Jackie Bird's Afghanistan diary

BBC Scotland has been examining the involvement of Scottish troops in Afghanistan with four days of special coverage.

Reporting Scotland presenter Jackie Bird has been keeping an online diary of her trip to the desert warzone.

You can also watch the team's video reports from Camp Bastion and the front line.

It's our last day. Our two week trip feels like we've been away forever, but that's ridiculous when you're surrounded by men and women who're out here for six months.

The small number of Americans based here have an even longer tour - a year or more. I call my son and he says he's missing me.

He says he had a nightmare last night that I'd been shot. My ex-husband had a nightmare that I hadn't. I reassure Jacob that I'll be home soon - but it is the RAF, and if you remember the delay we had getting out here, Christmas seems like a good bet.

Our aim was to give our viewers an insight into the situation here and the work of the huge number of Scots soldiers deployed

They love their jobs and have no qualms about doing their bit on the front line, but mention wives, husbands and children and they really hurt.

Our final night's broadcasting includes an end of programme montage of our week here. Pete, our techy wizard put it together, using a lot of Cameron "Ginger Beard" Buttle's front-line footage. It's very moving.

We're all going to be in bits by the end of the programme. Being here has been a fantastic opportunity.

Our aim was to give our viewers an insight into the situation here and the work of the huge number of Scots soldiers deployed. We hope we've done that.

Like us, many of them will soon be on their way home, but we're grateful for all the time and hospitality they've shown us...especially the daft presenter who had to have all the regiment and battalion groupings explained to her twice.

We're informed that we may have to pack up our gear after the programme tonight (10.30 Afghanistan time) because our flight might be in the early morning.

It's hard to believe but stacking it is going to take about eight hours - then it's a Hercules to Kandahar and a day-long wait for a connection. That means we might get about a couple of hours sleep over 48 hours.

I think that's where I came in�

Slept with SAS action hero Andy McNab. At last something to spice up the memoirs.

All our work is nothing compared to the camp's emergency hospital

Today's stories are focusing on the medical facilities here.

There's a hugely impressive emergency hospital in the middle of the desert. We've been warned that our live broadcast will be halted at any time if casualties come in, which is fair enough.

Earlier in the week we were doing some general filming there and a family of Afghan nationals were brought in by the flying emergency team. They'd been caught in crossfire during a skirmish between the Taliban and the Afghan army, who're mentored by our troops.

Three of the seriously injured were small children. The sight of the long, luxurious black hair of a young girl who must have been about 10, cascading from the stretcher will stay with me for a long time.

Today is special. It's new socks day.

We had to pack so lightly for this trip that I skimped on the footwear. So far three days wearing the same pair is about the limit.

You've no idea how good clean socks feel, although I suspect you've an idea of how, in temperatures in the mid-40s and in Army boots, they smell. Talking of the senses, cameraman Jim's snoring has eased at bit. I hope Mrs Jim has enjoyed her break.

The camp was abuzz with helicopters coming and going

I went for an early morning run out by the airstrip and it was just phenomenal to be out there as the Apaches and Chinooks took gracefully to the skies.

Craig our producer has come down with the "D and Vs" as they call it here - use your imagination.

It's not pleasant. He was already tall and lean, but after spending 10 days roughing it in an FOB and risking life and limb to get here, he's wandering around like something out of the Night of the Living Dead.

Our reports tonight deal with the reconstruction that's going on here.

Cameron Buttle has some excellent footage of a young squaddie in the middle of an Afghan village showing maturity beyond his years by calmly reassuring local people and explaining why the troops are here. Dangerous work, but I bet that young man's family is proud.

D-day - or should that be B-day as it's our first live broadcast.

One of the frustrations of live broadcasting so far from home is your reliance on the technical side of things...from the smallest wire among the enormous kit we've brought out here, to whether there's a rain cloud in front of the satellite.

Pete, our technical supremo, has done a grand job working all hours in the baking heat ensuring the kit is up and functioning.

Pete has been working under pressure to keep communications open

9.30pm our time...6pm at home and we still haven't got proper communications. We're outside the HQ of 2 Scots, formerly known as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

The guys there are confused - why have the jovial, confident bunch of telly people they met earlier been replaced by a gaggle of hysterical, sweating headless chickens?

Get the communications sorted with minutes to spare and we go live.

We're particularly satisfied that we managed to get one of the ordinance experts - a lovely guy called Fraser from Ullapool - to show us some IEDs, those improvised explosive devices.

It's all very well talking about them constantly, but now we know what those insidious devices look like.

The broadcast is over, I desperately need a drink - and it's not water. Find that as the days go by in this alcohol-free zone I'm fantasising increasingly about gin and tonics. Go to sleep wondering if I'm an alcoholic.

Ross Kemp seems to be the big news here.

Move over Vera Lynn, the 21st Century forces' sweetheart is a burly actor who played a thug in a soap - now if that's not a sign of the times I don't know what is.

Women are making their mark in the front line of modern warfare

I'm told the men like him because when the going gets tough and he's scared, he shows it. The women like him because... Let's just say I know they do because we spent some time filming a group of them last night.

The role of women in battle has been in the headlines recently with the death of the first female soldier out here. Although still not allowed to join the infantry or the Paras etc, their jobs include working with sniffer dogs, as drivers, or as liaisons with the Afghan locals. It all puts women on the front line.

They're very proud of what they do and want to be treated no differently from men. Quite right too. That said I've applied for a transfer into their tent.

It's homely and unashamedly girly and they were going to have what they called a pampering night. Cameraman Jim wanted to know what that entailed and they explained it was face masks and lots of leg and eyebrow waxing.

I realised that only women could describe having boiling wax applied to their bodies and their hair pulled out by its roots as "a pampering night". No wonder we're good on the front line.

Work continues apace from our luxurious five-star accommodation.

At any one time we're sharing a small tented barracks with seven strangers. They arrive noisily in the night and then disappear.

My sleeping area is positively palatial - a sleeping bag on a camp bed with a net around it. We spend our day racing around the camp interviewing the many units. All seem to be doing extraordinarily dangerous things - there are few soft options here.

I suffer the ignominy of being thrown out of the canteen... "No arm holes, ma'am," says the stern-faced young man. The top I'm wearing is sleeveless. Surely not that infamous Hogmanay show all over again. The shame of it.

Great news, Craig arrives out of the dust like Bruce Willis in Armageddon. The private view here among the military is that arriving in one piece after two days with the Americans, he's a lucky man.

After spending two minutes enquiring after his welfare, Jim, Pete and I set him to work. He may have diced with death on the desert plains but nobody likes a show off.

Jackie is in Helmand Province with Scottish troops

We've lost our producer. Not in a careless sort of way, but Craig is in a FOB - a forward operating base - with our roving reporter Cameron Buttle some miles away and can't get a helicopter back in time for our live week of programmes.

This is devastating news and puts the whole job in jeopardy. On the positive front Peter, our technical wizard, has just flown in spreading good cheer. Meanwhile everyone is trying to get Craig on a helicopter, but they seem to be busy flying troops and saving people.

In the meantime Jim and I start to get our bearings around the camp. The word camp doesn't do Bastion justice as it's the size of a small town.

It's the hub for all the military operations in Helmand Province and a base for 3,500 soldiers. There really are Scottish voices everywhere - and flags too as each country and battalion asserts its territory.

We're really keen to ensure we feature as many Scots on the programme as possible, but don't want it to seem that the entire British army is made up of Jocks.

The heat is extraordinary. All you can do is drink bottle after bottle of water and pretend it's chilled lager. And it's in temperatures like this that the soldiers have to patrol, sometimes for days on end whilst carrying huge amounts of kit.

I'm amazed at how young many of the soldiers are

It's no surprise that the majority of men and women around the camp look, as they say, as fit as poachers' dugs.

Talking of dogs, while we were filming we met John Allison from Paisley, taking his attack Alsatian Toby for a stroll along the perimeter fence.

As Toby strained at the lead to get a piece of BBC meat, John told us he was 18 and this was his first tour of duty. He confessed, quite understandably, that his first "contact" out in the field when under attack from the Taleban had been a really daunting experience.

I'm amazed at how young many of the soldiers are and how the pressures of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be putting such young souls in dangerous territory so soon after their basic training.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch we've discovered producer Craig has absconded to the other side.

Not the Taleban, but the Americans. He's hitched a ride on a US convoy and hopefully is heading to a place where he might pick up a helicopter. We fear we'll have to bail him out of Guantanamo Bay.

You know the dream where you discover you're interviewing the Queen naked? (That's you, not the Queen.)

Perhaps you're not familiar with it, but it's a common nightmare among TV presenters.

This morning we came close.

Jim and I got to Kandahar sometime early morning and then boarded a flight on a Hercules aircraft to Camp Bastion. The Hercules has a giant empty belly with a row of seats around the perimeter with the best space reserved for the cargo.

In mandatory body armour and helmet you strap in, take off, and then the lights go out. What follows is a roller-coaster ride in complete darkness. I swear we were weightless for a couple of seconds. On landing we spent the night "in transit" - a pitch-black barn with camp-beds and assorted sleeping bodies. We crashed out.

Two-and-a-half hours later I was shaken awake by our media minder: "The prime minister is coming in half an hour."

Jim and I waited on the runway like street urchins, with apologies to street urchins

And as good as her word, a short time later Gordon Brown, in a crisp white shirt, descended onto the runway at Bastion. It was a visit we'd known was coming but didn't know when.

He was followed by a gaggle of political correspondents who were accompanying him to Beijing and needed a stop off in Afghanistan like a hole in the head. Still, they were a striking sight.

After a night no doubt in five-star luxury in Muscat, the women trotted of the plane looking glamorous, and one chap, from the Daily Mail I think, looked particularly striking in a white Fedora.

Jim and I waited on the runway like street urchins, with apologies to street urchins. That's what four hours sleep over 48 hours does for you. I think the worst moment was when as we waited for the PM I asked one of Gordon's be-suited civil servants, in all seriousness, what day it was.

The PM really rubbed the rest of the press corps up the wrong way by agreeing to give only Reporting Scotland an interview. One up for the street urchins. I suppose an up-coming by-election focuses the mind, but it was a nice gesture.

After the excitement of the PM's visit we were given an in-depth briefing by a senior soldier on the situation in Afghanistan. Jim fell asleep in the middle of it. If he noticed, the senior soldier was very diplomatic. Street urchins in the bad books again.

The MoD calls it "assisting operations". The rest of us call it a war.

Either way, you can imagine that with more than 8,000 troops currently involved in an increasingly bloody battle with the Taleban, getting a TV crew out to Afghanistan wasn't their number one priority.

However, after turning up at Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire on Sunday, it was now Wednesday and Jim, my cameraman and I had been thrown off more planes than Naomi Campbell.

A group of Fusiliers from Two Scots battalion filled our plane in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning, their deep suntans hinting that they hadn't spent the early summer in Saltcoats.

The main aim now is provincial reconstruction - to use that now familiar phrase, to win over the hearts and minds of the people

After what amounted to 10 days leave (they'd also been delayed on the way out, so we shouldn't take it personally) they were heading back to Afghanistan for the final stretch of their seven month tour. This time they were going to Kabul.

"We just want to get back and get the job done," said one confidently. He couldn't have been more than 18 and was heading back to patrol a city increasingly terrorised by suicide bombers.

There are an estimated 2,000 Scots military in the country at the moment.

Apart from the short-term deployment of Scots units to help with the first Iraq war, there hasn't been a sustained presence of so many Scottish servicemen and women on foreign soil since World War II. That's why Reporting Scotland is heading there.

They're fighting a campaign that was launched in the aftermath of 9/11 but stepped up early in 2006. Most are based in Helmand Province, in the south of the country.

The main aim now is provincial reconstruction - to use that now familiar phrase, to win over the hearts and minds of the people. New schools, hospitals, judiciary - good. Taleban - bad. But it's been a bloody summer here, taking the current death toll of UK troops to 116.

Eventually Jim and I got seats on the next flight to Kandahar. As we boarded the bus that roams the Brize Norton base the driver shouted to our khaki-clad companions and asked which stops he needed to make. "Anyone for the armoury?" he called.

"No mate," bellowed a voice from the back of the bus, "but could you take us to Ferguslie Park?"

The Scots were on the move.

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