Deep Field Read Online Free

earthquake. We had been lent some space amid the concrete debris by a mobile German medical unit that had quartered there, and during the day we set up our office on a series of string beds, one of which we turned on its head and moved every half-hour following the sun, to provide shade. Every few minutes the dull thud of rotor blades roared overhead as NATO helicopters—sent over from Afghanistan—flew past on aid missions. The nights were bitterly cold, and even though I slept in a cracked classroom I learned quickly to leave my sleeping bag open and to run out into the courtyard every time there was an aftershock—which came frequently and massively in the aftermath of that first tectonic jolt.
    IOM had been given a central role in the relief effort but had taken some time to scale up its operations to respond on the massive scale required. When we arrived, our reception was harsh. We were addressed by our institutional acronym, rather than by name. The multi-pocketed, pseudo-military jerkins we wore quickly became known as ‘the target’, owing to the organisation’s round logo and the hostile response it guaranteed. As they subsequently became an established part of ‘field wear’, sported by anyone who wished to suggest they had somehow been ‘at the front’, they became known as ‘the wanker jacket’. ‘Don’t you realise there’s been an earthquake?’ I was asked early on by one exasperated aid worker who, ironically, had come to us for help.
    The nights were equally unremitting, and what was officially termed ‘the close of play’ began sometime after 10pm with the announcement of an hour of reflection—a sort of humanitarian Nunc Dimittis, complete with the swirling smoke of Raj-nostalgic cigarettes: Player’s, Pall Mall, Craven A. We called this almost religious moment ‘fuck-up of the day’.
    But information on the earthquake was limited and uncoordinated. Reports dribbled in from field staff of new population movements, uncontacted villages and whole districts in the mountains still reeling from aftershocks. Random shell-shocked people would turn up at our door asking for aid, sometimes with battered handwritten letters of supplication in English or Urdu that had clearly been taken from aid agency to aid agency in the hope of finding a tent, sleeping bag or box of military rations.
    I spent a day with a team conducting aerial assessments of the northern valleys most severely hit by the earthquake. I had read the reports and seen some footage but only after eight hours in a helicopter, weaving in and out of the valleys, did I begin to comprehend the full picture. From on high little damage could be seen, but as we swooped low on unsuspecting hamlets clustered together at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet, the destructive power that had been unleashed across these vast alpine tracts was awesome. Roofs of houses that looked intact from above were suddenly revealed to be unsupported by walls and sat a few feet off the ground, covering the debris that had crushed those inside. Roads, carved through the vast mountains over decades with conscripted muscle and dynamite, had been swept away in seconds, cutting off whole regions from the outside world. In a land of swallowed roads and shattered bridges, everything covered in a grey dust of concrete, rubble and brick, only the domed mosques—built, ironically, for another world—continued to stand.
    In a few places we landed, blowing down tents and covering the landscape and its inhabitants with dust from the helicopter’s downdraft. We leapt out clutching notebooks and GPS units, vigorously recording our altitude, coordinates and observations, as if this rush of note-taking would somehow shrink mountains, unify villages and bring order to chaos.
    But this new appreciation for the enormity of the disaster only diminished our feeble initial response. After some days trying to establish a presence in Mansehra and acting as the de facto punching bag for