Serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, with Christian Hill

23rd June 2018

Combat Camera by Christian Hill, memoir serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Afghanistan for the troops during the war was “ninety percent boredom, really, and only ten percent shitting yourself“…

From a sleepy local radio station to combat central in Afghanistan, the memoir opens in 2011 with a thunderous attack around Camp Bastion (a “permanent monument to Western overstretch“). The author up until that point had had a chequered career which was cut short with the bombings of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and thus he came to join the Combat Camera Team, circuitously via the BBC.

The author, camera in hand and part of a team, was on hand to record the everyday lives of the people on the frontline, sometimes from both sides of the conflict and his observations and experiences are brought unfiltered to the reader. He tells it as it is, how he feels and describes what he observes.

Upon arrival he had to take part in Reception Staging and Onward Integration to understand and cope with the situation that he faced. General tips about pelvic protection (keeping the reproductive organs safe) and once “out on the ground” advice to put a dog tag into your boot in case your leg got blown off. All rather sobering stuff.

From the Field Hospital to travelling in the local terrain, “outside the wire“, his detail of battle and filming is in many ways remarkable, as he captures the capacity of the military machine to just roll ever onwards, a real insight for us civilians who only really familiar with the situation on TV and in newspapers.

His team at one point had to hook up with a rookie Afghan Combat Camera Team and try to capture normal life. He meets and observes Ross Kemp who briefly breezes in on the scene (as he was filming his own exploits for his TV series which aired several years ago).

And climatically, or not, he is there when Osama Bin Laden is killed. But the underwhelming feeling at that juncture seemed to be that Bin Laden was a figurehead, who had actually become irrelevant as the war had morphed into a conflict driven by drugs.

Combat Camera is a journey to the heart of a dark time. For me it bowled along, there is dark humour with vivid accounts of the time. Way too many acronyms punctuated the text and eventually I gave up trying to fathom the tiny footnotes. I yearned for some photos – photo opportunities after all were central to the book – to break up the narrative, which I think would have been a nice touch. This book will appeal to readers who want to discover more about combat and military exploits.

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