Free Bodyguard by Craig Summers

don’t believe that to be true. I saw them towing away a Land Rover in which I knew one of their men had gone down. Meanwhile Waji Barzani was helicoptered out of there to hospital. His brother fell into a coma.
    Despite his war fatigue, Fred continued to film out of the glassless window, the camera always on his knee. But he understood now and he meant it – it was time to go and see his baby. He had come straight from a month in India. All he knew professionally was putting his life on the line for the story – but when it became this real, he’d had enough. And even though I was the ex-military guy, the tough man in all this, we both knew it was an epic event to walk away from. It’s not every day John Simpson wipes blood from a TV camera lens minutes after a 1,000 lb bomb has fallen a few yards away from you, dropped by an F14 on your own side, tearing across the sky at close to 500 mph. For now, enough was enough.
    Oggy met us at a checkpoint ninety minutes down the road. He told us Abdullah was on the way to the hospital with shrapnel in his neck and thigh. He asked us if we were OK to carry on driving, but we knew we had to complete. He also told us that Kameron had died. It was only what I’d expected.
    By 16.00 we were back in Arbil. Word had spread that a BBC team had been bombed. I was shattered by the time I unloaded the gear into the hotel lobby – there was nothing left in the tank – but the warmth in the locals’ hearts was genuine. It was one of those surreal moments where people still have compassion, even when there’s a war on and you have to put yourself first.
    Someone sorted a car to take Fred to the UN medical facility at Ankawa on the other side of Arbil – his head badly needed dressing. As I saw him off, I sat down outside the hotel with another security guy called Steve Musson to talk it through and I realised just how fucking lucky I had been. I wasn’t in delayed shock; I didn’t get emotional; yet this was the closest in all my scrapes that I had come to meeting my maker.
    Suddenly I found a conscience and thought the right thing was to go the hospital to see Abdullah. It was chaos. Waji was in there too and the locals knew it. For once, our hotel manager played a blinder and got me straight through to the doctor, who checked me over. I really wasn’t sure if my hearing was still in one piece. Thankfully, I was given the all clear. 
    Oggy was already there and took me to Abdullah’s room but nothing had changed. He had nurses swooning all over him and he lay there playing the hero. There was a small amount of shrapnel and the odd bandage but, my God, he was still alive – unlike poor Kameron. When he saw us, he turned into a terminally ill patient going for an Oscar. To rub it in, I passed dead Peshmergas on trolleys on the way out. That was the true level of the mess that the blue on blue had caused. I had done the decent thing – and that was it. I hoped I never saw him again.
    There was still work to be done amid all this. I hadn’t even called home, although London had rung Sue. She knew the score. We were up against it – two hours from doing a live into the Six – all of us traumatised but in denial and Fred a whizz kid on the edit but desperate to get out of there. We worked our bollocks off on autopilot and John went live on the roof at the top of the bulletin.
    Again, the legend was at his best at the end of a day nobody will forget. Afterwards, we hit the bar and I broke my golden rule of never drinking on tour. We downed a beer and raised a glass to our late friend Kameron. Earlier we had also been to see his mother. ‘God gave us Kameron and now he took him back,’ John put it beautifully. Kameron had been the main breadwinner for the family, yet they didn’t really know the danger he was putting himself into – they thought he was a translator for the papers. He had told John he had wanted to work for us out of friendship and adventure – the wailing at the