Camp Shorabak

I really just didn't think I'd done anything special.

As time went on and as it sat with me more and more and as sort of rumours were going around, You know, you hear things like people saying, wow, did you hear what this medic did? And then the hospital at Camp Bastion who, who received, um, the casualty or Simon was sort of making a big deal out of, out of my treatment and what I did to him.

You start thinking there's my, and I, and I, that was our last operation before we went home on R and R for two weeks.

And I went home and I remember speaking to my dad.

Met

him in Camp Bastion.

Right.

And was he really like a proper soldier or was he...

Here he is doing a weather report for Five Live from Afghanistan in 2014.

Yeah, good morning from Camp Bastion.

I'm a reservist in the RAF and I'm out here actually doing weather forecasting for the military.

Right, so the weather for the weekend, Simon.

But they put me to sleep on the helicopter that picked me up.

And they did initial operations in Camp Bastion and then decided, look, you know what, we've done what we can here.

We'll just staple him together and put him in an induced coma and then let the UK deal with him when he got back.

By that point, my body was, everything was in a pretty bad state.

So I have to respect that.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? Passengers travelling on flight Romeo Romeo 3246 to Kandahar, Kabul and on to Camp Bastion.

Your aircraft is finally ready for boarding.

Leaving Britain today, hundreds of extra troops bound for Afghanistan.

Everybody happy?

So for James, who has reinvented his life just about as dramatically as anybody could, a seven hour flight separates him from Afghanistan, the battlefields, and his duty as a Royal Marines Commando on the frontline.

Camp Bastion, the massive British base in southern Afghanistan, and springboard to military operations throughout Helmand Province, and where the rookie Marines meet their troop commander for the first time.

Second Lieutenant Bertie Carr.

And the research highlights a massive counterintuitive success story regarding this.

They audited a joint UK and US role three MTF at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

Yes, a massive facility.

Given the sheer volume of catastrophic trauma coming through those doors, you would assume their antibiotic prescribing would be panicked and messy.

Yeah.

But the authors explain the specific mechanics of why it worked.

First, the casualties at Camp Bastion were being managed by highly experienced senior medical consultants.

Right.

I'm safe.

I'm on, I'm on Camp Bastion," my aunt saw it and said-

[laughs]

... "Oh, I've seen Dave.

I've seen him there.

He's not on Camp Bastion anymore.

He's been sent to the front line.

Oh my God."

Like they're going on about this, "Oh, you know, I was, oh, I was, yeah, I was in Afghanistan.

I was, I was in Camp Bastion." Like, sound there, that you are now no longer in the same chat that I am because I never...

I went to Camp Bastion once and you had a fucking KFC, you had a fucking pizza hut, you had loads of cool shit there.

I was in fucking Camp Tombstone, which was next to there, which was next to the American camp, and we had fuck all because we were with the fucking Afghans.

And I mean, we, I spent less than a week there.