After three days of evacuating compromised vehicles, running from explosions and masked gunmen, my confidence was jostling the north star, sky high. A good nights sleep and a hot shower later, it’s dawned on me that I’m still just a kid who rode a bike for the first time. A bike with stabilisers.
When a select triumvirate of double-‘ard military men tell you to do something, you do it, and you do it fast. You listen, and you listen well, because you know that somewhere down the line your life could be at stake, or the life of a friend or colleague. I’m haunted by the mad dash from an ambushed land rover which saw my team navigator, codename ‘Geordie’, abandoned alone and at the mercy of a guy in a balaclava with a handgun. During debrief, Geordie told the team:
The gunman said ‘if you don’t come back here by the count of three, he’s a dead man’.
Twelve boots running on uneven ground meant we heard none of this; we left the area as quick as we could, got our bearings, and tried to find a way to safety, following train tracks and avoiding roads.
From a utilitarian perspective, six of us got away, but in the real world we may have been running headlong into some other danger. The reality was, I didn’t even think about the poor lad at the time; self preservation kicked in hard, we saw cover and went for it. It wasn’t a case of ‘forget about him’, because I never thought about the poor guy at all.
I’d learned first aid, navigation by map and compass or by the night sky, and that you have more chance of survival if you stick together. All together, not six of seven, five of seven. Weigh up being kidnapped with someone familiar or being kidnapped alone… there is no question that, in a life-threatening, harrowing situation, solitude will only compound the misery. Geordie’s blood is on my hands. Sorry pal, it’ll be different next time…
…but in the real world, there is no ‘next time’.
If you want to be a journalist and cover important events in uncertain times, you need to do this course. Enormous thanks to the blue dot team, consumate professionals with real-life experience.
Read Geordie’s story here.
Target Aquired | Mission Aborted 