Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  After breakfast I walked over to the Embassy shop – it was a well-stocked Portakabin outside the canteen – and bought twelve cans of Heineken, plus a can of Stella to replace the one I took. I went back to the villa, put the beers in the fridge and changed into my grey hooded top and shorts. Then I headed for the pool.

  The next eight hours were taken up with sunbathing and swimming. I had the pool to myself for most of the day. The odd diplomat came in for a dip or to catch some sun, but they didn’t stay long. They had work to do, clearly.

  I didn’t see any sign of Joshua at dinner. I ate my rump steak on my own, watching Wimbledon on the big flatscreen at the back of the canteen.

  I walked back to my room after dinner to the faint sound of sirens. This was Kabul’s soundtrack, wailing through its chaotic streets three or four times a day. Somewhere in the city, yet another very bad thing had just happened.

  In the villa I took a Heineken from the fridge and sat in the empty lounge. I still hadn’t seen any of my housemates. I flicked through the movie channels on the TV, before settling on a DVD box set of Generation Kill.

  I slept soundly again that night – safe inside the Embassy bubble – then went to breakfast for 8 a.m., ready to do some filming. I bumped into Joshua just as he was coming out the door.

  “The graduation ceremony is tomorrow now,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Not really, no.”

  I ate my breakfast, then spent another day by the pool.

  * * *

  During my peaceful mini-break, the Intercontinental Hotel, about twenty minutes’ drive down the road, was attacked by insurgents. It happened on the Tuesday night, around the time I was returning to my villa after dinner. Although the attack was widely reported throughout the world, I knew nothing about it until the Thursday morning, when I was chatting to Steve, one of the G4S guys who were taking me and Joshua to the Staff College.

  “We’ll be going past the Intercontinental Hotel this morning,” he said. “It’s right next to the Staff College.”

  “I’m quite curious to see that,” said Joshua. “See what the damage is.”

  “The damage?” I said. “What happened?”

  Steve explained. A suicide bomber had run into the lobby and blown himself up. At least five insurgents had then run in, firing AK-47s. Ten civilians – mostly hotel workers – died in the attack. Afghan security forces, helped by members of the New Zealand SAS, surrounded the hotel. The ensuing firefight had lasted several hours before the remaining insurgents were killed.

  “It’s the standard way the insurgents do it now,” said Steve. “Send the suicide bomber in, then follow it up with small-arms fire.”

  At least two of the insurgents made it up to the hotel roof, only to be blown to pieces by a NATO helicopter. This started a fire that was captured on film and broadcast by countless international news outlets. We saw the damage from the road as we drove past, the flames having gutted one half of the top floor.

  The Staff College, at least, was untouched. We arrived there ten minutes before the graduation ceremony was due to start, but the guards on the gate, still jumpy over the hotel attack, kept us waiting for fifteen minutes while they ran a number of pointless security checks. By the time we got into the main headquarters, the ceremony had begun. All the officers on the course were sitting at their desks in the largest classroom on the top floor, listening to a speech by one of their senior commanders. He looked as old as the hills, his white beard and rumbling voice giving him the air of an Afghan Moses. I had no idea what he was saying, but I set up the camera on the tripod at the back of the room and started filming.

  Following the speech, each officer was presented with a certificate. They had to march to the front of the room and shake hands with the course instructors, all of whom had gathered under a portrait of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai. I took the camera off the tripod and filmed them from a number of different angles, always trying to frame each officer in the same shot as the British instructors I’d already interviewed. The plan was to put together a series of pieces for regional TV, each centred on a British instructor local to that region.

  After the ceremony, I tried to get an interview with the senior commander who’d given the speech, but he left almost immediately, apparently suspicious of the media. I’d already interviewed a number of officers on the course, but I still needed something from a senior Afghan figure to give an overview of the training. As well as British regional television, I was hoping to send the footage to some of the stations in Kabul in an effort to strengthen our links with the Afghan media.

  “The best man to interview is Major General Patang,” said Joshua. “But he tends to be quite busy.”

  Major General Patang was the head of the Afghan National Police Training General Command. In other words, he ran the whole show. If I could get an interview with him, the Afghan stations would come knocking.

  “Can we get him?”

  “Not today,” said Joshua. “We’ll have to come back again. What’s your schedule like? You could be stuck at the Embassy for a few days.”

  I interviewed Major General Patang three days later. In the meantime, I just did what you do when you’re stuck at the Embassy for a few days. I drank all the Heinekens, drank some Carlsberg, watched a lot of movies, ate some nice meals, swam many lengths of the pool and got very brown. As holidays in Afghanistan go, it wasn’t that bad.

  The day after the Patang interview, I was supposed to catch my rescheduled flight to Bastion – which, however, was cancelled due to technical problems. I waited at the airport for an hour before the announcement came through. The Hercules would not be flying for another twenty-four hours, which meant I would be spending another night in the Embassy. A G4S team came back to pick me up.

  “You might get to see the big man,” said the driver. “He’s just arrived at the Embassy.”

  “Which big man?”

  “The Prime Minister.”

  “Our Prime Minister?”

  David Cameron was in town, preparing to make an announcement about a planned withdrawal of British forces. His original timetable was supposed to take him to Lashkar Gah, but the mysterious disappearance of a British soldier in Nahr-e Saraj had thrown out his schedule, every available helicopter being pulled into the search. The Prime Minister had flown straight into Bastion, met some of the troops, then flown up to Kabul for a night at the Embassy.

  I did not get to see him by the pool the following morning. He went straight to the Presidential Palace for talks with Hamid Karzai, before flying back to the UK in the evening. The next day he gave a statement to the House of Commons, announcing that British troop levels in Afghanistan would drop from 9,500 to 9,000 by the end of 2012.

  * * *

  I finally got back to Bastion on the afternoon of Tuesday 5th July, leaving me just eight days and a wake-up until my flight home. My replacement, Joe, had by now arrived at the JMOC and settled into my old bed space. I’d planned to spend my last few days conducting a handover with him, but he had other ideas. He’d brought a civilian cameraman with him from the British Army’s Media and Communication Team, and was shooting footage and interviews for a BBC series called How to Go to War. I would have to fit the handover around his filming schedule.

  By this stage, I wasn’t particularly bothered any more. Like most soldiers nearing the end of their tour, I was just focused on going home. To all intents and purposes, I was already sitting on my Tristar, flying away from Afghanistan for ever.

  Faulkner went through his usual roll call of death and destruction at the brief that evening, although even among all the carnage there was some cause for optimism.

  “Ninety-nine significant acts today,” he said. “Which is forty-five per cent down on what it was this time last year. So although it’s the fighting season, there hasn’t been that much fighting.”

  I sat in the corner of the office, wondering whether I’d spent the last four
months in some twisted parallel universe. A man at a desk was reading numbers off a page, saying there hadn’t been much fighting. He was not wrong – the summer had been quieter than recent years – but it still felt completely fucked up.

  “We killed 164 insurgents across theatre this week,” he said. “Thirty-eight captured or detained.”

  He then told us more about a British soldier whose body had been found after he went missing from his base in Nahr-e Saraj. Highlander Scott McLaren from 4 Scots had inexplicably walked out of Salaang on his own in the early hours of Monday morning. The twenty-year-old’s disappearance had triggered a seventeen-hour search operation involving hundreds of troops across Nahr-e Saraj. His body was eventually discovered in a culvert around 700 metres north-east of Patrol Base 4.

  “There’s all sorts of speculation about what happened,” Faulkner said. “But we still don’t know. It’s still under investigation.”

  Colonel Lucas had already issued a statement to the media to that effect, which had been reproduced in most of the main British newspapers. This hadn’t stopped the press from coming up with a number of theories about his disappearance and death. The Daily Telegraph quoted a “top Afghan commander for the province”, Sayed Maluk. He said that McLaren had been found dead in a stream that ran through his base after apparently drowning, and his body was later shot by insurgents.* Meanwhile, the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden suggested that Highlander McLaren’s actions were possibly the result of “battle shock”.† Later in the week, the Sunday Times claimed to have spoken to one of the insurgents responsible for Highlander McLaren’s death. The paper reported that the twenty-year-old had fallen into the hands of a group of Taliban fighters who had tortured and shot him. It claimed their commanders later rewarded them for their efforts with a motorbike and the equivalent of £180 in cash. “The senior leaders in Pakistan were very happy with us,” one of them apparently told the newspaper.‡ On the same day, the Sunday Telegraph published the findings of its own investigation, claiming that Highlander McLaren had left Salaang to find a pair of night-vision goggles.§

  This version of events came closest to the findings of the inquest into his death in December 2011, which recorded a verdict of unlawful killing after he was captured by insurgents, tortured and shot in the head. It heard that McLaren went to retrieve the goggles – considered a vital piece of kit – after they’d been left behind by another soldier at a nearby vehicle checkpoint. However, when he walked out of Salaang at 2 a.m., he was caught on CCTV heading straight past the bridge that led to the checkpoint. The coroner at his inquest said: “Quite clearly, Scott was concerned as regards the missing goggles and talked of going back to the checkpoint on the northern side of the canal where they were last seen. The evidence, in particular the CCTV imagery, points quite clearly to Scott heading in the direction of the bridge. But he never crosses the bridge and heads off in an entirely different direction. It is unclear what Scott was doing that night, and sadly the only person who could help us is no longer with us.”

  *

  See Appendix 1: Field Reports and Significant Acts.

  *

  Daily Telegraph (online), 5th July 2011: ‘UK Soldier in Afghanistan “Drowned after Going for a Swim”’.

  †

  Daily Telegraph (online, Toby Harnden blog): ‘5th July 2011: Highlander Scott McLaren and the Toll of Battle Shock’.

  ‡

  The Sunday Times, 10th July 2011: ‘Taliban Fighters Get Bikes for Killing British Soldier’.

  §

  The Sunday Telegraph, 10th July 2011: ‘British Soldier Missing for Two Hours before Alarm Was Raised’.

  A Hazardous Environment

  On the day I returned from Kabul, four newly arrived reporters were undergoing their Media Induction Package at Bastion. In terms of readiness, they had not made a great first impression on the JMOC. Faulkner shared his concerns about their dress and equipment with the rest of the office the morning after their arrival.

  “One turned up in some baggy, low-crotch harem pants,” he muttered. “She insisted they were perfect for hot places.”

  He was drafting a lengthy email to PJHQ, calling for a more comprehensive training programme for embedded journalists. Three of the four had attended the MoD-run “Hazardous Environment Course” back in the UK, but apparently it was lacking in useful information.

  “They said there was an interesting lecture on how the Chinese recruit sleeper agents,” Faulkner said. “But that was about it.”

  It being a war zone, he soon had other stuff to distract him. An RAF Reaper had blown up two trucks in Now Zad, successfully killing two insurgents and inadvertently killing four Afghan civilians. Sky News was running a report on the incident, describing it – not incorrectly – as a “drone” strike.*

  “We don’t say ‘drone’ any more,” Faulkner said, reading back through the MoD’s official statement. “It’s a remotely piloted air system.”

  I wondered whether “drone” was such a terrible word. To my ears it spoke of something dull and inert, bringing to mind the ramblings of a dinner-party bore. It certainly wasn’t as disturbing as “Reaper” – the name provided by the US manufacturers – which brought up the classic image of Death himself, scythe in hand, looming over his next victim.

  At just after midday a flight lieutenant called Simon walked in. He was the RAF’s media-liaison officer in Kandahar, come to visit us on a whim. His admin sergeant – a squat man with beady eyes – had travelled with him. He’d picked up some “Kill TV” along the way, and thought we might like to see it.

  “I’ve got the file here,” he said, holding up a USB stick. “It’s awesome.”

  None of us leapt up to join him. He sat at the desk recently vacated by Russ, opening the video file on the spare computer. Only Simon stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  “It’s from a Tornado using Brimstone,”* said the sergeant, unperturbed by the general lack of enthusiasm in the room. “They’d spotted a dicker† on top of a hill. You can just about see his mobile phone.”

  Simon leant forward, squinting at the footage. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Hang on.” The sergeant mouse-clicked a few times, trying to sharpen up the grainy image of the insurgent. “How about now?”

  “What’s that?” Simon said.

  “That’s the impact.”

  Simon took his time. “I still don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  The sergeant clicked again. “When you switch to infrared, you can clearly see blood spurting out of him.”

  Again Simon squinted at the screen. “It’s still not clear…”

  The sergeant sighed heavily. “Once you establish what you’re looking at, it’s clear. His head and a trail of blood go in one direction, and his torso and a different trail of blood go in another direction. His legs stay where they are.”

  Simon grimaced. “Did we release this?”

  “No,” snapped Faulkner from across the room. He’d already had enough of the pair. “We don’t do snuff movies.”

  We had just one more visitor that day. An Apache pilot dropped off some cockpit footage just before dinner. His clips highlighted some brilliant tactical flying, but alas, there were no kills in the picture.

  “We used to kill forty to fifty insurgents a week,” he said casually. “It’s gone down now.”

  That was how he talked about it. Like the unexcitable slaughter of insurgents was the norm.

  Which it was, of course.

  * * *

  A day after completing the Media Induction Package, one of the newly arrived reporters – Stephen Bailey – flew out to Patrol Base 2 to join C Company of 1 Rifles. Tom, the huge commando from TFH who normally made the tea for Colonel Lucas, accompanied him. Having learnt of his growing frustration with life in the office, Colonel Lucas had allowed his admin sergeant to try his hand at the job of media minder, escorting the journalist out on the ground.

  As a physical specimen, Stephen did
not look like someone who would take naturally to a foot patrol in the Green Zone. Skinny and bespectacled, he seemed almost too human alongside Tom, who looked not unlike a Norse god.

  At 16.30, the two of them left the base as part of a joint 1 Rifles/ANA patrol. Stephen was nervous. He’d never been to Afghanistan before, and this was his first time outside the wire. He’d already spoken to Tom about some of his fears, which centred around IEDs, small-arms fire and heat illness.

  “He did ask a lot of questions,” Tom told us later, sitting in the JMOC. “I tried to answer them in a reassuring manner.”

  The aim of the patrol was to set up a vehicle checkpoint about 600 metres from the base. The ANA would be conducting the checkpoint itself, while the soldiers from 1 Rifles would provide cover. They expected to be out on the ground for about three hours.

  The patrol headed out along a tarmac road leading from the base, watched by a number of local women and children in nearby compounds. The area was home to several families, and the patrol had to stop several times to allow traffic to pass. Tom used these moments to check up on Stephen.

  “I’m OK,” Stephen said. “Just hot.”

  Tom felt this was quite normal – everyone was hot, it was still in the mid-thirties – so they carried on.

  After 500 metres the patrol split in two. The Afghans continued along the tarmac road, while the Rifles turned onto a track that led through a series of rundown compounds.

  Two hundred metres down that track, the Rifles stopped and carried out a counter-IED drill. Tom noticed that Stephen was beginning to struggle with the heat and told him to sit down and drink some water.

  Stephen did as he was told, but he was still having problems. Within a few minutes, it was clear he was experiencing the initial stages of heat illness: clammy skin, faintness, light shaking.

  By now, the patrol had been out on the ground for just over half an hour. Tom spoke to the patrol commander, and the decision was taken for the Rifles to return with Stephen to Patrol Base 2.