Video: Hear from the Army private whose first-person video of a firefight in Afghanistan has received more than twenty-three million views on YouTube. The small, mountable cameras are often used for tactical means, but hours of combat footage taken by these helmet cams have also been viewed by millions on the Internet. The Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe talks about the ubiquity of the cameras and the combat footage that ends up on computer screens around the world.
The video would be viewed more than 23 million times, making it perhaps the most-watched footage of the Afghan war. It began last April when Pfc. Ted Daniels pressed the record button on his helmet camera.
The device captured what he could see: a rocky Afghan hillside dotted with shrubs and boulders, a small village and no place to hide.
(Mathew Staver/For The Washington Post) - Pfc. Ted Daniels strapped a camera to his helmet and recorded as he was caught in a firefight in Afghanistan.
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It also recorded sound: The pop, pop, pop of gunfire, and then Daniels’s voice.
“Hey!” he yells. “I’m moving down!”
The 37-year-old soldier pauses for a second and steps into the Taliban barrage, hoping to draw fire away from his fellow soldiers. A bullet kicks up a cloud of dust inches from his right foot. Another strikes near his left.
Daniels scrambles across the steep hill, breathing heavily. The camera careens from side to side as he looks for cover. He is kneeling behind a small rock when an enemy round slams into his rifle, knocking it from his hands.
“I’m hit,” he screams in pain and disbelief. Then louder and more desperate: “I’m hit!”
He glances at his hand, checking quickly to make sure he has all of his fingers. Another burst of enemy fire bounces off the rock, peppering his arms with slivers of razor-sharp shrapnel.
“Help me!” Daniels yells. “I’m hit! I’m hit” He screams the phrase six more times and falls silent.
Seconds later, his camera battery died.
The next day, in the safety of his base, Daniels downloaded the footage to his laptop computer. His hands and forearms were still bandaged and oozing blood. A small group of soldiers pressed in close to see. The room was hushed as they watched.
For as long as there has been war, soldiers have sought to capture the unexplainable terror and thrill of combat. Previous generations snatched war trophies or snapped photos that they stored away in shoe boxes. In Afghanistan, soldiers have recorded untold hours of video with small cameras mounted on the front of their helmets.
Some of the footage is officially sanctioned for intelligence-gathering purposes. But most of the videos are intended as battlefield souvenirs. Several hundred of them have surfaced on the Internet.
The power of Daniels’s video lies in its ability to deliver the viewer directly to the battlefield. Viewers can hear Daniels panting, his boots crunching on rocky ground and the snap of enemy bullets as they pass by his head. The perspective is familiar — it is the same as Call of Duty and other combat video games.
What the video doesn’t show is Daniels. The footage lacks context. It is an empty vessel that viewers fill with their own opinions about America’s wars, its troops, killing and combat.
Daniels had a different response the first time he watched the video. His hands shook. For the next several days, he couldn’t sleep and he struggled to eat. When other soldiers at the outpost asked for copies, he turned them down. “It’s personal,” Daniels told them.
‘He was scared for me’
In August 2012, Daniels was sent home because the firefight had aggravated a foot injury. As soon as he reached the United States, he picked up his two boys — one from each of his broken marriages — and drove them to his father’s house in northern Pennsylvania.
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