David Pratt: Front line beckons when the confines of desk job stultify

But if coming home can be an emotionally and psychologically dislocating experience, then likewise going back into the theatre of war has its own set of pressures, peculiarities, anxieties and pleasures.

“Ah, well, another day at the office,” a television cameraman joked the other night as we waited a seemingly interminable two hours at 3 o’clock on Wednesday morning for our baggage to be cleared at the airport in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil.

This “normal” city with its shiny airport and busy shopping malls is the jumping off point for most reporters heading the short distance to the frontlines around the very different Iraqi city that is Mosul.

There in Mosul, of course, lies the story we have all come to cover as the long awaited offensive by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters gets under way to liberate Iraq’s second largest city from more than two years of brutal rule by the Islamic State (IS) group.

Milling around Erbil airport in the wee small hours of Wednesday, I couldn’t help wondering what William Howard Russell of The Times of London would have made of it all.

Generally hailed as the father of “modern” war journalism after his reporting of the Crimea War in 1854, it was Russell who, understandably, went on to describe himself as the “miserable parent of a luckless tribe”.

What would he have thought of today’s members of that luckless tribe as they lounged around waiting for their Kevlar helmets and flak jackets to come trundling off the baggage reclaim belt after security clearance at Erbil airport the other night?

Glamorous as the lay person might think the job is, most people in reality know little about the mundanity involved in covering war.

I’ve lost count of the times people have asked if I get “danger money” for what we do.

They seem flabbergasted, too, when they hear that most of today’s war correspondents have little or no budgets or expense accounts and, indeed, that some starting out, myself included many years ago, have been known to pay their own way to the conflicts they cover.

Long gone are the grand old days days when Russell was around, or when the late, great, correspondent of Scottish parentage, James Cameron, could file an expense account to his newspaper for “camel feed” while covering war in the deserts of the Middle East. The simple fact is that most of today’s war correspondents are freelances who do what they do on a shoestring.

Beyond the household names of the major broadcast network correspondents, the vast majority of frontline news gatherers whose stories and pictures fill our publications, airways and television screens, are indeed part of a luckless tribe and anonymous to boot.

With little or no corporate support or backup, many are – as a colleague and friend once put it – somewhat akin to circus trapeze artists, swinging on a high wire with no safety net to catch them should they fall. And fall they often do.

Waiting to buy a local SIM card for my mobile phone to help keep costs down, I found myself talking to an Italian colleague in a store in Erbil. Like me he’d had about three hours sleep in the last 30 hours and was preparing for the first foray of his assignment to the Mosul frontline yesterday.

Though still a staff reporter, he had taken on other work with his newspaper’s approval from an online agency to help pay the way through this trip and earn some money at the other end.

Staying in a hotel next to mine, he was keeping costs low by sharing a room with another freelance French photographer colleague he had only just met.

“You think it’s still all worth it?” I asked him, before he gave me a quizzical look and offered up his reply

“Of course it is,” he said, adding, “anyway, what else would the likes of you and I do?”

He’d tried the desk job, he explained,but it simply wasn’t for him. No doubt over the coming days we will likely bump into each other again, part of the travelling circus in which most performers share his sentiments and antipathy towards being shackled to a desk.

It was the novelist John le Carre, a man who has spent more than his share of time in the company of foreign and war correspondents, who made the observation in his novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, that “a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world”.

Sitting with a beer at a bar in Istanbul airport the other day en-route to Iraq, I was reminded of the wonderful encounters and experiences that travelling in this line of work throws up.

Within seconds of sitting down I found myself immersed in conversation with two men.

One was a young, black American from Boston who had flown via Istanbul to get to London to see his girlfriend.

“Well, why the hell not, I’ve never been here before, ” he told me by way of explanation.

It was, he said, a welcome escape from his day job as a prison officer in one of America’s most notorious high security jails.

Alongside us as we spoke was an elderly Portuguese former naval captain who, having been stuck behind a desk as part of a shore job, decided it was not for him.

His escape, he said, was to become skipper of a yacht for a Lebanese billionaire whose boat was berthed in Beirut, where the skipper was now heading.

In the space of perhaps an hour, we had struck up a discussion about our respective takes on life and why there is always the need to get out and explore. Our chance meeting was a point in case.

It’s early evening here in Erbil as I write this.

Outside it’s still a balmy night with the temperature around 30 degree celsius.

The muezzin’s hypnotic call to prayer from a nearby mosque is reverberating across the rooftops and tomorrow promises to be a fascinating and, doubtless, challenging day covering events on the frontlines around Mosul.

Sleep beckons before I need to get down to the job of reporting on what will be a huge international story here for, perhaps, months to come.

First, though, I have to wash my socks in the hotel bathroom wash basin.

I did say this job is far from glamorous, but then I wouldn’t have it any other way.