Jo Metson Scott spent the past five years photographing American and British soldiers who spoke out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using their letters and portraits, her book The Grey Line explores the soldiers’ reasons for doing so, and the fates that have awaited them.

Metson Scott introduced The Grey Line to a Frontline Club audience on Tuesday night, with journalist Victoria Brittain and former SAS soldier Ben Griffin joining her on stage.

Metson Scott described the proces of collating her book:

“The Project is about individuals, or soldiers, who have moral doubts about their involvement in the Iraq War, and over a period of five years I went back and forth to America and I interviewed about 40 soldiers. . . . I essentially was looking at what an individual does when they’re contractually obliged to do something that they’re morally opposed to.”

 

“The thread that runs through them all,” Griffin said of Metson Scott’s subjects, “is a moral objection to what’s going on – seeing a moral bankruptcy in what is being done in these countries.”

Griffin himself fought in Iraq in 2004:

“We would go out in the nighttime and use explosives to smash our way into people’s homes. . . . These were normal civilians . . . I suppose it could all be summed up when my commanding officer . . . said that he was worried that we were becoming the secret police of Baghdad. . . . I contemplated this every day. What was I doing? What was I doing taking part in this?”

In 2005, he refused to return and was discharged. He began criticising the Iraq War in public, and in 2008, a High Court injunction banned him from ever speaking again on what he knew from his time in the service.

Griffin adhered to the injunction for two and a half years.

“I actually became quite ill,” he remembered, “in a sort of PTSD kind of way. Got very depressed, and I was drinking a lot, and I was thinking about Iraq, and the rest of it. And I decided that maybe what was causing the illness to be worse was that I had this duty to speak.”

In 2011, he founded the UK Chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Griffin praised Metson Scott for capturing the courage in her subjects:

“The most important point to make about this resistance is that of all the guys I’ve met . . . this is not about being scared [of getting hurt].

 

“This is about being morally opposed to doing it to other people . . . to shooting people . . . to killing people, to torturing people, to dragging them out of their houses in the middle of the night.

 

“[Yet] the media likes to portray these [soldiers] as cowards.”

At its core, Griffin tied the problem to Empire – “Britain and America are basically an Empire,” he said – and that the projection of power – “the war in Iraq I think is pretty straightforward: it’s about controlling the oil supply” – has lacked a real moral footing.

Audience member Anwar Sarwar, also a British veteran of the Iraq War, agreed:

“I’ve been to Auschwitz and Birkenau . . . it was absolutely horrific. . . . This is a wider case about whether you should fight for Queen and Country, etc. When something like that happens, you’ll feel it in your stomach. And I’m sure that loads of people here are willing to get up and fight that kind of tyranny.

 

“That’s not the kind of thing that was going on in Iraq, where I served twice, and I was also one of the first troops to invade. . . . I was the guy kicking the doors in.”

Shorts at the Frontline Club on 1 February showcased five documentaries that highlight different ways of telling non-fictional stories. Four of the filmmakers were on hand to discuss the themes and process behind their work.

The first film of the evening, Afghanistan: The forgotten war, was shot by Vaughan Smith, who spent three weeks with the Grenadier Guards 3 Platoon in Helmand mid-2012. As the war in Afghanistan drops off ‘top stories of the year’ lists in the news, Smith asks what the soldiers are doing it for. It opens with an announcement of a casualty, Lance Corporal Groom, and the reactions of grief from fellow soldiers – a scene the MoD wanted removed in the final cut.

During the Q&A Smith said:

“I think it is important to show the suffering of war as well as the paraphernalia of war. . . . [The news] we get here is a long sequence of successes which somehow turns into a significant defeat. . . . What are they are fighting for? They are fighting for each other, for their regiment. . . . They are professional soldiers doing a job.”

The next film, Borderland, by Simon Mitchell, looks at the deep divisions of a Syria in conflict; divisions between and within nations, religions, communities and families.

“We have given a very black and white narrative from the outside, it suits our media, it suits our politicians . . . [but] there is a whole contradictory, confusing outlook from almost every perspective [on the ground],” Mitchell said.

From South Africa, Port Nolloth: Between a rock and a hard place is about a former deserted mining hub on the west coast. Filmed against a backdrop of desolate, barren landscape and sleepy shops, director Felix Seuffert introduces three characters and their stories – all tied to the diamond trade for better or worse. Seuffert was not on hand for the screening.

After, by Lukasz Konopa, is a silent ‘day-in-the-life’ of today’s Auschwitz. It is a meditative reflection beginning and ending with the routine maintenance and care of facilities as a variety of tourists cross the train tracks that once transported victims. The film is a student project inspired by the poem Campo dei Fiori by Polish Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz.

“[The film is about] how past and present melds, how do Europeans remember [the] past? Which, growing up in Poland, is [a] very important subject because wherever you go you see places where people were dying or were killed and it’s kind of normal, we get used to that, it’s everywhere,” Konopa said.

The last film of the evening was director Kate Sullivan’s Walk Tall, an animated portrait of 1948 Olympic gymnast and indefatigable nonagenarian George Weedon. It moves between filmed scenes of Weedon’s present-day campaign to improve the world’s posture and animated clips detailing his story and the challenges he overcame on the way to the Olympics.

Sullivan said: “After his Olympic escapades [Weedon] worked for a great number of years as a builder and I just have a general love of DIY manuals, and that was the starting point for the styling [of the animation]. . . . The whole film is handmade, he is a guy with a handmade gym in a garden, so to me that was a lovely poetic thing.”