Christina Lamb (36:30)
Good evening. In my wardrobe, where most women keep their little black dress, I keep something I call my war Bag. In my war bag I keep my flak jacket, my helmet, some boots and a medical kit, not with band aid or Tylenol, but with tourniquet ties and Silox powder which magically clots your blood if you get shot at or step on an ied. I also keep toys, children's toys that my son has given me or clothes that he's grown out of to give to kids that I might find it's all part of my strange double life. Being a mum and a war correspondent, that sometimes leads to some extreme situations. In October 2007, for example, when I should have been at a school parents evening, I was on Benazir Bhutto's bus when it was blown up. Most extreme of all, however, was in June 2006 when I was in Helmand, Afghanistan. Back in the days, we were being told that Afghanistan was a reconstruction project, not a war. I'd been going to Afghanistan since 1987. It was my first story as a foreign correspondent. In those days, I didn't really know what a foreign correspondent did or needed. I just knew I wanted to be one. So I took something called the Flying Coach up to Peshawar in Pakistan and I had with me a case in which I had a big bag of wine gums, a copy of Kipling's Kim, my lucky pink stuffed rabbit, and a trade bottle of Chanel no. 5 that a friend had given me. When I got off the Flying Coach in the old city of Pesha, dusk was just settling and all I could see was men, most of whom seemed to have guns and everybody seemed to be trying to sell me something. So I got into a rickshaw and, and I asked him to take me to a cheap hotel. He took me to a place called Greens Hotel, which I later discovered was where arms dealers stayed. I discovered this because somebody tried to sell me a Chinese multi barrel rocket launcher at breakfast for a very cheap price apparently. That first night in the hotel, I lay on my mattress and I looked out the window and I could see these mountains silhouetted in the distance. And beyond them lay Afghanistan. And I thought about all the people who'd invaded over the centuries. Alexander the Great, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan Baba, the first Mughal emperor, the British several times. And at that time, 1987, the Russians were there. I never imagined then that I would be back 20 years later covering troops from my own country, but. So it was in 2006 that I was embedded with British troops from the Parachute regiment, which we call the Paras. When they went into Helmand for the first time. They were the first combat troops that we sent in. And one day we were sent on a hearts and minds patrol to a village called Zumbale. And we set off. There were about 45 soldiers and me in 15 vehicles. And when we got near the village, we parked outside and we left the vehicles and the big guns and about 15 soldiers outside, and the rest of us walked in so that we wouldn't look threatening. And it was a kind of hot, sunny day, as it always is in Helmand, and it was a sort of picturesque part of Helmand, and everybody was in high spirits, almost as if we were going on a picnic. And I was wearing my flak jacket, which has the word Press in big white letters across the front, which is supposed to indicate that I'm a member of the media. The British soldiers thought it was very funny to come up and press. When we got to the village, I noticed that there weren't many elders around. And it was also odd that nobody invited us for tea. Afghans are usually very hospitable, but I was with the elite of the British army, so it was kind of their show, not my show. And I did say to them, there don't seem to be many elders around. And the commander actually asked, and he was told, oh, the elders are at the mosque praying. Well, actually, later on, we discovered it wasn't prayer time. Anyway, we went and sat on this muddy bank with a few elders that were there. And the commander said to them, we've come at the invitation of your government to bring you development. I couldn't help thinking that that's probably what the Russians had said 20 years earlier. And then the commander said to the elder, are there any Taliban in your village? And he said, no. And then he just chatted a little bit. And then at the end of the conversation, the main elder said to us, if you go out of the village that way, as opposed to the way we'd come in this way, you'll find that there's a bridge over the canal and you won't need to jump over it. Well, that seemed rather good, because coming in, when we jumped, I actually fell in and got very muddy, much to the amusement of the soldiers. So we start going the way that he said. The commander says to me, well, that seemed to go well, didn't it? And I had my notebook out writing it down. And literally, as he said that, the first shots rang out and his radio crackled into life. And it was the guys that we'd left outside with the big Guns. And they said, we've been ambushed. So we stopped to try and understand what was happening. We could hear these shots going. And within a minute we were under fire, too. And somebody shouted, helmets on. Get down. Everybody just ran. And there are all these irrigation ditches. So we jumped into a ditch. And as I jumped, I dropped my notebook. Now, in 28 years of being a foreign correspondent, I have never lost a notebook. So I immediately started scrambling back up the trench to try and get the notebook back. As I did, an RPG came so close that the whoosh made the hairs on the back of my neck lift. So I left it and went back down. I sometimes wonder if the Taliban went through that notebook and thought, these are the secret British plans for Helmand. My husband says they wouldn't be able to read your writing. So we stayed in that trench, and there was all this firing going on. And then somebody shouted, we've got to get out of the trench. And I was like, no, it's fine in the trench. Everything's going over the top. And he said, no, we've got to get out. So they started getting out of this trench. And it was really scary coming out because there was a kind of earthwork over the top which made you very exposed as you came out. But literally, as we got out, there was suddenly a burst of orange flame and a mortar had landed in the ditch. So we got out and we started running. And for the next two and a half hours, we were under fire with Kalashnikov fire, RPGs, book bullets sending up clods of earth everywhere. Sometimes it was deafening and blinding. And it was like really being in a First World War movie where we were just running through these muddy fields, jumping in ditches and trenches. My heart was just thudding against my chest, and my mouth was so dry because I dropped my water bottle when I dropped my notebook. And Helmand in the summer is about 120 Fahrenheit. So it was so hot, and my breath was coming in these sort of short, rasping pants like an animal. And I just couldn't see how we were going to get out. But every time I thought I couldn't run anymore, the paratroopers were shouting at me to keep going. And to start with, I thought, okay, it's fine. I'm with the elite of the British army, the Parachute Regiment. They all know what to do. Then I realized that they didn't look as though they thought we could get out. In fact, most of them were young enough to be my son. And I realized I'D been under fire, probably much more than they had at that point. And then at one point, the sergeant Major, Mick Borden, said to me, can you use a pistol? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, we're going to probably have to fight for our lives. We'll be pinned down in these trenches, and can you use a pistol? So we were just like running, and everywhere there was all this firing going, and I just really couldn't see how we were going to get out. And the one thing that kept me going was I could see in my mind's eye a picture of a little boy with curly hair and big blue eyes, the color of the sea, which is my son Lorenzo. And I had to get out for him that Sunday. I was supposed to be hosting his seventh birthday party, a football party. And I just kept thinking about that. And I really, really didn't want to die in that muddy field in Helmand. But we just kept running. Firing was happening, and then at some point, we'd run one direction. The firing would come that way, we'd run this way would come. We'd been totally surrounded and you just couldn't see a way out. Later on, I talked to the commander who we'd all been split up, and he said to me that he was radioing headquarters and begging them for air support. And they said, there's nothing available. And he said, but I've got 45 people and a journalist. We're all going to get rolled up here. And they said, no, there's so much fighting elsewhere because everything's been used up. So at that point, he realized that they would have to fight their way out. And it was pretty impressive how they did once they realized. And actually, the way we got out really was because the guys we'd left outside with the big guns managed to get out of their ambush. And they came along the ridge at the top, and they could see us down below, and they could see one particular group of about 10 to 15 Taliban. And so they trained their.50 caliber gun on that group and shot them. Afterwards, the fire support commander said to me, rather graphically, we turned them into pink mist. So we managed, because that group had been taken out, we managed to get onto open hillside, which the army liked better because then they could kind of see all around. I didn't like it. I preferred being in the trenches. The sergeant major, once we were on the open hillside, said for us to run across the hillside, but with big gaps between us so that they couldn't fix a target. I didn't like that. I wanted to stand by a soldier. So he shouted at me, this isn't F Club Med, you know. So eventually we got out and at that point an Apache helicopter appeared, which the Taliban scared of the Hellfire missiles. So we managed to get back to our vehicles, but then it wasn't over because the commander said, we can't go back to our camp because there's only one way back and the Taliban will know that we have to go back that way. So he said we'll have to go and camp in the desert for the night. So we went towards the desert and camped. And I'm not going to lie to you, being in war and surviving is exhilarating. And we were all in quite a high and I couldn't stop talking. In fact, we lay on the sand and under all the stars and I even forgot about the scorpions and the scary camel spiders, which are these sort of Martian like transparent spiders in Helmand, which the soldiers used to collect and used to fight against each other. So we spent the night there. And then in the early hours of the next morning, an American pilot got in touch and said he could offer air support from his A10. So we started to leave, but even then it wasn't over because he said he'd only got fuel for 45 minutes, which is about the length of time for us to get back to camp. And when the commander started to try and drive his car out, it was stuck in the sand. So we were running out of time. Eventually we got the vehicle out and we just got back to camp as the fuel was running out. And it was really cool, actually. As we went over the bridge into camp, the American A10 was dropping these white flares all around us as cover, like kind of eggs dropping around. And so we managed to get in. And afterwards the British commander then said to him, thank you very much for that, in a very British accent. When we got back to camp, I thought about what had happened. I thought about what had been odd about the village, which actually was there was no children. In Afghan villages, kids always come and ask for candy. I also thought about the fact that this was war, this wasn't reconstruction. And when I told my editor what had happened, he gave me five pages to Phil, which was unprecedented for his story in the Sunday Times. I managed to get back to London on the Sunday just in time for the football party. So I went straight from Heathrow airport to Tesco's to buy ham and bread to make sandwiches, and then was in this park hosting this football party, watching 26 and 7 year old boys running around and I couldn't help thinking how weird it was that I was still covered in bruises and thorns and things from this ambush. In all my 20 years of being a foreign correspondent at that time I'd covered wars from Angola to Zimbabwe, from Iraq to the west bank. But that was the most terrifying experience that I'd had. Of course a few weeks later I was on a plane again and a few years later the commander got married and his best man read some of my article out at his wedding speech. And as you know, the foreign troops, the British have left Helmand now. The Taliban are mostly coming back into those places. Zumbale has become a very notorious Taliban stronghold and after having been told that we wouldn't fire a single shot in Afghanistan, the British actually ended up firing 46 million bullets in Helmand. Thank you.
