Never Broken

by Hannah Campbell

  One of the more bizarre aspects of the prison guard duty was that the women were allowed to bring in pans of food for the prisoners. We were supplied with hand-held metal detectors so we could scan all the food and if we had any doubts we would stir it up with a spoon, or even feel around inside with gloved hands to make sure nothing was concealed. One day a woman showed up with a boiled dog’s head in a metal dish, still with its eyeballs intact, which made me want to retch. Because its skull cavity was such a good potential hiding place we had to get the gloves and metal detector on the dog and it stank, which wasn’t nice at all.

  Once they were all inside the prison we would stand on concrete plinths to guard throughout the visiting time and watch individual visitors. Each family would sit on mats and have picnics huddled in groups and we’d each be tasked with watching certain groups to ensure there was no threat or to diffuse fights breaking out because of hierarchical disputes as there was a definite pecking order among the detainees. Fortunately I never got caught up in one in the prison, but there were protocols in place. The armed guards on all the doors would grab the back of the soldiers body armour who was on guard inside – which would have included myself – then they’d pull you outside, walking backwards, so you faced the enemy at all times and then they would shut the doors and and lock you all in for the duration of the fight.

  Even back on camp if you were on guard duty there were still risks. The camp was vast and at night some areas of it were pitch black, where there were no tents, so you’d be completely alone. One of my greatest fears was being caught on my own in one of those areas in a mortar attack at night. I don’t know what I would have done. I was told there had been a sniper taking pot shots so everywhere you went, you had to wear body armour, and jogging around the perimeter was banned as a result.

  One of the lads had a legendary escape near the perimeter boundary that became the stuff of camp folklore. He was standing having a cigarette, waiting for a transport vehicle, when someone fired a mortar bomb that, by chance, hit the ground right next to him. Though it left a crater, incredibly it didn’t detonate. It was a miracle he lived to tell the tale and his survival spread like wildfire around camp. A real brush with death, it totally shook him up. The bomb disposal team had to go out and do a controlled explosion. It was unbelievable. But incidents like that made us all realise that if it’s not your time, it’s not your time.

  Three months into my deployment I had two days of Operational Stand Down – which meant I had completely free time. A group of us, including Sally and John, decided to take one of the regular military flights that went to Kuwait to get away from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the camp. I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before, knowing I was going to get out of the shithole of camp. Of course I’d rather have been going home, but this was the next best thing.

  But first we had to get out of Basra. It was full kit and helmets for the two-hour flight, again under cover of darkness. Landing at the US Air Base in Kuwait called Camp Arifjan at 5am, we headed straight for breakfast after a quick change and a wash. We were all caught up in a holiday atmosphere. Relief washed over me that I was away from Iraq – albeit for just forty-eight hours. Camp Arifjan was probably the most luxurious and vast I’d ever seen. Compared to our facilities, the US cookshop was like a five-star hotel and the breakfast buffet had everything and anything you could think of, just like a five-star Hilton. I chose sausage, pancakes and syrup and sat in air-conditioned luxury within a proper building, not a stifling tent.

  By contrast, the meals at our British camp were notoriously terrible as everything was shipped in from outside Iraq for there was a threat of poisoning if it was local. Staples were tinned fruit salad and while there was a hot breakfast option of bacon and eggs, because the cookhouse was in a tent there were flies everywhere. The most appetising thing on the menu was the cereal miniboxes flown in from the UK and served with UHT long-life milk. You’d struggle to survive more than a hastily eaten meal as the air conditioning buckled under the heat from the stoves. Dinners were often stews made from canned meat and always there were loads of chips. Whenever a delivery came in there would be salads and fresh fruit, but here in the US camp everything was on offer, like an all-you-can-eat banquet. The British camp was a poor relation in comparison. Our two main luxuries were a small Naafi, which had a limited selection of crisps and sweets, and a professional Mr Whippy ice cream machine, which boosted morale more than anything else when it was flown in. They’d pour the mixture in the top and the machine did the rest. In the searing heat it was a massive treat. The Americans had Starbucks coffee, burgers, pizza and pretty much everything you could wish for, which was extraordinary. After we’d eaten so much our stomachs hurt, we decided to leave the base, get a taxi and hit the malls.

  Switching off completely from the hell of Iraq was bliss. I put on the only civvies I had with me: filthy brown combats and a black T-shirt. I’d never been anywhere like Kuwait, which is a beautiful country, dripping in wealth. It was a world away from where we’d been and it felt much richer than our own country. There was a sense of unreality – we had just stepped out of a war zone and now we were able to jump in a taxi, stop for coffee and walk freely and without fear. Even using a cashpoint machine felt like a treat.

  The streets were lined with more Ferraris than I’d ever seen in my life and I wandered from shop to shop looking in the windows, admiring the latest fashions and drinking in the normality until we found a Debenhams, the only store we recognised from the UK. Inside it was exactly like the shops at home, except the clothes were more modest, with long sleeves and dresses and skirts that would cover legs. Desperate to take off our dusty clothing we all splashed out and bought a change of clothes each. I chose a bright pink kaftan so my arms were covered, and a pair of long shorts, along with a modest black swimming costume as we planned to visit a water park the following day.

  We’d arranged to stay at the US camp as it catered for Allied troops who were moving forward to other countries and when we discovered the American soldiers had a line dancing night, it only added to the surreal atmosphere. We stayed up all night before heading to Kuwait’s biggest water park and had the time of our lives there, whizzing down water shoots, diving and swimming and generally letting our hair down. All the women were in burkinis but no one bothered us and we had an amazing time – mostly because it was in such stark contrast to where we’d been.

  That night we dined at the exclusive Kuwait Towers. Eating amazing food, although there was no alcohol, we gazed out at the views across the city. It was spectacular, but all I wanted was to have Jamie and Milly with me, and the elephant in the room was that we had to go back. We crammed a two-week holiday into forty-eight hours, staying out until literally ten minutes before we had to be at camp for the flight back, dressing again in full kit in case we faced an attack.

  Within hours of flying back to Basra I was brought back down to earth with a bump. Talking to Sally, while I was ironing my kit for the next day in our tent, gossiping about our break, we were interrupted by a distinct whistling over our heads. ‘What was that?’ I said and she said: ‘It must have been a helicopter or something.’ With that, there was an absolutely enormous bang and dust flooded into the tent. Everything that we owned fell to the floor. My ears were ringing – it was such an enormous boom. A mortar had sailed over the top of our heads and landed close enough to shake the ground around us. With that, the mortar alarm went off.

  That night, the camp took such a pounding from too many mortars to count. Hit after hit, it just went on and on. We all put on our body armour and helmets and lay inside our concrete coffins, praying for it to stop. Every time another mortar went off, I shook more and more, just waiting to get blown to smithereens. I grabbed one of the photos I kept of Milly beside my bed and I looked at her, praying the onslaught would end.

  After forty-eight hours of relative normality I found the whole experience overwhelming. I’d never known fear like it. I ke
pt inwardly repeating to myself: ‘Please let it pass’ and I tried to focus on Milly’s smile when we were reunited, but as the bombardment became more intense I started sobbing. I knew that people were dying. Reality had dawned by that point that there was a chance I might not make it home to my family. I became acutely aware of the fact that I was in my early twenties and of my own fragile mortality.

  During a brief lull my friend Sally crawled over and lay inside my breeze blocks with me. Cuddling me, as much for her own comfort as mine, she said, ‘Are you alright?’

  Desperate, I replied: ‘I’m not going to get home from here and I’ve got a two-year-old daughter.’ Inconsolable, I just couldn’t shake a terrible feeling that something bad was going to happen to me and I was genuinely scared witless. Somehow I’d managed to pull myself back together by the time the onslaught ended. I’d had my self-pitying moment and now I had to get over it and get on with the job I’d been trained to do.

  But after Kuwait it was just incredibly hard to get back into the mindset of being in a war. When the mortars stopped flying, our ordeal didn’t end. Members of the ordnance team started walking round the perimeter of our tent. We could see their feet and the flash of their torches and they kept saying: ‘Stay down! Stay down!’ as the all-clear hadn’t been given.

  ‘What do you think they are doing?’ I asked Sally.

  ‘They are looking for unexploded devices,’ she replied.

  So they must have counted the incoming devices and realised there was an unexploded one somewhere. We lay there in fear that it would detonate before they got to it. I don’t know if they ever found anything – thankfully it wasn’t around the perimeter of our tent, but that was the worst attack I ever experienced and it was so traumatic that I remember it like it happened yesterday.

  It was so bad that my boss, who was much older than me, came to find me to check that I was OK. He gave me a big hug and said: ‘Are you alright?’ My eyes welled up as I said: ‘No.’ So we went outside with some of the lads for a cigarette to calm our jangling nerves and then we got hit again so we all had to lay on the ground until it was over.

  Because I’d had my tears I was OK for that second attack, but one of the lads afterwards couldn’t light his cigarette as his hands were shaking so much. He kept saying: ‘Fucking hell, I can’t believe this is happening!’ and his adrenaline was going, whereas my tears had been my release. I grabbed hold of his fingers to steady him and used my lighter to spark him up.

  I realised then that the lads felt exactly the same fear as I did – it’s just that they often bottled it up and that’s why, when they got home, they struggled more in some ways to come to terms with what they’d gone through. When the bombing ended, and after seeing his reaction, I couldn’t help but think of the young boys who had to face so much and that it included potentially facing down insurgents every time they left camp. Even though everyone believed at that time we were in Iraq for the right reasons, I felt it still must be hard to deal with.

  When Op Minimise was lifted a day later I rang my dad. For weeks I’d been coming to the realisation that my chances of getting out unscathed were diminishing day by day. I remember sobbing down the phone: ‘Dad, you need to get me home. I’m going to die out here. I don’t care how you do it but you’ve got to get me back.’ I hadn’t told them how bad things were before, but now I was scared and I wanted to go home. It had been easier not to tell them about it beforehand as I didn’t think they’d understand, and also I was worried about worrying them. For that reason I went for weeks without emailing as I didn’t want to lie, or I’d write funny stories about the Portaloo man to avoid talking about what was happening.

  Dad told me afterwards he was worried but he didn’t let me know it. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t be a deserter, you need to do the job that you have trained to do. You are out there to help Iraq. You will be home on R&R soon and you will be fine,’ he said to reassure me. I remember repeating: ‘You don’t understand. I’m going to die out here. I’m not going to come home. There’s been a terrible mortar attack, people have died out here.’

  At the time they dismissed it as just a really bad day and that I was having an emotional outburst. Inside they were worried sick and every day Mum would check the news the minute she got home from work to see if there had been any explosions, injuries or deaths. For the months I was out there she feared hearing on the news: ‘Someone has been killed but the family have not yet been informed.’ But Dad’s words made me get myself together. I hoped that in some small way I was helping to make a difference to innocent people out there, perhaps even a child like my own daughter.

  Over time I got used to the rockets. Sometimes I even thought I preferred it when there was lots incoming – at least we knew what they were up to. I even managed to sleep through some of the alarms at night, although I don’t know whether that was a good thing or not. Camp life wasn’t all bad.

  One of the highlights was a Saturday night on camp. The camp was dry – meaning there was no alcohol – but after the pounding I decided we needed a drink. I had a rare day of stand-down over the following twenty-four hours and I knew I would have no responsibility the next day, so I asked one of the locals who worked on camp, who had tried to sell me booze previously, to get some for us. I paid him in dollars and the following day, he walked up to me with my contraband: a litre-sized bottle of Smirnoff vodka, which I concealed in my tent.

  That night everyone had the same aim: to have a toast to friends and try to forget the shit of where we were. Quickly quite tiddly, I decided to wander over to a social tent. John spotted me giggling while he was playing cards with a senior officer and immediately knew something was up. He quickly threw in his hand and got me out of there the moment he smelt booze on my breath. I’d only had a little tipple, but if I’d been caught, there would have been a strict punishment for flouting the rules. Thanks to John no one spotted me and that was the only time I broke the no-alcohol rule.

  In May 2007 I became aware via my colleagues that a VIP would be arriving through my primary role in OPLOC. The VIP had to be signed in and out of Theatre, just like everyone else. News of a mystery arrival spread like wildfire around camp as all the lads had to put up green netting the length of the perimeter fence, just in case an insurgent sniper decided to try to take a pot shot from outside.

  When the VIP arrived, it turned out to be Tony Blair, on what was to be his final tour of Iraq as Prime Minister. While I saw his entourage, I didn’t clap eyes on Blair himself, as we weren’t allowed close enough, but through the office I knew when he was expected to be checked out of Theatre. While he was there, the camp experienced a mortar attack, so he had a proper taste of what it was like. He ended up leaving earlier than we had anticipated but whether that was for operational reasons (timing it earlier than it was supposed to be, just in case someone tried to attack the plane) or due to the mortar attack, I suppose I’ll never know.

  While the PM was a diversion from the monotony of camp life, without booze we also invented other ways to let our hair down. John decided to host a fancy-dress night to boost morale, so thirty of us all got dressed up from odds and sods we managed to salvage from around the camp. I was a fairy made out of old ration boxes covered in tin foil and my pink shower curtain; John dressed as a hula girl, with two paper bowls covered in brown camouflage cream as his ‘coconut bra’, along with a ‘grass’ skirt made of mine tape. Even ‘Mustafa Shag’ was dressed and put in an appearance during the night! It was brilliant seeing everyone dressed up in their costumes. Two of the guys brought along guitars, followed by someone with a battery-powered iDock, so we had music.

  Ironically, it was my friendship with John that ultimately changed my life. As I explained earlier, when he told me that he was at the end of his six-month deployment and could get home early to his wife and son I didn’t hesitate to volunteer to cover his duty. I wouldn’t have got through my tour without John so I was really happy to help him, perhaps more so than for any
one else on camp. Whether it was bad luck or fate, that decision changed the trajectory of my life. Shortly after the duty started, the building I was standing in took a direct mortar hit. There was no warning, the building was flattened and I was buried, alive and alone, beneath it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER THE BLAST

  It’s the call every parent who has a son or daughter serving abroad dreads. Just after midnight, Jamie rang my parents at home in Cumbria and his voice cracked as he told my dad: ‘I’m so sorry but Hannah’s been injured. She’s alive but it’s bad.’

  The Army had wanted to send someone to knock on their door, but instead of sending the local police, as there was no barracks nearby, Jamie wanted to break the news himself. Mum has always been stoic and she was immediately practical: ‘What can we do?’ was her first response. They would have been prepared to fly out to Iraq if that were possible, as they just wanted to be with me.

  Jamie said: ‘For now, we can only wait. All I know at the moment is that she’s very seriously injured [VSI]. It’s such early days they are still working on her at the hospital out there and it’s going to take time before anymore information comes through. Let’s just hope to God that she’s OK.’

  In Army speak there are various grades of injury and the first is Casualty, which is generally not too bad. After that, there are three further grades of injury, where your next of kin would need to be informed: Serious, Very Seriously Injured, and Death. Jamie and my dad were aware that VSI meant they weren’t talking about a scratch, but thankfully Mum had no idea of the significance of those three words.