Free Combat Camera by Christian Hill

face.
    “What sort of a tour have you had?”
    He took a moment to respond. “It’s been very busy. We’re out on patrol just about every day. Fortunately, I’ve only had a handful of major trauma cases, which is the way I like it, although I would prefer it if I had none.”
    “How has the area changed since you came out here?”
    “In regards to insurgent activity, it’s increased dramatically in the last two months. Certainly since the New Year there’s been a huge increase in small-arms fire in our area of operations.”
    This wasn’t what I wanted at all. I steered him towards the bigger picture, hoping for something more positive.
    “How many times have you been out here?”
    “This is my second tour. I was previously out here in the summer of 2008 with the Royal Irish. That was an extremely busy tour, very demanding, but very rewarding. We had a few tragic days that I would have given anything to change, but it was good, very good.”
    “And since then, how has the situation improved?”
    “The IED threat has increased dramatically,” he said. “Back then, it was small-arms fire, RPG fire, indirect fire. Now the IED threat has gone up significantly.”
    I tried another angle. “What about Gereshk itself? It seems quite normal.”
    He looked at me for a long moment, thrown by the apparent stupidity of my question.
    “Gereshk is a toilet in an oven,” he said.
    Despite his obvious lack of media training, I did eventually manage to get some positives out of Aled, thanks to an unexpected source.
    “What about the Afghan soldiers?” I asked. “What’s it like working with them?”
    He smiled. “The Afghan soldiers, they still got the crazy fighting spirit that I do love and admire with them. They’re still challenging to work with, but they do really enjoy the medical training: they can see the need for it. The counter-IED training, they take it or leave it, but the first aid, they enjoy. So they have progressed somewhat since 2008.”
    I ended with a few questions about his home town (“What do you miss most about Port Talbot?”), then thanked him for his time. I had about ten minutes of audio, which would take a bit of editing when I got back to the JMOC, but I knew it was good for a couple of clips.
    Towards the evening, as it got cooler, many of the soldiers gathered in the seating area outside the squadron’s modest cookhouse.At one of the trestle tables where they normally ate their dinner, a dozen of them had crowded around a laptop. They’d produced a fifteen-minute “tour video”, culled from footage off their own hand-held cameras and mobile phones. Peering over their shoulders, I watched a clip of a top-cover man blasting away on his .50 cal., the empty cases falling around his feet to the sound of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’.
    This particular clip, it turned out, was their only footage of an actual firefight. It was interesting at first, but after about a minute, the unchanging camera angle got a little boring. You couldn’t see the enemy anywhere. It could’ve been filmed on the range. Nothing appeared to be happening, short of someone firing a machine gun at a distant ridge.
    One of the soldiers turned to me. “It was much scarier at the time,” he said, almost apologetically.
    It was often the way with combat footage, regardless of who was filming it. Firefights didn’t lend themselves to “holistic viewer experiences”. You rarely saw the enemy, and you rarely saw the fall of shot. You just got a succession of images of soldiers firing their weapons at some malevolent presence off-screen. It didn’t make for a particularly balanced narrative. What did the enemy look like, exactly? What were they doing? How far away were they? Did they pose a genuine, immediate threat, or were they just dickheads taking potshots?
    * * *
    We flew back to Bastion the following morning, and got to work on our own masterpieces in the JMOC office. Russ had about eight hours of footage to