Combat Camera (10 page)

“Christian, come in,” he said, turning to me. “Have a seat.”

I sat down at a spare desk between the two of them. Tom went back to the spreadsheet on his computer, punching in flight details, while Colonel Lucas gave me his full attention.

“I’ve got some good news,” he said, smiling. “The Afghans have put together their own Combat Camera Team. There are four of them. They’re still a little inexperienced, so I think it would be great if you did some training with them.”

“OK, sir,” I said. It sounded straightforward enough. I envisaged some classroom lessons, and maybe a few practical exercises at Bastion.

“I’d like you to go out in the field with them. It would be great if we could get you working together. I’m thinking four week-long operations.”

Steering a novice Afghan Combat Camera Team around the Green Zone for a month sounded like madness, but I responded in the way I always did to Colonel Lucas’s suggestions:

“OK, sir. Sounds good.”

I wasn’t about to argue with him. I knew Faulkner would put the kibosh on the whole thing anyway. Even if he liked the idea, he’d never endorse it, simply because it had been dreamt up by Colonel Lucas. I slept soundly that night and returned to Bastion the following morning feeling perfectly relaxed, confident the JMOC would give no ground in this particular pissing contest.

“I agree with Colonel Lucas on this one,” said Faulkner when I saw him at breakfast. “I think it’s a good idea.”

It wasn’t a good idea at all. It was a crazy idea. The Green Zone was no place for tutorials on interview techniques and shot sequencing. The tactical implications of seven of us in a huddle, faffing about with microphones and cameras in the middle of a firefight, didn’t bear thinking about.

“It might be a little ambitious, sir,” I said. “If I’m being honest.”

Faulkner thought about this for a long moment, chewing his bacon slowly.

“Four week-long operations is a big commitment,” he said finally. “Maybe go for a more gradual approach.”

“OK, sir. We’ll start with some classroom training.”

* * *

Grateful that sanity and the natural order had been restored, I went over to the RSOI training area with Russ later that afternoon to film a first-aid presentation. The recording was to be sent back to the UK, where it would be shown to troops as part of their predeployment training. Around forty new arrivals sat in a tent while a combat medic called Sergeant Melvin ran through the various ways of treating casualties out on the ground.

Russ and I had already seen the presentation during our first week in theatre, but it was still powerful. Sergeant Melvin – a surprisingly cheerful individual, given his job – started by emptying a one-litre bottle of blackcurrant squash onto the ground, representing the large puddle of blood that would immediately result from a traumatic amputation.

“Is that a lot of blood?” he asked. “Who thinks that’s a lot of blood?”

There were a few mumbled “yeahs” from the audience.

“It’s not a lot of blood, guys. It’s only twenty per cent of your blood volume. Guys out on the ground can lose up to three limbs, four limbs, and they’re still surviving.”

He pointed to a nearby pile of tourniquets, compression bandages, chest seals and haemostatic dressings.

“It’s because of all that kit over there that you get issued, and it’s because you guys are doing a fantastic job on the ground, sorting your mates out.”

The aim of the presentation, more than anything, was to instil confidence in the new arrivals, and to reassure them. As well as demonstrating the various applications of the issued kit – all revision – Sergeant Melvin also reeled off some comforting statistics about injuries.

“In February last year, there were 266 battle casualties across the operational spectrum, and eleven per cent of that number were British casualties – and that’s not many. And again, this year in February, we only had eleven casualties. This month so far, we’ve only had seven battle casualties out of 9,500 people. That is not a lot, guys. If you work that out as a percentage, your chance of getting injured is very, very slim at the moment.”

As well as going out on regular patrols in the Green Zone, Sergeant Melvin could also draw on his experiences at the hospital in Bastion, working shifts in the Emergency Department.

“There’s been some positive feedback from the hospital,” he said. “The insurgents are struggling to get hold of high-grade explosive. They’re using home-made fertilizer, which is resulting in more lower-limb amputations and fragmentation injuries. It’s not the high amputations that we used to get, it’s lower-limb. And that’s a lot easier to deal with. I was in the hospital the other day, and we treated an Afghan farmer who’d been digging in his field when he hit a device. What injuries do you think he suffered? What do you reckon? Lower limbs and all that kind of stuff? Do you want me to tell you what he came in with? Fragmentation injuries. Because the quality of the device was that bad, he just got fragged. So that’s real positive stuff, guys. You need to take that away.”

Later that afternoon, an incident occurred in Nahr-e Saraj that seemed to confirm Sergeant Melvin’s comments. A soldier from 5 Scots was caught up in a blast during a patrol near Patrol Base 3. Rather than losing both his legs, he’d just lost his left foot. The IED – containing around five kilograms of home-made explosive – had only partially detonated.

It got me thinking again about our prospects with the Afghan Combat Camera Team. Maybe deploying into the Green Zone with them wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Maybe things were getting better, and we’d be just fine.

Two-Headed Beasts

On the afternoon of Friday 15th April a man in ANP uniform walked into the police-headquarters complex in Kandahar. He waited in the courtyard outside the office of the Chief of Police, Khan Mohammed Mujahid. A former Mujahidin leader, Mujahid had already survived two previous attempts on his life. As he emerged from his office to get into his car, the man in ANP uniform stepped forward and detonated the explosives packed into his suicide vest. Mujahid died in the blast, along with two other ANP officers. Three others were wounded. The Taliban claimed the dead bomber as one of their own.

I read about the attack while sitting in the JMOC, wondering how long it would be before something loud and unpleasant happened at Bastion. When it came to insider attacks, there was no real fighting season in Afghanistan. They happened all over the country on a depressingly regular basis.

The following morning, a man in ANA uniform walked into a meeting between US troops and soldiers from the 201st ANA Corps at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in Laghman Province. There were around forty people in the room. The man in ANA uniform threw a number of hand grenades at them, before detonating several more on his vest. A few of the soldiers had a split second to hit the floor, and a few managed to jump out of the windows. But only a few. Five US soldiers and four ANA soldiers died in the attack, with
seventeen others injured. A US civilian and an Afghan interpreter were also killed.

“The Afghan and foreign forces had a meeting as usual, and an explosion took place,” said Major Mohammed Osman, a spokesman for the 201st Corps. “We found one leg that we expect might be from the suicide bomber.”

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Their spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “We had recruited this man one month ago, and he was serving as an Afghan soldier for the last month.”
*
He added: “Using these kinds of attacks is very useful for us in recruiting someone and working inside Afghan forces. This inflicts more casualties and does not cause any civilian casualties. We have many more youths who are already in Afghan military ranks waiting for their chance to attack.”

Security was now being tightened at Bastion. All ISAF personnel entering Shorabak, the large ANA training base located within the camp’s boundaries, were ordered to carry loaded weapons. The ANA was expanding at a rapid rate – they were aiming for 195,000 troops by 2013 – inevitably growing the “threat from within”.

Some of the more circumspect among us – myself included – also took to carrying a weapon in our own section of camp. The canteen, for a start, was the most obvious place for an attack, with thousands of us sitting down for breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time every day. Russ and Ali thought I looked ridiculous fetching my Weetabix and fruit salad with a Browning 9-mm pistol on my hip, but that didn’t bother me. There was a thin line between being prepared and being paranoid, and I was more than happy to cross it.

Two days after the killings in Laghman Province, a man in ANA uniform walked into the Defence Ministry in Kabul, hours before a visit from the French Defence Minister. He got up to the second floor before opening fire on ANA soldiers, killing two and injuring seven others. A security guard shot him dead before he could detonate his explosive vest. The unstinting Zabiullah Mujahid claimed the attacker was a Taliban sleeper agent who’d been serving in the ANA for three years and working in the Defence Ministry for six months, while the ANA’s military spokesman, General Zahir Azimi, insisted the investigation was still ongoing.

“We don’t know whether he was a member of the army or not,” said General Azimi. “All I can say is that he was wearing an Afghan National Army uniform. It doesn’t mean he was an army soldier. You know, finding a uniform is easy. They can find it anywhere, and they can make it. People sell military equipment in the bazaar. We have collected and confiscated uniforms several times, but it’s hard to collect all of them.” He added: “We have set up a security team who is watching suspicious people inside military forces, but it’s hard to recognize them.”
*

* * *

Two days later, on 20th April, we flew to Kabul to cover the most banal of stories. A team of civilian repairmen were visiting all the ISAF camps in the Afghan capital, carrying out maintenance checks on gym equipment. We were going to follow their progress.

Faulkner felt it made for a worthwhile story. Apparently it would highlight the fantastic training facilities available to both British and Afghan troops. He dismissed a request from TFH for the Combat Camera Team to deploy instead on a recce with 24 Commando Engineer Regiment, who were preparing to build a bridge over the Nahr-e Bughra Canal in Nahr-e Saraj.

“Media operations should be one big happy family,” Faulkner said, following another terse phone conversation with Colonel Lucas. “Not this two-headed beast.”

The flight to Kabul took just over an hour. There were about forty troops in our Hercules, half of them soldiers from the ANA. They all sat together down one side of the aircraft, while the British and Americans sat down the other side. The lights were dimmed for most of the flight, making reading difficult, and the noise drowned out any attempts at conversation. Most of us just slept for the journey, our spongy little earplugs reducing the roar of the engines to a hypnotic drone.

Kabul was much cooler than Bastion – I felt the difference at the airport, as soon as I stepped off the back of the Hercules. At the higher altitude, daytime temperatures sank by around ten degrees. Being tucked into the side of the Hindu Kush, the landscape was also very different: unlike the desert that encircled Bastion, Kabul was surrounded by mountains.

I walked over to the terminal with Russ and Ali. All the flight baggage had been dumped on the tarmac outside a set of double doors beneath a sign that read: “Welcome to Kabul”. We picked up our kit and walked through to the terminal concourse, a bizarre hybrid of defence installation and retail hotspot. It bristled with shops and cafés, giving it the air of a militarized tourist zone. Soldiers and airmen in a mixture of uniforms – German, Polish,
Estonian – drank coffee and browsed through all the strange items on sale. If you were in the market for ISAF crockery or a War on Terror chess set (the white pieces featuring the likes of Barack Obama and Donald Rumsfeld, the black pieces led by Osama bin Laden), it was a good place to waste some money.

The city had suffered a rash of suicide bombings in recent weeks, ramping up the threat level. Our transport from the airport consisted of two Ridgebacks – chunky, heavily protected vehicles, not dissimilar to Huskies. The drivers took us to a nearby British base called Camp Souter, stopping at four checkpoints along the way. It was only 800 metres from the airport, but the journey took more than twenty minutes. We sat in the back of the second Ridgeback with a signaller returning from R&R. He was based at Souter, and had never deployed anywhere else.