Combat Camera (6 page)

Shahzad

Our first job outside the wire was with 3 Para in Nad-e Ali, two weeks into our tour. BBC Four had requested footage of the Paras in Afghanistan to use in their documentary series
Regimental Stories
, which focused on different units within the British Army, looking at their history, training and current deployments. We were flying out to 3 Para’s headquarters at Patrol Base Shahzad, driving out to one of their smaller bases, then going out on foot with one of their patrols. Ali was also coming, taking photographs that would hopefully be of interest to the British press.

Before we left Bastion I stopped by the office to say goodbye to Sean, the outgoing Combat Camera Team leader who was about to catch his flight home. A wiry ex-Marine in his late twenties, he’d been full of advice during his handover to me, some of it useful, some of it less so. When he wasn’t in uniform, he worked for a shipping firm in Glasgow. How this qualified him for a position in Media Operations, I had no idea, but he seemed to like it out here.

“So you all set for Nad-e Ali?” he said.

“I think so.”

“Make sure you put one of your dog tags in your boot.”

“Why?” Both of my identity discs were hanging around my neck.

“In case your legs get blown off.”

“Seriously?”

He looked at me sympathetically. I felt a story coming on. Like Afghanistan itself, Sean was full of them. You never had to look far
to find something dramatic out here, and if Media Operations was your line of work, you were in clover. It was just a case of weeding out all the nasty stuff before you got to the telling.

“I was on this patrol last month,” Sean began. “We came across this compound, and were about to go in and take a look around, when a friendly Afghan ran across and told us not to go in, because it was littered with IEDs. So we didn’t go in, we carried on our way. But as we were walking past one of the open doorways, we saw a soldier’s boot just lying there, still with the foot inside.”

It wasn’t the most reassuring story I’d ever heard. Sean needed to work on his editing skills, clearly.

“It’s not uncommon to see lumps of flesh just rotting by the side of the track,” he added. “Sometimes it’s not worth the risk, clearing it up.”

“Sounds wonderful, Sean.”

He smiled. “Don’t worry, Julian, you’ll be fine.”

“
Julian
?” I said. “It’s Christian.”

“Christian?”

“Yes,
Christian
.”

It had seemed like a genuine mistake on Sean’s part, getting my name wrong, but it spooked me nonetheless. Julian was a fellow member of the MOG, and to my knowledge the only Combat Camera Team leader to have come to any harm out here. It had happened a year earlier. He’d been hit by shrapnel, a blast fragment skewering his hand while he was out with his cameraman.

“I’m not great with names,” Sean said. “Sorry about that.”

Julian had recovered OK, but it wasn’t exactly a good omen. I was feeling uneasy as it was – two Irish Guards had just been killed by an IED in the last week of their tour, and a Para who’d lost his
legs a few days earlier had also just died. There was a lot of death going on, and it was still only March.

Sean then made matters worse by showing me a clip from his head cam of an IED blowing up four soldiers on a joint patrol earlier in his tour.

“I don’t want to shit you up,” he said, opening the file on his laptop. “But I think you should see what an IED blast looks like.”

The clip began with Sean at the back of the patrol, walking along a wide, sandy track with his cameraman a few yards in front of him. A line of about a dozen Afghan soldiers stretched out ahead of them, leading to the corner of a mud compound seventy yards away. The point man had stopped just short of it and was pondering his next move, the corners of walls being known as hotspots for IEDs. A moment later he stepped off the track and continued with the patrol, putting some extra space between himself and the wall, the soldiers behind him following in his footsteps.

He’d only gone a few yards when the IED – buried near the foot of the wall – exploded. Sean and everybody else froze, the head cam trained on a huge cloud of smoke and dust engulfing the front of the patrol. Seconds later the head cam started to bounce violently up and down as Sean began to run, joining his cameraman in a charge towards the blast site.

The IED had knocked down four of the Afghans. They were spread out along the side of the track, flat out in the dust. Amazingly, none of them had died, all of them showing signs of life, groaning together in bewildered unison. Sean and his cameraman set about them with field dressings and morphine, doing what they could to help. One of the Afghans had lost a big chunk of his forearm. Another had a hole like an open mouth in the side of his face.

“We did release this footage,” Sean said. “But then it got withdrawn. It’s not the best messaging, to be fair.”

I suppose it was useful training, watching the entire sequence of an IED blast – by stepping away from the corner of the compound, the point man had saved himself and his colleagues – but it didn’t exactly stoke my appetite for my first patrol. If I could just get through it without the IEDs and the misplaced lumps of flesh, I’d be a happy man.

“My tour has been really quiet,” Sean said, closing his laptop. “This summer should be much more lively.”

“More lively?”

“Definitely.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “I envy you.”

* * *

I flew to Patrol Base Shahzad with Russ and Ali later that evening, our Merlin skimming the poppy fields of Nad-e Ali under a full moon and a sky thick with stars. I’d never been a huge fan of helicopters, but this was something else. I was actually enjoying myself, the whole flight like something out of a dream. For a second I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad way to die, crashing into a field of opium and getting blown to pieces in a massive fireball. At least it would be quick.

After ten minutes of fairground flying we landed with a thud at Shahzad’s helipad. The three of us grabbed our kit and stepped out into the moonlight. A gravel pathway led towards the base’s old factory, a stone building covered in scorch marks and bullet holes. We headed towards the lights of the main entrance, the Merlin blasting us with sand and grit as it roared back up into the night.

The old factory was home to 3 Para’s headquarters. The walls were about two feet thick, giving it the feel of a bunker. It had once
housed a construction firm employing thousands of locals from across Nad-e Ali. Before the Taliban got inside and ransacked the place, the firm had built the district’s extensive irrigation system, allowing crops and vegetation to flourish. They’d also built and maintained many of the local roads.

We walked into the lobby through a set of thick wooden doors. Five young Paras were sitting at a long table to one side of the room, quietly checking their Facebook messages on a row of laptops. Three other Paras were sitting at a table behind them, watching a football match on the wall-mounted television in the corner. To the other side of the room, hundreds of paperbacks filled a row of shelves cut into the wall. There was also a brew table nearby, with a stack of paper cups and a tea urn.

I noticed that a handful of press cuttings had been stuck to the wall behind the urn. Taking pride of place, right in the middle of the assorted headlines, was a piece by the
Daily Telegraph
’s Thomas Harding. An ex-Para himself, he’d been embedded with 3 Para earlier in the month, producing an article on a Taliban sniper who was targeting soldiers at Patrol Base Qadrat, just a few kilometres up the road:

Two soldiers have been killed and six wounded over the past four months at the base in Qadrat. One Taliban marksman has been killed, but another has eluded efforts to remove him and continues to shoot at soldiers… There have been many near misses with soldiers’ armour hit or returning with a hole in their backpacks. Qadrat has been recognized as the most dangerous outpost in Helmand – the site of the highest number of gunshot wounds per soldier.
*

I read the article carefully, wondering whether we’d be going to Qadrat in the morning. I knew our hosts were planning to take us to one of their outposts, but they still hadn’t said which one. The other possibility was Khamaar, a patrol base about which I knew practically nothing. I’d located it on the map, just over two kilometres south-west of Qadrat, but that was the full extent of my knowledge. Whether it also came with its own neighbourhood sniper, I had no idea.

I slept badly that night. We were put up in a transit tent with four other soldiers, all of us dozing fitfully in the darkness. Less than a hundred yards away, a troop of 105-mm guns from 7th Regiment Royal Horse Artillery blasted out fire missions into the early hours of the morning. I lay on a camp cot with my combat jacket for a pillow, staring up at the roof of the tent, a showreel of death and destruction stuck on repeat inside my head, playing out on the black canvas above me. In a matter of hours I’d be going outside the wire for the first time, out on the ground, out in the shit. Surrounded by snipers, IEDs and lumps of rotting flesh…

I got up early. Sunlight started to leak into our tent from 5 a.m. I went outside for a piss and a shave, noting through half-open eyes the perfect crystal blueness of the sky.
If I get hit
, I told myself,
I can look up at that sky and pretend to be somewhere less fucking ghastly
.

I joined Russ and Ali for breakfast. They were sitting at one of the trestle tables inside the dining tent, surrounded by noisy, hungry Paras. Both of them seemed calm and relaxed, the banality of their small talk bringing some much needed perspective to the wild meanderings of my imagination.

“This bacon is terrible,” said Ali.

“It’s not that bad,” said Russ. “I’ll eat it.”

Things got better after that, lifting my mood considerably. It turned out we were going to Khamaar, which I decided was probably for the best. It hadn’t featured in any of the newspaper reports I’d read on Nad-e Ali, so it can’t have been that bad. Surely, if it was dangerous, Thomas Harding would’ve gone there as well?

Our transport arrived shortly after breakfast, three Mastiffs rolling slowly into the vehicle yard through the back gate. Despite their unsophisticated appearance – they looked like giant coffins on wheels – they were still the safest road vehicles we had. Even if we drove directly onto an IED, we’d be OK – unless it was a small nuclear device, we’d just get shaken up.

Although Khamaar was only five kilometres from Shahzad as the crow flies, it took more than an hour to get there. The lumbering Mastiffs were not designed for speed, and the roads in Nad-e Ali were terrible. I sat with Russ and Ali in the back of the rear Mastiff, bouncing around in our seats, trying to get our first look at Afghan life through the narrow bulletproof windows. From what I could tell, it all seemed fairly calm outside, with nothing to suggest a country torn apart by war. Children worked alongside their fathers in the fields, while young men rode along the roads and tracks on their motorbikes. None of them appeared to be carrying any weapons, and none of them looked like they wanted to kill us.

Eventually we got to Khamaar, a base made up almost entirely of tents and Hesco fortifications.
*
It was much smaller than Shahzad, with no reassuring stone building in the middle of it. Our Mastiff pulled up outside the entrance to the largest tent, next to a smartly painted sign declaring “A Company Headquarters”. We opened the heavy doors at the back of the Mastiff and stepped out onto
the gravel, stretching our legs in the sunshine. It was 10 a.m. now, and already feeling hot.

A Company wasted no time getting us out on a patrol. We’d only just dragged our kit from the back of the Mastiff when the company sergeant major – a suitably hard-looking man with cropped hair – stepped out of the headquarters tent and told us we were going straight off.

Within twenty minutes we were standing at the back of a twelve-man patrol, lined up by the loading bay, waiting for the front gates to open. Like everybody else, I was wearing a Mark VII “bullet-stopper” helmet, a full set of Osprey body armour (fitted with chest, back and side ceramic plates), two tiers of pelvic protection – consisting of anti-microbial boxer shorts and a soft Kevlar garment known as a “combat nappy”, designed to safeguard your genitals in the event of an IED blast – and a pair of ballistic sunglasses. The only parts of my body that felt exposed were my arms and legs, but even if they got blown off, I knew I’d still have a fighting chance with the surgeons back at Bastion (I knew they’d try to save me, even if I didn’t want to be saved).

At least a dozen soldiers from the ANA were also coming, but rather than join us on foot, they were deploying in two Humvees, one at the front of the patrol and one at the back. This would make it harder for Russ and Ali to frame the all-important “partnering” shots, but the Afghans were in no way bothered about that. They were in love with the Humvee, the whole concept of it, gunning the engine and hanging off the doors. Those who couldn’t fit inside each vehicle clambered onto the back, crowding around the mounted .50-cal. machine gun. I wasn’t about to tell them to dismount, and neither were the Paras.