MEDIA & MILITARY


‘...Caroline Wyatt, News at Ten, Helmand Province.’


The role of the media, reporting back to the nation from today’s war zones, is an intensely challenging one. Caroline Wyatt, BBC News Defence Correspondent, gives us her personal insight.


I


t was a cold bright Christmas Day morning in 2007. A group of young Royal Marines from Delta Company,


40 Commando, was leaving FOB Gibraltar, then the newest forward operating base in Helmand Province, for an early morning foot patrol. I had half hoped they would not go on


patrol that day, in what was known to be a hostile area, so that no Armed Forces family would risk receiving the news they dread each time there is a knock on their door while their sons, husbands, brothers or fathers – and these days, daughters, wives, sisters and mothers too – are serving in Afghanistan. But go they did. And later in the day – after a lengthy firefight with


the Taliban – they returned, exhausted but unscathed, to celebrate their Christmas on the frontline.


Landing and reality My cameraman Chris Parkinson and I had arrived just a day or so earlier, landing in a blizzard of choking dust after a roller- coaster Chinook ride over the azure-blue lake at Kajaki. It was my first time back in Afghanistan since reporting from the north and from Kabul amid the early heady days of optimism in 2001 and 2002. That was when the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom – to track down Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11 – and later the NATO-led International Security and


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Assistance Force (ISAF) were launched, the latter in the hope that peace and stability could be brought to this war-torn country within a matter of years. The landing at FOB Gibraltar that day in


2007 brought with it a blast of cold, hard reality and a mouthful of hot sand as the Chinook took off rapidly, dropping us – and our 200kg of broadcast equipment – as fast as it could to avoid enemy fire. We had been told the base would be spartan. It was. But there was a welcome surprise. A group of young Marines and Royal Engineers were putting up a small tent at the edge of the dusty compound for their latest, rather less hardy arrivals. I had little inkling until then just how cold an Afghan winter’s


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