Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  “I am very sorry,” he said in his long-suffering Scandinavian way. “They were unable to make it.”

  I didn’t press Mikkel for their excuses. Like he’d said before, it was the Afghan way. We just had to be patient and go with it.

  We finally met up with the Afghan team on 17th May, just a week before Omid Haft was due to start. The four of them – a major, a captain and two NCOs – were waiting in one of the empty Portakabins when we arrived. Mikkel introduced everybody (with the help of an interpreter) and we got started straight away. Russ and Ali split them down into pairs and took them through the basics of filming and photography, while I took a few pictures in the faint hope this auspicious occasion could be turned into a story. The Afghans were a bit glassy-eyed at times, but generally they seemed to follow what Russ and Ali were saying. The two NCOs were the most keen to learn, while the two officers, perhaps wary about the presence of Ali (a woman telling them what to do) were more stand-offish. Either way, no one fell asleep or stormed out, so the day was judged a success.

  When we returned to Shorabak the following morning to continue the training, we were greeted by the sight of Mikkel outside the Portakabin. He was sitting on a bench in the shade, rubbing his sweaty temples.

  “Morning Mikkel,” I said.

  He looked up at me and smiled, all wry and careworn.

  “Good morning, Christian,” he said. “As you can see, they are not here. They have all been given other jobs by their commanders.” He shook his glistening head. “I think we’ll have to call today a write-off.”

  We went back to the JMOC and spent the rest of the day doing not very much. Op Minimize was called again at just after midday, so I killed some time on Ops Watch. I was beginning to find its unquestionable authority strangely reassuring, in a comforting “this is what the fuck is going on” kind of way.

  Also, its format reminded me of the old BBC teleprompter that used to give out the football results on Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon.

  In Nahr-e Saraj that morning, about a dozen insurgents had attacked a foot patrol from 1 Rifles with small-arms fire and RPGs. Two Apaches were called in, firing eighty rounds of 30-mm ammunition and a Hellfire missile. One insurgent was killed, and a member of 1 Rifles was shot in the buttock.

  Meanwhile in Musa Qala, a Georgian patrol had driven over an IED containing 5 kg of explosive. Two of their soldiers had been flown into Bastion with blast injuries.

  An Afghan child had also been flown into Bastion after stepping on an IED in Sangin. The child had lost a leg below the knee, and was left with a “mangled arm”.

  Ops Watch also reproduced the details for some of the many “significant acts” that took place across the rest of the country every day. Helmand was just one of thirty-four provinces in Afghanistan. It was easy to forget that we Brits occupied just a tiny portion of this vast landscape. I scanned through the lists of events that had taken place elsewhere that day.

  In Takhar Province, about a thousand demonstrators had gathered in the centre of Taloqan District to protest over an ISAF operation in which four Afghans, two of them women, had died. The crowd had turned violent outside the Governor’s compound and the local ANP headquarters. The ANP had fired live ammunition at some of the protestors, who fled and laid siege to the nearby Provincial Advisory Team headquarters instead. The German soldiers inside, under a barrage of petrol bombs and small-arms fire, also started shooting back. According to the initial estimates, twelve Afghan civilians had been killed and seventy-two injured. Ten ANP had been wounded, along with two Germans.

  In Kandahar, a joint patrol from the ANA and the US 502nd Infantry Regiment had discovered 2,000 kg of hashish in Zharay District. The ANA had burnt the drugs on site. They were then engaged by small-arms fire and RPGs from an unknown number of insurgents. One US soldier was killed and one wounded.

  In Wardak, a patrol from the US 3rd Squadron 89th Cavalry Regiment had discovered a weapons cache in Maidan District. It contained twenty-seven 122-mm rocket engines and two 107-mm rockets. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team had conducted a controlled detonation of all the munitions. The resulting explosion blew out the windows of two nearby houses, injuring two Afghan children.

  In Zabul, a vehicle patrol from the ANA had driven over an IED in Shah Joy District. Three ANP had been pronounced dead at the scene. Two injured ANP had been flown to the hospital at Qalat, where they’d died of their wounds.

  In Paktika, a joint patrol from the ANA and the US 506th Infantry Regiment had been engaged by small-arms fire from two insurgents in Mota Khan District. They returned fire, and following the engagement discovered the body of an eleven-year-old boy. A six-year-old boy was also wounded during the incident. The local elders were angry and blamed ISAF for the death. It still wasn’t clear whether the dead boy had been firing at the patrol. The KIA (Killed in Action) was listed as “suspected insurgent”. An investigation had been launched.

  In Kunar, a patrol from the US 2nd Battalion 35th Infantry Regiment had been engaged by small-arms fire from an unknown number of insurgents in Darah-ye Pech District, resulting in one wounded US soldier. An F-15 from the 389th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron had then come in and dropped a 2,000-lb bomb, forcing the insurgents to break contact.

  In Nangarhar, a car bomb had exploded near the Jalalabad Customs House in Behsud District. It had targeted a bus filled with ANP instructors and students. Eleven ANP were killed and six wounded. The blast also killed eight civilians and wounded twenty-two.

  Other than that, it was a quiet afternoon – not untypical, by Afghanistan’s standards. Terrible stuff happened all the time, spread out in pockets across the country. Here at Bastion, we were well out of it, removed from it all. The reports came in, and the casualties came in, but the insurgents never troubled us. We were working on a space station in the desert. No one was going to get to us out here. You could fly your granny in for tea and not worry about it. We were completely safe.

  Omid Haft

  The IDF attack on Bastion on 19th May – the first of its kind for eighteen months – took place just hours before the arrival of Ross Kemp and Virginia Wheeler, but no one told them about it, or indeed any of the embeds. It wasn’t the kind of information they needed to know, so we all kept quiet. They’d find out sooner or later – somebody on camp was bound to let it slip – but at least they wouldn’t hear it from the JMOC.

  While Ross Kemp was eating his fruit-and-raisin bars at the training village the following lunchtime, there was another little media crisis in progress at the JMOC. There’d been a cock-up with Virginia Wheeler’s timetable – she was supposed to be flying straight out to Lashkar Gah to interview a brigadier, but Dougie had misread the programme, and she’d unknowingly missed the flight. Frantic efforts were now under way to reschedule the interview. Flights to Lashkar Gah were supposed to be booked at least four days in advance, so finding her another seat was not going to be easy.

  To make matters worse, Dougie had disappeared. He’d crept out of the office after details of the cock-up had emerged, and three hours later was still missing. A search party consisting of Mick and Ali took the minibus and went out to look for him.

  They soon found him. He was wandering around the vigil site, right next to the JMOC. A section of desert the size of two football fields, it was the best escape from cabin fever that Bastion had to offer.

  “I’ve had enough of this place,” he told Ali. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Faulkner’s rhetoric was clearly lost on Dougie, but you couldn’t hold that against him. His role in charge of Strategic Messaging had devolved into something trivial and undemanding. He had become a glorified media handler, a babysitter to reporters passing through Bastion. Despite his lofty job title, he had no actual job. Strategic Messaging meant everything – and therefore nothing.

  I had a chat with him the following afternoon, back in the office, hoping to cheer him up. The Virginia Wheeler situation had been resolved – she’d ma
naged to get another flight to Lashkar Gah earlier that morning – so at least her timetable was back on schedule.

  “Good news about Virginia,” I said to him.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Now we’ve just got Ross Kemp to sort out.”

  “He’s not causing problems, is he?”

  Dougie stared at me blankly. He looked exhausted.

  “He was due to go on a Sea King this evening,” he said eventually. “But now he wants to go on a Chinook.”

  “Why a Chinook?”

  “It’s his favourite helicopter.”

  To be fair, this wasn’t as daft as it sounded. The Chinook was much more filmic, much more symbolic of the war, than the Sea King. Ross was flying out with his team to join 45 Commando at one of their patrol bases. Any footage from the flight could well end up in the opening shots of his new TV series, so it had to look good.

  Dougie wasn’t entirely in agreement with me on this one.

  “There’s a war on,” he said. “We can’t just move it around to suit Ross Kemp.”

  Ross did eventually get his Chinook, which was probably just as well. His team was carrying an enormous amount of kit – over twenty bags and cases – so they’d have struggled with the much smaller Sea King (unless they’d kicked everybody else off).

  Over the next two days, as I waited to deploy on Omid Haft, the inquest into Checkpoint Blue 25 took place. With nothing else to do, I spent a lot of time at my desk, reading through the coverage. Predictably, all the newspaper headlines were focusing on the drugs problem, with Gulbuddin’s behaviour in the run-up to the killings attracting most of the media’s attention. One of the guardsmen, Paul Steen, had told the inquest he’d been out on a previous patrol with Gulbuddin and noticed that he had been smoking cannabis.

  “One time I was on the Northern Sanger* alongside the ANP, and he was sat next to me and he was smoking cannabis,” said Steen. “It is easy to recognize the different smell between a cigarette and cannabis. I reported it to the Sergeant Major. He was quite sleepy on that Sangin duty. He could hardly walk straight. He was armed.”

  The inquest also heard from Lance Corporal Namarua, who was badly injured in the incident. He told the court he “didn’t trust” the ANP.

  “My general view was that I was not happy, to be honest,” he said. “Sleeping in the same room together, I was not happy with that. I didn’t trust them. The feedback that I got [from superiors] was supposed to be: work with them – and we were supposed to be able to bond. I can’t explain why I could not trust them: it was just a feeling that I could not suppress.”

  I looked through all the British media’s coverage of the inquest, dovetailing into the wider issue of ANP recruitment, but I couldn’t find any of the material we’d recorded at the police training centre in Lashkar Gah. TFH had taken on the responsibility for its marketing, but all I managed to locate was a short film of the graduation ceremony on Armyweb. We had been hoping our material would appear on a much bigger platform, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way.

  I just hoped that our footage and stills from Omid Haft would find a wider audience. Nobody wanted to risk their life for a photograph or a film or an interview that was going nowhere.

  * * *

  We caught a Chinook to Patrol Base 5 for Omid Haft on the afternoon of 24th May. Russ and Ali were both excited about the operation, and even I was starting to feel more upbeat, riding the high from the adrenaline boost that came with every helicopter trip in Afghanistan. I told myself it was time to stop fretting about worst-case scenarios and just go along with the whole fucking carnival. There was no point wasting your precious time on this earth just lingering on the sidelines, shitting yourself.

  At Patrol Base 5 I met our point of contact from the Brigade Advisory Group, a very tall officer from Devon called Captain Foot-Tapping. This put me in an even better mood. With someone like Foot-Tapping on our side, we couldn’t possibly fail. His name had that ring of eccentric British invincibility that immediately inspired confidence. He even spoke like a toff. His ancestors had probably conquered half of India. We were going to win this war after all!

  Foot-Tapping went through some of the details with me. We’d now be going out in two days’ time, in the early hours of the morning, timing our departure to coincide with the 1 Rifles/42 Commando heli-insertion 5 km north of us. Russ, Ali and myself would be attached to a mixed company* consisting of eighteen British soldiers from the Brigade Advisory Group and sixty soldiers from the ANA. Our patrol would be moving very slowly, all of us in single file, following in each other’s footsteps. We’d lay up in a compound about 2 km outside Patrol Base 5 on the first night, then complete the rest of the move up to Salaang by the following evening.

  “At Salaang you’ll get the chance to do a few interviews,” said Foot-Tapping. “And hopefully the Engineers will get the all-clear to build the bridge.”

  For us, the bridge was the main event. Russ and Ali would get plenty of footage and stills of British soldiers out on patrol – framed wherever possible with Afghan soldiers in the same shot – but we still needed to show the British public what it was their boys were actually trying to achieve. We weren’t just out here looking for a fight – we were here to build bridges, in this case literally.

  We stayed at Patrol Base 5 that night. I slept badly, kept awake by the nearby mortar line, firing illumination missions into the early hours. They stopped at around 2 a.m., allowing for a small window of calm, before waking us all with a rousing blast at 5 a.m.

  I went for breakfast at 6.30 a.m., joining Russ and Ali at one of the tables in the dining tent. None of us had slept well.

  “Did you hear the bang?” asked Russ.

  “You mean the mortars?”

  “No, a Husky hit an IED outside the base.”

  “That’s why the Apaches are up there,” said Ali.

  Two of them were circling the base, omniscient in the cloudless sky. They were scouring the ground for insurgents while the Engineers recovered the Husky. The driver and passengers had all walked away from the blast, reinforcing the vehicle’s well-earned reputation for safety. Chunky and robust, it was designed for saving lives.

  It turned into another stupidly hot day. Temperatures were now hitting 42°C. With nothing else to do, I spent the afternoon reading a book on my camp cot, wearing just a pair of sweat-soaked boxer shorts, staying out of the sun. We’d opened up both ends of our little tent, but it still felt like a sauna, the heavy canvas doing nothing to dissipate the heat. By dinner I’d drunk four litres of water and was still thirsty.

  After dinner a vigil was held for Colour Sergeant Kevin Fortuna, the soldier from 1 Rifles who’d been killed by an IED two days earlier near CP Sarhad, barely a kilometre from where we were all standing. Everyone on the base – there were about a hundred of us – formed a hollow square by the two flagpoles near the dining tent. By now the sky had clouded over, and the wind had picked up. A number of officers and senior NCOs read out prayers and eulogies, struggling to make themselves heard over the noise of the Brigade flags, still flapping wildly at half-mast.

  We had an early start the next morning, getting up at 02.30. Once again I got very little sleep, but I felt OK, waking up to the faint sound of distant helicopters. I put on my Bergen – it was heavier than I would’ve liked, but perfectly manageable – and walked with Russ and Ali to the meeting point by the back gate. We could see lots of other guys already there, getting their kit ready in the darkness, visible by their issued head torches. They looked just like miners preparing for a descent into the underworld.

  “We’ve got a delay,” I heard one of them say. “Moving off at 0430 hours.”

  That gave us another hour. I didn’t know if there was some sort of problem, but I was grateful for the slippage. It started to get light at 4.30 a.m., which meant it would be easier for the point men to spot any IED ground sign. We did have night-vision goggles, but they weren’t exactly high-definition.

  That said,
we were less likely to get shot in the dark.

  I walked back to the dining tent to get some cold water, bumping into Foot-Tapping on the way.

  “It’s still too windy for the heli-insertion,” he said, his silhouette looming over me. Dozens of illumination rounds had been fired into the night sky behind him. “They’re just waiting for it to calm down a bit.”

  I could still hear helicopters in the distance, so someone was flying. In the dining tent I took out as much water from the wardrobe-sized fridge as I could carry, returning to Russ and Ali with my arms full of 500-ml bottles. They were sitting on their kit by one of the ISO containers near the back gate. I handed out the water, and we started drinking.

  I was just opening my second bottle when a soldier came over and introduced himself. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but his voice told me everything I needed to know about him.

  “I’m Colour Sergeant Fisher,” he growled. “You’ll have to give us a hand with some of our kit.”

  He passed me one of the reserve Vallon metal detectors and a 66-mm rocket launcher. Russ and Ali had already declined my offer to carry some of their kit – they insisted they’d be OK – so I did have some spare capacity. I strapped both items onto my Bergen, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon to use them.

  Eventually we got going, the wind dying down enough for the heli-insertion to get the all-clear. It was closer to 5 a.m. as we walked out of the gate in single file, Russ, Ali and myself at the rear, with the stocky Colour Sergeant Fisher – looking as tough as he sounded – covering all our backs. Above us the murky clouds had formed a protective blanket, keeping out the sunshine. We knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long, but for now the weather was perfect.

  The ANA were waiting for us along the track, spread out in single file. There must’ve been about a hundred of them, all out in the open. They shuffled forward after a few minutes, moving very slowly. The first kilometre of the route had already been cleared of IEDs, but they still took their time. The Afghan commander, a chubby man who refrained from wearing a helmet, kept moving up and down the line, muttering to himself. Every time the troops at the front stopped, we all got down on one knee. If we were stationary for more than a couple of minutes, we’d sink back onto our Bergens, giving our shoulders a break. I was carrying around 45 kg of kit, body armour included. Some of the men in our patrol were carrying in excess of 60 kg.