The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  So I dodged that one. But the morning after I arrived I was told to report to a captain at the 10th, in the operations room situated in an abandoned school. As I approached the building, a couple of the NCOs started laughing at my blue gear. One of them said, ‘Hey, Aussie, you ain’t coming with us in that blue shit.’

  That pulled me up. The protocol for the media in a combat zone is to wear a colour that differentiates us from combatants – the agreed colour is blue. I told my hosts that war correspondents are supposed to dress like non-combatants, but the sergeant wasn’t backing down. He told me that, to the Taliban, I wasn’t a non-combatant, I was just a nice big blue target. A VIP worth shooting.

  ‘Paint that shit green,’ he said, giving me two spray cans of drab olive paint. That was the end of the discussion and the end of my media-ID days. No more blue shit.

  The 10th actually woke me up to the soldier–media divide. And once I’d seen it from the military perspective, I couldn’t go back. When a non-state actor – usually of the guerrilla, rebel or terrorist variety – sees a person in blue, they see a chance for maximum publicity. A captured or killed soldier doesn’t get much attention; a captured or killed journalist is big news and gives these peddlers of violence the attention they need. So see it from a soldier’s viewpoint: you’re travelling through hostile territory and on a normal day the snipers and shooters might let you pass because they feel outnumbered. But if they see a blue helmet and blue ballistic vest, they will force the issue because the journalist is seen as a VIP, not a soldier.

  It is absolutely against the Geneva Convention for an accredited press person to carry a firearm, concealed or otherwise. Yet the 10th Mountain guys thought I was crazy for going unarmed, and on occasion they would offer me a weapon. I always laughed it off, but it wasn’t funny. This mission and these patrols were about pushing the Taliban out of their territory. Hardly a picnic.

  I came to this accommodation with my hosts: I said I wouldn’t carry, because once one photographer does, that person makes it dangerous for every journalist or photographer. But that said, I told them, if there came a time for me to pick up a weapon, then something must have gone terribly wrong and I would use a firearm to defend myself and others. When you work with soldiers in their environment, around places like Helmand, Logar and Uruzgan, you are actually a liability if you’re not prepared to defend yourself. I don’t advocate journalists carrying firearms in conflict areas, but when it comes down to survival, I have my own code of ethics.

  Once we’d got past the ‘blue shit’ issue, I got along famously with the 10th. They – as distinct from many other infantry units in Afghanistan – did a lot of their work in night patrols. This is considered by many commanders to be dangerous because it gives an advantage to the soldiers who know the country (the Taliban, in this case). The first night patrol I did with the 10th was one of the eeriest and creepiest experiences of my life. Imagine walking with around twenty men – a platoon – who are weighed down with packs and firearms and they’re making virtually no noise. I wasn’t allowed night-vision goggles, but they were fairly useless to a photographer anyway. So I padded along in the middle of the unit, through the inky blackness, in a silence that amplified the sounds of my own breathing and even my own pulse. The 10th were highly professional and very tough and it was with them I started duct-taping all my gear against webbing so there was no sound. These guys were night-stalkers and the tiniest sounds gave them away. I had to secure my gear so there was no clicking or banging. The first night with them, carefully strolling around the canals and irrigation ditches of Logar’s agricultural areas, was an absolute blast to the senses and is something I won’t forget. The night patrols meant sleeping rough with these people and it was the best in-field access I’d had to date.

  ***

  After the intense night patrol work with the 10th Mountain Division, I felt physically hardened again and ready to embed with 1 RAR out of Tarin Kowt, where I’d meet Macca and Sally Sara. I was tired, though, so when the Defence media people said I had to do the pre-deployment course in Kuwait before we flew in, I wasn’t pleased about it. I’d done this course many times and I’d just spent four weeks with the 10th on combat patrols. But I zipped it. This was a trial embed and I wanted it to go well. So I flew out of Afghanistan to Kuwait to do the ADF four-day induction training.

  Having done the training, we flew back to Afghanistan in a C-130 and landed at TK. And it went downhill from there. From the first meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Peter Connolly, commanding officer of 1 RAR, it was obvious he didn’t want us there. It was a real shame, as I had first met Pete Connolly in Somalia when he was a young officer under David Hurley’s command. Macca and I spoke to the PR liaison and managed to talk our way out of TK and into one of the forward operating bases. This involved a ten-hour drive across the desert. Ian, Sally and I travelled in an armed Bushmaster convoy and there was a level of security alert that put us all on edge. But while the FOB was small and rudimentary, they had good stores and water supplies – always a good start in Afghanistan. We settled into our new home within the confines of this remote compound. A few days later we went though the patrol brief for an upcoming foot patrol. The officer in charge of the FOB was very clear and professional, and I thought this was going to work well. But at around midnight the patrol base commander got a phone call from Connolly’s office back at TK: he was withdrawing the embed. ‘No journalist is to go outside the wire,’ he ordered.

  Ian and I were both pissed off and I had a go at the public affairs captain. I told him I’d just spent a month with the Americans, on various combat patrols with no escort officer or restrictions. He shrugged and said there was nothing he could do and it was out of his hands. But it wasn’t out of my hands: when the 1 RAR soldiers went out that morning, I negotiated to go out with them for about a hundred metres so I could get shots of our diggers outside the wire. The pics came out okay and News gave them a run in a couple of papers. But this was a one-off thing that was quickly shut down. We were expected to cool our heels. Sally kept calm while we killed time out there, but Macca and I were restless. We weren’t doing what we signed up for. There was a bit of action: an American Dust-Off crew landed in their Black Hawk to collect an injured local whom the patrol had returned with. But we were kept in the base, away from interesting information. Finally the CO called us back to Company Outpost (COP) Mashal, where he was now based. Once more, we were expected to sit around, and Macca and I must have been too much to bear, because the CO sent us over to his own tent area of the base. So we lounged around a table in an area surrounded on two sides by HESCO blast walls (big barrels filled with sand, which when joined together form a barrier against blasts). There was also some shade over the large table because the space was covered in camo netting. I had nothing else to do so I started filing and archiving my pictures from the previous days. It was early in the morning, before it gets hot, and Macca and Sally were sitting against the HESCO walls while I worked at the table. Behind the HESCO, somewhere out in the desert, came this shrieking sound. When you’ve been in Afghanistan for a while, that shrieking – especially when accompanied by a whoosh – can only be one thing: incoming fire from rockets, usually ‘Chinese rockets’.

  The shrieking turned into shaking ground as one rocket hit the dirt a few hundred metres behind the blast wall where Ian and Sally sat. Shit – we were under attack. Dirt flew and then there were more shrieks, more whooshing, and I looked up and saw Sally diving towards the corner in the blast wall, where Macca just happened to be lying already, trying to get his flak jacket on. With the rush to the wall and Macca’s awkward position, Sally’s head looked like it ended up in Macca’s lap. I’d probably been in the field for too long by this stage, because I just started laughing. I was pissing myself laughing as the rockets shrieked.

  The public affairs officer ran past, telling us to get in the ASLAVs – the Australian Army’s eight-wheeler armoured troop carriers. I shot footage of Sally and Macc
a, and also got video of the Aussie ASLAVs shooting back against the enemy rocket positions with the 25mm chain guns mounted on the turrets.

  Having recovered from this attack, we finally felt like we were in Afghanistan. I was amped by now, and Macca got writing and so did Sally and I had the material filed to Sydney inside the hour. This was what we were here for. But no sooner had we got our game faces on than the army got the shits. We’d filed so quickly that the CO said we’d given the Taliban a heads-up about high-value targets (journalists) and the enemy would now try harder to hit the base.

  So the army’s experiment with embedding didn’t really work out. We were only embedded for two weeks and everything went wrong. For instance, on the Afghan election day, which was the event we’d been embedded for, I wanted to get out and about and get some stories about the locals voting. And the CO said, ‘No, it’s too dangerous.’

  I became aggressive – not just because the embed wasn’t working, but I thought he was stopping me from doing my job. I said, ‘This is the whole reason we’re up here.’

  ‘It’s not your call,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean this voting – democracy, elections – this is the whole reason Australia is up here!’

  The penny dropped and he saw the problem with it. So he said ‘yes’ to me, but Macca and Sally had to stay in the camp. I was ropeable that day, but I went down to a voting booth and started shooting video and stills. I got a good shot of a local elder hugging the young patrol commander and it ran across the front of The Australian.

  But the gig was cursed because a few seconds after I got that shot the shrieking started and in came seven rockets, clearly aimed at the polling station. I ran for cover along with the grunts, who called for reinforcements from Patrol Base Mashal. The ASLAVs came down to pick us up but, when half the patrol had piled in, the vehicles just accelerated away, leaving the rest of us standing there in the open. We had to run back to the base feeling like the proverbial sitting ducks for those Chinese rockets.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  A local elder hugging the patrol commander on election day.

  In the end, I didn’t shed a tear when we wound it up after two weeks. What had worked very well in Somalia was a complete failure in Afghanistan. The ADF had overcomplicated what was a simple idea, and besides they were just going through the motions: they didn’t want media embedded with their patrols. And they ensured it didn’t happen.

  18

  War’s Real Cost

  Major Marc Dauphin was a friendly, smart Canadian surgeon who was in charge of clinical operations at the Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit. The massive field hospital was housed inside the wire at Kandahar Airfield, and while it was run by Canadians it serviced all of the coalition units in the area. This was our last few days in Afghanistan and we’d dropped in at Dauphin’s invitation to see how one of these places works. Shortly after we arrived at around 10 am, Dauphin’s warm greetings were interrupted by the emergency sirens and barked instructions over the radio system. It was the first incoming warning for what would eventually be seventeen casualties in a single day, a day of carnage so infamous that in Major Dauphin’s own book he refers to this as ‘The Day the Australians Came In’.

  No one who was there will forget that day, as the hospital handled a constant parade of devastating injuries that included head, chest, leg and facial injuries, amputations and burns. You name it: the full horror of war, right there in one place. We just stood, stunned, as the waves of people came in, limbs hanging off, blood everywhere, screaming.

  The first to be admitted were three children. One boy was dead, one boy lost an arm and a baby girl was all smashed up by shrapnel. As I recovered my composure and brought up the camera to shoot some video, another child was admitted. All the kids were in a terrible way. Mutilated. They’d been playing in the dirt and hit an unexploded Soviet bomb, and it detonated. Sally was very upset after this. Macca stayed out of the way. I was concerned but not upset at the time. I just kept working – looking for that picture that would show the horror of what I was witnessing first hand. I wanted the viewer back home to see this carnage. In retrospect it was amazing that we retained our access on that day because all areas of the building were jammed with hospital workers, gurneys and surgeons, as well as military folks wandering around looking for their buddies. The noise was terrible – the worst I’ve ever experienced: the screaming and crying was overlaid by the emergency sirens alerting staff to more incoming and the radios crackling and barking with increasingly urgent hospital workers and flight medics. The entire scene was one of hell, and there were so many serious injuries that Major Dauphin took to writing the casualties on the back of his hand to keep up with what was happening. In the midst of it all he joked that the Canadian government wouldn’t buy them notepads. He gave up writing on his hand at sixteen people. There wasn’t enough room for another patient.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  Seventeen casualties in one day: all the kids were in a terrible way.

  They brought a young US Marine into the emergency section. He’d been walking through a market when a suicide bomber approached and detonated a suicide vest five metres away from him. He was filled with shrapnel and, amazingly, conscious. I stayed with him for a while and he was more confused than angry. He spoke to me on camera about the event while being treated by the hospital staff. This is how good the access was. If only the Aussies had the same sense of value when it came to telling the whole truth of this war.

  That visit to Role 3 is burned into my memory and to this day I can’t watch the footage I took in there. Actually, I’m still not comfortable with anything on TV that is set in a hospital or involves a medical trauma scene. I feel the emotions rising and all I can hear is the sound of children in pain.

  These days you can no longer get that close to the real cost of war. The publicity machine doesn’t allow anyone – let alone the media – into combat hospitals to document its workings. I guess if too many people knew the real cost, we’d put an end to it pretty damn quick. We got lucky – a major wanted the outside world to see his hardworking, under- appreciated team in action and we walked in a few minutes before the chaos started.

  But we were there and we witnessed it. I suppose that’s the job of the press, but we are just people and everyone in the media handles these environments differently, in their own way. It doesn’t matter how many times you look at this stuff – and you have to look when you’re a photographer – it never gets easy. There is nothing comfortable about a child screaming because she has shrapnel buried in her face; it’s hard to watch a child lose a leg, lose their life, be blown apart. One of the fatalities was a baby who suffered blast trauma.

  I have found a way to get through and be able to come back the next day and do the job. But it’s not without consequences. I had trouble after Somalia; I had some counselling back home and I was told to avoid trauma, which was unfortunate, because trauma is what I do. Instead, I had to find another way of dealing with the insanity of conflict, and when I work in these confronting places I tune into the adrenaline and really, really focus on the work. Major Dauphin retired with PTSD and wrote a book about it. He was a cool cookie in that emergency department, believe me, and he just put his head down and worked. That’s how he got through. That’s how I get through. I recall having to make this pact with myself way back in Somalia, when I watched the obese woman having her leg amputated by the Médecins Sans Frontières team, only to watch the young girl being brought in to have her leg sawn off. I had to keep my focus on the work, not on our shared humanity. It’s not a trick, it’s a survival mechanism, and I saw the same thing at work in Major Dauphin that awful day.

  It took me a while to recover from this trip to Afghanistan. The month of patrols with the 10th Mountain Division was tough and exhausting, and then the rocket attacks with 1 RAR and the emergency surgery at Role 3 hospital were quite a load to carry.

  19


  Jessica Watson

  After Afghanistan, I took a week off to recharge and then I was back into it. Gillard had challenged Rudd, and so we had a new prime minister. This was interesting from the press perspective, because Gillard was a personable and funny woman to be around, but her media advice and management was not good. The overly controlled access to her and the micromanagement of her public image worked against her natural strengths, which were a relaxed Aussie humour and a big laugh. After the confidence of Howard and Rudd, she came across as defensive in front of a microphone or camera.

  The News editors in Holt Street were always looking for a splash, and one morning I was standing in a stationery shop in Canberra when my phone went. It was the picture manager from Sydney.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘A shop.’

  ‘I want you to photograph Jessica Watson,’ he said, and my brain started spinning because as far as I knew she was somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, aiming to be the youngest person to sail around the world.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘South America.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  This is how it goes once you have a reputation for getting the job done. Just lucky I have a wife in the media, who gets it.

  I went home immediately, threw my go-bag and my camera gear in the car and phoned through to the Press Gallery photo desk to tell Kym and Ray that I’d be gone for a week. I was in Sydney about four hours after taking that call, and as soon as I arrived they added another surprise layer to the gig: they wanted video, too.