The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  So it was a clash of outlooks. At first Tyler was prepared to let me go my way and do my thing, but on the second day of me roaming around while he stayed behind in the office, tempers flared. He had written a story supplied by HQ but it didn’t match with the actual pictures from outside the wire. He wanted me inside the compound taking staged shots of the brass visiting the diggers, while I wanted to make pictures of the operational reality of our deployment.

  For the next four months, Tyler and I played a cat-and-mouse game: me trying to get outside the wire and document our guys in action, Tyler preferring to get the story from the commanders once the patrols had returned to the compound. He wanted the story, I wanted the shots; I thought the story was where the action was, he thought the shots could be taken when the soldiers returned and could pose for the camera. Both of these approaches are legitimate, by the way. In my current role as News Corp’s chief photographer at Parliament House, I can tell you there are journalists who stay in the Press Gallery newsroom all day, and there are journos who are out and about. Same with photographers: some look at their list of photo calls for the day and attend them; others like to roam and scheme. We had different styles, Tyler and I, but we produced some good work, and because the only output for the Australia media was coming from us, we got some good runs in the major metro newspapers. It felt good being able to inform the public about what was going on and it felt even better to think there was an entertainment factor too. It doesn’t matter how seriously we take ourselves in the media, we love to know that someone gets a kick out of what we produce.

  In the end we compromised. Tyler allowed me to go outside the wire as long as I photographed his jobs as a priority. Which, in my mind at least, translated to: ‘Go for it.’

  7

  Bleak City

  In Baidoa meat markets, the morning heat was just starting to take hold. Around me was a dirt-paved town square, bullet- pocked walls and scorched colonial buildings overlooking a market where, somehow, there was still livestock for sale. This was my first patrol with Charlie company, and we were in the meat markets because the locals had been attacked a few hours previously by a dangerous militia. The clan militias were known to congregate around food-distribution areas like flies on you-know-what. It was their way of controlling the population, and some of the people at the market that morning had been killed and others injured.

  By the time we turned up mid-morning it was business as usual. The patrol unit had insisted I dress in the Vietnam- era, US-issue flak vest. These things were not suited to the African climate because they’re heavy and thick and you just run with sweat under them. I had to wear a Nikon photographer’s vest over my flak vest, so within five minutes of our hour-long walk to the markets, my shirt was dripping wet. The meat markets had a smell about them which will never leave me. At African meat markets you choose your beast and you either lead it away or they slaughter it on the spot. So there was blood and guts and flies, and traders trying to make their sales even as the soldiers milled around working out where the militias were. Beside a butcher’s stall stood a camel, covered in flies. They were crawling into the animal’s nose and mouth while the butcher hacked into a carcass on his wooden bench.

  I walked with Charlie company further into Baidoa, a place that made Mogadishu look like a thriving metropolis. These dirty, decrepit streets were, according to the aid agencies and NGOs, the centre of the famine crisis and the hub of the worst, most violent militias. The bullet holes and burnt-out buildings were the obvious features, but I could also tell that the buildings – most dating from the 1860s or 1880s – had barely been touched in 150 years. No improvements or renovations, just slowly crumbling structures that hinted at a society that had given up long before the civil wars.

  I kept my camera up and I got some great material. But the scene wasn’t something I wanted to remember, and I had to remind myself that it is only through seeing confronting images that the rest of the world might be encouraged to give a damn. The streets were full of starving children and emaciated women and very few men. This was perhaps the only thing that enabled me to relax. The absence of fighting age males was really obvious in Baidoa, but it made me reflect on where they were: either dead or fighting for some warlord was the consensus among the Aussie soldiers. Popular places, such as the meat market and street markets, were dominated by women and old men. Interestingly, while Somalia is officially a Muslim country, the women back then did not wear the hijab. The rural women wore long scarves over their shoulders and hair, but the scarves were colourful and featured shiny bits of bling. They didn’t look religious. The city women – the ones running markets stalls and shops – had no head covering at all.

  The orphanages were overflowing, their beds set up in courtyards and side alleys, but with no food or water for the kids. Completely dejected, hopeless eyes stared back at me, and as I got my shots I wondered if they would still be alive in two weeks. It was as bleak a place as I’ve ever seen – Somalia felt like someone had actively set out to ensure that no civil society could survive there.

  After that first patrol in Baidoa, I thought to myself, We can’t help these people – there’s too many of them, we can’t help them.

  I hate to say this, but the only way you can do your job in the face of such wretched conditions is to put it out of your mind. I know it sounds callous, but it was the only way through. All the Aussies and Westerners did the same thing. You take a few days to adjust to the shock of it, and then, by unspoken agreement, you don’t talk about it. Can you help anyone by moaning about the awfulness? No you can’t, but you can do your job.

  The disgusting state of Baidoa and its people was one thing. The other concern I had was that we could so easily have been attacked – ‘contact’ in military-speak. Even with a flak vest and there being so few males around, I always felt exposed. The patrols with Charlie company into the city itself were bad enough – the streets were narrow, lots of eyes peering out of the darkness of burnt-out buildings, strangely taciturn locals and the threat of attack looming over our every step. But there were also bush patrols into the surrounding countryside, where our infantry guys would assert their presence and keep the militias on the run – or so the theory went. The landscape was all camel thorn and hard- packed dirt. You’d be hard pressed to find pasture for the very few goats or sheep to graze on. As soon as it rained, the dirt turned to ankle-deep mud and splattered everywhere. The countryside was largely emptied out, not only of people but of livestock and crops. Farmers had clearly once lived there, and a few hung on: occasionally we’d happen upon child goat herders with two or three animals to tend. But Somalia’s agricultural base was very small, hence the famine.

  The bush patrols I joined were mostly on foot and sometimes in Land Rover convoys for wider sweeps. We’d take a route to a well or a village before circling back to the airport. Mostly the diggers would be dealing with women and children and some of the rare old folks who hadn’t succumbed to the lack of food. Every now and then we’d bump into young men driving Toyota utes, with a load of other young men riding in the back tray. They were aged in their teens and twenties, typically, and they carried an assortment of weapons, the most common being the AK- 47. But they’d have a collection of random weapons too: I saw shotguns, M16s and the old FN machine gun. The uniforms were often military fatigue pants, and perhaps a pair of boots. But their shirts followed a sporting theme: the New York Giants, Manchester United, FC Barcelona. The first time I saw one of these militia vehicles, it didn’t slow or stop – it kept on going down the dirt road, the seven or eight occupants barely glancing in our direction. Generally, these people would avoid the diggers, driving straight past without stopping or driving off if we found them parked. As I became used to their presence, I realised what was different about them compared to the rest of the populace: the militias looked healthy and strong. They were eating, and quite well by the look of it.

  It was rewarding getting the pictures of these Australian pat
rols. This was the soldier’s ‘office’ and I thought it was worth documenting. I used my two-camera system: one Nikon with a wide-angle lens for close-ups and the other camera with a zoom lens. I started carrying a lot of kit in my Nikon camera vest, too, so I’d always have the lenses I needed and back-up batteries. I was also taking video footage on Betacam SP, much of which was turned into a documentary on the Somalia campaign about two years later. When that doco came out it featured mostly Mick Moon’s Charlie company on patrol around Baidoa, and the Alpha and Delta companies whined long and hard about their exclusion. Of course, they hadn’t been excluded – their bosses told me very clearly they weren’t interested.

  The patrols weren’t physically easy because of the heat and rough ground. But they got progressively harder because the militias slowly learned our movements and instead of passively avoiding us, started seeking contact with our infantry companies. I wasn’t present when Charlie company had a stand-off with one militia group, but the fact that the fighters were becoming emboldened worried the commanders. So they introduced a rule that I couldn’t go out on patrol with the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) guys until after they’d been in a contact. This annoyed me at the time because I wanted the drama and action – but in war zones you should be careful what you wish for.

  The militias were probably all around us when we went into town, and I always had the sense we were being watched, even if they held off. They did, on the other hand, attack the Americans, using rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and assault rifles. In 1993 one of the militias took on the Americans in Mogadishu, in a battle that would be immortalised in the book and movie Black Hawk Down. But during my deployment, it was early days and very few open hostilities occurred.

  It was a dusty, dirty grind, but our own discomfort was nothing in comparison to the plight of the locals. In one trip to the city we drove past a normally quiet well that was unexpectedly crowded. We stopped and the interpreter came back and said the militias had poisoned the other wells in the area and so hundreds of people were trying to get drinkable water out of a well that usually supported twenty or thirty. Their desperation was palpable. I saw this girl, about ten years old, who was crying. Just sobbing, inconsolable.

  She’d been sent down by her mother to get water as usual and all these interlopers were crowding her out, not letting her near the well. I pulled out my own water bottles and was going to hand them to her when Major Tyler stopped me.

  ‘If you give one water, you have to give them all water,’ he said.

  I was in the mood to argue, but I didn’t. He was right. One person can’t stand there playing Santa Claus. It would create expectation and violence and it would be the girl who’d be hurt because of it.

  The real problem was not the way we distributed aid, but warlords using starvation to hurt one another. In Africa, you take away food and water from the villages so the men will join the militia, where they eat and drink as much as they want. The women and children are screwed, basically. So the only way to distribute food and water was in a mass, organised way so women – who may have three or four children to care for as well as elderly parents – can get something to eat. We attended a few of these food drops, usually run by the Americans or Aussies, in a field adjacent to a village or well. At a memorable one, in which I took one of my best conflict zone pictures, the supply trucks pulled up in a field outside a small village. The Aussie soldiers stood on the back of the flat-bed trucks and tried to hand out the rice and maize meal according to need. The grains came in large sacks and the idea was a person would hand their plastic bowl to the soldier, the soldier would fill it with grain, and then serve the next person. But it didn’t work the way it was supposed to: too many people, too much hunger, too much desperation. And, frankly, too many men thrusting themselves forward and crowding out the women, most of whom were in no physical state to assert themselves. You can just imagine what happens to a full bowl of rice or maize when you’re being pushed and shoved from all sides. Not much stays in the bowl.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE

  She’d been sent by her mother to get water as usual.

  This particular distribution was heartbreaking and led to one of the most disturbing photo sequences I took in Somalia. It was the look on the faces of the women when the food distribution trucks were empty and readying to pull out. This was a stressful time for the women because some didn’t have enough grain to feed their kids and others didn’t want to be left at the mercy of the thugs and militias who would appear and take the food as soon as the Aussie soldiers had gone. One of those photos, which later made it into a book on Somalia, shows the panic on a mother’s face as we pulled out, and it’s a haunting image. What the picture doesn’t show is the sound these women made that day: high-pitched shrieks of fear. If you were at one of those food distributions, you don’t forget that sound.

  The food drops could be depressing and the diggers really had to keep up one another’s spirits. It was during one food drop that I struck up a conversation with a friendly soldier named Private Shannon McAliney – a chance meeting and one that would be repeated before we left Somalia, although in very different circumstances.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE

  What the picture doesn’t show is the sound the women made.

  ***

  One of the highlights of the mission was Charlton Heston. I was a big fan of Chuck’s from the Ben-Hur days and I really liked his company and his humour. He knew exactly how to talk to military people and with him I organised a system of souvenirs. I’d take a series of shots of Charlton shaking hands with an Aussie soldier, and when I’d filled a couple of rolls I whipped down to my darkroom van where Terry developed and printed them. Then I sought out Charlton and had him sign the photograph with a message to the soldier in the pic. Charlton thought it was hilarious and it gave the boys a lift.

  My enduring memory of Charlton Heston? Him telling me how to take a photograph (with a great deal of humour). Funny on one level, but I got a great insight into how movies stars like it to be done.

  ***

  About two months after the media contingent had flown out I started hanging around with the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) crew in the city. They had a makeshift camp in a bombed-out building, just off one of the main ‘streets’. They had essentially stretched plastic sheeting between the internal walls of a colonial building and created a plastic ‘ceiling’. There were partitioned rooms for the patients, fold-out cots, medicines and dressings stacked in sealed plastic storage bins and a generator to give them power. They were quite inspirational: volunteer doctors and nurses trying to make a difference in a place where even the most optimistic person wilted in the face of the task. I don’t mean to be negative about the mission in Somalia. I think rich nations should assist the poor nations, especially when it comes to basic civic infrastructure like water, food, shelter and safety. But in Somalia, the people with all the resources just wanted to fight and destroy, and the rebuilding was being done by outsiders. It was a commendable mission, but it was like fighting a bushfire with a garden hose: you can’t stop the fire but you can die trying.

  There was a morbidly overweight woman in her forties who came into the MSF clinic one morning when I was there with my camera. The blisters on her feet had become infected and they’d been covered over by the folds of skin that fell around her ankles. They’d ulcerated and caused a gangrenous infection in the lower leg. So the doctor cut off her foot with a bone saw. I watched him saw back and forth and the foot was off in a few quick minutes, discarded in a bin. Seeing the internal parts of another human being is a memory that has stayed with me, but while the sight of it was grisly enough, the smell was on another planet.

  I got over that, and after they got her off the operating table, they brought in a little girl, maybe five or six years old. She had an infected blister the size of a fist on her lower leg, and the doctor decided her leg also needed to come off. La
ter in my career, colleagues would remark that I had a cast-iron stomach when it came to what I had to shoot. But right then, in that MSF clinic, I couldn’t watch what that little girl was about to go through. That was it for me – I walked out. In Baidoa, at that point in history, I didn’t fancy the chances of a one-legged young girl against famine, militias and the lack of sanitation. My heart was breaking.

  ***

  The pictures I took with MSF drew me to the work of our own army medical centre in the Australian compound. I knew the staff there because the camp all socialised, but for the first time I started going down to their hangar, about a kilometre away, to see what they were up to. One series of shots I took of them got a run in a newspaper back in Australia, so the doctors and nurses were accepting of me and liked that they were being recognised. That’s where I first met Kym Felmingham, a young female army medic. We continued to bump into one another throughout our army careers and even after I left the army. Kym was the first female RSM at Australia’s Headquarters Joint Task Force 633 in the Middle East, as I’d discover years later when I was doing a portrait project for the Australian War Memorial.

  One evening I got an urgent call from the medics over the radio system; an armoured personnel carrier (APC) was on its way to the hospital with an unknown casualty – would I like to come down to film? I rushed down there and set up my tripod for the video camera in the inflatable field hospital where they did their surgery. Almost immediately I could hear the rumble and rattle of an APC outside the tent. Before I could get to the door, the screaming and yelling started. It was an anguished sound, one I hadn’t heard before and which I won’t forget. I pulled back from the door as they carried the soldier inside and then he was on the operating table in front of me: Shannon McAliney, now a lance corporal. He was still alive and in a lot of pain. He’d taken a bullet – it had gone straight through the useless American flak jacket into the upper left side of his chest and out the other side. When I realised he was one of ours, I switched off the video camera and just observed the attempts to save him. David Hurley and the regimental sergeant major were standing next to me as the doctors and medics tried to save this boy’s life, him yelling that he didn’t want to die and the commanding officer telling him to hang on.