The Shot Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my beautiful wife Ali,

  who puts up with my absences,

  and for my brave parents Cindy and Joe,

  who started me on this adventure.

  There are things I have seen

  that I cannot un-see.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 My Father’s Hobby

  2 Becoming Ramo

  3 Learning the Trade

  4 Out and About

  5 To Mogadishu and Beyond

  6 Inside or Outside the Wire?

  7 Bleak City

  8 Through Aussie Eyes

  9 Germany and Kosovo

  10 East Timor

  11 A Career Explodes

  12 Becoming a Civilian

  13 A New Career, a Tsunami

  14 The Hunted and the Hunter

  15 Prime Ministers and Yobs

  16 Mines, Ministers and Palaces

  17 Embedding

  18 War’s Real Cost

  19 Jessica Watson

  20 A Photographer Packs His Bags

  21 Helmand: Not the Hilton

  22 With the Marines

  23 Dust-Off Action

  24 Airlifts and Elections

  25 The Contact at Doan

  26 Stealth Work at Home

  27 Ice Nation

  28 Three Days in the Hide

  Epilogue

  Awards

  Acknowledgements

  Photos Section

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  It’s loud, cramped, and I’m face to face with a dying soldier. It’s just after ten o’clock in the morning and we’re flying at two hundred kilometres an hour and just thirty metres above the ground through the golden-brown valleys of western Helmand Province. I hold my Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera with one hand, and push against the roof of the Black Hawk helicopter with the other, trying to hold my shooting position as we hurtle towards a military hospital in southern Afghanistan. The scene in front of me is one of hopeless injuries and the half-insane, half-profound statements of a man who knows he is dying. I see it in my viewfinder: an American soldier, a bullet through his lung, bleeding out on the floor of this casualty evacuation helicopter. He is half naked, the dirty army fatigues of combat a terrible contrast against the vulnerable, bullet-riddled flesh. The bleeding soldier and I are flying with the US Army and a legendary team of operators known as Dust-Off. A crack unit of US Army trauma medics and ace pilots, they will fly through anything to rescue, revive and deliver the casualties of war. For many American military personnel, the Dust-Off crews represent the paper-thin difference between living and dying.

  The young soldier’s wound weeps and dribbles – the bullet has passed through his chest so he has a ‘sucking chest wound’, a description you don’t fully understand until you’ve seen one. The blood shifts in dark waves across the aluminium floor as the chopper banks and turns around known Taliban outposts, from which a rocket-propelled grenade or surface-to-air missile may be unleashed at any moment. The intensity of the medics who attend to the soldier is inspiring, but not loud. Unlike the movies, where airborne medics scream with urgency, these Dust- Off operators are calm and resolute, their voices almost conversational through the cabin radio system, yet audible above the shriek of the turbine engines and the thromp of the rotors. After ten minutes of flying the soldier seems to have accepted his fate. But one medic won’t give up. I feel like I’m watching a lesson in hope versus reality as the soldier’s chest heaves for pressure in his lungs and the medic encourages him to stay with us.

  I wait until the medic has the half-naked soldier in a dignified position and I start shooting. Through the carnage, the blood and the anguished moans, I have been waiting for my chance, moving my body until I have an angle where the shot captures the horror of a soldier’s death in Afghanistan but without showing him naked.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE

  The intensity of the medics who attend the soldier is inspiring.

  At this point I have been a photographer for twenty years, and my instincts are firmly to record and not to get involved. But that doesn’t mean I shoot and damn the consequences. It’s my shot, my photograph, and even in a cramped casualty helicopter I don’t add the loss of dignity to the loss of life. It has been many years since I stood and watched a young Australian soldier die in Somalia. I was unable to pick up the camera back then, too shocked by what a bullet wound actually looks like and how badly the human body has to fight it. I didn’t think of my job first in that instance – I thought about the soldier’s family and his unit waiting outside the surgery tent. The first war casualty Australia had suffered since Vietnam, and I didn’t take the shot. I vowed not to make that mistake again – that episode stayed with me for many years and can still stir emotions. But now I work through it. I just keep doing the work, doing what it is I can do: record this mess, put faces to the headlines, let readers see that war’s participants and victims are just people like us. They have faces and bodies, they have dreams and fears. And they all fight for life even when torn apart by the flying metal of combat.

  The soldier’s chest heaves less now, the bubbling reduced to a steady flow of blood. I get my shots and realise that the person most upset by this situation is the medic. Just as I want the shot, this medic wants to save the soldier. He catches my eye and we hold each other’s gaze for one second. And I make my decision. I can’t be with a hard-core unit like the Dust-Off operators and pretend I’m not there. I am here: I can see the blood, I can see from the medic’s eye contact that I’m up. I twist the seatbelt locking handle to the left and unbuckle my four-point harness. Released from the security of the collapsible seat, I move around the medic and drop to my knees on the other side of the injured soldier as ancient irrigation canals flash by below us. Without a word, the medic hands me a plastic CPR mask and I place it over the soldier’s face – I’ve seen it used when I’ve previously been embedded with the US Army. For ten minutes I puff air into the soldier’s useless lungs while the medic performs CPR and tries to keep his heart going. We work in sync, small grunts echoing over our radio systems, punctuated with occasional calls of ‘Okay – again’.

  The soldier is dead long before we give up, and when we do I am stony-faced and as emotionally drained as I have ever been. I sit back and look at the padded ceiling of the Black Hawk so I don’t have to look at the medic. To let him see what’s in my eyes would not help the soldier’s family and friends; nor would it give encouragement to a Dust-Off medic who will land at the hospital and be called to another casualty evacuation probably before he’s even finished his coffee. For now, I sit back and wait for the pilot to do his job, just as the medic and the soldier have done theirs. We are the various players in war, all trying to do our jobs and to hold it together.

  I am a combat photographer who has seen too much death. The first time was too much for me, and yet here I am, back in my comfort zone, where I will try my hardest and never be satisfied with what I have done.

  I am hard enough to endure this, yet also too soft. I can get through by reminding myself of the simple rule I live by: in wars where nothing seems to matter, I can take pictures in which every person counts.

  1

  My Father’s Hobby

  It’s tempting to look back on early life and find the beginnings of what you have become as an adult. That adulthood has seen me taking photographs in some places you would have heard of: Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Solomons and Bougainville. People become their profession – they’re not born that way. When I was a kid, growing up in my original home of Edinburgh, I had no inkling of a life that would see me ducking bullets, armed only with a camera.

  My most obvious
link to photography was that it was my father’s hobby. My earliest memories involve Dad carrying his camera bag on all our outings. He had a Super 8 cine camera but I don’t remember being given specific lessons on how to use it. What I remember was that a camera was part of everything: Dad shot the film and those reels formed the record of our family. It was a normal part of life and it was also considered normal that I – and, later, my two sisters, Geraldine and Nicola – could point, focus and shoot on that camera. I still have it, in fact, as well as the films and the projector we used to watch them on.

  Dad was a cabbie in Edinburgh, and one night a fare left a 1960s Praktica 35mm camera in the back of his cab. The taxi company tried to track down the customer and let it sit in lost property for the required time. But it was never claimed, and one night Dad came home with this camera. It was a magic piece of machinery and we all loved it.

  We lived in a cul-de-sac in Broomiknowe, to the south of the city. Mum was a hairdresser and Dad – as well as being a cabbie – was also a trained mechanic and panel-beater. My parents tell me I was bit headstrong and inclined to take the initiative even when I had no idea what I was doing – certainly a trait I carried into adulthood. In one incident, I watched Mum and Dad in the small backyard vegie patch and was determined to help them, even if I wasn’t big enough. The next morning, while they both slept, I tried to use the pitchfork and put it straight through my foot.

  PHOTO: GARY RAMAGE COLLECTION

  Gary aged 3

  Dad was active in the cabbie world and he and his mates would do charity days at the local hospital, taking sick kids out to the beach dressed as Wombles. As well as a cab he had a purple Jaguar E-Type which he drove in the thriving Scottish rally club scene. When I was seven he made me his co-driver and I spent an afternoon with my head knocking around the cockpit in a too-big helmet.

  Of course, Dad was also passionate about football – everyone in Edinburgh was. There were two teams you could support: Dad was a lifelong supporter of Hearts of Midlothian, while I supported Hibernian FC, known as Hibs. I never understood why Dad didn’t support Hibs; he was a total Leith boy, from that tough area in the city’s north where street gangs roamed the docklands, and Hibs played at Easter Road in Leith. Then again, when you talk football in Scotland, the ‘why’ has bugger all to do with it. Football is just a fact of life and once you select your team, that’s that.

  While he was very Scottish, Dad wanted to try another part of the world – maybe Canada, South Africa or Australia. It was the mid-1970s and the colonial countries would book a school hall and show movies extolling their virtues. My parents were agreed on the fact they wanted more opportunities for their kids, but Mum was less keen to move because she belonged to a large, close-knit family. Finally, when I was eight years old, they decided on Australia. Like all British kids, my only knowledge of the country came by way of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. We thought it was basically a documentary of life there.

  After an emotional farewell to my mother’s family at Edinburgh’s Waverley station, we boarded a sleeper for London. From there we made our way to Heathrow, where we boarded a British Airways 747 bound for Melbourne. We moved in with Auntie Estell from Glasgow, who had a flat in St Kilda, and Geraldine and I started immediately at Caulfield Primary School. In the early days, the teachers couldn’t understand what I was saying thanks to my accent. This wasn’t the only cultural difference; I remember being surprised by the fact there were no fisticuffs in the playground.

  After a year we moved south-east of the city to the bayside suburb of Frankston, where we built a large house on what looked to me like an enormous property, with a big grassy yard and also some sand. I had never seen so much space.

  The space wasn’t the only way in which Australia was unlike Scotland. There was the weather, of course – the heat and sunlight were startling after the cold, dark afternoons of Edinburgh. But the wildlife was a bit of a worry. I remember playing in the sand with my Action Man – and suddenly I was covered in bull ants! Immigrants to Australia are warned about the snakes, spiders and sharks, but we hadn’t been told about those ants. I ran into the house screaming and Mum whacked all the ants off me. She had no idea what to do with ant bites, though – there was no user manual for Australia. One time Nicola and Geraldine were at the neighbour’s house and a red-bellied black snake appeared on their lawn. They fled, screaming. It was frightening for us, our fear magnified rather than relieved by the nonchalance of the Aussies. When you come from a country where not much in the natural world can kill you, Australia is confronting.

  And I loved it.

  ***

  Mum missed the company of Scottish folks, so after a year in Melbourne we packed up and moved to Mount Gambier, in South Australia. My Auntie Shirley had friends living there and there was a Scottish community and a large population of European migrants. Dad found a job selling cars with a Holden dealership and we lived in a four-bedroom limestone house which backed onto paddocks where the plovers used to roost. The space and freedom of Australia really suited my personality. I loved the outdoors lifestyle. The other great thing about Mount Gambier was the soccer. There were soccer clubs everywhere and we immediately joined the Scots-Irish one, Blue Lake Soccer Club.

  I remember how much Dad liked being back in a football club. In Scotland football is a big part of community life. Dad had played for Scottish Taxi Drivers – a tough, high-quality outfit in the day – and his dad, Joseph Gilliland Ramage, had been an ace goalkeeper. Our first trip back to Scotland, in 1979, featured a special treat: Dad’s friends gave us tickets to George Best’s last game in the UK, playing for Hibs at home in Leith. Seeing George Best play at Easter Road is one of my great memories.

  Mum and Dad both felt more at home in Mount Gambier, but don’t think that means we were all friends. The rivalry between those football clubs was intense and we all played the game the way it was played in our home countries, which meant never pulling out of a tackle and never going soft once you’ve decided to take the ball. So there was hard tackling and bust-ups on the pitch and crowds accusing refs of being on the take and all the clashes you’d expect when you throw Italians, Greeks, Croatians, Scots, Irish and Dutch into the same competition. Soccer allowed us immigrants to express our culture and our passion, and we did that without holding back. And yet if there was any socialising done around those football clubs, it was beer and barbecues. That was Australia back then – a melting pot of cultures but everyone trying to be Aussie.

  It was through football that I discovered my temper, probably inherited from Dad. He played the game like a Leith boy, and his temper earned him some red cards. There was a competitive rivalry with the Italian team, Internazionale, who knew how to push his buttons. On a Sunday, when all the grades would play at a club’s home park, you’d have these fiery Scots and Irish players who would not be stood over or taunted and these equally fiery Italians who tried to stand over and taunt us. Not a good mix.

  When I finally played in the same A grade team as Dad, it was a proud day for him. Football brought out the beast in me. I played all the way through the grades of Australian soccer and captained the national army team, and I also played a lot of indoor soccer. I once broke another player’s leg in a tackle during an indoor game – not my proudest hour. And I could snap: my own players from 6 RAR in Brisbane once dragged me off the field because I lost it at the ref. For me childhood was about soccer and then baseball, and hanging around on pushbikes with my mates. I didn’t think of myself as a gifted student until my final year of primary school, when I was named dux – more for my charm and personality than my grades, I fear. And through all of this, there was photography. Dad was taking photos and shooting footage on his Super 8 camera and teaching me how to do it too. It was an old- school way to learn. Back then you had to pull focus and frame your shot. There was no digital point-and-shoot; film had to be developed and that cost money, so you didn’t just wave the camera around, take two hundred shots and hope one came
out. To this day, even with CF cards that can hold a thousand images, I still frame a shot as if I’m using film.

  After four years Dad was made manager of the Holden dealership in Millicent, a much smaller town fifty kilometres down the road. In Millicent I really started to develop my interest in sport. I did karate at the gymnasium, played basketball at school and football with the Blue Lake Soccer Club, with Dad driving me back to Mount Gambier for practice and games. Millicent was a small, unfashionable town, but boy did we have fun. Craig, Mark and I used to make our own bikes from parts salvaged from the local tip and wrecking yard. I built a pretty flash racing bike, added some cool accessories and painted it metallic green. You’d never know it started life as junk. I did the basketball umpiring course, played golf with Craig and tennis with Mark and when Egan’s sports store first stocked a set of aqualungs, Dad went in there, bought two sets, and we went down to the rocks at Cullen’s Bay near Southend, teaching ourselves to use this gear and dive on crayfish. We were diving one day when Dad said, ‘There’s no way we’d be doing this back home.’

  PHOTO: GARY RAMAGE COLLECTION

  Gary aged 12

  Once I got the hang of it, I’d grab Craig and Mark and we’d take the scuba sets down to the rocks. We pulled aerials off wrecked cars, made them into hooks and used them to pull crayfish out of rock crevices, which was against the law. We were in our early years of high school, and it was like a giant playground: freezing water, giant crays and white sharks. Only in Australia!

  My life felt pretty good: I was even studying photography as one of my elective subjects in Year 8, under Mr Gates, which would set me up for a challenging career later on in life. And then my folks threw a spanner into it. They decided we had to move to Perth.

  ***