The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  ***

  We would often go out with the army MPs because they could move around relatively safely and they always knew where the action was. One day, while on a foot patrol, we heard screaming. We followed the noise through the streets and found an apartment building on fire. The MPs tried to find out what was happening. I followed one MP into the burning building, running up the stairs to where the screams were emanating from. Someone had nailed the bloody door shut from the outside. Unbelievable! There was so much smoke, but the MP broke down the door and rescued the two old ladies inside. I managed to fire off a few frames of the MP carrying one of the old ladies down the stairs. According to the bystanders, the people in the house were Serbian collaborators, but when we got them out, they were old ladies. They were grandmothers!

  Another time, we were out with the MPs and the radio call came in that shots had been fired in one of the housing estates. We went out there to find an old lady in hysterics outside one of the huge concrete towers. At her feet was an old man, lying face down in a pool of spreading blood, his walking cane beside his hand. I took the shots and asked one of the MPs what had happened. The interpreter said the woman’s husband had left the apartment, and the moment he’d stepped outside an Albanian gunman walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Albanian vengeance.

  Some of the jobs involved inspections. One afternoon we were driven into the countryside to a secret ammunition dump that had been discovered by a farmer. It was a shallow depression filled with uranium tailings and other toxic nasties. But when one of the engineers tried to take a closer look, we realised the entire area was booby-trapped with jumping jack mines – the kind that leap up on detonation to inflict the worst injuries. Mines were a widespread problem in Kosovo. Both sides had laid them and the engineers from various nations spent a lot of their time fencing off football fields and family parks, and putting up the skull-and-crossbones signs.

  On one job, the MPs were going to arrest someone who’d been shooting people. They’d recce’d the area, and knew where the guy was. Shaun and I followed the MPs in convoy to an area outside the city, along a dirt road, where some of the paramilitaries were known to hole up in farmhouses. But when we arrived, we found the place eerily abandoned. The person we were looking for wasn’t there and the house in question was empty. But there was a blown-up car on the side of the track where there hadn’t been one before.

  There was a terrible silence while everyone looked around to work out what had happened. And then the voice over our army radio: ‘You’re probably on a mine field now,’ said one of the MPs. We reversed back down the road, taking care not to veer off the tracks we’d come in on. It was an agonisingly slow process, and we were so tense we ended up slapping one another to try to keep our sense of humour.

  ***

  Of course, there were lighter moments in the job. I was with Shaun one morning early on in the trip, and I was giving him heaps because a warrant officer had lined up a bunch of men and women that morning at the base camp, and blasted them for ignoring the British Army’s standing orders on fraternisation. The HQ unit had as many women as men, and apparently there’d been some very friendly behaviour after a few pints. I was joking with Shaun that the Poms wouldn’t have dreamed of banning the drinking, yet they called a halt to the shagging.

  ‘You Poms can sure sniff out a drink,’ I said to him jokingly.

  Later, we were in a rundown industrial area of Pristina with a whole lot of shipping containers among the weeds. Out of nowhere, Shaun said, ‘What the fuck is that?’

  I couldn’t see or hear a thing, but I followed Shaun and we found a rave party going on in a bloody shipping container. He could smell beer through steel walls!

  ***

  Something that no amount of high spirits or bravado could prepare me for was the mass graves. The British Army investigated mass graves with its criminal investigations teams, which meant detailed photography. There was no chance of a few quick snaps and then taking off. My job was to see everything and record it for the investigators’ files.

  The first time I had to photograph a mass grave, the call had come in while we were on another job, and we joined a convoy of Land Rovers headed east to follow up the report. We arrived in a small rural village, picturesque with its little stone houses and stone walls. It seemed the inhabitants had discovered a shallow grave on the side of a hill that overlooked the village. With the criminal investigations officers leading, we followed the locals, walking across the meadow. It was a beautiful summer’s day in the Balkans, and there was this scar across the meadow, about fifty metres long. The farmers at the site already had scarves over their faces, and as the soldiers and farmers scraped soil off this scar, the bodies started appearing. They were lying like sardines alongside each other: young men with bullet holes in their heads. The Paras handed out face masks and I took one. As the dirt was scraped off this mass grave the people from the village walked up and down looking for their loved ones. It wasn’t too difficult to identify the bodies: the Serbs had left the wallets in the executed people’s pockets when burying them. As the women cried out on seeing their sons, brothers and grandsons, I was overwhelmed by the smell of death. Kosovo is quite hot in summer, and as the sun warmed the area, the sweet smell of putrefying flesh went everywhere: up my nose, in my eyes and mouth, in my hair. Some of the soldiers and locals vomited as the smell wafted around, and I started shooting. The criminal investigators wanted a record of the bodies, which was mainly covered by Shaun’s video camera work. I wanted to get the reactions of the locals as well as the specific shots the investigators asked me to get.

  As invasive as it may sound, this was actually the story of civil war: not the politicians, the bombs or the machine guns, but the sobbing mother and father who held it together long enough to identify their son to the British officer at the back of his truck. Yes, I took that shot, and no, it’s not a shot some people would take in that awful circumstance. But when I go over my Kosovo footage, that’s still one of my favourites. When I think about how a picture can tell a story, that one sums it up: you’re not killing a Muslim, you’re killing someone’s son.

  There were around twenty-five bodies and they’d been in the ground for two weeks when we unearthed them. The sight of the villagers, walking from body to body, hankies over their faces, was something you don’t forget. Trying to give the friends and families of these executed people some dignity, while also clambering for the best shots, was tricky to say the least. It wasn’t like the locals were shooed away once they’d identified the corpses. There was a lot of standing around, hugging and crying. These gigs would take all day. And they all ended in the same strange scene: the soldiers putting each corpse in a black body bag and carrying it by the armpits and ankles to the back of a truck, until the truck was filled with corpses.

  I actually found the whole experience devastating – the image of my first mass grave stayed with me for years – but there was a really strange upshot to it. The next day we were in Pristina, walking along the street, when the word got out that the Kosovars had won. Kosovo would be an independent entity. After everything they’d been through, I watched these parents run inside, grab a couple of toy guns, and shove them in their kids’ hands as they started celebrating. All around me, children were being given toy guns to shake above their heads as they celebrated the end of war.

  I stood there stunned, wondering if the world had gone mad.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE

  The civil war is over, and a Kosavar child shakes a toy gun in celebration!

  10

  East Timor

  After five weeks in Kosovo I was returned to Germany. Everyone was exhausted, me included. When you do these gigs you’re constantly travelling, working and occasionally sleeping. The army has you on a schedule for work–eat– sleep, but the schedule is ignored: if you have to take shots of a British commander with a politician in Pristina in the morning, photograph the weapons inspections in the east
in the afternoon and then follow the MPs in the evening, there isn’t much downtime. As happens in the media, the downtime is usually taken late at night in a bar, with some reheated food. And then it’s all go again at sparrow’s with a slight hangover.

  While I didn’t think I pushed it any harder than Shaun or the other PR people, when I got back to my original exchange unit in Germany my boss took one look at me and ordered me to take time off to recuperate. He said, ‘You can’t work that hard – you’ll kill yourself.’

  I suspect that sometimes, when you do a job like mine, the excitement can mask stress and fatigue. And the longer you ignore them, the more they’re advertised on your face. People start to see in you what you can’t see in yourself.

  I spent my leave in the UK, and went up to Scotland to stay with my aunt Rita and visit my granny. While I was in Edinburgh, I went down to Royal Mall and got my tongue pierced. I’d become fascinated with Shaun’s pierced tongue, so in a silly moment of ‘I don’t give a shit’, I got mine done too.

  I’d been in touch with Giles before I got into Edinburgh and he’d wangled me a ticket to see the Edinburgh Tattoo. I went up there with my camera kit and started doing the whole Ramage thing; next thing I know, I’m in the accredited photographers’ section, taking some fantastic shots. I’m on holiday but I’m working. It’s a habit I have to consciously suppress; these days I have a marriage where this quirk is outlawed in our basic agreement.

  I then drove up to Inverness, where I’d arranged to stay on what I thought was a military base in Scotland. Once you’re in the British military system, you can do this as long as you give notice. The first problem was that no one was there, so I had to go into town to locate the mystery person who would let me in. Second, the ‘base’ was actually a medieval castle! So the mystery person takes me up the hill to this dark pile of rocks, opens these huge steel gates, lets me into the place and turns on the lights. He tells me to pull the gates closed when I leave, and then he pisses off. Do I need to spell out how strange it was to spend a night alone in a medieval castle? Do you think I slept much? There were so many unexplained noises it was like the building was talking.

  ***

  I got back to Australia in early August 1999, and by then my tongue piercing had swelled up so badly I could barely speak. I was immediately put on standby for East Timor, so I had to do a complete physical for deployment. When I went to see the military dentist in Canberra, he took one look in my mouth and said, ‘What the hell is that?!’

  I told him, and he said, ‘Well get it out of your mouth and then come back and see me.’

  So I did, and I’ve never been pierced again.

  Around Canberra, everyone was talking about East Timor. There was going to be a vote for independence at the end of August and then the Australian military would go into Timor after the election to secure the peace.

  Having done my physical, I was told I wouldn’t be going to Timor after all. Looking back on it now, it was the right call. But when a superior said he didn’t want me in his Timor team, I cracked the shits. I thought I was the best man for the job, but really I should have just kept my mouth shut. I’d had a really good run, and after my helter-skelter operations in the Balkans, I probably owed it to myself to sit this one out. But I couldn’t leave it alone, so I pushed and I won the argument and was sent to Timor. I wasn’t allowed to be in a field team, which meant I’d be staying back in Dili at the headquarters of the Media Support Unit, processing material and doing paperwork. I’d be a back-office guy.

  Yeah, right. Ramage will shut his mouth and sit in an office all day while there’s action in the hills. What are the odds?

  ***

  Every conflict zone has its character, its creepiness factor. By the time I was whisked from the airport to the Hotel Turismo in downtown Dili, I was in my fifth conflict zone in six years and I had an appreciation of these places. Where did Timor sit on the spectrum? I’d give it the danger factor of Somalia with the geography of Bougainville. It lacked the civil war feel of the Balkans, where the different factions could give as good as they got: Timor’s population was largely subsistence farmers and fishermen, being harassed by one of the largest standing armies in the world. You had villages filled with barefoot banana-growers being stalked by helicopter gunships; unarmed families hiding out in the bush while armed thugs torched their crops and killed their stock. Gratuitous bullying is what it was. I hate bullies.

  The locals had overwhelmingly voted for independence from Jakarta, and in the first weeks of September, when the Indonesian soldiers started their pull-out, the pro-Indonesia militias were raping, killing and burning in the small towns and villages of the interior. Even in Dili there was a constant smell in the air, similar to the smell you get in Canberra or Sydney when it’s bushfire season. It was a time of great internal migration as entire villages were forced to hit the road: for many locals there was nothing left to eat, nowhere to sleep.

  One morning, a large ship filled with Indonesian soldiers sailed from the Dili wharves. I was with some Aussie diggers on the wharf and we waved them off, but the Indonesians didn’t wave back: they made throat-slitting gestures at us with their thumbnails. It was full of hate, the entire mission up there. On the one hand there’d been a referendum, and Jakarta was making all the right noises. On the other hand, there were bands of psychotic Indonesian militias roaming the interior, obviously armed by the Indonesian military and able to slip across the Lois River into Indonesian Timor as soon as the Aussie soldiers got too close. The interior of Timor is hilly and covered in bush, with limited road access. It was easy for guerrilla units to move unseen through the country and difficult for outsiders to know where to look. It was a strange situation, because we were a peacekeeping operation, but we had special forces operators in the jungles, tracking the militias.

  Dili itself was pretty stable, though, and I settled into life at the Turismo, an old colonial Portuguese hotel where all the Aussie media crews were staying. I was with the guys from Channel Nine and Seven, News, Fairfax, Reuters and AAP – I was looking after the HQ photographic needs and troubleshooting for the media crews when they needed a fax that worked or a pictogram with a sat-phone connection, which I always travelled with. I was behaving myself: Sergeant Ramage, keeping his nose out of it and tending to his assignment.

  But one morning I was called up. The SAS regimental sergeant major walked up to me at the wharf. Was I Sergeant Ramage? he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He responded: ‘You’re coming with me.’

  I thought I was in the shit, with no idea what I’d done. It turned out he needed photographic coverage of bodies being dug up and I was his guy. It was all approved.

  We drove up into the interior, with two MPs and some other personnel, into an area where a militia had been actively intimidating the locals. Graves were identified and digging commenced – this was half an hour’s drive from the Turismo, so the militias were operating very close to the capital. While we were on site, a Land Rover turned up with the SAS commanding officer, the unit’s intelligence officer and two other soldiers who were not special forces. While the soldiers uncovered the graves, a local man came up to us and warned us to not go back down the road. There was an ambush being laid for us, he said. Then he left.

  The three senior SASR operators and the two non- troopers immediately jumped in their vehicle and set off to investigate. I wanted to join them, sensing a story unfolding, but the commanding officer said, ‘Absolutely not.’ All I could do was give my bulletproof vest to the intelligence officer.

  So I stayed on the side of the road and tried to stay in contact with the SAS guys on our army radio, but we lost comms. This got me frustrated, because these guys were going into a gunfight and I felt I should be there with them. We should have at least maintained communication with a small force going into contact. Thinking I could open up the comms if I moved up to altitude and clear air, we drove up the road towards the summit. As I fiddled
with the radio, I heard the scream of an over-revved diesel and the chopping of gears, and then around the corner – not two metres away – came this eight-tonne truck, flying across the road, with a full contingent of Indonesian militia fighters on the back. Then came a second truck with the same cargo, and the driver of this truck slammed the brakes and slowed. I held up my hands in an appeasing gesture as twenty shooters beaded up on me. I was close enough to see the pendant around one gunman’s neck and work out he was Catholic. I’ve been in some scrapes in my life, but that was definitely the split-second when I thought I was going to die.

  They eyeballed me, and then there were some shouts in Bahasa which probably translated as don’t worry about him, and the truck got its revs up again and they were off, following the first truck down the hill. As I caught my breath, now I had another problem. The SAS guys were moving down to one situation unaware that a bigger more dangerous situation was looming from behind. And I couldn’t get comms to warn them what was coming.

  We decided to drive down there, even though there was little we could do. There were forty shooters on those trucks and we weren’t heavily armed. When we got down there – gingerly, might I add – the SAS guys were chatting among themselves while the radio guy tried to get some support. Apparently, the truckloads of militia had come around the corner and stopped in front of the SAS guys. The commanding officer and RSM turned their rifles on the militias, and there was a tense stand-off until the militias decided to keep moving down the road. Now the CO wanted to get after these militias – these were the ones who’d been burning the crops and the villages. So he called in the quick response force from the SAS. The QRF is the troop on standby for precisely what the CO needed. He had his comms guy and his platoon sergeant around him, maps spread, coordinates worked out, ready to advise the QRF. But crackling out of the radio was an increasing amount of umming and aahing. I watched as the CO manfully tried to keep his cool while his QRF troop was clearly still on the ground at Dili airport. Finally, after all sorts of stuffing around, the CO was advised that the aviation regiment didn’t have a bird for them.