Hey guys, Andy here. I recently posted my thoughts on the photobook published last week by the Imperial War Museum (IWM), Camp Bastion Unseen Images From Afghanistan. In the same week the book was published it was also the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York while in the UK the government announced a call-up of members of the Strategic Recall Reserve.
Driving outside the wire of Camp Shorabak, Helmand
Without exaggeration 9/11 changed the trajectory of my life. Listless after graduating university that summer, and unable to land the job I thought I wanted, my father had been encouraging me to serve. With the Good Friday Agreement ending thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland and few hot spots on the horizon, I relented; I expected to play sport and get drunk in the mess (boy did I get that wrong). So, two days after the attacks, I found myself in the British Army recruitment office on The Strand, London. Four months later, in January 2002, I entered the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, commissioning at the end of the year.
While there was no direct connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the geopolitical shockwaves of the Twin Towers falling shaped western foreign policy and served as a catalyst for British military operations in Iraq between 2003- 2011, codenamed Operation TELIC. Eight working days out of training, in June 2003, I found myself deployed on Operation TELIC 2, the first peacekeeping mission after war fighting, responsible for a troop of 30 soldiers in southern Iraq.
Two years later, in 2005, after completing a second operational tour to Cyprus with the UN in the summer of 2004, I found myself at language school. Allocated to the Farsi course, I knew Afghanistan was on the horizon; indeed I summered in Afghanistan twice, in 2006 and 2008, before leaving the Army and becoming a photographer.
Despite my love of photography, I had always been awful at it; I kicked myself for taking holiday snaps in Iraq thinking that would be my only deployment. Practice and more practice led to my eureka moment coming in the jungles in Belize; with every item scrutinised for benefit versus weight, I limited myself to taking a single memory card and two batteries foreseeing the lack of means to clear the card or recharge the batteries. As a result every potential shot was scrutinised with the camera turned on only if certain of taking a quality image and no power wasted reviewing the images; it was film discipline in a digital era.
Thus it could be argued that my photographic career originated in my military one. And it was in this role, as a photographer, that I subsequently met and took the portrait of Condoleezza Rice, the American diplomat and political scientist, who had been instrumental in USA policy that had shaped my military career.
It is hard to read the news about a British Army veteran recall and not instinctively raise an eyebrow especially coming days after the Army announced suspending non essential training exercises due to cost pressures and funding gaps. As they say, you can not make this shit up.
Comments from the veteran community are varied; some are resolute that veterans will be rushing to rejoin both out of patriotism and also that ‘we knew what we signed up for’. This unnerving populism ignores both the howls of online discontent and also the notion that we gave a second thought to life 30 years, or more, into the future when we signed up. The idea that you do not or can not change your mind during the intervening years is comical. Furthermore to suggest something must be adhered to because it’s enshrined in a document or law overlooks the fact that laws can be changed; as proved by the mobilisation news which also included that the recall ceiling was being raised from 55 years old to 65. Laws change and suit whoever write them and just because a law says something today does not mean it will say the same thing tomorrow.
As for me, I will not be rushing to put uniform back on; during my service I felt the values and standards promoted by the Army were expected from but rarely applied to me, so it is with more than a certain amount of reservation that I would wish to be recalled. I doubt I will; I believe my liability to mobilise concluded some time ago.
