Getting into it
Hi everyone,
I’ve been very busy since I last wrote, so I’ll try to get you all up to date. Late Wednesday, 8th Nov, night I travelled out of Masum Gar on a convoy to a “Strongpoint,” which is basically a fortified position, on the plain which Masum Gar overlooks. This is where the heavy fighting in Operation Medusa took place, and there are several Strongpoints on the Plain. The coalition is building a road through this plain as part of its reconstruction plan, improving life for the locals, and it is constantly being attacked by the Taliban. We travelled out in a convoy of Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs), after dark, and soon I was setting up my sleeping quarters in the middle of a battlefield. As usual I can’t say much about the place I stayed for security reasons, except that it is called Club Z, a very sarcastic reference to the sun and sand holiday company Club Med. As soon as I arrived I was run through the procedures that I should follow in case of attack. Mortar fire is the usual danger in this area, so the trick is to get down low and stay down until the shrapnel stops flying. I was sleeping beside a LAV, outside on a cot, so I should be safe unless we took a direct hit. My position did have one drawback; I was right under the 25mm cannon on the LAV, which is an extraordinarily loud gun when it starts firing. I was convinced that if we were attacked when I was asleep and it started firing over my head, I would be dead from fright long before any real danger reached me.
I spent a few hours talking to the guys at my position, and I started to get a better idea of how the war is affecting these Canadians. Every single guy here had been in full-on fighting, and all of them had killed Taliban. In fact most of them talked of killing “many” anti-coalition fighters. I heard extremely grim accounts of how the body reacts to being hit with various types of ammunition, and none of them sounded pleasant. Suffice to say that these guys telling the sort of stories that would make most people sick. The thing that struck me most was the matter of fact way they talked about it. I never once asked about the killing, it was just something that kept coming into conversation. And I don’t believe anyone was boasting about it, it was more like a group therapy session. One guy would mention a particular incident, and then someone else would say, “Oh yeah, that’s where xxx happened.” Their Sergeant talked about a bok I have read, “On Killing,” written my a military shrink about the stages that a person goes through after killing someone. This Sgt. Said that he started going to the stages, but the feeling horrified stage just never took hold. He told me that having been under mortar, RPG, and machine gun fire from the Taliban for so long, and having had friends killed, he and his men were just glad to get a chance to fight back, and that the more Taliban they the killed, the less other Canadians would have to face. The other thing that struck me is that everyone I am meeting now has lost a friend, either killed or wounded. And a lot of guys I talk to are saying that they will sign up to come back here. Their attitude seems to be “We’ve been battle tested now, we’re blooded, and we’re prepared to see it through.” I’m meeting more and more guys who are getting very serious about this war. The whole attitude has changed from my last trip, and I fully expect to run into a lot of these guys again.
During the night I froze my ass off again. I am now getting roughly half an hour’s sleep before I wake up from the shivering, fall back asleep after a while, then wake up half an hour later. It means I am getting tired during the day, and taking more cat-naps. As soon as I get somewhere to buy a new sleeping bag I am going to get the biggest warmest thing they have, and fuck the price!!!
Thankfully the 25mm didn’t go off over my head in the night, and it was up at stupid O’Clock to travel further.
I arrived at my next Forward Operating Base only to discover that nobody there expected me. I met up with the people running the Command Post (CP) and they told me to hang around until the Commander turned up and he could decide what to do with me. Didn’t sound very promising, especially when one of the officers there told me that the CO didn’t like the media.
So I kicked my heels at yet another FOB, but this one was so small that I couldn’t really take any pictures at all without giving away some security features. This place has been attacked constantly, and there are the the scars of fighting all around. I am becoming very familiar with the different damage that mortars, RPGs, and machine gun fire can do, both to humans and to buildings. The one bright point about the camp was that they had a little puppy, who was the cutest thing I’d seen in a long while. The soldiers were all feeding him their food though, so he was spoiled rotten. He was a playful little devil, but I just couldn’t get a picture of him as he was scampering around so much.
When the OC came back I was introduced and he asked me straight out what I wanted from him. He wasn’t rude, but just direct. He had lots of people who wanted his time, and I obviously wasn’t going to get much of it. I decided if he was a straight talker, then I wouldn’t mince my words either, and said I just wanted to get into the middle of the shit-storm so that I could show people what the real situation was like in this area. He asked me if I didn’t know that all the fighting was finished in that area, or at least that was what people seemed to think, and I realised that he was annoyed at the media for abandoning the story after the big Op Medusa finished, and not staying to cover the day to day fighting. I explained that I knew the big battle was over, but I also knew the war was still going, and I explained my frustration at watching it from Masum Gar when I should be in the middle of it. So he said “Alright, if you want to get into the thick of it, I’ll put you there.”
Next thing I knew we were racing through the fine powdery sand in a convoy, and I mean racing. The soldiers in this area are regularly hit with IEDs, and in fact as I was talking to the CO at the camp we heard one explode just outside the base, hitting a civilian vehicle. So these guys take no chances and move as fast as possible, veering all over the place and stopping for nothing.
We stopped of at a different Strongpoint to deliver some supplies, and shortly after that I arrived at our destination. This strongpoint was a real eye opener to me, as it was like something out of a Vietnam movie, or even World War I. The whole place was sandbags and trenches, and it must have taken a huge amount of work to construct it. It was more of a fortified fighting position than a base. When I arrived there was double reason for joy at the Strongpoint, as they had run out of sandbags to fill, hence less backbreaking work, and the convoy had just brought them their first fresh food since 19th October. After I found a place in the sand to sleep (no bunks here), I had a chat with the Platoon Commander. These guys have also seen a hell of a lot of fighting in the last 3 months, and they are becoming hardened. They are attacked regularly, but were keen to point out that they attack as often if not more than they are attacked. They do not have a siege mentality in their fortified positions, and are constantly asking for clearance to get out and engae their enemy. The Captain in charge was a friendly guy, as are all these Canadians, and he ran me through the by now very familiar procedures on attack. Again, mortars seemed to be the Taliban’s favourite method of attack. He introduced me to the Sgt Maj., who laid down the ground-rules (which essentially were don’t do anything stupid or dangerous, and don’t be a pain in the ass to the men), and then I was shown around. As I said, this place was straight out of Apocalypse Now, and every photograph I took looked to me like an old war photo. So I decided to send a whole lot of them in black and white, as befitted the style of the place. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be on Getty Images website, but I’ll try to get a gallery up on my site soon.
As I was being shown around there were regular explosion at various distances, but no-one seemed perturbed by them so I tried to ignore them. It is surprising how quickly I have become used to hearing gunfire, mortars, and artillery without flinching. Between strikes on “suspect movement” and “test firing” there are guns shooting and explosions going off frequently.
Everyone was friendly at the position, although I’m sure the fact that they had just had fresh food was more the reason than seeing “reporter.” I find that even the friendliest guys out here are wary of the media, but when they hear I am a photographer it usually alleviate s their fears of me. (Which is why I don’t name people in this email / blog.) Anyway, I wandered around shooting this “war zone that time forgot” and got some really great stuff. Not bang-bang fighting stuff, but guys sitting in the dirt, just living their lives in very difficult conditions. And then there was the care package, sent from a school in Stittsville, Ontario, which included lots of treats for the soldiers, and letters from the 14 and 15 year olds. I read a couple, and I swear, you couldn’t make this stuff up. There were prayers for the soldiers and their families, thanks that these guys were fighting so the letter writer’s friends didn’t have to, and fears that this war would still be going on for years. I really felt I was witnessing a whole country come to terms with the situation it finds itself in, which again is very different from when I was here in April / May, when most Canadians still seemed to think it was a peace-keeping mission.
Eventually it was time to freeze, I mean sleep, and of course the night passed in small sections of sleep interspersed with long bouts of shivering and loud bangs. There were flares fired from mortars at various stages, and occasional gunshots in the distance. At around 1am there were some very loud explosions nearby, which I think actually shook me awake, but when I finally managed to open the top of my sleeping bag no-one else was moving around, so I figured it must be ok and just tried to get back to sleep. And that’s what these soldiers go through every night.