by Gary Ramage
The attack only lasted a minute, but it was a big shock to the system. You sit around in a mosque, talking about peace, only to walk out into an ambush? It was an eye-opener about who these people really were. Some bullets hit the wall close by to me, something I realised when I played back the footage. But mostly I’d focused on finding a sheltered position behind the wall. Whatever instinct it was that made me drop to the ground was an instinct that probably saved my life. And then another instinct cut in: the instinct to get footage.
When the danger was over, and the incoming stopped, the guys immediately formed up into their sections and scanned the area for Taliban. This is when you hear the platoon captain calling for information and calling out to other platoons to get info on what is happening. The unit I was with had become a hit-and-run target for a particularly savage militia operating in the area – a militia with no compunction at all about shooting at people leaving a mosque. After all, their place of worship bore the brunt of the incoming from the AK-47s.
It was frantic in Helmand – you never knew where the danger was coming from and the atmosphere occasionally pushed me towards paranoia. One morning at Patrol Base Beatley, I was brushing my teeth and the thump of rotor blades and turbine engines came in so low over the roof that I dropped my toothbrush, grabbed my camera and ran outside to see what was happening. There were two American Apache gunships, hovering over a point just outside the walls where they were obviously chasing something. The Apaches took out two shooters on a motorbike. One of them, I was told a few minutes later, was a high-value target (HVT) known to the Americans as ‘Kojak’. He’d been tagged for planting IEDs and ordering raids. A patrol was dispatched to pick up the body parts, which were to be scanned and documented before sending the data to the Intel people. I had already come under attack twice from the Taliban militia operating in this area, and now I wasn’t inclined to shed a tear for these people. It turned out the intelligence staff had had an eye on Kojak for most of the night, and by the time he made his run at the US Marines’ base, the Apaches were waiting for him. The patrol never located the body parts as the bodies were whisked away by locals before we reached the location.
A couple of the Marine snipers attached to the 3/6 were taking fire ahead of the patrol I was travelling with. The Marines got down to the gunfight very quickly, and I followed them, running in a zig-zag pattern across open ground, as they tried to sneak up on the Taliban shooters. And yes, with the cameras going all the time. I tend to think about the balance between taking my shots and staying alive later, when I’m having a rest. When things are happening and we have contact with the enemy, I just use the camera instinctively.
The pattern of life at Beatley was pretty rough. Not only were there constant threats from the Taliban, but it was a harsh, dusty, isolated part of the world. It’s easy to imagine American soldiers living a life of luxury in their foreign wars, and obviously Americans are wealthy compared to just about anyone living in the developing world. But Beatley had no running water, only a small generator for power, no beds, and ‘poo bags’ for going to the toilet. These were plastic sealable bags with a chemical agent in them that broke down the faeces in four days, making their disposal easier. One night the pallet containing our poo bag supply was burned down so we had to re-use what we’d been issued until we could be resupplied. I was very specific about which one was mine, but the Marines got a bit mixed up and there was a lot of dysentery in the patrol base after that.
The 3/6 Marines mostly did foot patrols in the day. So there was the heat exhaustion of walking with a loaded pack and a rifle in 50º heat, but it was worse when you consider how much water they had to carry to stay hydrated. About the only thing heavier than water is steel, but even then, a rifle is pressed steel – it’s not solid. So water becomes your friend and enemy. I learned to disperse it around my body and my pack in smaller even weights, to at least balance the load. On a hot day we’d be out and about by 6 am, trying to beat the heat, but if there was a delay or a contact or they found an IED and decided to call in the engineers, you’d be out until dusk and that meant carrying enough water to see you through. It wasn’t unusual for a soldier to carry 10 kg of water.
A patrol could be delayed because spotters were following us. Spotters were Taliban lookouts who hid on the ridges and kept an eye on where the Marines were travelling that day, informing their commanders of the movement. Some spotters would just watch us go by but some would have rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and sometimes they’d fire at us. The US Marines patrols had recon and sniper elements that roamed ahead and around, finding these spotters and also working out where reinforcements were massing and reporting back to the patrol leaders. The first time a spotter took a shot at the unit, the Marines worked like a machine: they immediately went into harbour protection, where they’d fall into a circle pointing their rifles outwards. This was because an obvious spotter sitting on the ridge line might be the distraction for a bunch of shooters hiding in the bushes. So they covered the threat in front of them and the potential one at their backs. When these sightings occurred several times a day, we wouldn’t be back at base until nightfall, everyone tired. People ask me if I felt unsafe on these patrols, and the obvious answer is ‘yes’ – these are inherently unsafe environments where people try to kill you. But once I got used to the rhythms of the patrols and their training and focus, I realised there was probably no safer way of travelling through rural Afghanistan.
I loved my time with the 3/6 Marines and they were in my thoughts whenever I heard a news report from Afghanistan. They were right in the middle of the shit and they always made sure I was okay. I made some fantastic photographs during my time with those boys.
23
Dust-Off Action
When I left the Marines I returned to Camp Dwyer in Helmand province, the base for a unit called the Dust-Off crew. The Dust-Off guys are a legendary bunch of highly- valued casualty-evacuation (CASEVAC) people who fly Black Hawk helicopters into the worst situations and try to retrieve and keep alive those injured in the field. I’d had these guys in the back on my mind for a while, wanting to document them because of how highly every soldier in-country spoke of them.
I joined them at Camp Dwyer in early June 2010. Dwyer was a major US Marines base in southern Helmand, which looked as if it had been plonked down on a beach. The ground beneath it was very sandy and when the wind blew, it was an immediate dust storm. The soldiers and pilots lived in large standard tents, surrounded by HESCO blast walls, and also mini cities of Quonset-styled tents.
The Dust-Off teams – run by the US Army – consisted of four crew in each Black Hawk: two pilots, a crew chief and a flight medic. They immediately struck me as humble, strong people with a lot of focus. As I was to realise as I did missions with them, these people were not the ‘high five’ style of Americans. They were something quite different.
The main benchmark for a Dust-Off crew is a return trip called the ‘golden hour’. If they get an Alpha call – which means the casualty is verging on being a fatality – the US Army requires the Dust-Off crew to get to the casualty, stabilise him and bring him back to the hospital in under an hour. This includes the twelve-minute run-up, which is how long the flight crews need to bring up all the temperatures and pressures, and do a safety check on the aircraft.
I wanted to document their amazing work, especially since it hadn’t been done for an Australian audience. They accepted me quickly and after a couple of days asked me to join them on one of their mercy dashes. So I took to hanging my Kevlar vest in the helicopter, where the crews had theirs. I was ready to go. Now all I needed was an Alpha call.
In this part of the world, I wouldn’t have to wait long.
***
I was sitting in one of the canvas-covered tented areas at the Dust-Off HQ, talking to a medic, when the Alpha call came over the speaker system. It was 6 June, 11.35 am, and the urgency was incredible. Everyone, myself included, dropped what they were doi
ng and scrambled onto this Black Hawk, whose pilots were doing their run-ups as we climbed in the side door. I put on my ballistic vest before getting into my cameras harness, then clipped into the rear forward-facing fold-down seat and tried to keep my adrenaline under control as we sped across country to the scene of a fire fight. By now I had my earphones plugged into the helicopter’s comms jacks via my camera – a technique I stumbled on during the Jessica Watson gig – and I could hear all the back and forth between the Dust-Off pilot and the officer on the ground. A US Marine had been shot in the hand.
We flew in from the south, towards a typical scrub- covered hill where US soldiers were spread out in attack formation, looking up the hill. The pilot asked for the situation on the ground – they don’t have to land in a ‘hot’ landing zone (LZ) – and the officer said the shooting had died down. Perhaps the shooting had died down but shots were still being exchanged on that hill as we descended. The guys I was with in the back – Adam and Derek – got the injured Marine into the cabin and started treating him immediately, cleaning the hand wound and doing triage. I took some shots without getting in the way. But on the way back to Camp Dwyer with the injured Marine we got a Charlie call – a bad injury but not imminently life threatening. He was a local boy, about 10, with an injured eyeball that looked hacked, but no one seemed to know what from. The Black Hawk swooped, we picked him up and continued back to the hospital. This child was in a bad way. His head was already bandaged, and the Dust-Off guys went to work on the eye. We got both of these people to the base hospital and were at the base for half an hour when another Alpha call came in, this time for a Marine who’d taken a gunshot to the head.
It was a big introduction to Dust-Off and I was seeing how they’d earned their reputation. They were very efficient and organised, and obviously incredibly well drilled. There isn’t a lot of space in the back of a Black Hawk once you have a couple of patients and the two crew back there. And they worked around each other, with all of their IV drips and heart-starter machines and bags of medical supplies. It was like watching ballet – no one ever had to tell their colleague to get out of the way.
The pilots were amazing too. The zones they fly into are usually ones where there are rifles and RPGs going off, and their calm judgement about where they can put down is pretty cool to watch. I mean, these were sites where Taliban were shooting at us, and they were pretty motivated to down a US helicopter.
The next morning I was eating eggs, coffee and hamburger in the shade of the over-hanging tarp. In my first day of flying with Dust-Off, I’d seen the boy with the hacked and bleeding eye and I knew I had to focus, stay busy. As I sipped on my coffee, the siren sounded – an Alpha call. I ran to the chopper and got on my body armour and we were airborne in the regulation twelve minutes. I plugged my headphones and camera into the comms jack in the helicopter, and listened in to the radio traffic. After a few minutes we got to a hot LZ. Through the pilot’s windshield I could see two Cobra gunships pouring cannon fire into the scrub. The commander on the ground was telling the Dust-Off crew to hang back for one minute while they dug the Taliban out of there. As I listened to the radio talk I heard the agonising compromises being made between pilot and the team leader: they wanted this injured soldier out of there so he could live, but no one gets to live if the Dust-Off chopper is shot out of the sky. They had to have caution ahead of courage.
Confusion reigned. The noise was deafening, and it wasn’t until the words, ‘The patient is crashing,’ came over the radio that Adam – one of medics with me in the back – said, ‘Fuck this, we have to go in.’
The panic from the ground crew was palpable over the radio. They were losing one of their guys and they couldn’t secure the ground so we could land. Finally, the pilot said, ‘Screw it,’ and descended to the designated CASEVAC site. Adam, an athletic twenty-seven-year-old from Illinois, jumped out of the chopper before it touched down and sprinted two hundred metres over broken ground to where a group of four Marines was struggling under the dead weight of their wounded colleague. Adam directed them to the chopper and the patient was placed on board. As we lifted off above the melee, the medics in the back were already going to work on this guy. He’d taken a bullet through one lung and so it was a sucking wound with no pressure to get the breathing going.
Adam tried everything, all the way back to base, even CPR, while I got shots of a young man struggling to save the soldier. There is nothing glamorous or heroic about a sucking chest wound, and when Adam got me to operate the CPR mask on the patient, it didn’t feel uplifting; it felt futile. We came in fast and low to the Role 3 hospital. Derek threw the door open and Adam frantically waved towards the waiting medical staff to get their arses out to the aircraft. It was a slow process because the medical staff tried to get him onto a wheeled litter but it had got stuck in the makeshift pebble landing pad. I couldn’t stand the delay – I’d taken the journey with this injured soldier, tried to keep him alive – and now I wanted him in that dammed intensive care unit. I dropped my cameras, grabbed both stretcher handles and pulled upwards. I took his weight so the medics could untangle the trolley. They eventually unengaged it and took him away to be treated. When Derek and Adam returned we lifted off and flew back to the Dust-Off hardstand at Camp Dwyer. And that’s when the reality of this work started to sink in. Having got off the chopper, and looked in, I saw it from another perspective. The back of the aircraft was a real mess: blood everywhere, discarded dressings, bloody tubes and CPR masks – a real mess of human flesh on metal.
I breathed out a couple of long breaths, feeling the adrenaline slowly letting go. Flying into a hot LZ, with gunfire all around, and then trying to save a soldier with a bullet through his chest, and seeing how much it meant to the Dust-Off crews, was a profound experience. And one that really smelled like war: the cordite of battle, the exhaust fumes of a helicopter. It was indelible.
Once the engines were shut off the rest of the detachment came out on the hardstand and helped with stripping the armour from the floor so they could wash out all of the blood with hoses and scrubbing brushes. They handed out plastic gloves and they all pitched in, scrubbing the Black Hawk floors. I realised that this was more than just cleaning – it was a ritual, and in a strange way I felt part of it. At very least, I didn’t think I could go through a mission like that and pretend I wasn’t affected. So I got my shots – and then put down my cameras and pitched in with the clean-up. The picture of a medic holding a hose as he sprayed water into the floor of the helicopter with the red cross off to the right said so much. You actually get the idea of what is going on at that moment without actually seeing the horror of the event.
After we’d finished Sergeant Derek Costine called my name.
‘Gary, catch,’ he said, throwing me the Dust-Off unit patch. ‘Welcome.’
It was his way of saying thanks for helping.
By now it was only 10.30 am – this was a breakfast job. As I looked for a coffee, I was joined by Adam. In Adam I was seeing many of the good qualities of Americans, the qualities so often overlooked by our media. He was humble and brave, up for a laugh and also serious about his job. And I had been impressed with the way he urged the pilot to land in the hot LZ and then ran to grab the casualty.
‘He was basically dead when I reached him,’ said Adam, of the soldier with the lung shot. ‘But I couldn’t give up on him – we don’t give up.’
***
Flying with the Dust-Off crew was busy and action-packed, but I hadn’t been fully prepared for the non-stop intensity of the work. A couple of days after the soldier with the shot lung, I was informed by Dust-Off that two Australian soldiers had been killed and then, the morning after, a US Marine unit was attacked and there were already two confirmed Angels – Dust-Off code for killed in action – along with a lot of Alpha patients. We scrambled and flew across country, two helicopters just thirty metres off the ground. The first Black Hawk took the Angels and Alphas, and we picked up the Bravo patients
– who were out of action but with injuries unlikely to lead to death. This meant bullet holes in young men, a lost eyeball, shrapnel buried in flesh. It was quite a sight, and what was remarkable was the range of reactions to combat injuries: some were yelling, freaking out; some just wanted to sleep; some were panting, calling for water; and others were floating in an out of consciousness. Most babbled, wanting to know that their fellow soldiers were okay.
On the way back with our Bravo casualties, I was introduced to one of the things that has really stayed with me from that war. We stopped off at a village because a two-year-old local girl had ingested diesel and needed hospitalisation. We had to be very careful about this pick-up because Taliban militias were forcing diesel into kids’ throats to lure the medic choppers, which the Taliban could then shoot down. But ignoring the call was not an option. So when we landed it was a cautious set-down. Adam was very quick to grab the girl and get her into the chopper before we lifted off again at great speed. When we landed back at Dwyer, Adam jumped out of the helo; he landed badly, breaking his ankle, but kept hold of the little girl. He got her onto the waiting gurney and into the hospital, where she was saved.
The stress of this embedding mounted by the hour – there was no respite from it. A day after we picked up the girl with diesel poisoning a US Special Forces PEDRO helicopter was shot down and four Americans were killed. This helicopter carried the best of the best medics (Dust-Off is US Army, PEDRO is US Air Force).