Posted on 07/25/2007 3:05:33 AM PDT by Clive
Having avoided getting sick for the whole trip I finally lost the germ roulette and caught something in my last two days here. I wouldn't mind but this cough is making it really hard to smoke cigarettes.
My last days, and I had so many projects on the go, and potential stories, and art projects, and portraits that I simply couldn't stay organised anymore. So i didn't even try. I gave myself over to the wheel of good fortune and hoped for the best.
I have been trying to work on what I like to think are my main art projects in my down time. Pahhh!. That is, images driven by the arty side of me rather than the historical documentary side. In my mind, and somewhere in the tens of thousands of photographs I have taken are forty or fifty potential large art projects. There are so many iconic military visual metaphors around me here that it is a bit like shooting fish in a fish shop. The test for me will be to sort out the trite from the true.
The image below is the first one that I have actually tried to push beyond the idea in my head onto the paper. It is a scene set around midday, as the soldiers staged briefly on a Quick Reaction Force mission. They are discussing their plans for the mission. The scene lasted minutes at most.
Yesterday morning I tracked down the Padre who had give the memorial service at MaSum Ghar for the six Canadian soldiers killed by an IED on July 4th.
I didn't feel I had done him any justice at all when I drew him before, and I wanted to get something a little more representational of his character. He is a great big tall fellow, and he exudes honest warmth and good humour. He is a Christian minister but he administers to any faith.
MAJOR KEVIN KLEIN (PADRE)
In the afternoon I continued my love hate relationship with the Role 3 hospital. I had arranged an interview time with one of the nurses yesterday, which with my spastic schedule I forgot all about. She thankfully was very understanding when I arrived an hour late. As we finished the interview I overheard that there were U.S. casualties arriving. I sought out the civilian surgeons and got them to get me clearance to shoot photos while they worked the cases.
There were two wounded soldiers. Both were survivors of a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) attack which had killed their buddy.
The one I chose was awake and alert but silent when I arrived. He lay staring at the ceiling as the two Canadian nurses worked on cleaning his various wounds before surgery. He had shrapnel wounds all over his body including a piece which had gone up through his jaw. His X-rays showed a scene like a starry night sky of RPG shards in his body. I had taken thirty or forty photographs before my camera died. I has stupidly left my spare and my batteries on charge back at the tent. I ran the eight blocks to pick up the batteries.
CAPTAIN STEPHANIE SMITH AND CORPORAL SHELLY WALSH
As I picked up the batteries I remembered I had another trip organized that day. I had previously arranged to go and visit the Russian village just outside the wire.
To do this I had had to get in touch with the U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major at Camp Sherzai. He would be here in to pick me up in ten minutes. "***". I ran the eight blocks back to the hospital and told them that I would not be attending the surgery after all. Sorry guys, my fault.
Five minutes after I got back to the media tent Sergeant Major Allan Jellum arrived. I had met him when I toured the Russian tank graveyard about a week ago. At the time he had recommended not approaching the Russian village on my own without an interpreter. I accepted his good advice and his generous offer to escort me around.
COMMAND SERGEANT MAJOR ALLAN JELLUM
I had heard lots of stories from other people who had driven through the village only to have the wheels stolen off of their vehicles. Well not quite, but the kids were apparently tenacious and really gifted at pilferring. But really, how bad could it be?
When we got to the Sergeant Major's truck I saw he had brought four interpreters with him.
The Russian village was originally homes for officers and their families. The buildings reminded me of council tenements in Scotland. They have a squat, utilitarian and well, Russian, feel to them. Nothing ornate. Just long three storey boxes with small balconies and small windows.
The four buildings stand less than a km from Tim Horton's on the base but inhabit a completely different universe.
When the Russians left and the Taliban seized the day the homes became housing for their soldiers. During the initial stages of the war it had been targeted by the U.S. and each building now has at least one large hole in it where a bomb or missile had struck.
The fact that each of the buildings bear gaping wounds has not made them any less desirable as residences. They are filled to capacity with people afluent enough to be able to afford the rent. This affluence is visible in the array of satellite dishes dotting the outside. There is a small school behind some corrugated iron in the basement of one, and a bakery in one of the mud brick buildings nearby. Make no mistake though, this is a slum, satellite dishes or no. There is no garbage collection, so what can be burned is burned, but everything else is thrown outside. Mounds of detritus - bleached by the sun - surround the buildings.
When we arrive one of the interpreters is tasked with keeping an eye on the vehicle and the other three are tasked with keeping the kids at bay. The kids start to appear almost immediately. Boys and girls, but mostly boys. They take a telling pretty well, and having realised that there is no free stuff to be had they go back to doing what it was they had been doing before. Playing.
We walked slowly around the outside of the first building. I felt a little ridiculous with my entourage of interpreters. The younger children are still inquisitve and come and peek out of the stairwells at us as we wander. One little boy is trying to fix his bike. Some kids pumped water from a hand pump onto one another's heads. Other kids had a small fire going. They were all doing their own thing which meant I could take photographs without interuption.
As we passed the destroyed section of the first building I saw that people still lived in the section underneath the two stories of rubble. Plastic sheeting had replaced the original glass. Carpets hung out on the balconies, laundry swung in the hot breeze. A satellite dish sat out in front in its own fort of razor wire.
Our walk took us all the way round the outside. The kids ignored us for the most part. The whole vista was the same. Depressing and sparse. Older men came out from the inside and offered us tea, but we politely decline.
As we arrived back near our starting point I managed to break away from my minders a little and get closer to the kids while they were playing. Down in a gulley ten or twelve industrious boys of all ages had built a trampoline. It was made of old box spring mattresses reduced to just the springs. Five or six of these had been piled on top of one another, then a tarpaulin stretched around the outside. Various boys wee tying the sides together as I arrived.
There is only room for one boy at a time so they waited patiently and took it in turns to bounce. This is obviously something they have done before because some of the boys were quite proficient. Back-flips were no problem. I watched them bouncing and took some photos. The little boys were given as much time on the trampoline as the bigger boys.
The leaping and somersaulting became even more fun when they discovered they could see themselves frozen in midair in my pictures. They took it in turns bouncing, then came to see the picture each time.
Children are the same the world over.
This is probably my last but one post in my Afghan Journal. I am sitting in the media tent with about six hours till my flight leaves for Dubai.
This being my last post from here I can feel the pressure to find some tidy way to round out the whole experience, but there is just too much and I am just too tired.
Yesterday was a perfect example of how many stories there are here. So much drama, so many lives in crisis, everyone with a story to tell and so little time to tell them. I could have stayed another two months and never stopped drawing or writing.
This evening I fly from Kandahar to Dubai, then Dubai to London, England, where I am going to go and see my grandmother for a couple of days. She has been worrying about me solidly for the last two months. Bless her.
Then I am going home to my wife and my children.
Honey I am coming home. I know how lucky I am.
r.
-
Thanks. It’s too bad we don’t hear enough from this afgahnistan conflict. It sounds like a pretty big war over there. I have a few fellow canadians who are enlisted and i don’t hear from them either. thanks for bringing an artistic POV to this.
Do you have any pictures of poppy plants? :) either on or of. =)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
