In the last 25 years the Australian Defence Force has sent soldiers to the Gulf War, East Timor, the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq War and the War on ISIL. For starters. So why is it, when we make a war film, we’re still tapping World War I? (See 2010’s Beneath Hill 60.)
Where’s our version of Hurt Locker, or Zero Dark Thirty? Who are our quiet heroes in the Middle East, ready to join Gallipolli’s Archy and Frank in the filmic war chest?
Director Paul Katis found himself asking the same sorts of questions, albeit in a British context. He’d been working on a training film for the Ministry of Defence, interviewing a young soldier, just turned 18, who was heading to Afghanistan.
“I knew nothing about what his life was going to be like… We’ve been at war I think every year since 1945 bar one, but we don’t make any films about it.” Katis says.
So he and writer Tom Williams set about finding a modern British war story.
An incident dubbed ‘The Day of Days’ stood out. It read like a drama already: a group of soldiers – mostly from the British Army’s 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (3 PARA) – were stationed at the Kajaki Dam in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. On 6 September 2006, three men hiked down into an unmarked, 25-year-old Soviet minefield, a disastrous move that was further exacerbated by a series of military cockups.
Initially based on a re-telling of the incident by Paul ‘Tug’ Hartley, a British medic central to the action, the Kajaki narrative was subsequently augmented by the recollections of many who were there. The more Katis and Williams got to know the soldiers, the more they felt compelled to get as close to the truth as possible.
One soldier who didn’t contribute to the narrative was Corporal Mark Wright, (played by Scottish actor David Elliot). He perished after injuries sustained in the minefield and was posthumously awarded a George Cross. Katis and crew were careful to get Wright’s parents’ blessing on the project.
“There are a number of people who distinguish themselves through the course of the day,” says Katis. “To me the defining moment is when Tug (played in the film by Game of Thrones’ Mark Stanley) is faced with the inevitable, which is he has to behave like a hero despite the fact that every fibre of his being is telling him he doesn’t want to. And that’s a common man becoming a hero rather than the hero going through a heroic journey.”
What follows is an act of gallantry that is so clumsy and human and reeking of fear that we cannot help but put ourselves in Hartley’s shoes and live those moments with him.
Hartley was just happy the film was made. “There were a lot of young boys there that day. Ken (Barlow) was 18, young Jar Head (Chris Harvey) was 19 and they didn’t really get much praise for what they did…. Four of us were given gallantry awards, six men got nothing and this is the chance to immortalise what they did.”
Kajaki: Kilo Two Bravo is a tremendously powerful film, searingly naturalistic, the barrage of military terms and Scottish dialects sometimes impenetrable but – as any fan of The Wire will tell you – you just deal with it. The lack of any musical score means you have no distraction from the explosions and screams of men with limbs blown off when the morphine runs out. It’s in-your-face harrowing and dreadfully tense.
The black humour is wonderfully poignant: laugh-out-loud moments in between the horrors. Says Hartley, “We were in that minefield for just short of six hours, singing happy birthday, giving each other abuse… none of the training I ever did had me ready for what happened that day. There’s the black humour to just get you through it.”
The film (thankfully) refuses to take any kind of political position on war, starting with some of the most mundane soldier banter you’re likely to hear, and ending in a frustrating tragedy. After the film was released, Katis says he was pilloried by both the war guys and the anti-war guys – a good sign he’d got the balance right.
Having now taken the film on tour to various parts of the world, Katis is amazed at the number of countries that, like the UK, have avoided making films about modern conflicts. Looking for reasons, Katis says that among our film-making communities there is a very singular, liberal view of war, leading to a “kind of mass attempt at trying to deny that we’re at war.”
The other hurdle is it’s rarely black and white with modern warfare. “The Second World War was delightfully straightforward, there were the goodies and there were the baddies. Now who’s to say who’s the goodie and who’s the baddie. It’s much more complicated”, says Katis.
A percentage of profits from the film has been donated to four UK war veterans’ charities.
Kajaki: Kilo Two Bravo will be available on DVD, Blu-Ray and to own or rent on digital platforms (including iTunes) from 20 January.
