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THE PRICE OF WAR
WAR IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY BUT THE PAIN IS FELT MUCH CLOSER TO HOME IN THE BEDROOMS OF THE BOYS WHO DIDN’T RETURN
Billy Briggs on a moving project to commemorate fallen soldiers
The intimate black and white photograph shows a CD collection next to a shelf stacked with books telling tales of his beloved football teams, Rangers and Manchester City. A set of dumbbells lie on a floral carpet while a pair of speakers act as book-ends to a television beside a single bed. In the foreground to the right, tartan ties hang from a hook and on a shelf to the left sits a picture of Robbie and his sister when younger, their heads touching as they pose for the camera.
There’s an old cricket bat leaning against a wall and a Formula One duvet cover, and hanging proudly from the room’s white wooden walls are framed photos of an army regiment, its soldiers standing proudly to attention in precise rows. Clues to a young man’s life, captured for posterity.
This was the bedroom of Private Robert McLaren who was killed in an explosion on June 11, 2009, while serving with the Black Watch in Afghanistan. Robbie, as his parents called him, was 20 years old when he died, the victim of an improvised explosive device planted by the Taliban. His life ended less than a month into his first tour as an infantryman. Robbie came from Mull, where he grew up in a south-westerly place called Kintra Fionnphort (Port of the White Sands in Gaelic), close to where the ferry sails to Iona. His family home was in a small community, the bedroom his from the age of two years old.
The image of Robbie’s room was taken by war photographer Ashley Gilbertson nearly two years after his death, as part of a project called Bedrooms of the Fallen, which pays tribute to soldiers killed in action. In the remoteness of south Mull, the Australian photojournalist met Robbie’s parents, Alasdair and Linda, who had granted him permission to visit their home.
Gilbertson knew much of war and death as he’d spent seven years working in Iraq, documenting the lead-up to the 2003 US-led invasion and its chaotic aftermath. Often risking his life, Gilbertson produced striking reportage for The New York Times, among others, an eyewitness to events such as the Battle for Fallujah and the carnage of war-torn cities including Baghdad, Ramadi and Samarra. In 2004, he won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his courage and a photographic memoir entitled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War was published in 2009.
Gilbertson was deeply affected by his experiences and when he returned to his home in New York in 2007, he began focusing on issues facing army veterans as he sought to communicate to people the immense costs of war. However, he became frustrated that society was largely ignoring returning servicemen while seemingly failing to comprehend the enormity of sacrifices made in the Middle East. As he pondered how to redress the balance it was an idea from his wife that gave rise to Bedrooms of the Fallen.
“We were looking at head-shots, like a thousand head-shots across two pages of The New York Times…of soldiers who had died in combat…and Joanna turned to me and said, ‘you need to photograph their bedrooms’. My wife’s idea was the best, the most inspired, and touching idea that I have ever had the honour to work on.
“It was incredible because it addresses the absence and it addresses the reason people are grieving. I feel that ‘ignoring’ is a very strong word but by paying little attention to those people who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re not being responsible as members of a functioning democracy,” said Gilbertson.
Bedrooms of the Fallen took seven years to complete. In total, Gilbertson photographed 40 bedrooms, a figure chosen to mark the number of soldiers in a platoon. The men whose rooms Gilbertson photographed came from America, Canada and European nations including Holland, Italy, England and Scotland. The soldiers ranged in age from 18 to 27 and the book was dedicated to Marine Lance Corporal Billy Miller, who was escorting Gilbertson in Fallujah when he was shot dead.
Gilbertson says it was a long process to convince grieving families he was not seeking to politicise the deaths of their children, nor disrespect their names in any way. He would do multiple visits to places such as Indiana and Pennsylvania to gain families’ trust and eventually, he says, they would understand he had honest reasons and agree to share their memories.
“We get really uncomfortable about death because of our own mortality, not because somebody died. We’re afraid of talking about it but in fact, you go to a funeral and then you go to the wake, and what do you do at the wake? You sit around and drink and talk and laugh, and tell great memories of that person you loved and were close to, and that’s what these families want. I don’t believe we’re giving them the opportunity to do that enough.”
When Gilbertson contacted Robbie’s parents, Alasdair and Linda, they were wary but they agreed to see him and he visited Mull in spring 2011, where he learned about Robbie and took photographs of his bedroom. After flying to Scotland from the USA, then driving from Glasgow to Oban before taking a ferry to Mull followed by another drive down to the south of the island, Gilbertson felt as if he was nearing the edge of the Earth.
“It was so remote. But then sitting there and looking over the water and hearing the sheep and the waves crashing…to think that the war in Afghanistan had so profoundly affected a family, even out there, it made me feel like you can’t escape this…and the family were so warm, they were so welcoming,” he says.
Alasdair and Linda have since moved from the island and now live in a quiet part of Perthshire. When we meet at their new
The family were so warm, they were so welcoming
home they talk of Robbie and how he was always laughing and smiling but could sometimes be stubborn like his father, and that he always knew if his sister, Laura, had borrowed CDs from his room and not put them back in the right place. ‘You’ve been at my CDs,’ he’d say to her,” Linda recalls, smiling at the memory.
In the lounge, there are several photos of Robbie in army uniform and two framed photos of Chinook helicopters he took on his phone when in Afghanistan. His army colleagues called him Rab whereas school friends nicknamed him Berto after the former Manchester City manager, Roberto Mancini. “One of his pals from school has Berto tattooed on his leg as a tribute,” Linda says.
Robbie always loved sport, and as a kid he would play golf in a field at the back of the family home at Kintra, using rabbit burrows as makeshift holes. The cricket bat in his bedroom – a gift from his dad – was used for rounders but Robbie’s greatest passion was football and he played in midfield for Oban High School.
As we chat, Alasdair brings out a photo album and flicks through the pages until he finds a picture of Robbie’s friends at a memorial football game in Mull. The lads are lined up with their backs to the camera, each shirt sporting McLaren with the number 7 below, as a tribute to their friend and teammate.
Robbie had a large collection of football shirts, Linda mentions, some of which the couple gifted to a charity called KitAid that sends clothing to under privileged African
children. “We felt there was something good come out of it. Although there were a few we couldn’t part with,” she adds.
Such was Robbie’s love of football the couple thought he might choose a career to chime with sport. He’d also been accepted by three colleges to study electrics so both Alasdair and Linda were quite shocked when in 2006 Robbie said that he wanted to join the army.
There was no military tradition in either family and their son had never before expressed interest in joining the armed forces, always saying he wished to pursue sport.
“He was keen on sports physiotherapy. It came out of the blue,” says Alasdair, who recalls advising Robbie to learn a trade if he did opt for the military. His son paid heed and in November 2007 he joined the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME). During basic training Robbie proved to be an outstanding soldier. Indeed, he was voted Best Sapper by his instructors at combat engineering training, although Alasdair and Linda knew nothing of his success until the passing out parade.
“He never told us about his prizes. He was the same at school. He didn’t blow his own trumpet, ever. He was very modest,” Linda says handing over the framed certificate Robbie received.
Life in the REME was good for Robbie but at some point he decided he wanted to transfer to the infantry and in April 3, 2009, he passed out of 7 Platoon and was posted to the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. Within weeks he was in Afghanistan, where he was killed by an IED less than a month
into his tour. Paying tribute to Robbie, Commanding Officer of 3 Scots, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Cartwright, said the Black Watch had been conducting an offensive operation against the Taliban and had been engaged in close combat with insurgents for several hours. He added: “Robert had displayed enormous physical courage during this battle. He gave his life for his friends with his selfless commitment, moving forward in the face of a determined and ruthless enemy.”
Back in the family home, there is silence for a moment, then Linda hands over a book called Aviation Assault Battle Group: The 2009 Afghanistan Tour of The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland, and opens the chapter that details the circumstances surrounding her son’s death. “His platoon were the ones who had to clear the houses. They called them The Doomers,” she says, before explaining that another five young men died during the Black Watch’s tour that year: Sergeant Sean Binnie, from Aberdeen; Sergeant Gus Miller, from Motherwell; Private Kevin Elliott, from Dundee; and Corporal Tam Mason, from Kelty. Bombardier Craig Hopson of the Royal Artillery was also killed.
There is another pause then I ask what both Alasdair and Linda think of Bedrooms of the Fallen? Alasdair replies the book is a fitting tribute to his son and the other 39 soldiers who died, and that it brings home how young the soldiers were, mostly school leavers. Linda says she found some of the text so moving she couldn’t finish reading it the first time round, adding: “It’s really just scratching the surface. How many bedrooms like that are all over the world?”
For Gilbertson, he says he felt more like a war photographer covering Bedrooms of the Fallen than he ever did in combat.
“I think it’s because the real heart of war, the real pain and difficulty and grief and loss that war represents, was inside those bedrooms. The bedrooms felt a lot more honest as a war photographer, a lot more to the point than everything else around war. In combat, working in Iraq or Afghanistan, your job was to take pictures and survive to the end of the day, and it’s the same job that a civilian has and a soldier has, which is basically to survive.
“In the bedrooms it was a lot more about empathy, compassion and being emotionally connected with the families.”