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Our war
2011-05-28 14:35:24
28 May 2011 Last updated at 08:27 Share this page Delicious Digg Facebook reddit StumbleUpon Twitter Email Print Life at war captured through the eyes of soldiers By Louise Coletta BBC News
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// Find out more about Helmet camerasPresident Obama, for example, was able to watch real-time footage of US Navy Seals as they approached Osama Bin Laden's compound in May, using this technology.
The cameras can go anywhere the soldier goes and once set recording, can easily be forgotten.
They are small, wireless and tape-less. And fitted only with a memory card, they can run for three or four hours at a time.
When Sgt Panter returned to base on the day Private Gray had been shot, he was surprised the camera was still running.
"[The footage] is completely unvarnished in that respect, nobody is acting-up for the camera," says Mr Barr.
"It feels like you're in somebody's head. When they look left, you look left. When they look right, you look right. And when they run, you run."
When she heard of her son's death, Private Gray's mother Helen said she "needed to know everything", but should we?
The kind of unmediated experience this footage offers the viewer is undeniably a powerful story-telling device.
Continue reading the main story “Start QuoteIt does bring back memories and I do find it a little bit hard”
End Quote Sergeant Simon Panter 1 Royal AnglianBut it can also be quite disorientating.
"There's a helplessness in it," continues Mr Barr, "you don't quite know what's going to happen next."
It is inevitable that, as viewers, we will see an increase in this kind of footage because of its compelling nature.
But does it have the potential to render the "embedded video journalist" redundant?
Mr Barr argues not and sees the films as "another layer of material" for journalists and film-makers to use to tell the story.
"If you're an embedded cameraman, you're filming with an eye to telling the story as you go and you're thinking about that all the time. If you're looking at this footage, it doesn't have any of those values in it… and without the interviews underpinning it, it would be meaningless."
The real danger, he says, is that this footage is not treated with the respect it deserves.
That people get so used to seeing it that it almost loses its point, a little like the way undercover filming was abused 10 years ago. Suddenly everybody was doing it.
"The worst thing for me would be if this material ended up just becoming part of a kind of casual palette of war, like archive that's just used and re-used and almost loses its meaning because of that… it has to be so carefully handled."
"It does bring back memories and I do find it a little bit hard," says Sgt Panter about the films he took.
"Just because I'm a sergeant, doesn't mean I haven't got any feelings."
Our War, episode one, will be broadcast at 2100 BST on 7 June, 2011, on BBC Three.
Read more about the series and see over 35 exclusive self-shot films, exploring a decade of conflict in Afghanistan.
Read an account by Bjorn Rose, Private Gray's commanding officer at the time of his death.