In the summer of 2008 I found myself in Helmand Province. It was my second deployment to Afghanistan and the fourth and final tour of my seven year military career in the British Army. Having spent the first few months in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah mentoring an Afghan National Army unit, I found myself moved to Forward Operations Base (FOB) Price, outside the town of Gereshk. I was in command of the unit operations room and the FOB was the headquarters of the Danish Battle Group. We hosted troops from a number of NATO countries and during my first few days I introduced myself. I didn’t meet the American special forces contingent because they weren’t there when I knocked on their door, but several days later the unit commander kindly came to find me. During our conversation he claimed to be a linguist and that he spoke Chinese. Having graduated with a degree in East Asian studies I said, in Mandarin, it was good to meet a fellow Chinese speaker. Seeing the blank look on his face I then apologised and asked, in Cantonese, if maybe he spoke a different dialect.
“Shit,” he said, “Of all the places to be caught out for not actually being able to speak Chinese, I never expected it to be by a Brit in Afghanistan.” My operations room, which by now had fallen silent and was watching our interaction, burst into laughter. Suffice it to say, saying something does not make it true.
Throughout my military career I was told, ‘these are our, and now you’re, values’, and that our adventures overseas were ‘the right thing to do’. However by the time I left, it had been demonstrated that the values that had been instilled in me, and which I was expected to uphold, were not being reciprocated: loyalty was not a two way street. And by ‘I left’, I mean I was running out of the door as I could not wear the uniform anymore. I asked myself, “where were the Iraqi WMDs… What did we achieve in Afghanistan?”. I am the son of a refugee. My mother and her family fled Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War. From all my youthful bluster and bravado, I see now that I was part of an Army of occupation in different theatres of conflict, and contributed to conditions which resulted in people in two different countries having to flee their homelands. They say history repeats itself; for all my good intention, I am now a part of that.
I swapped a rifle for a camera when I left the military and became a photographer. During the Fall of Kabul in 2021 I was moved to help and do “something” because of how I felt about the part I played there. This was the origins of Armed with Words, a portrait project focused both on Afghan interpreters, who had served with the British Army, resettled to the UK and also military veterans who became political activists to help these interpreters. Completed with LSI co- founder Prof Sara de Jong, the aim was to document the plight of these two groups of people; that the former are not merely immigrants and the moral injury that drove the latter.
So do not simply say you are a linguist, prove it: speak to me in a foreign language. If you are going to send people into conflict, do not tell them they are doing the ‘right thing’ based on a lie. And do not tell me you have a moral compass: show me you know which way is north. Saying something does not make it true; you are what you do, not what you say.
Photography by Andy Barnham