Free Combat Camera by Christian Hill Page A

edit, while Ali had taken hundreds of photographs, from which she would select thebest dozen or so. I drafted a quick press release to accompany her pictures, then started listening back through my interview with Aled.
    Most of it was unusable. There was no point sending out clips of a British soldier saying that “the IED threat has increased dramatically”, for instance. Even if it was true, * what purpose would it have served? I was supposed to be putting out material that helped and supported the cause of our troops. Keeping the British public on side was a part of that cause: it was a part of the war effort. More than ever, the public wanted to know what was being achieved in Afghanistan. After ten years, they didn’t want to hear that things were getting worse.
    The issue of selective reporting was a moral quagmire, of course, requiring its own coping strategy. Without wanting to get bogged down, I told myself that as long as I was on the military’s payroll, I would do the military’s bidding. Balance and impartiality – those cornerstones of BBC journalism – were not part of my current remit. When I was no longer in uniform – i.e. when I was back to being a journalist again – then maybe I would rethink my actions. Until then, I would do the job I was being paid to do. I wasn’t being asked to kill civilians, and I wasn’t being asked to send soldiers to their deaths. I was just a little media bit player, pushing out odds and sods. Joseph Goebbels I was not.
    I polished two clips from Aled’s interview, both fifteen seconds long, wrote a cue to go with each, then emailed them off to Real Radio Wales, a commercial station based in Cardiff. The first clipwas just human-interest bait, a way of hooking the News Editor. It was Aled’s answer to the generic question: “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”
    When I get home I’ll put the kettle on and go out into the garden. Look over the mountains where I live, smell the air, listen to the sheep and just enjoy the sounds of the countryside. Just peace and quiet and rest.
    It was the kind of clip that news editors love. Some could be wary about taking audio from the military, so you had to soften them up.
    I put the key messaging into the second clip. News editors would rarely take just one clip when they could have two.
    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. And I try to make my lessons as interesting as possible for them.
    One of the main aims of our job was to highlight the fact that the Afghans would soon be taking over this place (and we would be getting the hell out). From a key-messaging perspective, any media content that failed to include the ANA/ANP was a missed opportunity. Wherever possible, we tried to stress that our presence on the ground was all about “partnering” and “mentoring” the Afghan forces, with a view to the withdrawal of ISAF combat troops by 2015.
    Increasingly the Afghan forces were dealing with security incidents on their own, leaving out ISAF altogether. Just that afternoon,as I was editing Aled’s interview, the rolling-news channels were full of reports about an attack on a UN compound in Balkh Province. Around two hundred demonstrators had gathered in Mazar-e-Sharif City to protest against the burning of a Koran by a US pastor. The ANP were quickly on the scene, but they did not request ISAF support. Hopelessly outnumbered, they were unable to prevent the demonstrators from storming the compound. Seven UN workers died in the resulting carnage, a number of them beheaded. *
    Later that evening, I rang home. I was going to wait until the following day – Mother’s Day – but I knew all the headlines about the UN slaughter would’ve upset my mum. She’d almost certainly assume that Mazar-e-Sharif City – a