Being A War Correspondent And A Mum Is A Strange Double Life

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 helmets, some boots and a medical kit. Not with Band-Aid or Tylenol, but with tourniquet ties and Celox powder, which magically clots your blood if you get shot or step on an IED. 

I also keep 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. We were being told that Afghanistan was a reconstruction project, not a war.

I’d been going to Afghanistan since 1987. It was the first place I went 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 Peshawar, dusk was just settling, and all I could see were men, most of whom had guns, and everybody seemed to be trying to sell me something.

So I got into a rickshaw, and I asked him to take me to a cheap hotel. He took me to a place called Green’s 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 of the window, and I could see these mountains silhouetted in the distance. Beyond them lay Afghanistan, and I thought about all the people who had invaded over the centuries: Alexander the Great, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Babur, the first Mughal emperor, and at that time, 1987, the Russians.

I never imagined then that I would be back twenty 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 when they went into Helmand for the first time.

One day we were sent on a hearts and mind patrol to a village called Zumbelay. We set off. There were about 45 soldiers and me in 15 vehicles, and when we got near the village we parked outside, and 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.

It was a hot, sunny day, as it always is in Helmand, and it was sort of picturesque. Everybody was in high spirits, almost as if we were going on a picnic. 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, but the British soldiers thought it was very funny to come up and “press” me.

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. If I’d been on my own, my antennae would have been raised by that, but I was with the elite of the British Army, so it was their show, not mine.

I did say to them, “There don’t seem to be many elders around.” And the commander actually asked someone, and he was told, “Oh, the elders are at the mosque praying.”

We went and sat on this muddy bank with the 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 twenty years earlier.

And then the commander said to the elder, “Are there any Taliban in your village?” He said, “No.” And then he chatted a little bit, and 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, “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 started going the way that he said.

The commander said to me, “Well, that seemed to go well, didn’t it?”

I had my notebook out, writing it down. And literally, as he said that, the first shots rang out, and his radio crackled to life. It was the guys that we’d left outside with the big guns, and they said, “We’ve been ambushed.”

We stopped to try and understand what was happening, and we could hear these shots going, and within a minute we were under fire, too. Somebody shouted, “Helmets on! Get down!”

Everybody just ran. And there were all these irrigation ditches, so we jumped into one. 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 ditch 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 ditch, and there was all this firing going on, and then somebody shouted, “We’ve got to get out of the ditch.”

I was like, “No. It’s fine in the ditch. Everything’s going over the top,” so I felt quite safe. But he said, “No. We’ve got to get out,” and they shouted that the Taliban had mortars.

It was scary 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 landed in the ditch.

We started running, and for the next two and a half hours we were under fire, with Kalashnikov fire, RPGs and bullets sending up clods of earth everywhere. Sometimes it was deafening and blinding. And it was like being in a First World War movie where we were running through these muddy fields, jumping in ditches.

My heart was thudding against my chest, and my mouth was dry because I dropped my water bottle when I dropped my notebook. Helmand in the summer is about 120ºF, so it was hot and my breath was coming in these short, rasping pants, like an animal. But every time I thought I couldn’t run anymore, the paratroopers shouted 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’ll know what to do.

Then I realised that they were scared too. In fact, most of them were young enough to be my children, and I realised I’d probably been under much more fire than they had at that point. And then the sergeant-major, Mick Bolton, said to me, “Can you use a pistol?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “We’re going to probably have to fight for our lives. We’ll be pinned down in these ditches. Can you use a pistol?”

We were running, and everywhere there was all this firing going on. 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 colour of the sea, my son, Lourenço. 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.

I really didn’t want to die in that muddy field in Helmand.

We just kept running. We’d run in one direction, and the firing would come from that way. Then we’d run another way, it would come from there too. We’d been totally surrounded. It was almost as if the Taliban were playing with us, like we were pieces in a game of chess.

Later on I talked to the commander, and he said that he was radioing headquarters and begging them for air support, and they said, “There’s nothing available.” He said, “But I’ve got 45 people and a journalist. We’re all going to get fucking rolled up here.” And they said, “No. There’s so much fighting elsewhere that everything’s been used up.”

So at that point he realised that they would have to fight their way out, and it was pretty impressive how they did it.

The guys we’d left outside with the big guns managed to get out of their ambush. 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-calibre gun on that group and shot them.

Afterwards the fire support commander said to me, rather graphically: “We turned them into pink mist.”

So because that group had been taken out, we managed to get onto open hillside, which the army liked better, because then they could see all around. I didn’t like it – I preferred being in the ditches. 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 fucking Club Med, you know!”

Eventually an Apache helicopter appeared, and the Taliban were scared of the Hellfire missiles, so we managed to get back to our vehicles.

But 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 that way.” He said, “We’ll have to go and camp in the desert for the night.”

We camped, and we put the vehicles in a protective circle around us. And I’m not going to lie to you; being in war and surviving is exhilarating. We were all on quite a high, and I couldn’t stop talking. In fact we lay on the sand, 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.

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 A-10. But he said he’d only got fuel for forty-five minutes, which is about the length of time it would take us to get back to camp.

So we set off and immediately one of the vehicles got stuck in the sand. It took ages to get it out, and meanwhile the clock was ticking. Eventually we got the vehicle out, and we got back to the bridge across from our camp. As we crossed the bridge, the American A-10 was dropping these white flares all around us as cover, so no one could fire at us. It looked like eggs raining down. It was kind of cool.

And afterwards the British commander then said to him, “Thank you very much for that,” in a very British way.

When we got back to camp I thought about what had happened. I realised what had been odd about the village, which was that there were no children. In Afghan villages kids always come and ask for candy, and that hadn’t happened.

This wasn’t a reconstruction project. This was war. And when I told my editor what had happened, he gave me five pages to fill, which was unprecedented for a story in The Sunday Times. I managed to get back to London just in time for the football party.

I went straight from Heathrow Airport to Tesco to buy ham and bread to make sandwiches, and then was in a park hosting the party. It was bizarre being there, watching all these six and seven year old boys running around without a care in the world. I was still covered in bruises and thorns from the ambush.

In all my 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. I felt that if I hadn’t been there to see what happened, nobody would have known.

A few years later the commander got married, and his best man read some of my article out at his wedding speech.

As you know the British have left Helmand. Now the Taliban are mostly coming back into those places. Zumbelay has become a very notorious Taliban stronghold.

And after having been told that “not a single bullet” would be fired in Afghanistan, the British ended up firing 46 million bullets in Helmand.

Christina Lamb is chief foreign correspondent at The Sunday Times