Free Combat Camera by Christian Hill Page B

place I’d never heard of before – was right outside my tent.
    “Hello?” she said. Whenever I made my weekly call, it was always Mum who answered.
    “Hi Mum, it’s me.”
    “I knew it was going to be you!” She said this every time, her voice always a mixture of happiness and relief. “How are you?”
    “I’m fine, absolutely fine.” I always tried to make my voice sound as laid-back and untroubled as possible, which was generally quite easy. “How are you?”
    “Fine, we’re all fine. William is here. We’re just having dinner.” I pictured the scene: my brother sitting at the kitchen table underneath the big mirror; my father at the head, his back to theWelsh dresser; my mother at the other end, nearest the Aga; the dogs invariably sniffing around underneath the table.
    “I’ll call back in a bit.”
    “Don’t be silly, I’ll pass you round. Just say a quick hello.”
    She handed the phone to my brother first. “How’s it going?” he said, as though he’d just bumped into me in the pub. “Everything going OK out there?”
    “It’s good, all good. How’s it with you?”
    “Not good,” he said. “Bad day for Notts County. Lost two-nil at home to Oldham.”
    “Never mind,” I said. “Keep your chin up.”
    He passed me over to Dad. He also lamented the Notts County defeat.
    “They were terrible,” he said. “Absolutely hopeless.”
    We chatted about Notts County’s hopes in the league – a fairly short conversation – then he handed me back to my mother. She lowered her voice.
    “That was awful, what happened at that UN place,” she said.
    “It was. Nowhere near us, though. Other side of the country.”
    “Good. I’m glad.”
    I let her get back to her dinner. “I’ll call again tomorrow. With it being, you know, Mother’s Day.”
    “I look forward to it.”
    I went back into the office the following morning. Sunday was normally a fairly relaxed day for the JMOC. There was just the tireless Ali at her desk, poring over her photos.
    “Could you clear my images from the Household Cavalry, boss?”
    “Sure.”
    I went through the pictures on her laptop. Our patrol in the poppy fields looked like it had been lifted straight out of a Vietnam movie.With our MK7 helmets and our multi-terrain-pattern uniform we were dead ringers for American GIs, waiting to be picked off by an unbeatable enemy against a backdrop of lush vegetation and abundant drugs (with no domestic allies in sight). Perhaps if I was truly serving the cause, I would’ve binned every single image, but I didn’t have the heart to wipe out an entire patrol: maybe censorship wasn’t my thing after all. In the end I only deleted two images, each showing a soldier in close-up without his ballistic sunglasses (he’d removed them because they’d steamed up, a common problem). Orders from the top, in keeping with our key message that the troops were well equipped.
    Op Minimize was announced on the public-address system at midday, just as I was finishing with Ali’s photos. Somewhere in theatre, another British soldier’s luck had just run out. Whenever one of our guys was killed or badly injured, a temporary ban was enforced on personal calls and social networking until the next of kin had been officially informed.
    I logged onto Ops Watch. It wasn’t just one of our guys that was hurt: a flurry of reports was coming in from across theatre. Four soldiers from 5 Scots had been caught in an IED blast during a foot patrol in Nahr-e Saraj. The explosive had been placed in a tree. One soldier had shrapnel wounds to his face, two soldiers had wounds to their legs, and another had wounds to his back. Their interpreter took shrapnel to his groin. Also in Nahr-e Saraj, a patrol from the Warthog * group had been hit by an RPG, leaving a soldier with blast wounds to his face, chest and abdomen. Meanwhile in Nad-e Ali a foot patrol from 3 Para had discovered an IED containing roughly 5–10 kg of explosives. As they were