Combat Camera (17 page)

GOATS GO AWOL

BRITISH
troops in Camp Bastion have been put on special alert – to hunt down three goats that have gone AWOL from the base.

The trio escaped from the army training village under cover of darkness. The farm animals – code-named Tom, Dick and Harry – are part of the realistic Afghan training village on the military base where the troops practise drills.

Colour Sergeant Roughley, of 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, said: “While we are impressed with the goats’ skills, it’s time to return to duty.”

Whether the goats would return in time for Virginia’s arrival remained to be seen. Either way, her stories for the
Sun
would soon be heading into much darker territory. Op Minimize had been called yet again, for the third day running. Five British soldiers had been taken to Bastion with heat injuries, all of them collapsing before 10.30 in the morning. Later that afternoon, an RPG attack near a patrol base outside Lashkar Gah caught three British soldiers, leaving them with blast injuries. The following day in the same area, three soldiers from 3 Mercian – our hosts at the Royal Wedding celebration – suffered blast injuries after their armoured vehicle hit an IED.

As the temperature rose, so did the operational tempo. Virginia would get a few days in theatre to find her feet, then she’d be outside the wire for Operation Omid Haft. She was getting embedded with 42 Commando, and would be joining foot patrols throughout the operation.

My own preparations for Omid Haft, meanwhile, were not exactly going to plan. I still hadn’t managed to meet up with the elusive Afghan Combat Camera Team. We’d arranged to start their training in a classroom at Shorabak a week earlier, but none of them had turned up. Even Mikkel had failed to appear. We didn’t hear from him until the following morning, when he’d cycled over to the JMOC to apologize.

“I am very sorry,” he said in his long-suffering Scandinavian way. “They were unable to make it.”

I didn’t press Mikkel for their excuses. Like he’d said before, it was the Afghan way. We just had to be patient and go with it.

We finally met up with the Afghan team on 17th May, just a week before Omid Haft was due to start. The four of them – a major, a captain and two NCOs – were waiting in one of the empty Portakabins when we arrived. Mikkel introduced everybody (with the help of an interpreter) and we got started straight away. Russ and Ali split them down into pairs and took them through the basics of filming and photography, while I took a few pictures in the faint hope this auspicious occasion could be turned into a story. The Afghans were a bit glassy-eyed at times, but generally they seemed to follow what Russ and Ali were saying. The two NCOs were the most keen to learn, while the two officers, perhaps wary about the presence of Ali (a woman telling them what to do) were more stand-offish. Either way, no one fell asleep or stormed out, so the day was judged a success.

When we returned to Shorabak the following morning to continue the training, we were greeted by the sight of Mikkel outside the Portakabin. He was sitting on a bench in the shade, rubbing his sweaty temples.

“Morning Mikkel,” I said.

He looked up at me and smiled, all wry and careworn.

“Good morning, Christian,” he said. “As you can see, they are not here. They have all been given other jobs by their commanders.” He shook his glistening head. “I think we’ll have to call today a write-off.”

We went back to the JMOC and spent the rest of the day doing not very much. Op Minimize was called again at just after midday, so I killed some time on Ops Watch. I was beginning to find its unquestionable authority strangely reassuring, in a comforting “this is what the fuck is going on” kind of way.

Also, its format reminded me of the old BBC teleprompter that used to give out the football results on
Grandstand
on a Saturday afternoon.

In Nahr-e Saraj that morning, about a dozen insurgents had attacked a foot patrol from 1 Rifles with small-arms fire and RPGs. Two Apaches were called in, firing eighty rounds of 30-mm ammunition and a Hellfire missile. One insurgent was killed, and a member of 1 Rifles was shot in the buttock.

Meanwhile in Musa Qala, a Georgian patrol had driven over an IED containing 5 kg of explosive. Two of their soldiers had been flown into Bastion with blast injuries.

An Afghan child had also been flown into Bastion after stepping on an IED in Sangin. The child had lost a leg below the knee, and was left with a “mangled arm”.

Ops Watch also reproduced the details for some of the many “significant acts” that took place across the rest of the country every
day. Helmand was just one of thirty-four provinces in Afghanistan. It was easy to forget that we Brits occupied just a tiny portion of this vast landscape. I scanned through the lists of events that had taken place elsewhere that day.

In Takhar Province, about a thousand demonstrators had gathered in the centre of Taloqan District to protest over an ISAF operation in which four Afghans, two of them women, had died. The crowd had turned violent outside the Governor’s compound and the local ANP headquarters. The ANP had fired live ammunition at some of the protestors, who fled and laid siege to the nearby Provincial Advisory Team headquarters instead. The German soldiers inside, under a barrage of petrol bombs and small-arms fire, also started shooting back. According to the initial estimates, twelve Afghan civilians had been killed and seventy-two injured. Ten ANP had been wounded, along with two Germans.

In Kandahar, a joint patrol from the ANA and the US 502nd Infantry Regiment had discovered 2,000 kg of hashish in Zharay District. The ANA had burnt the drugs on site. They were then engaged by small-arms fire and RPGs from an unknown number of insurgents. One US soldier was killed and one wounded.

In Wardak, a patrol from the US 3rd Squadron 89th Cavalry Regiment had discovered a weapons cache in Maidan District. It contained twenty-seven 122-mm rocket engines and two 107-mm rockets. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team had conducted a controlled detonation of all the munitions. The resulting explosion blew out the windows of two nearby houses, injuring two Afghan children.

In Zabul, a vehicle patrol from the ANA had driven over an IED in Shah Joy District. Three ANP had been pronounced dead at the
scene. Two injured ANP had been flown to the hospital at Qalat, where they’d died of their wounds.

In Paktika, a joint patrol from the ANA and the US 506th Infantry Regiment had been engaged by small-arms fire from two insurgents in Mota Khan District. They returned fire, and following the engagement discovered the body of an eleven-year-old boy. A six-year-old boy was also wounded during the incident. The local elders were angry and blamed ISAF for the death. It still wasn’t clear whether the dead boy had been firing at the patrol. The KIA (Killed in Action) was listed as “suspected insurgent”. An investigation had been launched.

In Kunar, a patrol from the US 2nd Battalion 35th Infantry Regiment had been engaged by small-arms fire from an unknown number of insurgents in Darah-ye Pech District, resulting in one wounded US soldier. An F-15 from the 389th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron had then come in and dropped a 2,000-lb bomb, forcing the insurgents to break contact.

In Nangarhar, a car bomb had exploded near the Jalalabad Customs House in Behsud District. It had targeted a bus filled with ANP instructors and students. Eleven ANP were killed and six wounded. The blast also killed eight civilians and wounded twenty-two.

Other than that, it was a quiet afternoon – not untypical, by Afghanistan’s standards. Terrible stuff happened all the time, spread out in pockets across the country. Here at Bastion, we were well out of it, removed from it all. The reports came in, and the casualties came in, but the insurgents never troubled us. We were working on a space station in the desert. No one was going to get to us out here. You could fly your granny in for tea and not worry about it. We were completely safe.

Omid Haft

The IDF attack on Bastion on 19th May – the first of its kind for eighteen months – took place just hours before the arrival of Ross Kemp and Virginia Wheeler, but no one told them about it, or indeed any of the embeds. It wasn’t the kind of information they needed to know, so we all kept quiet. They’d find out sooner or later – somebody on camp was bound to let it slip – but at least they wouldn’t hear it from the JMOC.

While Ross Kemp was eating his fruit-and-raisin bars at the training village the following lunchtime, there was another little media crisis in progress at the JMOC. There’d been a cock-up with Virginia Wheeler’s timetable – she was supposed to be flying straight out to Lashkar Gah to interview a brigadier, but Dougie had misread the programme, and she’d unknowingly missed the flight. Frantic efforts were now under way to reschedule the interview. Flights to Lashkar Gah were supposed to be booked at least four days in advance, so finding her another seat was not going to be easy.

To make matters worse, Dougie had disappeared. He’d crept out of the office after details of the cock-up had emerged, and three hours later was still missing. A search party consisting of Mick and Ali took the minibus and went out to look for him.

They soon found him. He was wandering around the vigil site, right next to the JMOC. A section of desert the size of two football fields, it was the best escape from cabin fever that Bastion had to offer.

“I’ve had enough of this place,” he told Ali. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

Faulkner’s rhetoric was clearly lost on Dougie, but you couldn’t hold that against him. His role in charge of Strategic Messaging had devolved into something trivial and undemanding. He had become a glorified media handler, a babysitter to reporters passing through Bastion. Despite his lofty job title, he had no actual job. Strategic Messaging meant everything – and therefore nothing.

I had a chat with him the following afternoon, back in the office, hoping to cheer him up. The Virginia Wheeler situation had been resolved – she’d managed to get another flight to Lashkar Gah earlier that morning – so at least her timetable was back on schedule.

“Good news about Virginia,” I said to him.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Now we’ve just got Ross Kemp to sort out.”

“He’s not causing problems, is he?”

Dougie stared at me blankly. He looked exhausted.

“He was due to go on a Sea King this evening,” he said eventually. “But now he wants to go on a Chinook.”

“Why a Chinook?”

“It’s his favourite helicopter.”

To be fair, this wasn’t as daft as it sounded. The Chinook was much more filmic, much more symbolic of the war, than the Sea King. Ross was flying out with his team to join 45 Commando at one of their patrol bases. Any footage from the flight could well end up in the opening shots of his new TV series, so it had to look good.

Dougie wasn’t entirely in agreement with me on this one.

“There’s a war on,” he said. “We can’t just move it around to suit Ross Kemp.”

Ross did eventually get his Chinook, which was probably just as well. His team was carrying an enormous amount of kit – over twenty bags and cases – so they’d have struggled with the much smaller Sea King (unless they’d kicked everybody else off).

Over the next two days, as I waited to deploy on Omid Haft, the inquest into Checkpoint Blue 25 took place. With nothing else to do, I spent a lot of time at my desk, reading through the coverage. Predictably, all the newspaper headlines were focusing on the drugs problem, with Gulbuddin’s behaviour in the run-up to the killings attracting most of the media’s attention. One of the guardsmen, Paul Steen, had told the inquest he’d been out on a previous patrol with Gulbuddin and noticed that he had been smoking cannabis.

“One time I was on the Northern Sanger
*
alongside the ANP, and he was sat next to me and he was smoking cannabis,” said Steen. “It is easy to recognize the different smell between a cigarette and cannabis. I reported it to the Sergeant Major. He was quite sleepy on that Sangin duty. He could hardly walk straight. He was armed.”

The inquest also heard from Lance Corporal Namarua, who was badly injured in the incident. He told the court he “didn’t trust” the ANP.

“My general view was that I was not happy, to be honest,” he said. “Sleeping in the same room together, I was not happy with that. I didn’t trust them. The feedback that I got [from superiors] was supposed to be: work with them – and we were supposed to be able to bond. I can’t explain why I could not trust them: it was just a feeling that I could not suppress.”

I looked through all the British media’s coverage of the inquest, dovetailing into the wider issue of ANP recruitment, but I couldn’t
find any of the material we’d recorded at the police training centre in Lashkar Gah. TFH had taken on the responsibility for its marketing, but all I managed to locate was a short film of the graduation ceremony on Armyweb. We had been hoping our material would appear on a much bigger platform, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way.

I just hoped that our footage and stills from Omid Haft would find a wider audience. Nobody wanted to risk their life for a photograph or a film or an interview that was going nowhere.

* * *

We caught a Chinook to Patrol Base 5 for Omid Haft on the afternoon of 24th May. Russ and Ali were both excited about the operation, and even I was starting to feel more upbeat, riding the high from the adrenaline boost that came with every helicopter trip in Afghanistan. I told myself it was time to stop fretting about worst-case scenarios and just go along with the whole fucking carnival. There was no point wasting your precious time on this earth just lingering on the sidelines, shitting yourself.

At Patrol Base 5 I met our point of contact from the Brigade Advisory Group, a very tall officer from Devon called Captain Foot-Tapping. This put me in an even better mood. With someone like Foot-Tapping on our side, we couldn’t possibly fail. His name had that ring of eccentric British invincibility that immediately inspired confidence. He even spoke like a toff. His ancestors had probably conquered half of India. We were going to win this war after all!