3 Para

"That’s right. Fighter Boys is a wonderful account of the Battle of Britain, with a huge amount of detail. But Patrick wasn’t there—and, as I said at the beginning, the point of a war correspondent is that he has to be there. Now Patrick was there in Afghanistan in 2006 with the Third Parachute Battle Group, a British Army regiment, at the start of the UK deployment into Helmand Province. Apparently the paratroopers did so with a mission to bring schools and hospitals back to work, to ensure proper food supplies, and so forth. It was a psychological campaign, not a military campaign. “Telling a war correspondent to be careful? It’s just not part of the job” The point of the paratroopers is that they are the best trained in actual combat in the British Army, thus they were put in a position that they had to do something they weren’t really trained to do. But they did their best and Patrick was with them as they built the schools, repaired the roads and the waterworks, and so on and so forth. But what they quickly found was that they were meeting a people who did not want them to be there. So this supposedly humanist campaign quickly became an actual, vastly bloody war in which the paratroopers were badly outnumbered and lacked the proper equipment. There just weren’t enough helicopters. So a peace mission became a war mission and the paratroopers were trapped in these mud-walled villages, were trapped in the desert without the proper armoured vehicles, not knowing where to go or how to fight this enemy that was there one minute and gone the next. It was a classic guerrilla war, and they lost a lot of men. What Patrick Bishop has done is report on that mission step by step, reporting on how it became a nightmare for a very hardened and very famous British Army unit. Good question. When I was covering conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, that’s one thing I held in my mind: there is a reader at home. In those days, it was print newspapers, and I had to make sure he didn’t just turn the page. I couldn’t just write: oh, a terrible atrocity happened and the Rhodesian forces blamed the guerrillas and the guerrillas blamed the Rhodesian forces. That isn’t going to work. What you have to do is talk to the people who are emotionally engaged. I went into the townships around the Rhodesian capital, which was then called Salisbury, and talked to the people who were acting as guerrillas, or reporting back to the guerrilla bases in Mozambique about the morale of the white population. To break that morale, the guerrillas—then under Robert Mugabe—were killing as many white farmers as they could in the countryside, ambushing mission stations, making the roads impassible. Only by talking to, say, a barman in a township, could one get some idea of the frustration and the feeling of sheer oppression visited on them by the white minority. It wasn’t all black and white. I should say this. Because many Africans joined the Rhodesian Armed Forces, both the regular military and special forces, and the police. So that made it more difficult to make moral judgements on the war. And moral jeopardy is something that foreign correspondents, and particularly war correspondents, find themselves caught up in if they try to make judgements as to who is right and who is wrong. As far as possible I tried not to make those judgements, I just tried to report what was happening. And I did so through the eyes and the ears and of the local people, the ordinary people I found there."