‘You have to see it to believe it’ say the soldiers who have put their heart and soul into an exhibition about their Afghanistan experiences
Over 150 soldiers from 16 Air Assault Brigade have laid their forces lives bare in an effort to bring their story to the British public, in their own words and using their own personal items.
The compelling images on these pages form part of
Helmand: The Soldiers’ Story
, a unique exhibition that was dreamed up, built and written by soldiers fighting in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Fed up with reading articles in the British press that seem at odds with their own experiences, and driven by a need for people back home to understand their work – with all the stress, danger, humour and grief that continuous engagements create – the troops approached the National Army Museum with plans for their own exhibition about Afghanistan.
The soldiers have given the museum raw and unedited written and oral accounts of their experiences. Their personal photos, footage, diaries, letters and emails offer an unusual insight into the conflict from a British soldier’s perspective.
A step into the exhibition immerses visitors in the sights and sounds of Army life in Afghanistan. You can explore an accommodation tent in ‘Camp Bastion’ – complete with
camp beds, mosquito nets and letters sent home – or tour combat outposts, a mortar gun position and an improvised medical outpost.
Soldiers from the Royal Engineers, Royal Logistics Corps and Royal Irish Regiment built every structure in the exhibition. Personal objects relating to the tour include worn-thin combat shirts, improvised ‘contact’ calendars, mugs made from mortar bomb packaging, and shrapnel kept as mementoes of war wounds.
Each item in the exhibition is authentic, and all the more poignant for it. But the sight that really drives the message home is a wall bearing the names of 19 soldiers from the Brigade who died between June and September 2006. This is their story too.
