Combat Camera (9 page)

“It was. Nowhere near us, though. Other side of the country.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

I let her get back to her dinner. “I’ll call again tomorrow. With it being, you know, Mother’s Day.”

“I look forward to it.”

I went back into the office the following morning. Sunday was normally a fairly relaxed day for the JMOC. There was just the tireless Ali at her desk, poring over her photos.

“Could you clear my images from the Household Cavalry, boss?”

“Sure.”

I went through the pictures on her laptop. Our patrol in the poppy fields looked like it had been lifted straight out of a Vietnam movie.
With our MK7 helmets and our multi-terrain-pattern uniform we were dead ringers for American GIs, waiting to be picked off by an unbeatable enemy against a backdrop of lush vegetation and abundant drugs (with no domestic allies in sight). Perhaps if I was truly serving the cause, I would’ve binned every single image, but I didn’t have the heart to wipe out an entire patrol: maybe censorship wasn’t my thing after all. In the end I only deleted two images, each showing a soldier in close-up without his ballistic sunglasses (he’d removed them because they’d steamed up, a common problem). Orders from the top, in keeping with our key message that the troops were well equipped.

Op Minimize was announced on the public-address system at midday, just as I was finishing with Ali’s photos. Somewhere in theatre, another British soldier’s luck had just run out. Whenever one of our guys was killed or badly injured, a temporary ban was enforced on personal calls and social networking until the next of kin had been officially informed.

I logged onto Ops Watch. It wasn’t just one of our guys that was hurt: a flurry of reports was coming in from across theatre. Four soldiers from 5 Scots had been caught in an IED blast during a foot patrol in Nahr-e Saraj. The explosive had been placed in a tree. One soldier had shrapnel wounds to his face, two soldiers had wounds to their legs, and another had wounds to his back. Their interpreter took shrapnel to his groin. Also in Nahr-e Saraj, a patrol from the Warthog
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group had been hit by an RPG, leaving a soldier with blast wounds to his face, chest and abdomen. Meanwhile in Nad-e Ali a foot patrol from 3 Para had discovered an IED containing roughly 5–10 kg of explosives. As they were clearing the site, they came under fire, leaving one of them with a gunshot wound to the leg.

Op Minimize was lifted the following morning. A number of families back in the UK would’ve had a very unpleasant Mother’s Day, but at least no one had died and, according to the initial reports, no one had lost any limbs.

I tried to ring home. There was always a rush on the phones after Op Minimize, and the system struggled to cope. Unsurprisingly, I’d have to wait until later to get through – everyone on camp was belatedly trying to call their mum.

I went back to work, going through Russ’s piece on the Household Cavalry. He’d completed a ninety-second film for the British Army’s website (“Armyweb”), which featured an archive of clips you could access via YouTube. The footage showed our drive along Highway 1 and our patrol through the “bazaar in progress”, as well as our detour through the poppy fields.

It was a good-looking piece, but there was one shot right at the end that gave me cause for concern. It was a close-up of a poppy flower, with a soldier walking straight past it, as though the purple opium bloom that was ripping this country apart was nothing to do with him.

“That’s got to go,” I told Russ.

“Sir, that’s a really nice shot.”

“But he’s walking straight past the poppy. Like he’s ignoring the problem.”

“But we are ignoring the problem.”

He moaned a little bit more, but eventually he re-edited the ending, cutting out the offending poppy.

“It ends on a really boring shot now,” he said.

Later that evening, news came through that three Afghan policemen had been killed in Herat Province by an “unknown number” of civilians, reportedly angry about poppy eradication. It made
me wonder about Russ’s film. The shot of the untouched poppy would’ve gone down perfectly with the farmers out there. They would’ve loved to see all the uniforms in the land walking straight past their opium crops, ignoring them completely. More than ninety per cent of the world’s heroin originated in this country, generating a vast amount of money. What else were the farmers going to grow? Wheat? It was like asking Western bankers to forget about junk bonds and start investing in bread.

War and Peace

The JMOC wasn’t the only Media Operations office in Helmand. There was a smaller office at Brigade Headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the province’s capital. Known as Task Force Helmand (TFH) Media Operations,
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it was run by none other than Colonel Lucas, who’d only recently completed his stint as the commanding officer of the MOG. He spoke to Faulkner on a regular basis, but bosom buddies they were not. Phone conversations between the two of them had a tendency to turn into pissing contests. They never openly fell out – they were too professional for that – but they rarely agreed on anything. Surrounded by the upper echelons of our fighting units, Colonel Lucas had a natural bias towards more offensive operations – anything “kinetic”, as far as he was concerned, made for a story. In contrast, Faulkner took a more considered approach, preferring to focus on stories where nothing got blown up.

Our next job was much more in keeping with Faulkner’s line of thinking. Three days after our return from Gereshk, we flew out to Forward Operating Base Shawqat to film and photograph a rugby match. A dozen Royal Marines from 45 Commando were playing a team from the ANA on the gravel of their vehicle park. Shawqat had been established within the ruins of a fort built by the British Army in the 1880s during the second Anglo-Afghan war. Some of the original mud walls were still standing, providing a
nice backdrop to the contest, which was more a jovial chuck-about than an actual match.

We’d been asked to record the event ahead of a charity match between Wasps and Bath taking place at Twickenham on St George’s Day later in the month. The organizers were raising money for a number of causes, including Help for Heroes. Our footage would be broadcast on the big screens at half-time, reminding the crowd to spare a thought (and a few quid) for our boys overseas. They would get to see the Royal Marines at play with their ANA colleagues, bonding in a non-threatening environment.

The Royal Marines let them win, of course. The Afghans were hopeless, but then it wasn’t exactly their national sport (they struggled in particular with the concept of passing backwards). After the final whistle blew on their unlikely victory (they won by six tries to three), they offered to take on the Marines at cricket, which would no doubt have made for a more evenly fought contest.

It wasn’t the most challenging task in the world, filming a game of touch rugby, but I wasn’t complaining. The job had its key messages – it’s not all shit and misery out here, and we do get on OK with our Afghan colleagues – and we got to stay inside the wire. I wasn’t in any great hurry to go wandering around the Green Zone, dodging bullets and side-stepping IEDs. I was quite happy to spend a few days in a non-hazardous environment, staying firmly in one piece.

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After Shawqat we flew to Lashkar Gah, the headquarters of 3 Commando Brigade and the home of Colonel Lucas and TFH. He met us at the helipad, all smiles and promises of spicy, crunchy adventure.

“Welcome to Lashkar Gah,” he said.

He took us to the NAAFI
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for a cold drink. We sat in a sun shelter next to the base’s makeshift volleyball court. He seemed to be in a good mood, although it didn’t take him long to launch into a polemic about the Combat Camera Team.

“I want to see you doing more of that.” He pointed at the “Combat Camera Team” badge on my left shoulder, poking the word “Combat”. “And I’m sure you do too.”

“Well, yes, absolutely,” I mumbled.

We’d come here to interview Johnny Hall, an ex-army officer from Nottingham who was now working for the Department for International Development (DfID), helping the Afghans to build a highly ambitious business park near the base.
East Midlands Today
had requested the footage, which the JMOC felt would highlight the progress being made in the heart of Helmand’s capital. Once again, combat would not be on the menu.

That wasn’t to say that Lashkar Gah was a particularly safe place. Just a week earlier, two suicide bombers had tried to blow up the town’s courthouse. One of them had detonated his explosive vest prematurely, killing himself and wounding three others outside the main gate, including his partner. The latter had been taken into custody, where he’d told his interrogators there were six other would-be suicide bombers in Lashkar Gah, prepped and ready to go.

This information – reliable or not – had impacted upon our filming schedule. We were going to follow Johnny around a busy market, meeting the locals on foot, but that was now considered too risky. Instead we drove straight to the proposed site of the business park in a convoy of three bulletproof Land Cruisers. Because he was
working for DfID, Johnny came with his own G4S
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security team, composed of burly middle-aged men with designer sunglasses and fancy machine guns. They ploughed through the traffic of Lashkar Gah with ruthless efficiency, cutting up everything in sight, never once allowing the convoy to split.

The business park was apparently going to be built on a patch of wasteland off the main road through Lashkar Gah. We pulled up at the site’s entrance, a large archway where Johnny had arranged to meet a small group of local businessmen. They would be overseeing the project, handling the finances and managing the construction. They didn’t look much like businessmen when they turned up – they looked more like village elders, bearded and robed – but Johnny seemed happy enough to see them. He greeted each of them personally, smiling and shaking hands, before unfolding a copy of the plans for them all to discuss.

Russ filmed them where they stood, the archway in the background. They were all full of ideas and optimism, pointing out the various imaginary landmarks. I stood off to one side, casting my eyes over the wide empty space, wondering idly whether any of these buildings would ever see the light of day.

I interviewed Johnny after the Afghans had left. He was bright and enthusiastic, brimming with public-schoolboy charm. Pots of government cash aside, I could see why the Afghans liked him.

“I hear them say, ‘We don’t want the Taliban, we don’t want the insurgency here, we want to work with you, what can we do to make that happen?’” he said. “And when you see those changes, you start to have a real sense of optimism.”

Clearly you had to have some sort of faith in the local population if you were going to get anything done out here, but I found it hard to share in Johnny’s optimism. I already knew enough about financial irregularities in this country to know that money had a tendency to disappear into thin air. Rumours of corruption ran through everything. A 2010 UN survey had found that 59 per cent of Afghans viewed public dishonesty as a bigger concern than insecurity and unemployment. During the twelve-month survey period, one Afghan out of two had to pay a kickback to a public official, with the average bribe worth the equivalent of 160 US dollars, totalling almost 38 per cent of the country’s per-capita gross domestic product.
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Back at base I wished Johnny the best of luck, and then wandered over to the TFH office to tip my hat to Colonel Lucas. Since our conversation in the sun shelter, I was in no great rush to see him again, but I thought I should do my bit for TFH-JMOC relations before returning to Bastion. At times I felt like an emissary between two rival factions, responsible for maintaining at least a semblance of diplomacy.

He was at his desk when I walked in, chatting to Tom, a huge lumbering commando who for some reason worked in the office as the admin sergeant, booking flights and making tea.