A journeyman's candid camera

A former radio newsreader has produced a thought-provoking account of a British military camera team's attempts to relay good news from Afghanistan at the height of the insurgency

COMBAT CAMERA: FROM AUNTIE BEEB TO THE AFGHAN FRONTLINE
Author: Christian Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury  
Pages: 278
Price: Rs 399

How do you talk up a war nobody wants to fight? Radio newsreader Christian Hill volunteered to do just that on behalf of the British government in 2011. He and his two colleagues on the Combat Camera Team may not have faced the same hazards as the regular troops. But the job took a special kind of courage — the nerve-numbing bravura familiar to public relations professionals tasked with putting a gloss on bad news.

The difference between Hill and the average PR professional is that the former had no illusions about his job — or the fabled War on Terrorism. This is good, because he has spared the reader the harrowing angst that informs most war literature. With no pretensions to high prose, Hill tells it like it is: tragic, depressing, tawdry, mostly incredibly boring, occasionally amusing and, ultimately, utterly wasteful.

No burning ambition informed Hill’s decision to volunteer for a Combat Camera Team in Afghanistan. It was a decision born of desperation to escape a career rut. After serving in the Army for four years, Hill left to take a diploma in broadcast journalism. The anticipated glittering career did not materialise. Instead, Hill knocked around in several low-grade jobs — a “sound editor” and showbiz reporter for a private radio channel (which “meant hanging around outside movie premieres, pestering celebrities over the phone and generally acting like a d**k) and later, newsreader on a local service of BBC. After many “frustrating, dispiriting years” Hill cast around for an escape route — and hit on the Media Operations Group (MOG).

MOG is a Territorial Army unit based in London that wanted “media operators” with military experience, just the ticket for Hill. As it happened, it was also looking for a Combat Camera Team leader to be deployed in Afghanistan just as the British troops were gearing up for a big operation in Helmand province . When BBC’s national service turned him down, Hill agreed to go to Afghanistan. As he explains, “I was a desperate journeyman looking for a seismic shift....”

He was the ultimate embedded reporter but his work was far more prosaic than the job description suggested. Together with Russ, the cameraman, and Ali, the still photographer, Hill had a specific remit. “The Combat Camera Team’s role was … to show the British public that after ten years of fighting, our sacrifices hadn’t been in vain: some gains were being made, and Afghanistan was, in some places at least, beginning to find its feet.”

The team, thus, was mostly involved in filming patrol sergeants talking to locals and Afghan policemen (known as “partnering shots”) or medical teams swarming around casualties (nothing too gory), persuading sullen troops to be interviewed or recording the “positive effects” of training Afghan security forces (so no reports of locals shooting their coalition partners in cold blood).  If the team went “outside the wire”, it was the unglamorous danger from IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) rather than an actual shootout that remained a constant.