“We did release this footage,” Sean said. “But then it got withdrawn. It’s not the best messaging, to be fair.”
I suppose it was useful training, watching the entire sequence of an IED blast – by stepping away from the corner of the compound, the point man had saved himself and his colleagues – but it didn’t exactly stoke my appetite for my first patrol. If I could just get through it without the IEDs and the misplaced lumps of flesh, I’d be a happy man.
“My tour has been really quiet,” Sean said, closing his laptop. “This summer should be much more lively.”
“More lively?”
“Definitely.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “I envy you.”
* * *
I flew to Patrol Base Shahzad with Russ and Ali later that evening, our Merlin skimming the poppy fields of Nad-e Ali under a full moon and a sky thick with stars. I’d never been a huge fan of helicopters, but this was something else. I was actually enjoying myself, the whole flight like something out of a dream. For a second I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad way to die, crashing into a field of opium and getting blown to pieces in a massive fireball. At least it would be quick.
After ten minutes of fairground flying we landed with a thud at Shahzad’s helipad. The three of us grabbed our kit and stepped out into the moonlight. A gravel pathway led towards the base’s old factory, a stone building covered in scorch marks and bullet holes. We headed towards the lights of the main entrance, the Merlin blasting us with sand and grit as it roared back up into the night.
The old factory was home to 3 Para’s headquarters. The walls were about two feet thick, giving it the feel of a bunker. It had once housed a construction firm employing thousands of locals from across Nad-e Ali. Before the Taliban got inside and ransacked the place, the firm had built the district’s extensive irrigation system, allowing crops and vegetation to flourish. They’d also built and maintained many of the local roads.
We walked into the lobby through a set of thick wooden doors. Five young Paras were sitting at a long table to one side of the room, quietly checking their Facebook messages on a row of laptops. Three other Paras were sitting at a table behind them, watching a football match on the wall-mounted television in the corner. To the other side of the room, hundreds of paperbacks filled a row of shelves cut into the wall. There was also a brew table nearby, with a stack of paper cups and a tea urn.
I noticed that a handful of press cuttings had been stuck to the wall behind the urn. Taking pride of place, right in the middle of the assorted headlines, was a piece by the Daily Telegraph’s Thomas Harding. An ex-Para himself, he’d been embedded with 3 Para earlier in the month, producing an article on a Taliban sniper who was targeting soldiers at Patrol Base Qadrat, just a few kilometres up the road:
Two soldiers have been killed and six wounded over the past four months at the base in Qadrat. One Taliban marksman has been killed, but another has eluded efforts to remove him and continues to shoot at soldiers… There have been many near misses with soldiers’ armour hit or returning with a hole in their backpacks. Qadrat has been recognized as the most dangerous outpost in Helmand – the site of the highest number of gunshot wounds per soldier.*
I read the article carefully, wondering whether we’d be going to Qadrat in the morning. I knew our hosts were planning to take us to one of their outposts, but they still hadn’t said which one. The other possibility was Khamaar, a patrol base about which I knew practically nothing. I’d located it on the map, just over two kilometres south-west of Qadrat, but that was the full extent of my knowledge. Whether it also came with its own neighbourhood sniper, I had no idea.
I slept badly that night. We were put up in a transit tent with four other soldiers, all of us dozing fitfully in the darkness. Less than a hundred yards away, a troop of 105-mm guns from 7th Regiment Royal Horse Artillery blasted out fire missions into the early hours of the morning. I lay on a camp cot with my combat jacket for a pillow, staring up at the roof of the tent, a showreel of death and destruction stuck on repeat inside my head, playing out on the black canvas above me. In a matter of hours I’d be going outside the wire for the first time, out on the ground, out in the shit. Surrounded by snipers, IEDs and lumps of rotting flesh…
I got up early. Sunlight started to leak into our tent from 5 a.m. I went outside for a piss and a shave, noting through half-open eyes the perfect crystal blueness of the sky. If I get hit, I told myself, I can look up at that sky and pretend to be somewhere less fucking ghastly.
I joined Russ and Ali for breakfast. They were sitting at one of the trestle tables inside the dining tent, surrounded by noisy, hungry Paras. Both of them seemed calm and relaxed, the banality of their small talk bringing some much needed perspective to the wild meanderings of my imagination.
“This bacon is terrible,” said Ali.
“It’s not that bad,” said Russ. “I’ll eat it.”
Things got better after that, lifting my mood considerably. It turned out we were going to Khamaar, which I decided was probably for the best. It hadn’t featured in any of the newspaper reports I’d read on Nad-e Ali, so it can’t have been that bad. Surely, if it was dangerous, Thomas Harding would’ve gone there as well?
Our transport arrived shortly after breakfast, three Mastiffs rolling slowly into the vehicle yard through the back gate. Despite their unsophisticated appearance – they looked like giant coffins on wheels – they were still the safest road vehicles we had. Even if we drove directly onto an IED, we’d be OK – unless it was a small nuclear device, we’d just get shaken up.
Although Khamaar was only five kilometres from Shahzad as the crow flies, it took more than an hour to get there. The lumbering Mastiffs were not designed for speed, and the roads in Nad-e Ali were terrible. I sat with Russ and Ali in the back of the rear Mastiff, bouncing around in our seats, trying to get our first look at Afghan life through the narrow bulletproof windows. From what I could tell, it all seemed fairly calm outside, with nothing to suggest a country torn apart by war. Children worked alongside their fathers in the fields, while young men rode along the roads and tracks on their motorbikes. None of them appeared to be carrying any weapons, and none of them looked like they wanted to kill us.
Eventually we got to Khamaar, a base made up almost entirely of tents and Hesco fortifications.* It was much smaller than Shahzad, with no reassuring stone building in the middle of it. Our Mastiff pulled up outside the entrance to the largest tent, next to a smartly painted sign declaring “A Company Headquarters”. We opened the heavy doors at the back of the Mastiff and stepped out onto the gravel, stretching our legs in the sunshine. It was 10 a.m. now, and already feeling hot.
A Company wasted no time getting us out on a patrol. We’d only just dragged our kit from the back of the Mastiff when the company sergeant major – a suitably hard-looking man with cropped hair – stepped out of the headquarters tent and told us we were going straight off.
Within twenty minutes we were standing at the back of a twelve-man patrol, lined up by the loading bay, waiting for the front gates to open. Like everybody else, I was wearing a Mark VII “bullet-stopper” helmet, a full set of Osprey body armour (fitted with chest, back and side ceramic plates), two tiers of pelvic protection – consisting of anti-microbial boxer shorts and a soft Kevlar garment known as a “combat nappy”, designed to safeguard your genitals in the event of an IED blast – and a pair of ballistic sunglasses. The only parts of my body that felt exposed were my arms and legs, but even if they got blown off, I knew I’d still have a fighting chance with the surgeons back at Bastion (I knew they’d try to save me, even if I didn’t want to be saved).
At least a dozen soldiers from the ANA were also coming, but rather than join us on foot, they were deploying in two Humvees, one at the front of the patrol and one at the back. This would make it harder for Russ and Ali to frame the all-important “partnering” shots, but the Afghans were in no way bothered about that. They were in love with the Humvee, the whole concept of
it, gunning the engine and hanging off the doors. Those who couldn’t fit inside each vehicle clambered onto the back, crowding around the mounted .50-cal. machine gun. I wasn’t about to tell them to dismount, and neither were the Paras.
Having already seen peaceable, non-threatening Afghans going about their business in the fields that morning, I didn’t feel too nervous about leaving the base. We turned left outside the gates, walking straight onto a hard-baked dirt road that ran alongside the perimeter wall, keeping a narrow, muddy river on our right. There were a lot of Afghans along the riverbank, most of them young children. They all seemed friendly, many of them smiling and some of them even giving us the thumbs-up.
My job in these circumstances was to stick with Russ, ensuring he didn’t wander into the river. His camera’s viewfinder left him with no peripheral vision, so whenever he began to stray, I laid a hand on his shoulder, guiding him back into the middle of the road. It wasn’t the most demanding task in the world, and I soon found myself starting to relax, all the exaggerated tensions of my sleepless night disappearing. It was actually quite enjoyable, being out on the ground but not feeling in any great danger. The IED threat along the road was low, given its proximity to the base, and the “atmospherics” – the behaviour of the locals against which we measured the likelihood of an attack – were good.
Only one of the youngsters on the riverbank was unimpressed with our patrol: a boy of around seven who pointed a catapult at us. Apparently he had something of a reputation, having slung rocks at soldiers on previous occasions. Our patrol sergeant walked over to him with the interpreter, calmly telling him to put it down.
“If you ever use that catapult on us again,” he warned, “I’ll tell your father.”
The boy lowered his weapon and hurried away.
We set off again, following the river for another hundred yards before arriving at the local bazaar, crowded into the alleyways between two mud compounds. It was a strange, alternative world, the ramshackle stalls offering impossible-to-shift items like slashed tyres and cracked solar panels. In one corner a grimy elder sat in the dirt, welding together two lumps of scrap metal, the sparks flying out in front of us. He didn’t spare us a second glance, but the rest of the bazaar’s elders stepped out from behind their curious wares and shook our hands. Bearded and craggy-faced, they smiled broadly, showing us their rotten teeth. Unlike the youngsters on the riverbank, they didn’t pester us for sweets.
After ten minutes of mostly unintelligible chat, we said our goodbyes to the elders and continued with the patrol, taking our time along a rutted track that eventually led to a remote vehicle checkpoint. It was a poky little compound with a wooden pole for a road barrier, manned by two Afghan policemen. Despite the dangerous nature of their work, searching vehicles for weapons and drugs, they looked deeply bored with their lot in life, their hands thrust into their pockets and their eyes half closed. Our patrol sergeant talked to them for a few minutes, relying heavily on the interpreter, while Russ and Ali captured the moment on film. It was the only chance we were going to get for some partnering shots, our friends in the Humvees having disappeared shortly after we left the base, following their own mysterious route.
We left the policemen to their risky but stultifying work and made our way back to Khamaar. The Humvees rejoined us twenty minutes later, materializing on the dirt road alongside the base. What the ANA had been doing for the last hour was anybody’s guess, but they looked happy enough. They took up a position at the back of the patrol and slowly followed us in through the gates.
Back inside the base, alongside the languid Afghan soldiers with their lazy smiles, I must’ve looked like a grinning, wide-eyed idiot. Despite the heat and the flies and the dust, I was buzzing. I’d been outside the wire for the first time, met some of the locals, and not died or lost any body parts.
Clearly the Paras had taken us out on a soft patrol, which was fine by me. My aversion to bullets and explosives aside, it suited my team’s changing remit. Stories about IEDs and snipers killing our boys served no key-messaging purposes other than to highlight the bravery and commitment of British troops. The Combat Camera Team’s role was about more than that: it was evolving into something more progressive. We weren’t just here to show the boys having a scrap. We were also here to show the British public that after ten years of fighting, our sacrifices hadn’t been in vain: some gains were being made, and Afghanistan was, in some places at least, starting to find its feet.
We stayed in the base’s transit tent that night – I slept for a good seven hours this time, spared the bad dreams and the crashing artillery – then after breakfast I interviewed a few of the younger Paras outside the headquarters tent. BBC Four had provided me with a list of questions they wanted asking (examples: Why is your current operation important? Has it been successful? What is so special about being a Para? Why do you refer to other regiments as “craphats”?).* Most of them mumbled through their answers, having only submitted to the process at the behest of their commanders. They may have had no qualms about charging into battle, but they were less keen about fronting up to Russ’s camera.
I also tried to interview the patrol sergeant. He’d already said a few words to the camera at the vehicle checkpoint the day before, proving himself to be an intelligent speaker, if a little gruff. In his mid-twenties, he was relatively young for a sergeant, and obviously something of a flyer, destined for great things.
“I don’t mean to be awkward,” he told me, “but I’d rather not do an interview.”
“Why not?”
He grimaced, apparently embarrassed by his excuse. “I’m doing Selection when we get back. I don’t want to show my face too much.”
By “Selection” he meant “SAS Selection”. As excuses went, it was a pretty good one. He was under no formal obligation to give us an interview anyway, and I wasn’t about to order him to talk. Even with the younger soldiers I never went beyond some gentle encouragement: if any of them were genuinely opposed to an interview, for whatever reason, I left them alone.
We had more than enough material anyway. Russ started going through all the rushes on his laptop. If time had been an issue, he would’ve sent the edited footage back to the UK via our portable BGAN satellite dish, using a piece of software known as Livewire.* The BBC Four deadline, however, wasn’t for another three weeks, so we could afford to take our time. Once Russ had cut down the footage – and once I’d cleared the resulting edit† – he’d burn it onto a disc and post it back to the UK.
The Mastiffs returned later that afternoon and took us back to Shahzad. They got us in through the gates at 1800 hours, just in time for dinner. After dumping our kit, we joined the queue outside the dining tent, making small talk with the other soldiers as we waited for our scoff.
It was a warm and pleasant evening, the calm only disturbed by the shouting and laughter of kids playing football outside the back gates. Hundreds of feet above the base, the Persistent Ground Surveillance System was watching all, keeping us safe. A blimp with cameras, its coverage of the surrounding area was beamed directly into the old factory’s Ops Room, televised on a bank of flatscreens. Any suspect behaviour within a certain radius would be picked up immediately.
“You should’ve been here in September,” said the lieutenant standing next to me. “It was pretty crunchy back then.”
Between the hoots and grunts of the young footballers, I could just make out the birdsong in the leafless trees that surrounded the base. “It’s amazing,” I said. “You’ve really turned things around.”
The lieutenant frowned. He must’ve been in his early twenties, but the wrinkles that deepened around his eyes took him closer to forty.
“When the summer kicks in, it’ll start over,” he said. “As soon as the vegetation grows back.”
“The vegetation?”
“The leaves on the trees.” He glanced up at the blimp. “The cameras will be less effective.”
“You think it’s going to ge
t bad again?”
He nodded. “I give it another month before it kicks off.”
*
Daily Telegraph (online), 13th March 2011: ‘Paras Play Deadly Game to Draw out Taliban Sniper’.
*
Containers fashioned out of wire mesh, lined with heavy-duty fabric and filled with rubble and hard core. They are found on ISAF bases throughout Afghanistan.
*
If you weren’t good enough to wear the Parachute Regiment’s maroon beret, you were naturally a craphat.
*
The size of a laptop, the BGAN allowed us to access the internet via satellite from anywhere in the world. Each minute of footage took just over five minutes to send back to the UK through Livewire, at a cost of sixteen US dollars per minute.
†
I cleared our material for any operational security issues, as well as any glaring messaging fails.
Making Things Look Better
Two days after Nad-e Ali we drove to a small base on the outskirts of Gereshk, home to D Squadron of the Household Cavalry. One of their former troop commanders – Prince William, no less – was getting married in a month. He’d served with D Squadron after passing out from Sandhurst at the end of 2006. To feed the growing demand for wedding-related items in the news, we were going to show the world what his old muckers were getting up to in Afghanistan.
D Squadron shared the base with a company of soldiers from the ANA. The day before our arrival, an insurgent had thrown two grenades at the rickety front gate, injuring three ANA sentries. We drove straight past their replacements on the way in, one of them already with his helmet off, trying to stay a little bit cooler in the midday sun.
The base was like a smaller, grubbier version of Patrol Base Shahzad. It was nice, though, despite the not uncommon grenade attacks. A crumbling stone building housed D Squadron’s sleeping area, its half-lit rooms filled with long rows of camp cots. They led through to a bright, airy courtyard that boasted a ping-pong table and two armchairs, giving the base an under-the-radar charm that felt more in keeping with a backpacker community than a military camp.
Combat Camera Page 5