The Shot Read online

  So Lisa noticed me and threw me the challenging gigs at K92, and she got me thinking about the media, trying to anticipate what they wanted and getting it to them quickly. I went from being happy to have my pictures in the army’s publications to seeing them in metro newspapers and having my footage get a really good run on Nine’s A Current Affair.

  One afternoon in December, after K92 had ended, we were standing around a TV set at the PR section in Brisbane. A United States action had just started with a dramatic landing on a beach near Mogadishu, the capital of war-torn Somalia. The US was sending troops to Somalia and Australia would also contribute to the humanitarian mission.

  It was all a bit of a chuckle. But two days later I got a call from Lisa Keen.

  ‘Do you want to go to Somalia?’ she asked, just like that.

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ I said, without even pausing to think – or to ask Sheree!

  5

  To Mogadishu and Beyond

  Kissed on the dick again. It turned out I wasn’t just going to join the Media Support Unit in Somalia – I was the advance party. Along with Major David Tyler, a PR officer, we were going to be on the first plane into Somalia, where we’d find a base for our operations and set up in anticipation of the media arriving.

  No one explained why I’d got the gig, but they did tell me something about where I was going. Somalia was on the north-east coast of Africa – the Horn of Africa, just south of the Arabian Gulf. Years of civil war had resulted in a breakdown of the normal operation of market agriculture and then famine had set in because opposing warlords kept stealing humanitarian aid donated by the West. Even the United Nations had been unable to bring order to the famine-relief program. We Aussies, along with the Americans, were going to secure the supply lines so the women and children got the food, and the doctors got the medicines. It was called Operation Solace and the Australian Army’s 1 RAR – also known as the 1st Battalion – would be part of a UN mission called UNITAF.

  The capital, Mogadishu, was known to be a hellish mix of bandits, warlords, poverty and the rampant abuse of a drug called khat, and considering the role I was expected to play, I told my own commanding officer that I’d have to throw my weight around and be a bit demanding to get the PR base set up. I’d have to requisition supplies and divert men, and I didn’t fancy my chances as a lance corporal. Acknowledging the problem, they made me up to full corporal and said, ‘Do your worst.’

  Our first stop was Townsville, where the MTV and the other two caravans were being loaded onto the HMAS Tobruk. We needed them in Somalia, but the commanding officer of 1 RAR, Lieutenant Colonel David Hurley – later to become Chief of Defence Force and then the Governor of NSW – was furious. He was the army’s first combat commander since the Vietnam War and he did not appreciate his precious logistics space being taken up by not one but three of these caravans. Worse, Tobruk had already been fully loaded and all of Hurley’s vehicles, stores and munitions were ready to sail for Africa. Then we turn up, these smartarses from PR, and we want some caravans on board. He had to take his own vehicles off the ship to accommodate us and he and his officers were hostile about it.

  Once we’d jumped through this hoop, my photographic style got me into the shit, and not for the last time in my career. I’d watched the local media mill around and take their shots of the dignitaries on the docks. It seemed like classic ‘going to war’ photography. But because I’m always pushing for something a little different – or better – I waited for a more candid moment. I waited, and crept in, and I shot the Minister for Defence, Robert Ray, standing on the wharf while he smoked a pipe. It was a good shot. But Ray went quite mad at me. He demanded to know who I answered to and made me promise that the photograph wouldn’t see the light of day. Apparently he didn’t like the public to know he was a smoker, which I guess was why he was standing on a wharf in Townsville, puffing away. I was in the army back then, and my chain of command led all the way to Robert Ray, so I had no choice but to obey. But I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Screw you, that’s a good shot.’

  So, not a good start. With the caravans bound for Mogadishu, in January 1993 we were flown in a C-130 Hercules to Darwin and then to Port Hedland. I hadn’t been into a combat zone before and I was pumped – in fact, the entire Australian military was amped. This wasn’t blood lust, but it was the first foreign combat mission since Vietnam and it’s not unlike a footy team: they train for years, and all they want to do is get on the field and play the game. I was no different, even if I wouldn’t be firing a gun. I hadn’t been in a war before, and this was a big deal.

  It took us three or four days to reach Diego Garcia, which is a US–British military base on an island in the Indian Ocean. We were packed like sardines in that plane and it was uncomfortable travel, sitting on the fold-down hammock chairs that are fixed to the inside of the fuselage. We finally fell out of the plane at Diego Garcia and spent two days of R&R in the accommodations at this massive military base. Diego Garcia is an atoll which looks like the island Robinson Crusoe would have washed up on, except it is dominated by a massive air base and runways and a large military port. So it’s lots of squared-off concrete in a tropical paradise. The battalion guys called us ‘pogues’ – a Vietnam-era term used by grunts for non-infantry types – because of the dispute in Townsville with the caravans. And because of our rejection by them we befriended the military police guys. This meant that while the 1 RAR battalion boys had to stay sober, we went out and enjoyed a few too many beers with the MPs.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE

  Defence Minister Robert Ray. This shot of Ray smoking was not supposed to see the light of day.

  The next morning, first thing, the spectre of war really loomed. Our first stop was the hangar, where we loaded rounds into magazines for our Steyr assault rifles – we may have been PR but we were going into a combat zone and we had to be armed. One of the MPs was still half-cut. It had been a big night and we had to be very careful because in the Australian Army mixing alcohol and firearms is a big no-no. We got through that and then it was off to meet the media contingent, who had flown in that morning. The contingent included people like Hugh Riminton, from the Nine Network, and Palani Mohan, a photographer from Fairfax. We’d be supporting them for two weeks in Somalia, so it was a meet-and-greet. Prior to the media deploying they were shown the basics of living in the field. They were shown how to eat the issue ration packs, use the sleeping and toileting systems, work on operations with the military, and stay safe and not get in the way when certain things are going on.

  Tyler and I flew into Mogadishu with the Battalion’s advance party the next day, on an RAAF C-130. From my window, the city – a former Italian colonial outpost which had been rent by civil war since 1990 – looked like someone’s vision of hell: burnt-out, filled with rubble, shrouded in smoke. If there was a paint job in that city less than ten years old, I couldn’t see it.

  As we landed and taxied to the terminal, I could see the entire airport precinct was secured and controlled by the Americans. There were soldiers everywhere, military vehicles, helicopters and big stacks of shipping containers.

  From the airport, we were bussed, with a heavily armed American escort, to the university campus where the Australian commander, Bill Mellor, was based. From here he’d oversee the Australian operations. Our home was a section of tents inside the campus, which had a secured perimeter but also boasted smashed-up university buildings, pockmarked with bullet holes. As we found our tents and had something to eat, I noticed there was no Aussie flag in place. I got the authorisation and then climbed the scaffolding on a burnt-out building and attached the flag. It was the first Aussie flag to be flown in Somalia, and that felt good.

  The general atmosphere, though, was slightly confused: all the Aussies in that place were excited but also on edge. For most of us, war meant a clear fight between two sides, but in Mogadishu nothing felt clear. Every night we heard the sound of gunfire – sometimes
in the distance, at other times a few suburbs away. At one point, there was an almighty crashing and shaking somewhere in the city, the result of a rocket attack. The fighting came nowhere near the university, but it was reassuring to have our flag flying while all this was going on.

  We spent a week in Mogadishu before shipping out, and once the initial excitement had faded I was struck by a sense of hopelessness. The civic infrastructure we take for granted just wasn’t there. The more we explored and got out and about, the more we saw the scale of the destruction. The city was a total mess. I felt like I was in a scene from Apocalypse Now. Just anarchy, chaos, violence, danger and sick and scared children. The only law and order I could see was the US military. The fact that there were families living in this smouldering, dirty, broken and bombed-out place was astonishing to me. And the smell! Mogadishu smelled like an open sewer.

  Alongside the desolation of the city was the quite awesome might of the American war machine. There was an enormous hangar at the Mogadishu airport, and in it and around it was the biggest collection of military hardware I’d ever seen in one place. The US Marines were camped there and there were C5 Galaxy cargo planes, Black Hawk helicopters, Cobra gunships and munitions and stores stacked to the sky. They had tent cities and massive messes churning out steaks and mashed spuds. The contrast between the overflowing bounty of the Americans and the less-than-zero subsistence of the Somalis was too much to bear. After a week in that place, I had to switch off my sense of fair play and make a conscious effort not to think about starving children eating garbage. I had to focus on my job.

  Near the end of our week in Mogadishu, Major Tyler went off to a meeting. When he returned, he told me that Tobruk was about to dock and we were to grab our caravans and head to our ultimate destination: Baidoa.

  Yes. Baidoa. The Australian contingent would be based in the city 240 kilometres inland from Mogadishu. It had been called the City of Death by aid agencies because of the particularly savage wars fought between the clan militias and the lack of all laws and infrastructure.

  We went down to the Mogadishu docks at the appointed time. The Americans had taken over the wharves and equipment while the local kids scurried around like rats, looking for whatever the foreigners might drop that could keep them alive. The 1 RAR boys were far more friendly getting those caravans off the ship than when they had to load them on. We hitched them to Land Rovers, and they were taken in the Aussie armed convoy to Baidoa while Tyler and I flew up to the City of Death in a C-130.

  We flew over Baidoa on the way to the secured airport and it was worse than Mog. There were bullet holes in everything and every structure was somehow affected by war. It looked like a city of arsonists. Pretty much the only thing working in Baidoa was the airport: the US Marines had initially taken and secured the city, with the airport as their base, and the engineers had got in there and fixed up some power, lights and an air traffic control system. This was going to be our base, and even though much of it had been destroyed by gunfire and artillery shells, it had some feeling of security about it. I found an old Soviet-era concrete bunker, built for the MiG fighters stationed there in the 1980s, and it seemed to fit the bill for our media centre, so we grabbed it and made it ours.

  Once the caravans arrived, a day and a half after us, we hooked ourselves up to the power supply and Tyler liaised with the battalion commanders at the air base. The camp consisted of our caravans, some demountable office blocks and about twelve large army tents, in an area about fifty metres wide, some of it covered with camo netting. When we were secured and everything worked, we called the media scrum in from Mogadishu and they arrived a day later.

  Channel Nine arrived with their own SNG – a satellite uplink that you tow behind a car – and that unit was going to be used by everyone under agreement. We processed their photos and gave them time on the editing desks for their TV footage, although the TV crews found it easier to send their footage and voiceovers back to Sydney over the SNG and let the production people do it back there. For the photographers, we developed and printed their shots, and pictogrammed them back to the pictures desks in Australia over the INMARSAT satellite phone system. Back in the day, the INMARSAT was so big you had to carry it around in a large suitcase. The pictogram was a rolling drum about twelve centimetres across and twenty-five centimetres long. You pressed the photograph to the drum until it was flush all the way around, and once you’d established a phone connection back to the picture desk at your newspaper, you hit ‘send’ and the drum started spinning. Back at the picture desk the picture would be printed and then the picture desk could use it.

  Each morning, Tyler would go down to see the battalion HQ, pick up a sense of what was happening and come back to the media camp. We’d design a day trip for the media, working out what could make for good images and who the journalists could interview. It was a really good media camp, and we worked incredibly hard helping journos and photographers get access to patrols and army people. I also learned a few tricks and picked up a few things about what makes a story and what is worth giving a miss. The photographers talked about a good ‘get’ and they constantly referred to the difference between ‘news’ and ‘colour’. Until this point, I’d assumed that news photography – that goes with daily reportage – ranked above ‘colour’, which is the more magazine-like picture that brings alive a person’s humanity rather than their place in the day’s news. But in conflict zones, the colour shots often get the big run on the front page of the major newspapers, especially the weekend papers. It was a tip I filed away and would use when I went into conflict zones: the personal picture can tell the biggest story.

  6

  Inside or Outside the Wire?

  Operation Solace was a dry gig for the Australian Army; this meant not one drop of alcohol was to be drunk on operations. But before we’d left Australia, Barry ‘Buck’ Buckley had stacked slabs of beer in the mobile darkroom. I’d previously learned on K92 that an empty box of 8x10 photographic paper could hold four cans of Tooheys New. But we were busted and Buck was ordered to dispose of the beer.

  One night, Hugh Riminton was interviewing David Hurley, doing a live cross to the newsroom in Sydney. As the interview got going, an inebriated radio journalist from Townsville crawled out of his tent and wandered towards Riminton. For some reason, the radio journo was wearing a shirt but no pants or underwear – and he was hung like a donkey. As we realised what was happening, we tried to get his attention, but he wouldn’t respond to our whispered calls. He was making a beeline for Riminton, but luckily someone saw him and tackled him before he was within range of the camera.

  Getting rid of the secret beer cache left us with only army-issue food and drink. These were the US MREs – Meals Ready to Eat – and our own rat-packs, which back then were quite terrible. Some of the meals came on aluminium trays with a lid you had to tear off, and there was a range of four or five food options. Most of them looked and tasted like slop, and the only one we found edible was the bolognaise, though even that had to be heated so you could get it down. The Italians, French and Americans who were also camped in the airport compound had much better food. We were always trying to trade, and it was the Americans who were most generous. I was particularly thankful for the American generosity because I’m not a small fella and the wooden Aussie Army field cots were too cramped for me to get a good night’s sleep. I managed to trade Aussie rat-packs and a bunch of our Rising Sun pins for a steel US Army field cot, which was bigger than the Aussie-issue cot. For any Aussie who’s going to spend some time in-country with an American contingent, always take Rising Sun badges and pins: the Americans love them.

  Other than the booze bust, it was a really solid two weeks. And when we said goodbye to our media guests, I’d basically spent a fortnight finding the best stories, building rapport with the patrol leaders and getting a lot of good ideas for how to cover Operation Solace. I also had with me Tim Bowden’s biography of Neil Davis, One Crowded Hour, and it became my bible.
Neil Davis was the Australian photojournalist and cameraman who became famous for his coverage of the Vietnam War, especially his gritty combat footage that always looked a little close for comfort. I picked up a lot of ideas from that book, in particular the idea that informed people make for better democracies.

  While in Baidoa I got the seed of an idea going – I thought there could be a book in this gig. We had a modern new leader in Canberra and a newly centralised set-up. I figured Lisa Keen might go for the book idea. But before I pitched it I needed a lot of good photographs and some solid notes. And I didn’t want to talk about it too much over there. I thought I should wait until I got back to Canberra where I could pitch to Lisa.

  Once the media contingent was gone I kept the momentum going with the patrol leaders and commanders, letting them know I still wanted to go out with them, reminding them that now we could relax because I was shooting for Defence PR. Most of the companies were uncooperative; they saw media as a nuisance. The exception was Major Mick Moon and his Charlie company. He was proud of his guys and liked the idea of there being a record of their service.

  Major Tyler gave me a driver and Land Rover and my job was to range around getting the shots that would form the media packages. Packages are photographs and press releases that are sent to newspapers in the hope they’ll get a run and publicise what we’re doing. But I had creative differences with Tyler. He was an officer and former journalist who’d been brought in from mainstream media. He was a well-presented man in his thirties, around six foot three. He had thin blond hair and wore glasses, which gave him an intellectual air, but while he had a smooth exterior he wasn’t exactly a dynamic news-gatherer, and he certainly didn’t see his job as operating outside the secured perimeter. On the other hand, I was an NCO who’d been in the infantry and then trained as a photographer. So I saw a once-only opportunity to document our guys in combat in Africa, and I had one patrol leader who was totally positive about my goals and was prepared to assist me.