At home, I had grabbed everything I’d previously laid out – I always packed for two weeks and made the rest up. Just after I finished, there was a knock at the door. The BBC had gone from apathy to overdrive in hours. It was a courier with a massive bag of stuff.
‘I thought I was picking this up at the airport,’ I told him.
‘You are; this is another one,’ he replied.
It had all gone nuts. I took a moment to have a peaceful bath, mindful that I might not shower again for weeks. Then, Sue drove me to Terminal Three in silence. Deep down she didn’t believe I was actually going. I did my usual trick of laying out an incentive on our return. I talked up a trip to our place in Spain. I never gave a second thought to whether that would come off or not.
There were two huge bags waiting for me – we really had gone from shoddy to hyperactive. Check-in was hectic, and I was never one to linger. I went straight to the Virgin Gold Card Lounge. That’s the benefit of having your wife work for the airline. It was New Year’s Eve. On the flight, I was out like a light for seven hours. The next thing I knew I was through Singapore and checking into the Mandarin Hotel in Jakarta. I went straight to the bar for a beer.
The world’s media had concentrated on Thailand for the past week – that was where the first footage had come from, and John Irvine had turned the spotlight onto that coastline. Everybody had missed the real story – there were actually 250,000 dead and unreported on in a little place called Banda Aceh, which was where I had to get to.
‘Can I get on that flight?’ I asked Jason from Associated Press, who had been looking after things for us as the attention shifted countries. The answer was no.
I had no idea where I was going, what I would find when I got there or what I was going to do. I just knew I had to get there yesterday. There was only one flight a day to Banda Aceh and most of it was filled with aid and aid workers. To get it, I had to get to Medan, some 600 kilometres adrift. That was the only flight I would be getting in the morning.
When I arrived there, a freelance producer from Sydney by the name of Paul picked me up, drove me to the hotel and briefed me. He had been there since 30 December, acting as our Logistics Coordinator; the fact that we were relying on a guy from Oz should tell you how stretched we had become, how slow we’d been, and how far away from the story we still were as fallout from the tsunami entered its second week. If I thought the images I’d seen up to now were bad, Paul told me, then I needed to prepare myself. The worst was yet to come.
At the Garuda Plaza Hotel, he warned that I had missed today’s flight to Banda Aceh and I couldn’t go anyway unless I had a Blue Card to travel.
‘Can we drive?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he told me, condemning me to another day twiddling our thumbs.
I was concerned that everybody would be packing up by the time I had made it out here. Far from it – it was a cat-fight to get on this one plane a day. I rammed every possible idea at Paul to get the maximum information for what lay ahead – I even asked if we could get there by boat now that the waters had receded. I needed to know how the hell I could get a vehicle of supplies in there ready for when the main team arrived. I still had a nagging worry, as you do in places like this, that the plane would take off without me.
It was warm, humid, and I had been on the road for three days. In that time, I had slept for just seven hours total. This was only the beginning. Like the soldier I still was, I unpacked my kit then packed it again. I knew I had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice – always expect nothing to happen, then for it all to kick off in seconds. Inactivity followed by panic was the order of the day.
Because of the time difference, it was impossible even now to get my head down. Calls were coming in from London and around the globe at any given moment. Paul Greeves – I learned – was on his way out behind me. I got the word to set up an operations base in Medan and to work with Paul when he got there, organising convoys of supplies in; to brief new arrivals as teams changed over; and to create the hub – you had to go through Medan to get the story. We definitely needed to do this – Australian Paul was inundated with requests that it wasn’t his job to deal with. The sooner London Paul got there, the better.
On 2 January, I was first to check in at the airport – this was now Day Nine. Everybody wanted to make that 09.00 flight – I don’t think it mattered if you were booked on or not. It was chaos. Of course, there was no sign of the flight being called and nobody was saying anything. As I sat around waiting, wondering, I couldn’t believe what I saw next. I hadn’t been told about it.
Coming towards me from across Departures was a friendly face I knew only too well. Straight in from Bangkok, onto Jakarta and down to Medan, it was the BBC’s Ben Brown. I asked him how things had been in Thailand – very grim was all he would say. They had now realised that the story was moving on. Something had triggered with the reporter Rachel Harvey, who was based near the epicentre; she knew that what she was watching on the TV didn’t ring true. It was down to her that all roads now led to Banda Aceh, though of course they didn’t – every route in bar this solitary flight was blocked.
I was pleased to see Ben and his cameraman Duncan but he looked worse than I did. When I first spotted him, I didn’t know him at all. He looked like a bedraggled man dragging a suitcase across the airport. Of course, he had no paperwork either, nor did he know he needed any. Ben would have got the flight anyway and argued the toss at the other end. He would tell them the world needed to see this story. As we were delayed, Aussie Paul took him back into the city to the Press Centre to get him accredited. He was back within the hour and the flight was still waiting to go.
We knew little of Banda Aceh – it was heavily Muslim and a good diving place. That was it. It would, from this moment on, forever remain in the history books.
I could barely imagine what lay ahead as Ben painted the picture of Thailand, full of makeshift morgues, each with bodies piled high, all bloated through their intake of water. Beaches had been washed away. Both Ben and his cameraman Duncan in all their years had never seen anything like it. We now knew that was nothing compared to what was coming.
At 12.25, we finally boarded in torrential rain and thunder. Air Garuda had one of the worst safety records on the planet – so bad they weren’t even allowed over UK airspace. The flight only lasted forty-five minutes – around me were journalists, aid workers and locals trying to find their families. It was the approach to landing that shocked us all.
About twenty minutes out, there was a surge to the windows and everybody grabbed their cameras. The West Coast was gone – washed away, flattened and devastated. Picture the white cliffs of Dover, which you can probably visualise in detail even if you have never been. Now, imagine them gone. That’s what we were looking at. Heaven only knew what we would find on the ground.
When we landed, it took us two hours to gather all our gear and get away. We drove straight to the military airport to meet Jeremy Hillman; he was now based in Asia, knew the patch inside out, and had been on the first plane into Banda Aceh. It was a thirty-minute drive to what would become the BBC house.
I had never seen anything like it. I had witnessed ethnic cleansing and mass burial in Bosnia. This was on a scale a million times worse. Duncan had no choice but to film through the windscreen. Those who had survived and the poorly equipped authorities hadn’t been able to get started even over a week on. By the side of the road, we saw mass graves and bodies after bodies. Even for someone like me, who had seen it all in war, this was no way to go.
The team put their masks on. There weren’t enough to go around, so I went without. To my right, I saw an open pit and a massive tipper truck tilting up with its back open. Bodies were flying out into the graves. It smelt of death and decay; every time, you would smell the bodies first before seeing them as you got closer. It stunk in a way death had never reeked to me before – so different from that burning flesh and fuel in Iraq. These were abandoned souls and it wa
s beyond humane, but there was nothing anyone could do – they were simply left to rot. You would just be getting used to the tilting truck when an army vehicle would pull up with more bodies. It never stopped. It reminded me of those black and white movies where Nazis, or those whom they ordered to do so, loaded bodies into pits.
Ben looked horrified – and he had already seen a week of this. I told him all I knew. The only way to rid yourself of the smell was to take it in. It was easy to trot out stuff like ‘apocalypse of biblical proportions’, but this really was monumental. From locals burning fires in their doorways to keep warm, to nearby bridges with dozens of boats rammed up against them, and bodies just floating in the water: this was new territory for even the most battle-hardened.
I had to crack on though, as sterile as that sounds – Paul Greeves and I had attempted to send that convoy off from Medan as a tester to see if it would get through the sodden landscape in what we knew was bandit country, even at a time like this. We’d packed twenty cases of water and food because we had to be self-sufficient and healthy amid the carnage – if one vehicle made it through that would be a success. We had told Peter Leng to meet us at the big mosque in Banda Aceh. Neither of us knew this place but we figured it was the only prominent landmark that anyone would still recognise. It could, however, represent a danger, given that people flock to religion in moments like this.
As night fell around 17.00, we set off on the main route into town. It was cold and eerie, with just the little fires offering light and warmth. Darkness brings suspicion on both sides; we had to get in and out as quickly as possible. Having already attracted the unwelcome attention of two guys on motorbikes carrying AK-47s, who knew what was round the next corner?
Thankfully, the convoy had made it.
At 03.30, we hit the sack. The time difference for the Ten meant this was going to be the norm. We were up at the crack of dawn to hire a boat to take us to the open sea. It was horrific. Every time we approached a bridge, there were bodies on the bank. I had to take pictures as part of the job. Dead bodies don’t bother me: they can’t hurt me once they’re gone. I just got on with it.
It was body after body after body, each with breasts swollen to breaking point, eyeballs popping and tongues hanging out, and in the rubble of the destroyed buildings, more of the same – often semi-clothed, always swarming with flies. The heat of the mid-morning sun made things worse – more flies and more stench. As I proceeded like an emotionless machine, people were trying to clean up the houses and shops that remained. Haunted spirits got on with the soulless task of attempting everyday life, even though there was little to live for. These people would never forget: they would see reminders forever on every corner until their number was up, too. It was different for me coming in with a job to do – I would soon be out of here on the way back to Baghdad and new adventures. As we shot footage of Indonesian sailors cleaning one of the islands, you knew that they would play that film in their head from now until the end of time.
I was called back to the house – Peter Leng had summoned me and sent a bike to pick me up. After it dropped me on the bank, I walked back to the first bridge we had passed. Crossing it on foot for the first time at the mouth of the river, I had needed a mask. The sheer volume and horrific condition of the corpses, plus the fact that they were still there after well over a week, would have troubled even the most resilient. When I picture it now, I can still smell it.
Peter was panicking because a satellite dish was coming in and someone needed to fetch it safely. I also had to organise more food for more conveys to come in. We needed to get the house into shape. We couldn’t make the schoolboy error of falling ill because of our hygiene.
I set up a chalkboard with everybody’s locations and numbers. I stuck a massive sign saying ‘Take One, Replace One’ over the bottled water in the fridge, and bollocked the guys constantly about the overflowing bog out the back. I also hired a local guard, a couple of fixers/drivers and a chef/cleaner – Eva, whose husband had perished in the tsunami. She needed the money but never spoke of what had gone on. She had now assumed the role of provider in her family. Every night when she left, we gave her food to take away. Yet she was probably the lucky one, if you can call it that, falling on her feet by working for us.
I also renegotiated the contract for the house with the owners – the story might not be going to change, but we wouldn’t be leaving here any time soon. Equally, some mornings between 05.00 and 07.00, just after finishing for the Ten, we would still get the odd aftershock. There were eleven of us sharing what was no more than a building off the back of a flower shop. I paid up until 15 January.
By 4 January, things were getting better but only marginally so. Vehicles were now getting through regularly from Medan to Banda Aceh. I was sending back daily food lists. The convoy was also getting quicker – generally we would see it a day and a half after it had set out. On Indonesian TV there had been only sporadic coverage. We had no sense of the vast numbers of New Year holidaymakers, who, I later learned, had flown back without passports and in just their t-shirts and shorts. The world’s media now understood that Banda Aceh was where the story was – but look at how much time had passed.
The Indonesian army were starting to get their act together, even though one whole barracks had been completely wiped out. Muslim law regarding burials had long since been overlooked – the army was ‘hoovering up’ bodies and dumping them en masse in an airport hangar. More and more people were now on the streets but, everywhere you went, there was still the constant sound of wailing as individuals learned their fate. Photos of missing relatives hung off walls, holding out the most remote of hopes. By now those looking for loved ones were way past the last chance saloon, and as more prayers went daily unanswered, some sense of reality was returning – except for one thing that suddenly dawned on me.
There were no pets.
As if they’d been using that sixth sense that you sometimes hear of, where animals are tuned into weather patterns and seismic movements, there wasn’t a dog or cat in the street. That was unusual for these parts. I only realised this when a cat appeared near the BBC house. I immediately took it under my wing and named it Tsunami. This little ginger and white thing had come into our lives – but unbeknown to me, Ben Brown hated cats!
‘Get that fucking thing off the table,’ he yelled, after I had let it trough down a load of tuna.
‘Come on, Ben, it survived the tsunami,’ I replied.
It was a rare moment to break the stress and fatigue. So amused was I at this arrival in our lives, I decided to wash the bugger, covering it in shower gel. Then, borrowing one of the girls’ hairdryers, I entertained myself by drying it off and styling it.
Perhaps this was a sign that the story was moving on. There were only so many times you could hire a boat, watch the clean-up, go to a makeshift morgue and file accordingly. Every day we went out looking for that one success story – an act of goodwill or an overcoming all the odds moment. That’s what you did in Newsgathering in the days after a natural disaster. Deep down, we knew anyone trapped was dead. The story was over, but we were still here, mainly because it had taken so long to break in the first place. In the modern era, it really is unheard of for word to get out so slowly: that was the Banda Aceh story.
In the Central Business District of Meulaboh, we found a lone official fishing bodies out of the water with a rope and a stick. One by one, she pulled them out and checked their pockets for any chance of ID, and then she catalogued them on a clipboard. It was a thankless task but she told me that within a fortnight of the tsunami, the infrastructure was returning. She spoke a little English to us and it hit me what a big job this was for one individual. If she couldn’t identify someone, she just wrote down ‘Body One – unidentified’ and carried on to the next one. I didn’t enquire if she had lost anybody herself.
There was something about the clipboard that struck me. We had got used to seeing piles of bodies rather than seeing them as i
ndividuals. The fact that she was cataloguing them made it very personal. She couldn’t have possibly known on the night of our Christmas Day that she would be doing this come the New Year.
Nor could I have foreseen what I awoke to on the morning of 7 January.
It was a rest day – the struggle to get here, the long hours, the time zone and its demands, plus the unprecedented intensity of what lay around us had left each of us knackered. I still rose early – that had become my new body clock.
I went to the kitchen area and, as I had done every day, replenished the fridge with water. Two noises hit me straightaway.
First was the silence – I couldn’t hear our fixers and drivers on the doorstep because today was a day off. I had got used to waking up to their chatter. That air of peace paved the way for the next sound. It was all I could hear; as I got closer to the source it became louder. It was a buzzing sound.
I opened the front door. The sun was rising; nobody else was up. Swarms of flies hit me in the face and surged through the doorway. Flies had become the norm since we got here, but now there were millions, and I had no idea why.
Then I looked down and saw it.
Dead and naked, lying on cardboard, a baby boy had been left for us. He looked between one and two years old, his eyes closed and his black hair matted in the aftermath. There were no other obvious identifying marks.
‘Who the fuck has dumped that there?’ was my first thought. I was disbelieving at the discovery rather than emotional at the find. Then I thought how tragic it was.
There had to be a reason for this. This wasn’t random or down to chance – someone had specifically left this baby at what they knew to be the BBC house. They were either beyond their last resort and thought there was something we could do, which was wrong because we couldn’t help (it was just a baby with no ID and no trail to trace its family) or they still didn’t understand the way this story had gone round the world and wanted this child to resonate around the globe. Ultimately, in the big scheme of things, this was just another body. It wasn’t in my instinct to get attached to the story.
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