by Gary Ramage
We were called out again, another Alpha – a young soldier had triggered an IED and had taken the full blast. He was lucky to survive but was going to lose both his legs. When we got back to Dwyer there was another Alpha callout. After fifteen minutes of CPR in the cabin of the Black Hawk, the medic sat back and shook his head. The soldier had died. That was now three dead Marines in three days, in the bird I’d been travelling in.
Two days after the PEDRO had been shot out of the sky, we flew into the same area, to attend another casualty. But this one wasn’t an American or Aussie, and also not an innocent local. He was a Taliban bomb-maker who’d had his hands damaged by an IED that detonated in-place. The Dust-Off guys flew to him and saved him as if he were one of their own.
I was becoming fatigued by the missions: not just the physical effort but the mental and emotional burden. A lot of death and agony, up close in a confined space, is very confronting, and when I’m working I’m forcing myself to see things that are upsetting, so I’m really processing too much. So the next morning I missed my alarm and slept through.
I joined the crew again that afternoon and we went to a call at a hot LZ, where bullets were coming close to the nose of the Black Hawk as we landed. When that sort of thing is happening, there’s a chance of dying and, sure, I feel some trepidation – if a PEDRO helicopter can be downed by the Taliban then so can a Dust-Off. But I also assess the environment and the company I keep, and I trust professionals who care about their own welfare; if the risk is too great, they won’t do it. But that isn’t to say I’m comfortable with landing in a hot LZ – no one is comfortable with that, not even Dust-Off crews.
As we touched down a soldier ran towards the chopper with a dog in his arms. He’d walked with his dog into an IED and the dog had come off worse. The US Marine dog handler followed the animal onto the chopper – he’d taken shrapnel to the neck in a big, ugly bleeding mess. We returned to that hot LZ later in the day and a soldier who had been shot in the leg broke from the bushes and ran for the chopper. Watching him run in an agonising hobble is another very strong memory from that gig. The look on his face, the will to live, the encouragement and help from the Dust-Off crew. He flopped into the Black Hawk, relieved to be on the aircraft, but in agony from the gunshot. Sights like that don’t leave you.
After that day I had to move on, because I had other embeds to do. But I wrote my first feature piece about my time with the Dust-Off crews, and it got a run in the Murdoch press. I was very impressed with these people because to me they’re the guys who live by their motto, ‘Never refuse a mission, never return with an empty helicopter, and the needs of the patient come first’. And to them I was the Aussie who helped them clean the blood out of the helicopter.
24
Airlifts and Elections
I caught a small C-130 from Dwyer, and I was at Camp Bastion one hour later with my five bags. Bastion was a British-built base, home to the NATO logistics hub in the south of Afghanistan. I’d requested to visit the British/ Australian Cutler Troop at Camp Armadillo in Helmund. It was a real Taliban-magnet and had been the subject of a Danish documentary. It was situated near a place called Gereshk, which had been a pain in the arse since the British were at war in Afghanistan the first time around, in the nineteenth century.
I was assigned to a Royal Navy helicopter, where the loadmaster was an Aussie on exchange. It was really wild out there. Armadillo was a coalition Forward Operating Base sitting on a hill, and down the road from the hill was a small, hostile village. The Taliban militias in this part of Afghanistan were so brazen that they’d come up the hill and plant IEDs on the front gate of the base, from which two people had been killed; they’d been known to throw grenades over the walls. The Aussies and Poms got on very well and were eager to engage the Taliban.
Back in Kandahar I travelled with the British RAF Air Defence Guards in their Panther and Cougar vehicles, which are armoured patrol vehicles with heavy machine guns on them. I did this for two days, taking good pictures, but not getting into any contacts. Then I was back to spend time with 6 RAR out of Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan. The big mission for 6 RAR was the take-over of Forward Base Razak from the Dutch contingent and replacing them with the Aussies. Ironically, the 6 RAR end of my stint was relatively safe, and the Razak handover was highly controlled and professionally managed. Until – that is – the final days of my embedding with 6 RAR, when private Nathan Bewes was killed by an IED.
***
It was an exhausting six weeks in-country and I probably overdid it. I took a couple of weeks’ holiday when I got back. My best mate, Trevor Bailey, was getting married and he’d asked me to be best man. After Trev and Jodie’s wedding it was off to cover the 2010 election: Julia Gillard versus Tony Abbott. Not exactly blood and guts in the back of a Black Hawk, but an all-consuming six weeks all the same: totally exhausting and deathly repetitive. Planes, hotels, photo calls. I got to know Tony Abbott, who was always nice to me and was always up for a short chat. He knew me by name and would wander down the back of the plane. I don’t see this as vanity, by the way, with either Abbott or Rudd or any of them. When your job is how you are presented in the media, you notice the shots that present you well and it’s your job to understand that process. Later, when Abbott won the 2013 election and became prime minister, he was still affable and I saw glimpses of a real Tony Abbott who wanted to break out of the controlled media performance and be himself. He was similar to Gillard in that he liked a bit of a joke and he had an infectious laugh. Photographers probably see this more than the journos because we’re not quoting them and writing the stories. So when we did a photo call without a journo, Abbott or Gillard were fun, likeable people. Especially when you give them the photographer’s gee-up to get them smiling. Rudd and Howard? They were the same whoever was around. Abbott’s final months in the job – before being rolled by Turnbull in September 2015 – saw him really pulling back from the Press Gallery in general and the photographers in particular. Perhaps he felt besieged by all the talk of a coup? I don’t know, but he really withdrew.
I covered the 2007, 2010 and 2013 federal elections (and as I write this I’m gearing-up for the 2016 election). I also covered a large number of foreign delegations led by prime ministers or foreign ministers. For these jobs everyone in the media likes to be on the plane, but the exhaustion is something you have to accept before you do it. These politicians cram a lot into a week when they go overseas, and when you’re the photographer you have to be on deck for all of it.
I’ve seen some real stamina from these top politicians, and I thought the Iron Man of them all was Rudd. But when Malcolm Turnbull became PM, his first foreign tour covered five countries in eight days. On that trip we did fifty hours straight on our first leg into and around Jakarta, and then the Paris attacks happened while we were in Berlin, so it was all hands to the pump. Also on the itinerary were Turkey, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. And the PM charged through it like the Duracell bunny, scaring the bejesus out of a journalist or two.
***
I arranged to head back to Afghanistan in August 2011. This time I was I was going to be spending time with the 2 RAR, first at Tarin Kowt and then at FOB Tinsley in western Uruzgan. But before I joined the Aussies, I was going back to embed with a new Dust-Off crew, this time a group from the Minnesota National Guard: or, to be more precise, C Company 1/171 Air Ambulance, 4th Platoon. This crew was based at FOB Edinburgh in Helmand, codenamed Task Force Thunder. Edinburgh was built on rocky ground, was enclosed by HESCO blast walls and, because it supported so many aviation units, there were large stacks of shipping containers (for mobile mechanic workshops and spare parts) and lots of refuelling infrastructure. It was like living at a makeshift airport, albeit bloody and dusty.
It was early August, the first day of my embed with C Company. I was eating my lunch – my first MRE, Meal Ready to Eat, of the assignment – when the loudhailer broke the silence with a medevac, medevac, medevac alert. The crews of both Black Hawks scram
bled towards the aircraft, their boots loud on the stony ground. The blades were spinning and I was already strapped into my seat by the time Damian, the flight medic, jumped in. He gave me a nod of approval and then the bird lifted off. Our call sign was ‘Dust-Off 41’, and the crew had a category Alpha – someone was close to death.
Over the radio system I picked up that we were racing towards a local boy who’d been shot in the lower right abdomen. Unlike some of the longer flights in my first Dust- Off assignment, this time we were on the scene in minutes. The left-hand door slid back towards me and Marines raced towards the chopper with a small boy lying motionless on a stretcher. As soon as he was in the helicopter the door was slammed shut and we were in the air, racing towards the field hospital at FOB Edinburgh. The flight medic, Sergeant Michael Armesto, and the crew chief, Sergeant Brendan Anderson, went to work on the boy immediately. Michael applied CPR chest compressions as the boy faded; his airway was blocked with vomit and Brendan tried to clear it as Michael continued CPR. The boy’s blood pressure was dropping all the time, and it got down to twenty beats. He was bleeding out.
The Black Hawk came in quick at the base and the hospital staff grabbed the boy and raced him into surgery. I followed them and watched the military doctors crack open the boy’s chest and start manual CPR of the heart. One of the medics later told me that even if the kid survived he would be brain dead as he was down for about twenty minutes. When I enquired about the boy later that night, I was told he didn’t make it. He had became another tragic statistic in this campaign against the Taliban.
The second mission for the day involved a local driver in a military convoy who’d been shot in the right elbow. The round had gone through and exited the other side. Two Marines walked him to the helicopter, through a huge amount of dust kicked up by the spinning blades. Michael provided care for the man as he was flown to the hospital at Bastion.
Four days later we responded to a double-category Alpha at FOB Robinson. One of the Georgian soldiers had taken a round to the back of the head but he was conscious and still talking to the medic during the flight to the Role 3 hospital. The other Georgian had been shot in the back and there was a hole the size of my fist in his lower left side. He was also conscious and talking to the medic during the flight.
As my second week started, I was paired with another crew, who introduced themselves as Jeremy, Lucas, Shep and Will. These guys told me that whenever they were put together, the days were hectic. I thought they were pulling my leg, but then the siren went and we were into the first mission of the day at around 8 am, a category Alpha for a US Marine with acute appendicitis. Having dropped him at hospital, the second call was another cat Alpha: a US Marine had stepped on an IED and it had taken off his left foot above the ankle. The calmness of the Dust-Off guys as they triaged the soldier’s mangled leg was humbling. The sight of a fellow American with all his meat and bone on display must have been upsetting, but they got on with their job. Then I had a strange interaction. The soldier was in shock but was conscious and talking, and he wasn’t talking to the medic, he wanted to talk to me. I’d crouched down to give him some attention while the medic dealt with another patient, and as we talked about life he had a really good grip on my forearm. When we got to the hospital, he thanked me profusely, and I told him I hadn’t done a thing.
‘Yeah, you did,’ he said. ‘Thank you, man. Thank you, man.’
That Marine survived, and I have no idea why our chat mattered so much to me, but it did.
We were barely in the air again when the Dust-Off guys were assigned another cat Alpha. An insurgent fighter with a gunshot wound to the right shoulder had to be taken to the Role 2 medical facility at Edinburgh. Amid the blood and screaming agony, it was mildly amusing, because when the medic cut off the patient’s clothes to look for other injuries, the guy was more worried about people seeing his dick than he was about his shoulder wound.
After this, we stopped to grab a hamburger and coffee, and we were just taking the weight off when a fourth cat Alpha was announced. A US military truck in a large convoy had hit an IED and four Marines had been injured. When we arrived all of the injured were walking, at least, which was a good sign, but they were beaten up: the improvised shrapnel bombs leave a variety of terrible injuries. Someone had a smashed wrist, someone’s thigh muscle was sliced through, another person had an injured skull. We dropped them at the Role 3 hospital at Camp Bastion, and before we flew out the Dust-Off boys pre-ordered pizza from Bastion so we feasted when we returned to FOB Edinburgh.
From day one at C Company, there was at least one Alpha case every day, with amputees, multiple bullet wounds and shrapnel trauma. Lots of bleeding, lots of screaming and lives hanging in the balance. I was ready for it this time – as much as you ever can be ready for it. The first assignment with Dust-Off had been a shock to the senses: the eyes, the ears, the nose. Combat CASEVAC is a torrid business, with no opportunity to look away once the patient is on the chopper. On this trip I was doing some interviewing, asking military personnel about their tours and their lives and getting it on tape. One time, I was having a chat with Shep, a strongly- built paramedic from Minnesota, and a larger-than-life operator who exuded confidence and strength. But when I asked him about life back home, he got upset; he missed his family, he missed his buddies and he was feeling the hourly stress of this job. No matter what these people went through in that shit hole called Helmand they still maintained their humanity.
I was realising that these people were not so different from me. And that there is only so much you can take. As I was to discover when we picked up a patient from FOB Judas, operated by the Georgians. A ten-year-old boy had been chasing a chicken in his rural village when a Taliban IED triggered, killing the boy’s younger brother and riddling the surviving boy with hot shrapnel. The Dust-Off crew wrote medications on the boy’s chest, willing him to stay alive. I documented it as well as I could. But I documented his final minutes, not his miracle recovery.
When you do this job, you have to tell yourself not to take it personally. But there are limits to that philosophy.
25
The Contact at Doan
I flew into Camp Russell at Tarin Kowt – the Australian base – where I’d spend a few days alone before meeting Macca at FOB Tinsley. At Camp Russell there was a ramp ceremony for Matthew Lambert, from 2 RAR, who had been killed in action. He was a sniper, and the whole sniper section turned out dressed in their ghillie suits and carrying their sniper rifles to see him off. It was quite a sight to see all these soldiers dressed in suits with foliage hanging out of them.
I caught a US Chinook out to the remote patrol base called Tinsley, where the Australian Army was helping to train Afghanistan National Army (ANA) soldiers. The Australian Commander – Middle East, Major General Angus Campbell, was willing to support me doing an assignment at Tinsley, to show the folks back home that we were nation- building, not just terrorist-destroying. That was the plan, but Tinsley was in the violent outer reaches of Uruzgan, and it turned out that the PR mission coincided with what I now describe as the Contact at Doan.
PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE
2 RAR snipers in their ghillie suits, seeing off one of their own.
It started well enough. Tinsley was a comfortable patrol base, and with the support of General Campbell I was accompanying the Aussie patrols as they trained the ANA. But very quickly hostilities erupted with the Taliban, and the Aussie commanders decided to launch an aggressive patrol around the outlying area. We set off at around four o’clock one morning and first contact didn’t take long. As we walked among the mud-brick homes of a farming village, the first shots rang out three or four hundred metres from us. One of the Aussie patrols was in contact, and it was on. Suddenly the radio traffic was alive with Aussie Army shorthand and slang as the platoon tried to zero in on the enemy.
It was a cat-and-mouse game for a few hours, as the scouts, snipers and recon guys drew sporadic contact and the HQ platoon element I
was with tried to assess how the fight was developing and where to commit. It’s important to understand how infantry units balanced their aggression with caution in Afghanistan. One of the methods of the Taliban was to use skirmishes – where the Taliban take a few shots and then disappear into the country – to pull the Aussie or American soldiers in a certain direction. Having encouraged commitment from the foreign forces, the Taliban could launch an ambush or get the foreigners to rush their vehicles through a choke-point at which point the IEDs would be triggered.
So the stop-start nature of these patrols wasn’t dithering. It was like boxers circling, trying to sort the real punch from the feint and working out where the force was really hiding. The recon guys and the snipers seemed to work from pre-dawn until dusk, getting information back to the unit leaders. Just as the sun was coming up that morning, we came out of the green zone – the cropping area on the valley floor – intending to climb a hill of steep scree. With the diggers muttering their annoyance we started climbing. The first shot rang out when the first of the section was halfway up the slope. The bullets went between the first two diggers and there was no cover and nowhere to run. So the soldiers beside me just fought their way up that slope and it’s lucky the shooter was such a lousy shot, or a few of us would have been dead. Corporal Mark Tunnicliffe, the section leader, was up the front with the scout when the firing started, and he later told me he felt a bullet brush past him. Once we got to the top, everyone was panting for breath and soaked with sweat. Now I knew why soldiers avoided those slopes – you’re not just a sitting duck, you’re an exhausted sitting duck.