Living in a bubble

April 10, 2011

Living in Camp Bastion is like living in a bubble. Everything you need to live and work in this environment is here - there's even a bloody Pizza Hut!

That's right - a Pizza Hut in Afghanistan

It’s easy to get too comfortable, and (dare I say it) it’s easy to feel safe.
That’s why you feel as if that bubble bursts, leaving you exposed, when you leave the camp’s tall barbed walls.

I’ve been here for eight days now and I’ve left camp once, for a day-trip to Lashkar Gah.

If I’m honest the potential of the threat we can find ourselves in hit home the night before, when my colleague and I attended a routine ‘threat brief’ which you have to attend before heading ‘outside the wire’.

“It’s been fairly quiet in Lash of late if I’m honest,” said the young officer pointing at a satellite image of the Afghan town.

So while I was feeling more and more convinced of my own personal safety with every anxious breath, the bomb then dropped.

“But you (BFBS) won’t be going out on the ground as we had those two suicide bombers yesterday trying to blow up the court house…”

They were successfully stopped by the Afghan National Police, and there was no injury or damage.

All sorts of thoughts run through your head after hearing something like that, I can tell you.

The reality is they are just thoughts, and we (as journalists) are not going looking for these people.

We arrived on a Chinook helicopter at Lash (nicknamed ‘Lash Vegas’ because of the rumours about the good food, community feel and colourful floral gardens) and there we found countless servicemen and women and civilians – not cowering in a corner – but going about their everyday work.

And that’s the thing.
Life in Afghanistan, whether it be the life of a local Afghan or the life of a serviceman or woman, goes on regardless of the threat.

If everyone shut their doors and halted their lives at the slightest mention of a ‘threat’, there would be no lives for the Afghan people.
That’s why our troops are ultimately here, to provide a life for these people to live.

After our meetings at Lash we headed back to our home from home at Camp Bastion on a helicopter.

Wearing my body armour, strapped into the harness for the short flight back to Bastion, thoughts of the unknown threat crept into my head again.

The helicopter crewmen manned the guns on the sides and back of the aircraft and this only painted another picture in my mind.

But then before I knew it, I was back in the safe confines of the base.

These helicopters take off and land all over Afghanistan countless times day after day; the guys out on the ground patrol the so-called ‘badlands’ arguably more often; and British civilians spend hours upon hours in small communities working with Afghan locals to help build better communities.

There are thousands of people out here working continuously day in, day out.

While family members and friends back home understandably worry about their loved ones over here, the image of danger is often far greater than the actual reality (cue my colleague Charlotte throwing something at me shouting “you’ll jinx us!!!”).

Yes, the threat is there and you have got to be wary of it at all times, but everything is done to minimise that risk of threat.

While many question the role of the British serviceman (and the under-hyped civilian contractor) in Afghanistan, it would be a fool who questioned the determination and drive of these people to help a country which ultimately only wants to take care of itself in the future.

Twitter: @tristan_nichols