The front line isn't the most dangerous place

The best advice I ever heard about being a war correspondent came not from a journalist but an admiral. Horatio Nelson once told his commanders that if they found themselves out in the ocean and not knowing what to do, they should simply find an enemy ship and attack.

That's the best maxim I know for reporting on wars: head for the action. The nearer you are, the better. And, in fact, the front lines are not the most dangerous places for war reporters.

Seven journalists have died in Afghanistan in the past week and all of them were killed not in conventional fighting across front lines, but in the helter-skelter chaos that has followed the sudden collapse of the Taliban.

Last week, three journalists were hitching a ride on top of an armoured vehicle - always a risky move, as these things attract shells - when it was attacked by a stray Taliban unit cut off by the assault forces. And earlier this week, in an incident that has knocked the stuffing out of the rest of the press corps here, four journalists were executed after being stopped by roadside bandits on a supposedly safe road.

What is so hard about these latter deaths is how unnecessary they were - the bandits could simply have robbed them and fled. There was no reason for the killing beyond the casual brutality that haunts this country.

Of the seven wars I've covered for the Standard, this has been the hardest logistically. Afghanistan is a country almost without electricity, which means finding generators, plus the fuel and the spare bits to keep them going. It is a country which has no running water, which means water-purifi-cation tablets and never touching the fruit. It has almost no roads. And in these hard times, it has no cuisine beyond mutton, naan bread, green tea and rice that tastes of goats.

Luckily, one thing this country does have, even on the front lines, is kiosks which sell toilet paper. The loos are the worst. At the press centre north of Kabul, the toilet was a hole cut in the floor of the outhouse, made of the same mud and straw as the rest of the building. And little by little, this floor began to dissolve, until there seemed the risk that some poor reporter would fall straight through to meet an unimaginable fate. Luckily, Kabul fell first.

One saving grace is the Afghans, who are hardy and good-humoured. Another is the people around you. Not all of them, of course. There are many towering egos, and all the stories about bitchiness are true. There are "star" reporters who write lies, and others who specialise in stabbing colleagues in the back.

But there are some good people around, and in fact in these past few days, when everyone has pulled a bit closer after the killings, you find out who they are. Special mention to CNN's Christiane Amanpour on this count - her generator is making this story possible.

In all of this, Nelson's maxim holds strong: if you know one thing, you know to head for the action. Thus it was that at dawn last Friday I jumped in the Jeep and headed for Bagram airbase on news that British forces had just landed there. The mission was simple: see the newly-arrived British soldiers, then transmit a story by e-mail on the SAT phone in time for the first edition of the paper. Easy, except that my computer battery is now a wreck and I have no generator.

I managed to sneak my way into the airbase, and was in full view when two shots rang out. I froze. This is one of those moments when fieldcraft deserts you, and you think "what the hell do I do?" If it is a warning shot, you must stay still. If it is a sniper, then you'd better run. Do the wrong thing and that's it. In these moments all of us - first-timers and veterans - are lost in space. I just stood there numb.

And then I saw what it was. There were shouts, and the sound of car brakes, and men running. One of our brave special forces had driven a pick-up truck into the base without stopping, and the guard had fired in the air. Relieved, I marched to the gate, waving goodbye to the guard and saying hello to the soldiers and locals who had come to watch.

There was now no time to drive to town and send a story for the first edition, even if I could find a generator there. Idly, I asked if perhaps there was one here. Amazingly, there was. Inside a dirt compound, watched by the curious crowd, it was produced. But there was a problem. No petrol. And my Jeep had diesel. And there was no petrol-seller for miles in this mud-house village.

My driver took over, an argument developed, and it emerged that when the owner of the generator said he had no petrol, what he meant was that he had very little. A $20 bribe - two months' salary to many people here - settled the issue. I set up the equipment and unpacked the lead - then realised that my computer had a two-pin plug, while the generator had three. More angst. Again it was the driver to the rescue. Some wire was found. A soldier's knife was used to strip and cut it. After much shouting, a Heath- Robinson arrangement was jammed into the plug hole, with my plug plopping in after it. There were whoops and backslapping all round.

Now I had power. Now all I had to worry about was a) when the petrol would run out, b) whether the battery on the phone would run, and c) whether, even if the satellite got a signal, there was time to blast out a story in time for the first edition. There was. By the narrowest of margins the story got in and hit the streets of London while I was on my way back to Kabul.