought in behind three Royal Marines from 42 Commando, who’d also been out patrolling in the same district. They didn’t have heat injuries – they’d triggered an IED. Two of them had fragmentation injuries to the eye and arm respectively, while the third Marine – later named as nineteen-year-old Nigel Mead – died of his wounds.
That afternoon I helped our admin sergeant to sort out some of the body armour that would be distributed to all the embeds coming at the end of the week. His name was Mick, and he was our equivalent to Tom, the lumbering commando at TFH. Mick was a little lighter on his feet than Tom, blessed with a quick wit and a lively sense of humour. He was originally from Jarrow, a fact you couldn’t help but be reminded of whenever he opened his mouth.
“I’m no Geordie,” he would say. “I’m a Mackem.”
“Mackem?”
“That’s Sunderland to you, sir.”
The spare body armour was stored inside an ISO container next to the office. We sorted through all the different sizes, dripping with sweat in the sauna-like heat.
“That Virginia Wheeler is coming,” Mick said, wiping his brow. “From the Sun.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “Is she nice?”
“Is she nice? She used to be a Page Three girl.”
“What?” This was news to me. “How old is she?”
“Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”
It seemed highly improbable to me that Virginia Wheeler was an ex-Page Three girl, but I still went back into the JMOC and googled her. I managed to find a few byline shots of her, but nothing to suggest that she used to take her clothes off for a living. Mick was either misinformed or just pulling my leg.
Still, she was attractive enough, and certainly easier to look at than Ross Kemp.
I saw one of her stories in the Sun later in the week. It was taken from a press release that Dougie – still bored out of his mind in charge of Strategic Messaging – had come up with.
GOATS GO AWOL
The trio escaped from the army training village under cover of darkness. The farm animals – code-named Tom, Dick and Harry – are part of the realistic Afghan training village on the military base where the troops practise drills.
Colour Sergeant Roughley, of 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, said: “While we are impressed with the goats’ skills, it’s time to return to duty.”
Whether the goats would return in time for Virginia’s arrival remained to be seen. Either way, her stories for the Sun would soon be heading into much darker territory. Op Minimize had been called yet again, for the third day running. Five British soldiers had been taken to Bastion with heat injuries, all of them collapsing before 10.30 in the morning. Later that afternoon, an RPG attack near a patrol base outside Lashkar Gah caught three British soldiers, leaving them with blast injuries. The following day in the same area, three soldiers from 3 Mercian – our hosts at the Royal Wedding celebration – suffered blast injuries after their armoured vehicle hit an IED.
As the temperature rose, so did the operational tempo. Virginia would get a few days in theatre to find her feet, then she’d be outside the wire for Operation Omid Haft. She was getting embedded with 42 Commando, and would be joining foot patrols throughout the operation.
My own preparations for Omid Haft, meanwhile, were not exactly going to plan. I still hadn’t managed to meet up with the elusive Afghan Combat Camera Team. We’d arranged to start their training in a classroom at Shorabak a week earlier, but none of them had turned up. Even Mikkel had failed to appear. We didn’t hear from him until the following morning, when he’d cycled over to the JMOC to apologize.