Going to a patrol base was all well and good for seeing the war in close-up – it allowed you to zoom in – but you lost sight of everything else going on outside the frame. In the same way that Russ had needed a guide when he was filming out on the ground, I felt like I needed a guide to keep me informed about the rest of the war. The evening of 25th June followed an increasingly familiar pattern for me. When all of my JMOC colleagues went off to dinner, I stayed behind and manned the phones. That meant I took up my position at the Ops Watch laptop and looked through all the significant events of the day. In the last hour a US Marine brought into Bastion with facial wounds had gone into cardiac arrest. His unit – 2nd Battalion 8th Marines – had come under fire from insurgents during a security operation in Nad-e Ali, leaving one Marine with a gunshot wound to the right shoulder and another with gunshot wounds to the left foot and buttock. The rest of the Marines had retaliated with small-arms fire and a 40-mm grenade launcher; in the resulting confusion, one of the grenades had apparently landed short, leaving two Marines with serious shrapnel wounds to the face (both Cat A).
