Combat Camera (15 page)

I met the man himself the following morning. Paul was a Manchester United fan with tattooed arms who’d worked his way up through the ranks over twenty-odd years, earning his wings with the Parachute Regiment along the way. He still wore the maroon beret – it sat comfortably above his sun-narrowed eyes – but the famous winged-cap badge had made way for the crossed
kukris
*
of the Gurkhas.

He gave us a tour of the training centre, steering us around a grid of humid tents and scorching ISO containers. It was a miserable place, with a noticeable lack of colour, as though everything had been bleached by the sun. I don’t know why – maybe it was the lack of a gentle breeze – but the heat here felt different. It was like an invisible gel that clung to your skin, slowing down all of your movements. Even in the shade, it made you feel cranky and desperate.

Paul showed us a building site on a patch of wasteland within the compound walls, where a handful of Afghan bricklayers had started to build an accommodation block for the recruits.

“We’ve been given 1.4 million pounds to spend on this compound,” he said quietly, as though this fact alone could get him arrested. For some reason, I wasn’t sure he trusted us. What he thought we were going to do to him, I had no idea.

He led us back to the cookhouse for lunch. On the way, we spotted a stray dog, sitting just inside of the compound wall. Being dog lovers, Ali and I called him over.

“Here boy!”

The dog walked towards us, panting happily, but as he got closer we saw that he only had one eye. He didn’t seem to be in any pain – he was moving OK – but there was clearly something wrong. He came right over and sat down at our feet, looking up at us, showing us in close-up the huge gash running all the way down the side of his face, from his blood-caked eye socket to the corner of his mouth.

He clearly needed medical attention, but this was Afghanistan, so what hope did he have? There was a handful of British Army vets in theatre, but they were spread all over the place, and very much in demand. The only other option was the charity Nowzad,
*
but that would take time and money.

The dog looked at me, still panting happily. He seemed OK for now, but it was only a short matter of time before the wound would become infected. Flies were buzzing around his face in growing numbers, waiting to move in. I waved them away, wanting to comfort him, but reluctant to give him a pat on the head. I had no idea how he’d come to be injured, and if he bit me, I’d be bundled onto the next plane back to the UK for a long spell in quarantine, pumped full of anti-rabies drugs.

As though sensing my unease, the dog turned away from me, allowing me to stroke his back. I ran my hand along his thick coat,
the fur dark and matted with dirt. I wondered how he managed to cope in this heat.

“He needs to be shot,” Paul said.

He was right, of course. Without immediate treatment, the dog was only going to suffer a slow, painful death.

I had assumed there would be someone on the base who did this kind of thing, maybe a corporal who’d been given five minutes of specialist training for this very eventuality, but I was wrong. Paul meant to do it himself, right now. He called the dog over and walked back towards the compound wall, removing his pistol from his hip holster. The dog followed, still panting.

Russ, Ali and I turned our backs. We heard the shots almost immediately – two of them, two seconds apart. I turned again and saw Paul already walking back towards us, grim-faced, returning his pistol to his holster. The dog was lying on its side, perfectly still, with no visible sign of injury. Paul clearly knew what he was doing. I had expected to see some blood on the wall, but it was still clean and white.

The coldness of it – the rendering of a friendly dog into a corpse – upset me, but at least he hadn’t suffered. Paul had done exactly the right thing, dispatching him with the minimum of fuss, although that didn’t make the scene any less depressing. For a minute or so, the world was just an empty, wretched place, with life nothing more than a futile exercise in the avoidance of pain.

We slowly made our way back to the cookhouse. Ali blew her nose, crying a little bit.

“I’m sorry, but he was suffering,” said Paul. “I didn’t like doing it.”

In the cookhouse, the chef was refilling the trays at the serving counter, his red face glistening with sweat. The heat coming off the ovens behind him was off the scale. None of us were hungry,
but we took some food anyway, Russ and I opting for meatballs and pasta, Paul going for pie and chips. Ali had hung back, taking a moment to compose herself in the transit tent where we’d left all our kit.

We sat at one of the tables in the dining tent. A few of the Gurkhas were still finishing their lunch, but most had returned to their duties.

“It must be unbearably hot in that kitchen right now,” I said, trying to make conversation.

“Not as hot as if you’re out on patrol in the Green Zone,” said Paul, tersely.

We picked at our food in silence for a few minutes. Eventually Ali rejoined us, looking a little brighter. Trying to avoid the subject of the dog, we started to talk about the media. Paul seemed to think I was a press officer, for some reason.

“I’m actually a broadcast journalist,” I told him. “Ordinarily.”

“A
journalist
,” he said, making no effort to conceal his disgust.

“I’m really just a newsreader,” I said sheepishly. Persuading him to give me an interview was going to be harder than I thought.

The distinction was lost on Paul. He proceeded to launch into a rant about the evils of Fleet Street.

“What about all that phone-hacking?” he said, glaring at me.

I mumbled something about News International’s appalling behaviour.
*
On the grounds of my being a journalist, he seemed to think I was personally involved in the scandal. I wasn’t about to start an argument with him – he’d just a shot a dog – so I restricted my take on the matter to a few banalities. He stared at me, wanting
more, but I didn’t give it to him. After a long moment he returned to his rambling monologue, bemoaning the state of the gutter press. I sat there in silence, prodding my meatballs with my plastic fork, waiting for him to run out of steam.

“So?” he said finally.

I snapped out of my meatball-induced trance. “So what?”

That glare again. “What newspaper do you read?”

“What newspaper?” I knew if I answered truthfully I would set him off again, but I couldn’t be bothered to lie. “I read the
Daily Telegraph
.”

“The
Torygraph
,” he sneered. “And why do you read the
Torygraph
?”

It was a good question, even if it was dripping with contempt. I’d never really asked myself why I read the
Daily Telegraph
. Maybe I liked the plain writing, the like-minded editorials and the picture layout. All of that sounded about right, although it wasn’t necessarily the most interesting answer.

“I read it because my father reads it.” This was arguably true as well.

“Ah,” he said. “So you’re institutionalized.”

I ignored this ridiculous but probably accurate comment. “What newspaper do you read?”

Paul took a moment to respond, giving it some thought. “I read the
Independent
,” he said finally. “Right,” I said. “Of course you do.”

I wasn’t buying it. Saying you read the
Independent
was like saying you were writing a book. All very worthy and impressive, but nobody actually did it. I tried to picture Paul with his head buried in the
Indescribablyboring
, but it didn’t compute. The
Sun
, yes, but not the
Indy
.

Somehow we managed to get to the end of lunch without Paul shooting me. He returned to his duties while I joined Russ and Ali in the welfare tent, hoping to watch some TV. Unfortunately the air-conditioning wasn’t working, so we crashed in the transit tent. It had eight bunk beds, all of them with proper mattresses and, most importantly, the air-conditioning was working. The three of us had plenty of room; the only other occupant being a dog-handler called Alan. He’d brought his dog in with him, a black-and-white springer called Memphis.

“He’s four years old,” said Alan. “This is his fourth tour.”

Fourth tour
. Poor old Memphis. He looked exhausted, like a dog three times his age. Four tours in four years was outrageous. He should’ve been back in England, with grass under his paws, not sand. I gave him a scratch behind the ears, looking into his big droopy eyes.

Oh Memphis, what are we doing here?

At that point, to my amazement, he growled at me. I’d never been growled at by a springer before. I was confused and a little bit unnerved, a combination that triggered all sorts of questions. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? Could he tell where my hand had been? Did he know I’d been stroking another dog, just seconds before its death?

I had always been a great believer in the psychic capabilities of dogs. Monty and Trudie, my mother liked to assure me, would always start barking precisely five minutes before my arrival on the doorstep at home. What was that, if it wasn’t a supernatural gift?

Memphis stayed with us in the tent that night, lying on the bed alongside his master’s legs. Despite his fondness for growling, it was good to have him there, snoozing on his little blanket. He brought to mind a catalogue of images from a more comforting
world, evoking long walks in the countryside, muddy boots on the porch and foamy pints of bitter by the fire. I fell asleep to the sound of his gruff breathing, wondering whether he was happy or sad, wondering whether he dreamt of Afghan fields or English meadows.

We filmed the police graduation ceremony the following morning. Memphis did his thing, sniffing around the ISO containers that surrounded the parade square, looking for any suspect devices. Security had to be tight, with a dozen Afghan dignitaries watching the ceremony from a row of seats on the front edge of the square. In the middle of this audience was Helmand’s Chief of Police, a beefy character called General Hakim Angar. Around 150 recruits took it in turns to march across the square to collect a graduation certificate from him. He would’ve made a nice big target for any would-be assassins, but thankfully none of the recruits felt the need to start off their careers by killing the boss.

I interviewed him after the ceremony. We needed his input for some all-important “Afghan face”. Despite his busy schedule, he was more than willing to stop and talk, his interpreter rendering his Pashto into a number of media-friendly soundbites for my press release.

“This was a very good ceremony,” he said. “I can see the recruits are very disciplined and they’ll be very good at their jobs. When they go back to their checkpoints and their neighbourhoods, the people will see they’ve got a professional police force.”

Paul meanwhile was saying nothing. Having made vague assurances about giving us an interview at some point during our stay, he’d been doing a very good impersonation of a man who was trying to avoid being interviewed at all costs. Whenever an opportunity arose to say a few words, he’d found something else to do, something more important. At lunchtime, with our transport about
to return to Lashkar Gah, I tried to corner him one last time, but he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

“He doesn’t like doing interviews,” said Ali, who’d managed to have a couple of normal conversations with him. “He thinks of it as grandstanding.”

In the end I interviewed Paul’s boss back at Lashkar Gah, Lieutenant Colonel Fraser Rea. We met him outside the Gurkha temple (more of a tent, really) next to the TFH office, just after its inaugural service. He had a red dot in the middle of his forehead and a purple flower behind his ear, but they soon came off. The notion of grandstanding was not a concern, and he was happy to answer a few questions.

* * *

Back at Bastion, we learnt that the Checkpoint Blue 25 inquest had again been put on hold. It would now take place later in the month. Regardless, Russ still edited his footage, Ali still collated the best of her photographs, and I still wrote up a couple of press releases for national and regional media in the UK (Lieutenant Colonel Rea was originally from Scotland). TFH had said they would now be responsible for marketing the content, so once we’d done all the cutting and polishing we sent it over to them for distribution.

With all that done, we had a couple of empty days in our schedule. This meant loitering in Bastion, waiting for our next job. Consequently I spent a fair few hours at my desk, trying to look busy. This was no easy task, and the time would drag, but it was worth hanging around just to marvel at some of the characters that occasionally strayed into the office.

At one point a rather large, matronly naval officer walked in, returning a camera she’d borrowed from Ali. She was a practice nurse
from the hospital’s Primary Healthcare Department. In her spare time she would visit Bastion’s handling facility for detainees,
*
giving our guests there some moral support. She wrote poems about them, and had tried – and failed – to get permission to photograph them.

“Some of them are not very pleasant people,” she said. “But some of them are quite chatty.”

As for the war itself, that seemed to be on hold. Evidently the insurgents were still preoccupied with the opium crop. The main item in Faulkner’s brief that evening concerned our food supplies.

“You may have noticed a lack of choice in the cookhouse recently,” he told us. “It’s because half a delivery of protein – in other words, meat – and pudding went bad in transit. So two planes carrying 150 tonnes of pudding and protein are being lined up. Until then, we may have to use some US supplies, so expect lobster tails.”

The following day was equally slow. I went to the gym in the morning, returning to the JMOC after lunch. Time seemed to stand still at about 3 p.m., so with no interesting characters coming into the office, I offered to drop off some paperwork at the hospital.

Walking over to the hospital’s reception, I passed the entrance to the Emergency Department. One of the Afghan cleaners was hosing down a gurney on the concourse, sending a stream of blood into the nearby drain. So much for a lull in the war. I dropped off the paperwork at the front desk in reception and then walked over to Heroes. My predecessor Sean had advised me to take a moment for myself every now and again, just to collect my thoughts (this was surprisingly erudite, coming from Sean). With so much time on my hands, I’d started thinking about Omid Haft, the big operation that was coming up at the end of the month. It was making me a little nervous, so now I wanted a distraction.