Combat Camera (7 page)

Having already seen peaceable, non-threatening Afghans going about their business in the fields that morning, I didn’t feel too nervous about leaving the base. We turned left outside the gates, walking straight onto a hard-baked dirt road that ran alongside the perimeter wall, keeping a narrow, muddy river on our right. There were a lot of Afghans along the riverbank, most of them young children. They all seemed friendly, many of them smiling and some of them even giving us the thumbs-up.

My job in these circumstances was to stick with Russ, ensuring he didn’t wander into the river. His camera’s viewfinder left him with no peripheral vision, so whenever he began to stray, I laid a hand on his shoulder, guiding him back into the middle of the road. It wasn’t the most demanding task in the world, and I soon found myself starting to relax, all the exaggerated tensions of my sleepless night disappearing. It was actually quite enjoyable, being out on the ground but not feeling in any great danger. The IED threat along the road was low, given its proximity to the base, and the “atmospherics” – the behaviour of the locals against which we measured the likelihood of an attack – were good.

Only one of the youngsters on the riverbank was unimpressed with our patrol: a boy of around seven who pointed a catapult at us. Apparently he had something of a reputation, having slung rocks at soldiers on previous occasions. Our patrol sergeant walked over to him with the interpreter, calmly telling him to put it down.

“If you ever use that catapult on us again,” he warned, “I’ll tell your father.”

The boy lowered his weapon and hurried away.

We set off again, following the river for another hundred yards before arriving at the local bazaar, crowded into the alleyways between two mud compounds. It was a strange, alternative world,
the ramshackle stalls offering impossible-to-shift items like slashed tyres and cracked solar panels. In one corner a grimy elder sat in the dirt, welding together two lumps of scrap metal, the sparks flying out in front of us. He didn’t spare us a second glance, but the rest of the bazaar’s elders stepped out from behind their curious wares and shook our hands. Bearded and craggy-faced, they smiled broadly, showing us their rotten teeth. Unlike the youngsters on the riverbank, they didn’t pester us for sweets.

After ten minutes of mostly unintelligible chat, we said our goodbyes to the elders and continued with the patrol, taking our time along a rutted track that eventually led to a remote vehicle checkpoint. It was a poky little compound with a wooden pole for a road barrier, manned by two Afghan policemen. Despite the dangerous nature of their work, searching vehicles for weapons and drugs, they looked deeply bored with their lot in life, their hands thrust into their pockets and their eyes half closed. Our patrol sergeant talked to them for a few minutes, relying heavily on the interpreter, while Russ and Ali captured the moment on film. It was the only chance we were going to get for some partnering shots, our friends in the Humvees having disappeared shortly after we left the base, following their own mysterious route.

We left the policemen to their risky but stultifying work and made our way back to Khamaar. The Humvees rejoined us twenty minutes later, materializing on the dirt road alongside the base. What the ANA had been doing for the last hour was anybody’s guess, but they looked happy enough. They took up a position at the back of the patrol and slowly followed us in through the gates.

Back inside the base, alongside the languid Afghan soldiers with their lazy smiles, I must’ve looked like a grinning, wide-eyed idiot.
Despite the heat and the flies and the dust, I was buzzing. I’d been outside the wire for the first time, met some of the locals, and not died or lost any body parts.

Clearly the Paras had taken us out on a soft patrol, which was fine by me. My aversion to bullets and explosives aside, it suited my team’s changing remit. Stories about IEDs and snipers killing our boys served no key-messaging purposes other than to highlight the bravery and commitment of British troops. The Combat Camera Team’s role was about more than that: it was evolving into something more progressive. We weren’t just here to show the boys having a scrap. We were also here to show the British public that after ten years of fighting, our sacrifices hadn’t been in vain: some gains were being made, and Afghanistan was, in some places at least, starting to find its feet.

We stayed in the base’s transit tent that night – I slept for a good seven hours this time, spared the bad dreams and the crashing artillery – then after breakfast I interviewed a few of the younger Paras outside the headquarters tent. BBC Four had provided me with a list of questions they wanted asking (examples:
Why is your current operation important? Has it been successful? What is so special about being a Para? Why do you refer to other regiments as “craphats”?
).
*
Most of them mumbled through their answers, having only submitted to the process at the behest of their commanders. They may have had no qualms about charging into battle, but they were less keen about fronting up to Russ’s camera.

I also tried to interview the patrol sergeant. He’d already said a few words to the camera at the vehicle checkpoint the day before, proving himself to be an intelligent speaker, if a little gruff. In his
mid-twenties, he was relatively young for a sergeant, and obviously something of a flyer, destined for great things.

“I don’t mean to be awkward,” he told me, “but I’d rather not do an interview.”

“Why not?”

He grimaced, apparently embarrassed by his excuse. “I’m doing Selection when we get back. I don’t want to show my face too much.”

By “Selection” he meant “SAS Selection”. As excuses went, it was a pretty good one. He was under no formal obligation to give us an interview anyway, and I wasn’t about to order him to talk. Even with the younger soldiers I never went beyond some gentle encouragement: if any of them were genuinely opposed to an interview, for whatever reason, I left them alone.

We had more than enough material anyway. Russ started going through all the rushes on his laptop. If time had been an issue, he would’ve sent the edited footage back to the UK via our portable BGAN satellite dish, using a piece of software known as Livewire.
*
The BBC Four deadline, however, wasn’t for another three weeks, so we could afford to take our time. Once Russ had cut down the footage – and once I’d cleared the resulting edit
^†
– he’d burn it onto a disc and post it back to the UK.

The Mastiffs returned later that afternoon and took us back to Shahzad. They got us in through the gates at 1800 hours, just in time for dinner. After dumping our kit, we joined the queue outside the dining tent, making small talk with the other soldiers as we waited for our scoff.

It was a warm and pleasant evening, the calm only disturbed by the shouting and laughter of kids playing football outside the back gates. Hundreds of feet above the base, the Persistent Ground Surveillance System was watching all, keeping us safe. A blimp with cameras, its coverage of the surrounding area was beamed directly into the old factory’s Ops Room, televised on a bank of flatscreens. Any suspect behaviour within a certain radius would be picked up immediately.

“You should’ve been here in September,” said the lieutenant standing next to me. “It was pretty crunchy back then.”

Between the hoots and grunts of the young footballers, I could just make out the birdsong in the leafless trees that surrounded the base. “It’s amazing,” I said. “You’ve really turned things around.”

The lieutenant frowned. He must’ve been in his early twenties, but the wrinkles that deepened around his eyes took him closer to forty.

“When the summer kicks in, it’ll start over,” he said. “As soon as the vegetation grows back.”

“The vegetation?”

“The leaves on the trees.” He glanced up at the blimp. “The cameras will be less effective.”

“You think it’s going to get bad again?”

He nodded. “I give it another month before it kicks off.”

Making Things Look Better

Two days after Nad-e Ali we drove to a small base on the outskirts of Gereshk, home to D Squadron of the Household Cavalry. One of their former troop commanders – Prince William, no less – was getting married in a month. He’d served with D Squadron after passing out from Sandhurst at the end of 2006. To feed the growing demand for wedding-related items in the news, we were going to show the world what his old muckers were getting up to in Afghanistan.

D Squadron shared the base with a company of soldiers from the ANA. The day before our arrival, an insurgent had thrown two grenades at the rickety front gate, injuring three ANA sentries. We drove straight past their replacements on the way in, one of them already with his helmet off, trying to stay a little bit cooler in the midday sun.

The base was like a smaller, grubbier version of Patrol Base Shahzad. It was nice, though, despite the not uncommon grenade attacks. A crumbling stone building housed D Squadron’s sleeping area, its half-lit rooms filled with long rows of camp cots. They led through to a bright, airy courtyard that boasted a ping-pong table and two armchairs, giving the base an under-the-radar charm that felt more in keeping with a backpacker community than a military camp.

We stayed on the base that night, then deployed with a troop from the squadron the following morning, going out in a patrol
of four Jackals. The open-top wheeled vehicles, which carry up to five soldiers, were great for speed and mobility, but offered little in terms of protection. Russ took a seat in the commander’s Jackal, second in the patrol, while Ali and I were given the choice of either the first Jackal or the third.

“But you don’t want to go in the front vehicle,” said one of the soldiers. “That’s the one that always gets blown up.”

He was joking, apparently, but then again he wasn’t. Ali and I squeezed into the back of the third Jackal.

We rolled out of the front gate, straight into the traffic of Highway 1. The tarmac road was arguably the most important in Afghanistan, covering over 2,000 kilometres, connecting Kabul to Kandahar. Nearly half of the country’s population lived within fifty kilometres of it. As we sped through the town of Gereshk, we overtook countless tractors, buses and flatbed trucks. The squadron had been conducting regular patrols along a seventy-kilometre section of the route for the past five months, deterring insurgents from laying IEDs. Security incidents had dropped, and the number of road users was growing steadily.

Two kilometres to the east of Gereshk we turned off Highway 1 and parked up alongside a building site. Dozens of Afghan males ranging from boys to elders were constructing a bazaar, laying the bricks for a series of shops. They’d only just finished the foundations, but it still gave us plenty of decent photo and filming opportunities. We all climbed out of our Jackals and patrolled through the dusty site on foot, following Lieutenant Charlie Talbot, the troop commander. He was a photo and filming opportunity in himself, his fierce eyes, sculpted cheekbones and shock of blond hair giving him the look of a soldierly Billy Idol. With the help of his Afghan interpreter, he talked to the builders as they went about their work
in the morning sunshine. Russ followed him closely, recording for posterity their stilted chats about building schedules and security.

After half an hour we left the site and headed out into the greenery of the poppy fields. We patrolled in single file (the “Afghan snake”, as we called it), careful to follow in each other’s footsteps, even when crossing through the streams. We passed the occasional farmer along the way, tending to his poppy crop, but otherwise it was quiet.

We stayed out in the fields for an hour before returning to the Jackals. As we climbed back into our seats, we heard over the radio the ANA coming under fire about two kilometres to the south-east. They had been destroying a field of poppies – part of a programme known as Government-Led Eradication (GLE) – when they came under attack.

GLE was not something we got involved in. The Afghan President Hamid Karzai had given the initiative his full backing, but it was hugely unpopular with the Afghan people. No compensation was offered to the farmers, many of whom were forced to grow poppy by the Taliban (who had little sympathy for farmers with destroyed crops). ISAF was highly critical of the initiative, but reluctant to intervene. Afghanistan was supposed to be governing itself, and we were supposed to be taking more of a back seat.