‘I’m doing a piece to camera,’ John told Tom Giles, what felt like seconds later. ‘Fucking morons,’ he cursed the Yanks before miking up.
At the same time, I found Kameron lying on the bank. The American medics were running down with trauma packs on their back, helping whoever they could.
‘Come over here,’ I shouted to them, but it wasn’t looking good. His foot had been completely sliced off and blood was pouring out of his leg. He, too, made that gurgling sound that I had come to associate with death.
Some of the medics went towards John and the guys but he was already live on the Sat Phone to Maxine Mawhinney on News 24.
The medic told me to apply two tourniquets on Kameron’s legs above the wound to stop the blood loss – that surprised me. Only one leg was injured but he wanted both doing. I assumed he was more medically qualified than I was so went ahead and made it tight. I then got out my knife to cut Kameron’s shirt but I couldn’t see any wound. Still he carried on fading and gurgling.
‘Have you ever put a Given Set in?’ the medic asked me.
This was a saline drip, and all I had to do was to get a vein up and slide a cannula in. The medic had already made one up.
‘I can’t get a vein,’ I shouted over to Tom.
Kameron’s veins had collapsed. I knew he wasn’t going to make it.
He was convulsing. The grumblings were getting louder. I asked Tom to sit with him as I had with Stuart. I told him to talk to Kameron and just keep him company but I knew I couldn’t do any more and I had to start to clear the area. Our vehicles were now on fire.
That had to be sorted immediately but at the back of my mind was our conversation earlier about the money, and for a moment, I felt bad that he would die alone. My rare compassion was not for another victim of war – I just wish my last conversation of substance with him had been different. Crucially, even though his leg had borne the brunt of it, Kameron was one of the few in the car without a flak jacket. We didn’t have enough to go around. That was the mistake. It was the sandals all over again.
As we loaded Kam onto the vehicle, I knew he was gone.
‘This is a really bad own goal by the Americans,’ John was live and just in earshot. He was raging inside, but as cool as a cucumber when the red light was on.
(Weeks back, we had offered to give our co-ordinates to The Pentagon but they simply weren’t interested. It would be nice to think this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been embedded, but then we wouldn’t have been chasing Barzani across Iraq.)
Just then, someone spotted a body in the back of one of our enflamed vehicles. That awoke something inside me to save the story, let alone the body. I ran to my car to discover it was a sleeping bag wedged against the back window, but I had to rescue the remaining broadcast equipment. There was no point at all us being here if the videophone and all the footage were going up in smoke.
I managed to get the hatch open but it was like a furnace in there. I climbed inside to cut the rope to free the two spare jerrycans. I ran to John, threw them just to the right of the camera, then turned and went back to the other vehicles through the flames. Fred shouted to me to save his gear.
All the cars were burning now – the third one looked seconds away from explosion as I grabbed our personal bags along with John’s diaries, notebooks and fucking Tilley hat. It was like a barbecue out of control but the smell was horrendous – nothing is more ghastly than the smell of burning fuel and smouldering flesh combined. I blocked it out of my mind and concentrated on the vehicle. All our lives were in those trucks – my focus was now totally on preserving the story and not human life. The guys I was concerned about were safe; the gear was not.
John was raging again when he finished the live. ‘There’s gotta be a fucking inquest into that,’ he yelled to everyone and no one. ‘Was that OK?’ he turned to Tom. John had been better than OK. He was at his best, flicking an internal switch from anger and disgust to smooth calm.
It had been a disgraceful error. Forty-five had been injured, sixteen lives lost. The Americans were worried there was more incoming and wanted to evacuate.
Some of the gear was damaged. Most importantly, John’s Tilley hat now had a hole in it. Some twenty-five minutes later, my concern was still the vehicles. Despite that toxic mix of fuel and flames, I could see one of the Peshmerga guys trying to steal the third vehicle; the other two were burned to shreds.
‘Fuck off – this is our vehicle!’ I screamed at him.
In the back, he had placed his weapon along with some ammo. I found a hand on one of the seats. I told John to stay with the vehicle as I began to move everything into this car, piling stuff on the roof and clearing the glass from the seats. I had no windscreen left.
By now, all the traffic was coming towards us – the rest of the media had got wind of the story and were piling in our direction. All we wanted to do was leave, heading back down to the original checkpoint.
‘What about Abdullah?’ John asked.
We agreed to have one last look.
Checking under the vehicles and charred corpses in this scene of devastation, we found nothing except the truth. He hadn’t even bothered to stick around. That was the final straw for me with him. If he wasn’t my responsibility before, he certainly wasn’t now. It was time to go. In every sense. Even for battle-hardened souls like Fred and me, it had taken its toll.
‘That’s it, I’m off,’ the American announced through the dust and wind in the front of the Land Cruiser. But he meant off and out of the country. It was time for him to get back to California to see his little baby. This was just the wake-up call he needed to get off the adrenalin rush and back to the real world.
‘Yeah, that was a close call,’ I agreed.
It all showed what a difference a day could make, and indeed a week. On the same day that Kaveh was being buried, we nearly met the same fate. Just a few hours ago we had been buddying up with the very guys who called in the airstrike – and I’d been reminiscing about old times with them. The SF had told me none of theirs had died but I don’t believe that to be true. I saw them towing away a Land Rover in which I knew one of their men had gone down. Meanwhile Waji Barzani was helicoptered out of there to hospital. His brother fell into a coma.
Despite his war fatigue, Fred continued to film out of the glassless window, the camera always on his knee. But he understood now and he meant it – it was time to go and see his baby. He had come straight from a month in India. All he knew professionally was putting his life on the line for the story – but when it became this real, he’d had enough. And even though I was the ex-military guy, the tough man in all this, we both knew it was an epic event to walk away from. It’s not every day John Simpson wipes blood from a TV camera lens minutes after a 1,000 lb bomb has fallen a few yards away from you, dropped by an F14 on your own side, tearing across the sky at close to 500 mph. For now, enough was enough.
Oggy met us at a checkpoint ninety minutes down the road. He told us Abdullah was on the way to the hospital with shrapnel in his neck and thigh. He asked us if we were OK to carry on driving, but we knew we had to complete. He also told us that Kameron had died. It was only what I’d expected.
By 16.00 we were back in Arbil. Word had spread that a BBC team had been bombed. I was shattered by the time I unloaded the gear into the hotel lobby – there was nothing left in the tank – but the warmth in the locals’ hearts was genuine. It was one of those surreal moments where people still have compassion, even when there’s a war on and you have to put yourself first.
Someone sorted a car to take Fred to the UN medical facility at Ankawa on the other side of Arbil – his head badly needed dressing. As I saw him off, I sat down outside the hotel with another security guy called Steve Musson to talk it through and I realised just how fucking lucky I had been. I wasn’t in delayed shock; I didn’t get emotional; yet this was the closest in all my scrapes that I had come to meeting my maker.
Suddenly I found a conscienc
e and thought the right thing was to go the hospital to see Abdullah. It was chaos. Waji was in there too and the locals knew it. For once, our hotel manager played a blinder and got me straight through to the doctor, who checked me over. I really wasn’t sure if my hearing was still in one piece. Thankfully, I was given the all clear.
Oggy was already there and took me to Abdullah’s room but nothing had changed. He had nurses swooning all over him and he lay there playing the hero. There was a small amount of shrapnel and the odd bandage but, my God, he was still alive – unlike poor Kameron. When he saw us, he turned into a terminally ill patient going for an Oscar. To rub it in, I passed dead Peshmergas on trolleys on the way out. That was the true level of the mess that the blue on blue had caused. I had done the decent thing – and that was it. I hoped I never saw him again.
There was still work to be done amid all this. I hadn’t even called home, although London had rung Sue. She knew the score. We were up against it – two hours from doing a live into the Six – all of us traumatised but in denial and Fred a whizz kid on the edit but desperate to get out of there. We worked our bollocks off on autopilot and John went live on the roof at the top of the bulletin.
Again, the legend was at his best at the end of a day nobody will forget. Afterwards, we hit the bar and I broke my golden rule of never drinking on tour. We downed a beer and raised a glass to our late friend Kameron. Earlier we had also been to see his mother. ‘God gave us Kameron and now he took him back,’ John put it beautifully. Kameron had been the main breadwinner for the family, yet they didn’t really know the danger he was putting himself into – they thought he was a translator for the papers. He had told John he had wanted to work for us out of friendship and adventure – the wailing at the family home told us they’d had no idea he was risking life and limb.
You can only grieve so long in this game. There was no word from Jim in Tehran either. We were so knackered and insular ourselves that we’d barely spared a thought for Kaveh that day. It was extraordinary that all this had happened at the same moment he was laid to rest.
I finally spoke to Sue and, of course, she was worse than me. My girls had been told as well. As we hit the sack that night, there was indecision and uncertainty over whether we should come or go. We decided to sleep on it.
In the morning, we revisited the bomb site for Simpson’s World on BBC World. We spent half an hour walking round the scene. John asked me for my thoughts as the camera was rolling. I loved it just like the first time back in the bar at Charleroi. I was now well and truly bitten by the TV bug.
But you could see the crater and the scorch marks in the earth. The blood from the bandages where Kam had died was still there. Things like this happen, as sad as it was. In my head I wasn’t carrying the same baggage as the day before but I still knew it was time to go home. A translator called Huwer approached us and said that, with all eyes on Baghdad, he could take John and Tom to Kifri. John was adamant that he wanted to continue and told me to go home. Fred was already on his way and Dragan too wanted to see his baby for the first time.
I was split – my responsibility was to John but he had ordered me back. I also had to look out for Fred and Dragan. Ultimately, I took my lead from John: if he said go, then go I would.
On 11 April, we were driving home, overland to the border and on via Istanbul. It had been the right call to go. On the 9th, the Yanks staged the money shot of the toppling of Saddam’s statue. John hadn’t made it in time for the fall of Baghdad but, my goodness, in chasing the story he found himself at the heart of it. As for me, what I was asked to do next couldn’t have been more extreme.
HELLS ANGELS
A couple of months later, I was on the plane to Boston. This trip was like no other – a welcome break from paperwork and numerous trips back to Baghdad to set up the Bureau there. In that short time, Iraq had changed so much it bore no resemblance to the country that had taken Kaveh and Stuart out and nearly did for John and me.
My old friend Sam Bagnall had called. ‘Would you like to infiltrate the world of the Hells Angels?’
What? Too bloody right; you couldn’t get me out there quick enough. Sam had already got some undercover stuff in the can: would I like to go to the legendary annual event that Hells Angels from all around the world fly into? I was heading for the World Run in Laconia, New Hampshire. My mission was simple: were they all long-haired, drug-dealing, gun-touting individuals? This was right up my street. Whatever covert pieces I could get would be the icing on the cake after Sam had got access to a former American cop who’d been working undercover as a Hells Angel for the previous two years. We had also sent an overt crew into the media scrum for general views of Laconia and bog standard interviews with the local police – but this stuff was ten a penny, and all the international news crews had the same footage.
Jason Gwynne, the producer whom I had worked with on the Sam Hammam show, was also coming with me. He trusted me, knew I could handle myself, and of course my bald head on a good day could persuade you that I was borderline Hells Angel.
‘What do you know about Hells Angels?’ Jase asked.
‘They ride bikes and have leather jackets and wear their colours on their back,’ I stereotyped.
‘Do you know how they get the colours on their backs?’
‘Well, I know you become a “prospect” before you become a Hells Angel. You wear your “chapter” on the back of your jacket, but you don’t have the Hells Angels wing.’
If there was a test to pass, I had walked it. Most people didn’t know this much. I felt like I had been given a bonus when Jason confirmed the trip. My wife Sue just laughed.
It was becoming a great year for me in terms of making a name for myself at the BBC and I was absolutely loving it. Bob Forster was still around but Caroline Neil, the Head of High Risk who had worked undercover herself, was a breath of fresh of air. She told me this was a great gig, I had to go, and she would sign it off. Too right, it was; I was off to get pissed for the BBC.
I had found out just a week before that I was heading to Laconia with around a thousand international angels of the hellish variety. In that seven days, all I could see were Hells Angels – any sign of a bike or long hair or leather jacket and I was honing in on them. Now I was going to be in their midst, that was all I thought about. I had no idea where Laconia was but there was no stopping me. This jolly had Craig Summers written all over it.
At the top of my thought process was one thing – I was being paid to work, drink and film all weekend with a bunch of bikers all day and night. This was going to be brilliant, and hey, if we got a story, too, happy days! I was living a dream that people would have paid millions for, acting a role out for the cameras. My military and TV worlds had merged – I needed a cover story, commonly known as my ‘legend’.
I googled what you needed to become the perfect Hells Angel. I soon realised that I couldn’t pretend to be something I wasn’t – there was no point trying to penetrate that close-knit family. I didn’t invent some chapter that could trip me up. I was into bikes and had heard about The Run – that was as close as I would get to pretending to be one of their gang.
Instead, I was on leave from Iraq, had touched down in Boston, and was on a road trip with my old mate Jason, who had never been to the States before. I would talk about all the Yanks I had met in the Gulf and they would lap that up. I kept to the basic rule of the false ID – stick to something you know, and keep it simple. I could talk army bollocks all day long and have them eating out of my big military hand. If only they knew that their own fucking idiots had dropped a bomb on me just a few months before.
In real terms, the Boston leg was true, followed on by a nightmare drive down to Laconia in really shit bad weather and a stop at your typical small American motel. (My appetite for the BBC credit card hadn’t waned, but I needed to stay somewhere right for the role.) We had caned the beers on the flight over, and Jason told me he loved the cover story. If he was filming, he knew I
could do the talking and engage an audience without suspicion on my two favourite subjects – war and myself!
By the Saturday morning, we were good to go. Just outside Laconia, we had to get to 65 Fillmore Road. This was the massive Hells Angels’ house – all their meetings took place here. It was where the action was, but it was no go. The fraternity had put a barrier across the road. I could see the huge trees and the clubhouse, bar and log cabins behind it down this dead-end road. We weren’t getting in there and there was no point trying to slip in. I’d leave them to discuss their drugs and guns and whatever else.
Police and media were all over the town – the locals feared gang warfare. The truth was the opposite. It wasn’t that kind of event; it was more a huge stag party over three days talking bikes. It didn’t get more interesting than that.
I dressed in t-shirt, jeans, jacket and Timberland boots – as casual as you could get in what was lumberjack country. In my t-shirt was a camera – Jason and I would split the day and film half each.
Our first port of call was Tower Hill Tavern at Weirs Beach. I didn’t rush in to get my weekend bender underway. I would say I wasn’t actually holding court at the bar before 11.00, but it was close! Jason, too, was a reasonable drinker – and that was the only essential qualification for the part. There was no point standing there holding a lager shandy among all these hairy-arsed Hells Angels and all their birds with their tits hanging out when the AC/DC came on. The only way to get involved was to drink.
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