The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  Years later, when I went to see the Tom Hanks movie Saving Private Ryan with Lisa Keen and her partner Bruce ‘Johno’ Johnson in Canberra, it hit me right between the eyes. There’s a scene where a young medic gets hit while assaulting a German machine gun post and his friends are trying to save him from bleeding out. He is crying and screaming for his mum – he doesn’t want to die. I must have flinched in that movie theatre, because Lisa looked over at me and could see I wasn’t there. She tapped me on the knee and asked if I was all right. Of course I was all right – nothing wrong here! But the fact is, in that moment I was back in the hospital tent in Somalia …

  The senior doctor suddenly stood up, looked at us and said, ‘Okay, everybody out!’

  Shannon died a few seconds later. I wandered out of the surgery tent into a crowd of Shannon’s platoon, milling around, eyeballing me expectantly – some of the of young diggers were yelling and crying. I couldn’t look them in the eye.

  I left the medical centre, camera in hand, tripod over my shoulder, and went back to my darkroom. Then I sat on the blast-mound that surrounded the van. It started to rain. I took a few deep breaths and then started to cry. I was overcome with sadness. We were in this dangerous place and someone had died. Major Tyler found me and asked if I was okay.

  ‘Yep,’ I lied.

  ‘Good,’ said Tyler. ‘In that case you can photograph the body for the internal investigation.’ The regimental photographer was not up to it, apparently, and the battalion had requested I take the photographs.

  I grimaced and nodded, but my mind was saying, Are you fucking kidding me?

  I knew I had no choice; the battalion investigation into Shannon’s death would require pictures in the file. That’s just the way it works – that’s what photographers in the military do. So I collected my gear and met one of the battalion guys in the field morgue, which was the battalion quartermaster’s store. There were only two air-conditioned places on base: the darkroom van and the Q store, and they needed a cold place to keep Shannon’s body before repatriation. I made small talk with the doctor to take my mind off the task. We agreed that the whole thing was difficult and sad, that Shannon had just got really unlucky, and then we got down to work. Shannon was lying naked on his back, in a black body bag, in a pool of his own blood. I remember noticing that his eyes were still open. The guy just directed me to take the shots that were required for his report and we kept it very calm and professional. One of the shots required was a front-on picture of the bullet wound and I couldn’t get the shot by standing beside him. Trying to remain as respectful as I could during this bloody awful task, I had to straddle him and take the shot. As I looked down on Shannon, he was looking straight back at me and I didn’t have the courage to shut his eyes. I had nightmares about that moment for years, and in my dreams I was lying in the body bag and Shannon was photographing me. I realised that while I’m fairly gung-ho and action-oriented on the surface, I’m not made of stone. Shannon’s death upset me greatly.

  The shot that killed Shannon McAliney was friendly fire. It cast a pall over the Aussie mission and I can tell you to this day no one has discussed Shannon’s death with me. No one talks about it. Why was I so affected by his death? I had a strange, fleeting bond with Shannon. He was a popular, well-liked bloke. He was twenty-two and I was twenty-four. We were both young army guys, in a violent and dangerous part of Africa, doing our bit. I’d photographed him helping an old lady carry some food bags at a distribution point. A few days later he was dead. At the Australian War Memorial they honour a fallen soldier each day. When they honoured Shannon, they used the shot I took of him in Somalia.

  The episode stuck with me for many years, giving me nightmares. The problem with being a photographer is that you’re paid to see things – you open up your eyes and see it all. And then you can’t unsee it. And so it was with Shannon’s death. In the documentary on Operation Solace, Lisa Keen cut the first two months of life in Somalia to the tune of Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to listen to any Queen at all. I used to turn off the radio when it came on in the car, even if it wasn’t my car.

  The photographer who goes out looking for action? He should be careful what he wishes for.

  8

  Through Aussie Eyes

  One hot morning the order came to ship out. The operation was over.

  I didn’t respond well to this and argued with the person who passed on the order: Major Tyler. I was disappointed because I thought we should be on the last plane out so we could document everyone else leaving. My regimental sergeant major – Barry Buckley – had been among the last to leave Vietnam, with the PR teams, during the withdrawal and I wanted to emulate his commitment. It wasn’t to be. I was on the very first plane out of there, having disassembled the entire darkroom canvas annexe by myself.

  It was a disappointing way to end the operation. By now I’d finished reading Tim Bowden’s biography of combat cameraman Neil Davis, and I’d recognised the power of the images and storytelling when a photojournalist is fully committed. Davis had gone into Saigon in 1975, to shoot footage of the approaching North Vietnamese, even as every other Westerner was trying to get out of the city. And, after all, anyone in the storytelling business has to cover the end as surely as they cover the beginning and middle of the story.

  Still, I learned a valuable lesson from that deployment in Baidoa and having to work with a journalist who preferred not to go outside the wire. It really struck me that journos can actually get away with putting stories together at their keyboard, relying on meetings, phone calls, faxes and emails. The writer can cobble together something from the past, freshen it up and make it seem like news. But the photographer can’t take a picture of the past, or get their shot by asking someone on the phone to describe it. We have to be there – there’s no other way. Far from weighing on me, this realisation energised me. If it’s my responsibility to get the shot, then I’ll do what it takes and no excuses. That attitude now defines me.

  Once back at Victoria Barracks in Brisbane, I had to catalogue and file the negatives and prints that had come out of Baidoa. There were thousands. This was when my broader ambitions, and my ideas above my station, started to come through. There was so much material, and so many stories that went with the shots, that I couldn’t consign them to a drawer where they’d never be seen again. Operation Solace was a short combat operation, lasting not more than five months – but it was Australia’s first combat operation since Vietnam, we’d lost one person and we’d operated in Africa. I didn’t want it to pass without honouring our people.

  I started lobbying Lisa Keen to do something more lasting. Lisa was a civilian with an Executive Level 1 rank, equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, which meant she outranked a lot of pissed-off army PR officers who believed they should have been given the command of the MSU in Somalia and not some curly-haired blonde chick.

  Lisa also had the support of her boss, Brigadier d’Hagé, with whom she shared a vision. Lisa wanted to produce a short film from Solace, which was why she’d commissioned me to shoot so much video. She would eventually produce several films, some as in-house docos and one for commercial television called Solace: Everyone’s Mother Can Be Proud.

  But I thought there was also a book in it. Okay, yes, the photographer’s ego always thinks there’s a whole book in his or her pictures. Guilty as charged. Lisa was fair about the potential project. She said the stories had to be as strong as the pictures, and she wanted it to be a publication capable of commercial distribution so the public could see what we’d done in Somalia. She found Bob Breen, a writer and military historian, to do the research. Bob also interviewed me to get the real stories behind the pictures.

  I loved the process of selecting the pictures, and doing it in collaboration with Lisa and others. I’d never done something like this before and I liked working with people who were passionate about getting the best out of a project. I also liked
that with these pictures I got to drive the narrative because I had been out there, on the ground, and my pictures set the agenda. It was from this process of assembling the narrative of pictures that I vowed to always keep my own notes on my photo shoots and never rely on a journalist to do it. In Somalia, I’d pushed to go on patrols and get beyond that corporate PR level and do something extra and more human. It had been a confronting time but the work I produced vindicated my instincts. Somalia was a culmination of learning and experience, and Lisa Keen capped it off by going for great rather than just settling for a few press releases and some staged photographs. She was really something, that Lisa; no wonder Barry Buckley nicknamed her ‘Queeny’.

  The resulting book, Through Aussie Eyes, was published in 1994 by Defence Public Relations and I’m still proud of it as a team effort. When I look back on it, I see a pattern and approach to my profession that would become more entrenched as the years went by. I see someone who works very hard, covers a lot of ground and wants to document the human reaction in every frame. I also see a book that tells me that the photographer’s instinct has to count for something. If I’d sat back and done what the journalist had told me to do, we’d have produced a steady stream of staged shots of the brass pretending to talk to the enlisted men, with press releases telling the Australian public how great the army was. But that book has pictures of David Hurley actually out with the soldiers, wearing his flak vest; there are the ‘difficult’ shots of a digger standing guard on a food distribution point, handgun at the ready while the hungry villagers wait behind him; we even included the shot of Robert Ray smoking his pipe, and I kept my job!

  Mostly, we created a record of service, with the soldiers captured in their environment. My own grandfather served in the British Army in World War I and the only record I have of his service is an old picture of him in uniform, which I carry in my wallet. All his records were destroyed in a fire when the archive building in London was bombed during the Blitz. So pushing for that book had a lot to do with my own wish that someone had bothered to tell my grandfather’s story. In truth, every family of a person who serves wants there to be a record and some recognition of what their loved ones did. I was lucky that I was in the right place at the right time to do something about it.

  ***

  I settled back into life with Sheree, enjoying our new home, but I was not well. I’d picked up a dose of combat fatigue in Somalia and was a little remote from my wife and drinking way too much. Ever since we first became a couple, we’d been close friends, but now I was distant from her, and this distance was not helped by my work on the book.

  Life after a deployment can be like that. You have to decompress, get used to a life in which you eat normal food, walk around without a firearm and aren’t constantly on the lookout for people who want to fire an RPG into your vehicle. I was lucky to have an engrossing project like the book to keep me focused, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent. Shannon McAliney’s death and the subsequent autopsy photo shoot had hit me pretty hard and I had terrible flashbacks and night terrors about it for months after my return to Brisbane.

  PHOTO: GARY RAMAGE COLLECTION

  An old picture of my grandfather, Joseph Gilland Ramage (R), which I carry in my wallet.

  At work I was demoted to lance corporal, as the full corporal promotion had only been short term – a small fact they’d neglected to tell me when I was promoted for the Somalia trip. Before I could change my insignia from corporal, a person with a higher rank accused me of being inappropriately dressed. It was done publicly, for full effect, with an immature level of glee. After my deployment, and knowing that a book featuring my pictures could be on the cards, I was feeling pretty good about how my photography was going and I felt embarrassed for these people. Essentially, there were ten photographers in my corps and the lowly lance corporal had been sent, putting some – but not all – higher-ranked noses out of joint. They’d even started calling me ‘Petal’ because I was allegedly Lisa Keen’s favourite. Lisa took great joy in calling me Petal and years later she told me she backed me because I always said ‘yes’. She’d ask other photographers to go on jobs at short notice but was always met with some excuse. So her next port of call would be her Petal, knowing I would say yes.

  Terry Dex retired from the media unit at Victoria Barracks. I now had Mal Lancaster above me. He was a civilian photographer with the air force, and he’d won a Nikon press photographer award in his earlier career, which is the best accolade you can get as a press photographer. He was a real professional and he became my new mentor, and that was one of the luckiest breaks in my life. Whereas Terry had drilled me on the technical components of photography, Mal worked me much harder on the storytelling. He’d send me back to do reshoots if he thought I’d missed the ‘story’ and this approach worked very well for me. In Somalia, I’d really discovered the role of photographer-as-storyteller, largely because I had to pursue my own story ideas and make the pictures tell the story. I had limited note-taking skills so my shots had to speak for themselves.

  I became more refined under Mal. He insisted I do my homework and not rely on the journalist for research. ‘You have to know what you’re trying to say, before you hit the shutter,’ he told me. My good mate Mark Dowling then came across from the battalion and was trained by Mal in the early 1990s.

  Meanwhile, the publication date of Through Aussie Eyes was approaching. Because the project had Brigadier d’Hagé’s weight behind it, the sniping I took from my colleagues faded. A launch party was arranged at Victoria Barracks in Sydney and the invitations started going out. The problem was the function would be held in the officers’ mess, and Land Commander General Blake’s chief of staff wasn’t keen on having a lance corporal and his wife in there (you never knew – maybe we’d steal the cutlery or something).

  Apparently, Brigadier d’Hagé had a running argument with the chief of staff over the issue, and eventually it was agreed I could attend the launch with Sheree, but only if we entered the mess via the kitchen. It seems D’Hagé hit the roof and yelled down the phone at the chief of staff, eventually telling him to get fucked and slamming down the phone.

  The deal was eventually done, because Brigadier d’Hagé told the officers’ mess that there wasn’t going to be a launch of the book without Ramage and his wife. We flew down from Brisbane on the day of the launch, and d’Hagé had arranged for a limousine to bring us to the officers’ mess at Victoria Barracks. It’s a famously flash place, and because we were slightly delayed, proceedings were held up to wait for us. We walked in to find a room full of people all looking at us. David Hurley and his wife immediately took Sheree under their wing so I could go and do all my launch duties. They made her feel like a princess at the ball, and it was a classic example of the Australian Army: while it contains people who cling to their jumped-up colonial class system, it also contains smart, excellent leaders like d’Hagé and Hurley, who don’t have the time for all that crap.

  The book was widely promoted and well received. And I got my first taste of the spotlight, doing interviews on Channel 7 with Rob Brough and on Channel Nine’s Today with Steve Liebmann and Liz Hayes. I was proud of that book. It was a good road test for my style and technique and the way I use my equipment. Mostly, it made me realise my instincts about photography were pretty good – heading in the right direction, at least.

  Through Aussie Eyes marked the birth of my knack for conflict photography. I was hooked. This was what I wanted to do.

  ***

  My career was taking off with the launch of the book and my first combat assignment, but it spelled the beginning of the end for my marriage. At the end of 1994 I was posted to the Electronic Media Unit (EMU) in Canberra, which centralised all the photographers and video units in one place. It was a chance to work with Lisa Keen and a range of quality people and I was promoted to sergeant. We all worked very hard in that unit, and were regularly sent around the country and offshore to do our gigs. But between all the travel an
d my emotional distance from my wife, Sheree and I lasted less than a year in Canberra and split in 1995.

  It has only been in hindsight that I have come to understand the depth of my personal problems after returning from Somalia. Sleeping poorly, drinking too much, quick tempered, morose and isolated: that’s what Sheree got from me for two years. She did not deserve it. She didn’t even have the satisfaction of dumping me: I took the coward’s approach. I walked out one afternoon, stayed with a friend, and that was that. A bastard act and one I don’t expect forgiveness for – to this day I am still ashamed. About the only thing I can say about that time is that if Sheree felt she lost me, I was also quite lost to myself. Looking back, I can see I used hard work, a few drinks and a lot of fatigue to simply push through and keep going.

  The EMU was all hard work and exhausting assignments. Aside from a few portraits of generals and admirals and official shoots at Royal Military College, Duntroon, most photographic work was outside Canberra. It meant a lot of travelling, which makes you tired and a little self-focused, but I made good connections during my time there. I became good mates with Trevor Bailey, who was working out at the helicopter school at RAAF Fairbairn in the Q store. Trev is my best mate outside of the photographic industry and was a great support to me when I needed it. Another connection from Canberra would become a lifelong friend. Giles Penfound was a brilliant British Army photographer on exchange with the Australian Army, who introduced me to the Leica camera. He was also a burly former Royal Green Jackets sniper who had transferred to PR, as I had done. He’d covered a few combat gigs, he’d been posted around the world, and I liked his company and his technical abilities. We became close mates and he said I should apply for one of these exchanges myself. So in late 1997 I suggested to my bosses that they send me on exchange to the British Army and didn’t think much more of it.