The armoured Land Rover rocked and lurched
with all the violence of a fishing boat being tossed by the sea as it crashed
through the craters in the dirt road. In the windowless back of the military
vehicle, Sam White clung on to whatever he could find with the strength of ten
terrified men, while he was thrown about with each lunge and drop. At the same he
was trying to exude complete calm and professionalism, while his stomach
threatened to eject that morning’s hearty breakfast. And not for the first time
he wondered what had possessed him to volunteer for this assignment.
On the bench seat opposite a fully armoured
Royal Marine sergeant sat and grinned from behind tinted sand goggles and
leaned forward to offer some reassuring words. “Don’t worry mate,” he said.
“It’ll get better shortly, the road evens out. We have to take these potholes
at a bit of a pace so we don’t get stuck in the mud and make ourselves a target
for the Talitubbies.”
As if to confirm this Sam was again thrown
sideways as the vehicle crashed heavily over another crater. He looked up through the hatch in the roof,
and caught sight of the crystal blue Afghan sky above, but the view was partially
obscured by the bulk of Captain Tom Sharp. The captain was standing on a
platform, half out of the hatch, rifle at the ready as he scoped the landscape
for any potential threats.
“I guess you get used to it,” Sam shouted
back to the marine opposite. At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder and
looked up to see Captain Sharp beckoning to join him.
A little unsteadily Sam got to his feet and
with his body armour hanging heavy on him, squeezed through the small hatch to
stand shoulder to shoulder with the captain. He found his feet and secured his
blast helmet while he looked around for the first time at Afghanistan, the real
country, a country so ancient to his western eyes.
Sam had arrived in Afghanistan 24 hours
previously, after a long and uncomfortable flight on an RAF Hercules
transporter. He had flown into the sprawling international military base at
Kandahar with a small group of regional journalists, invited to the country to
report on the job being done by ‘our brave servicemen and women’ and deliver
Christmas messages back to the folks at home. As a young, ambitious reporter at
the Bristol Evening Post newspaper, he had long held a desire to visit a war
zone, having spent his teens and student years poring over the memoirs of the
giants of his chosen trade. However, now that he had made it to the front line,
in the midst of a very real war, that desire to be at the heart of the action
had evaporated as quickly as water on hot coals.
Following a restless night at Kandahar, the
regional press corps of five reporters and a photographer was transported by
Chinook helicopter at first light to the smaller British base at Lashkar Gah, the
administrative capital of Helmand Province.
Sam had been informed jovially by more than
one soldier that Lashkar Gah was ‘the place where the Taliban go on R&R’,
and it was with this in mind that he cautiously took his place next to Captain
Sharp and started to take in the surroundings.
They were on the outskirts of the town, in a
convoy of three vehicles with Sam and the captain at the back. He looked at the
buildings lining the street, as the track started to resemble something closer
to a road now, and saw they were little more than sheets of corrugated iron
held together by rope, or small single-storey compounds built with mud bricks.
It was mid-December and, although it was still warm when the sun was at its
height, winter had arrived in Helmand and the rains had turned the dusty roads
to muddy bogs, not helped by the tonnes of armoured vehicles churning
everything up.
The presence of British military convoys was
clearly no longer a novelty for the population of Lashkar Gah as people went
about their business with barely a glance in their direction. Young men sped
past on motorbikes that looked to be held together by faith and gaffer tape. Their
faces were almost completely covered by shemagh scarves and, Sam thought, they could
easily be Taliban, or their informants. Ancient pick-up trucks and cars passed
by and seemed to do a better job of getting through the mud than the Land
Rovers. Sam tried to look into the faces of the men and women at the roadside
but decades of war and the hard life in Helmand seemed to have aged them,
destroying the animation in their eyes. They looked blankly back at Sam, with
no flicker of interest.
In the distance beyond the town, the captain
explained, it was possible to see the remains of one of Alexander the Great’s
palaces. A reminder that for thousands
of years armies had invaded and left their mark, and this Royal Marines unit and
its cargo of war zone tourists was only the latest to pass through.
Sam was trying to take everything in and
brought out his small digital camera to take snapshots of this alien landscape.
It could not be further from the comforts of the newsroom that sent him, or the
civilised street where he lived in the heart of a modern city.
Above the crackle of radio squawk, Captain
Sharp said: “We can only do so much, every time we rebuild the market square,
the Taliban come back in and offer the farmers more to grow opium, poppies.
They get paid next to nothing for it in the first place, but then if they don’t
agree, the Taliban will kidnap their family. Or they take their children and
send them towards people like us wearing a suicide vest. Happened to one of our
unit a couple of months ago.
“Little kid with a handful of sweets walks up
to one of our foot patrols. As soon as he was close enough the bastards hit the
remote detonation device, took out the kid of course, as well as one of ours
and injured dozens around him. It’s what they do.”
Sam looked at the captain in shock, and
started to understand for the first time what exactly was happening out here.
“I can’t believe it,” is all he could say in response.
Then, without explanation, the other two
vehicles stopped and the radio chatter suddenly intensified as the captain was
being buzzed by one of the forward vehicles. He replied and signalled for Sam
to get down below. Quickly.
They sat for a minute or more, with only the
sound of the chugging diesel engine to fill the silence. Sam was making a show
of scribbling some notes on a small pad, as if composing some great dispatch
from the front. But he was really just thinking about every news report he’d
ever seen from Afghanistan and the number of convoys attacked by suicide
bombers every week and the fact that they were still not moving and that
possibly that kid on the motorbike he saw may have had a gun, and was that the
sound of an engine coming up the side of the Land Rover?
“There’s a lot of waiting around in this
job,” the sergeant opposite said. “I’d say about 90 per cent of the time is
waiting around, then a burst of activity, and that’s it.”
Sam felt the waiting around was preferable to
the kind of burst of activity the sergeant was referring to.
“How long have you been out here?” Sam said,
remembering for a moment that it was his job to be here interviewing servicemen
and women to reassure the readers back home that they were doing them proud.
“Just over six months, it’s my third tour,
hopefully the last one.” The two men sat in silence again, Sam’s usual mastery
of the English language and his ability to open up his interview subjects like
a clam had deserted him. Random thoughts started to fill the void in his brain.
He was thinking about Sarah, the possible new love in his life, whether she
really was as keen as he hoped, and whether it really was a good idea to be
dating somebody from the paper. She was a features writer, so worked in another
part of the office, but even so, it was a small newsroom and journalists did
love a gossip.
Suddenly Captain Sharp was shouting into his
radio: “What the fuck’s happening? We’re sitting on our arses here with a load
of civvies and our trousers down.” Just as he was listening back to the garbled
message there came the distinct sound of two mortar rounds landing nearby, thunk! thunk! - galvanising the convoy
into action. The sergeant immediately took a position near the back of the
vehicle where one of the doors was pinned open to give cover at the rear. The
captain shouted into the radio, “Contact, contact, that was aimed at us, we’re
going back in now, we’ve got civilians onboard. Move, move, move!”
Sam’s heart was in his mouth now as the
lurching movement of the Land Rover threw him to the floor, where he decided it
was easier to stay, and braced himself against the seats. He could hear the
captain and the marines from the two front vehicles intermittently shouting at
pedestrians and motorists to stop and clear a pathway through, brandishing
rifles to make it clear force would be used if necessary. It was about ten
minutes back to the safety of the base and Sam spent that whole time on the
floor, feeling every bump and boulder as they pushed the struggling engine to
its limit. He watched breathless as the sergeant aimed his weapon at possible
moving targets while they sped back to base, but kept his finger off the
trigger.
“Any sign of them coming up behind sergeant?”
shouted the captain.
“No we’re clear so far as I can see, a couple
of motorbikes, possibly wearing vests, but too far to confirm.” Vests, meaning
suicide vests, bombers chasing them.
“Keep eyes on, we’re about 200 metres and
closing in on home”, said the captain. Sam counted every metre until they got
to the perimeter, through the gate and to safety, stopping hard. The driver
killed the engine as the sergeant put down his weapon, turned to look at Sam
and said: “See what I mean?”
Sam picked himself up off the floor and as
soon as the doors were opened jumped out and went around the side of the
vehicle to throw up. The rest of the press corps had started to gather now,
with a look of amusement on their faces at the sight of Sam, white faced and
sweating. Captain Sharp came round the side of the Land Rover and put a hand on
Sam’s shoulder, steadying him as tried to get his bearings.
“A bit more lively than we thought that was
going to be, but at least it’ll give you something to write about,” he said. With
that he turned and headed into a large canvas tent to speak to his senior
officers, while Sam held up his notebook as if to prove he’d captured every
last detail, ready for the story he would file later that day. He could see the
headline now, ‘Evening Post man’s brush with the Taliban’ - a first hand report
of contact with the enemy and a race against time to outrun the suicide bomber.
What it wouldn’t relate was how the correspondent spent the whole time curled
up on the floor, close to tears, scared half to death and wishing he was back
home in Bristol. If they gave medals for cowardice under fire, thought Sam,
he’d return a hero.
No comments:
Post a Comment