Combat Camera (2 page)

On the night of 23rd May, I was in my tent checking over my kit – we were back on with the Afghans, flying out to Patrol Base 5 the
following morning – when the news came through that a British soldier had just been seriously injured in Nahr-e Saraj. Against my better judgement, I left my kit and went over to the office to get some more details.

It was quiet that night. Only Dougie was at his desk, going through the latest field report on Ops Watch.

“Bad news,” he said.

I stood behind him and read the report over his shoulder. A foot patrol out of Patrol Base 5 had struck an IED a few hundred metres from Checkpoint Sarhad. The British soldier caught in the blast had now died of his wounds. An Afghan interpreter had also been hurt – he’d been flown to Bastion with a shrapnel wound to his neck.

“Sarhad?” Dougie said. “That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I better get back to my kit.”

I left the office and went back to my tent, trying to think about my kit, trying not to think about the soldier’s family back in the UK, right now being told about his death, the chaplain and the officer standing on the doorstep, heads bowed. It was the worst way to prepare for an operation, running this kind of stuff through your head, but I’d always had a stupid, flighty imagination, and I couldn’t help myself. Inevitably I would start to think about my own family, my parents and my brother and my sister, all of them sitting around the dinner table at home, all of them hearing the knock at the door.

I really did not want to go on this operation. If I could’ve seen out the rest of my tour at Bastion, that would’ve suited me just fine. Yes, I’d volunteered for the Combat Camera Team, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get myself killed. Like most of my career decisions to date, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t a grisly demise in this shithole.

I’d read enough field reports on Ops Watch to know everything I needed to know about the vast unpleasantness of combat. It was all anybody needed to know. You didn’t need Ross Kemp to guide you through the horror, and you certainly didn’t need the army’s own-brand footage.

You just needed to read the field reports.

The Wasted Decade

I never had a burning desire to join the army – I just liked the idea of it. Notions of duty and honour appealed to the romantic idiot in me. I’d served in the cadets at school, and then the Officer Training Corps at university, so the grown-up army felt reassuringly familiar, like another warming dose of higher education. I’d graduated in the summer of 1995 with a half-baked degree in psychology, still unsure about my calling in life. I enjoyed writing, I knew that much, but that had yet to translate into an interest in journalism. Reluctant to pursue a career of any kind, I took the decision to become an army officer: my plan was to coast along on the Queen’s shilling for three years, and then start worrying about a normal job.

Not unpredictably, the grown-up army put something of a rocket up my arse. Despite all my years in the cadets and the OTC, I was not prepared for Sandhurst’s opening salvo of polishing, ironing and square-bashing. Throughout our first term we did nothing but drill for hours on end, marching up and down to the screams of impossible-to-please colour sergeants. At night we’d limp back to our little rooms in Old College and surrender to our wardrobes, toiling over our shirts and trousers and boots for the dreaded inspections at dawn.

It got better, thankfully. The more we learnt about soldiering, the more the colour sergeants treated us like grown-ups. We traded the Academy grounds for the great outdoors, learning how to fight
in the ditches of Norfolk and the mountains of Wales. It was still difficult and unpleasant, but at least we were starting to feel like men, as opposed to errant schoolboys.

I had no desire to become a poor bloody infantryman, but I could still see the attraction in doing something toothy. When the time came to choose our regiments, I put my name down for the Royal Artillery. If I’m being honest, it was the concept of fighting at a distance that appealed to me – the idea that you could do your bit on the battlefield, but from a good ten miles away.

Happily, the Royal Artillery accepted me, so when I finally made it out of Sandhurst, I had a place waiting for me on the Young Officers’ course at Larkhill. It was the home of the Royal School of Artillery, a place where second lieutenants could while away five months on a lot of cheap booze and some easygoing lessons in gunnery.

It was a wonderful period of my life, with nothing worth documenting for serious purposes – suffice to say that I was happy and content. Perhaps riding on a wave of good karma, I landed a surprise posting to one of the better Gunner units – 3rd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery.

My career at 3 RHA wasn’t entirely distinguished, but then it wasn’t a disaster either. It was so-so. I gained a reputation for sleeping a lot, which was understandable, given the nature of my deployments.

I spent four months in Bosnia, serving as an operations officer in a small town called Glamo
č
in the spring of 1999. Theoretically, it was an interesting time to be in the Balkans – NATO was attacking Belgrade, trying to stop a massacre in Kosovo – but you wouldn’t have known that where we were. Glamo
č
was populated by Bosnian Croats, all of whom were on their best behaviour. They had no beef with NATO, naturally – we were bombing the Serbs.

I also spent six months on the Falkland Islands, working as a watch-keeper in the Joint Operations Centre near Port Stanley. The threat of invasion from Argentina was practically non-existent, so my South Atlantic campaign consisted of drinking, answering the telephone and watching movies.

* * *

By the time I left the army in January 2000, I’d decided upon a career in newspapers. I was going to study Print Journalism at City University in London for a year, then take it from there. City University had one of the best reputations for turning out journalists, so it was the natural choice. I would make myself at home in the capital, and start scribbling.

Unfortunately, when I applied to City University, they told me the Print Journalism course for that year was already fully subscribed.

“Have you thought about Broadcast Journalism?” said the quietly spoken woman on the phone. “You’ve got a nice voice.”

What?

“Or you could wait a year.”

I’d set my heart on City University – after being tied down in places like Bosnia and the Falklands, I wanted to spread my wings in London, the centre of it all. That was where all the good bars were, and that was where the media was.

I wasn’t prepared to wait for a year, so I humoured the woman on the phone.

“So… Broadcast Journalism.”

“Yes.”

“What is it, exactly?

As she described the course to me, I suddenly saw myself in front of a camera in some distant war-torn city, telling the good people
back home all about mankind’s latest atrocities. I’d stay in the best bombed-out hotels and bounce back to London every weekend for champagne and sympathy.

The woman finished telling me about the prospectus, all of which had gone entirely over my head.

“OK,” I said. “Put me down for that.”

* * *

I went to City University, got my diploma in Broadcast Journalism and wound up getting a job at a showbiz news agency. How this tied in with my dreams of being a war reporter, I don’t know, but it was work, and I needed to stay afloat. I had to travel from my tiny flat in Fulham to a grubby little office in north London every day, a journey that took more than an hour on the bus and the Tube. If that wasn’t distressing enough – the whole notion of commuting was alien to me – the job itself was an even bigger shock. I was employed as an “audio editor”, which involved monitoring British TV and radio stations for celebrity interviews. If someone famous popped up, I hit the record button. That was pretty much it. The only skill required was my ability to cut down the resulting audio into a showbiz news feed that was sent out to a number of European radio stations and – incredibly – Disney.

It was a shit job. I wasn’t even sure it was legal. The pay was appalling and I was going nowhere fast. I couldn’t even use it as a springboard into Disney. They didn’t have a clue about my role. I may as well have been the caretaker.

After a fortnight, I started filling out more application forms for the BBC. This was an act of desperation. I’d already filled out a plethora at City University, and met with nothing but rejection. The BBC had one of the most time-consuming job-application forms
I’d ever seen – it was like writing a dissertation, filled with nothing but hot air. Concepts like “360-degree planning” and “holistic viewer experience” meant nothing to me, and yet I found myself writing thousands of words about them.

Then I had a break. One of our reporters managed to upset Disney with a story about George Harrison, claiming the ex-Beatle was on the verge of death. He’d recorded an interview with George Martin, attributing a number of quotes to the former Beatles manager that appeared to suggest that Harrison – stricken with cancer – only had weeks to live. The piece was bought and published by the
Mail on Sunday
, prompting a complaint from Martin. Apparently his comments had been “taken out of context”, and Harrison was not as sick as the article suggested.
*

With everyone at the agency terribly excited about such a big story, I’d been urged to use a couple of clips from the offending interview in my audio feed. When Disney found out we’d been responsible for upsetting George Martin – with the clips playing out on their US radio stations – they cancelled their expensive subscription to the feed with immediate effect.

Because Disney effectively bankrolled the feed, this meant I was out of a job.

Instead of making me redundant, however, the agency decided to keep me on as a reporter. This meant hanging around outside movie premieres, pestering celebrities over the phone and generally acting like a dick.

I soon decided that this was even worse than being an “audio editor”. I was now an out-and-out lowlife, as opposed to one that just sat in the office all day. My days and nights were spent trying to conjure up stories that we could flog to the tabloid press. I
wasn’t going through anyone’s rubbish bins just yet, but it was only a matter of time. The pressure was on at the agency. The economy was struggling, newspapers were struggling, and money was drying up.

We thought the Top Shop contract might turn things around. The fashion chain wanted a daily showbiz round-up for its in-store radio station. I was asked to put together a demo bulletin, voiced by myself and one of my colleagues, the soon-to-be famous Amy Winehouse. (Prior to her first record deal, she worked at the agency for about six months, although I never saw her do much reporting. She sang a lot in the office, which was nice.) We recorded a two-minute demo together, taking turns to read out the latest showbiz news, trying to pull off a winning combination of sassy and droll.

Top Shop turned us down. Our demo was sent back and tossed in the bin.

Worse was to follow, of course. Much worse.

* * *

It’s difficult to write with any sensitivity about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the entertainment-news industry, because – let’s face it – no one gives a shit, but I’m going to try anyway.

Human tragedy aside, it was a disaster for the agency. The demand for celebrity bullshit disappeared overnight. It was like no one cared any more. For days after 9/11, I just sat at my desk looking at reruns of the towers collapsing. To all intents and purposes, they were a metaphor for my career as a showbiz reporter.

I got laid off a month later.

My descent into local radio began shortly after that. I loitered in Fulham for a few more months, sponging off the taxpayer, before calling it quits and returning home to Nottinghamshire. I had
the basic skills needed to be a radio journalist (TV would have to wait, given the paucity of my CV), so I started applying for work-experience placements at stations across the East Midlands.

I kept banging away at the BBC – I had fantasies about landing a job at one of the big national stations, reporting to the masses – but to no avail. Eventually I got an unpaid placement at 96 Trent FM, a commercial station in Nottingham, which led to a full-time position. I did the odd reporting shift, but mainly I was used for newsreading, a pattern that was to repeat itself at several other local commercial stations for many frustrating, dispiriting years to come.

* * *

By the winter of 2008, I was still in Nottingham, stuck fast at a station called Smooth Radio. Whatever my career plan was, it had ground to a halt. I was trapped in the provinces, stretched out on the rack of commercial radio, destined to read the local news every day for the rest of my life.