A goodwill mission turns violent in Afghanistan

In our Behind the Scenes series, correspondents share their experiences in covering news. CNN correspondent Ryan Chilcote was an eyewitness to tragedy as an embedded reporter. He accompanied a platoon of soldiers on a mission in Afghanistan's volatile border province of Paktika. The soldiers were providing security to the province's new governor as he toured the vast region.

PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The convoy was rolling down the road toward Terwa, one of the Paktika Province's regions most sympathetic to the Taliban when we saw some of the scouts had dismounted running onto a hill.

I was at the back of the convoy; cameraman Alexey Belov was up in one of the command Humvees toward the front. He followed them, rolling the whole while as he caught up.

First, four shots rang out, then 13 seconds later - three more. Then the firing stopped. And I heard "he's down" over the radio. "He" turned out to be a 12-year-old shepherd boy. Alexey was right behind the soldiers when they came upon the boy, whose name turned out to be Azizullah.

I don't think I'll ever forget the tone of voice and words of the soldier who shot Azizullah as he told Alexey to "stop filming." Alexey went off to switch out the tape - I was pretty sure someone would try to take our tape away, but no one ever came to us for our tape.

Clearly, the soldier who shot Azizullah and told Alex to stop rolling understood something had just happened that no one had intended. Azizullah lay on the ground. He'd just been shot in the back from about two football fields away with a sniper rifle. The bullet went through his back, and arm, shattering it.

The soldier who shot Azizullah was kneeling next to him, helping him as much as he could. He looked completely destroyed by what he'd done.

Within a minute, he was joined by several other soldiers from the unit. Everyone got to work. The interpreter's job was to keep talking to Azizullah, and keep him from going to sleep, to keep him fighting. My job was to make sure the interpreter Khalid kept talking to Azizullah, and to hold the IV.

Azizullah fought like a champ. I could only imagine what was going through his mind with nearly a dozen people speaking a strange language around him, people telling him to hold on, that he's going to be OK even as they knew there was a very good chance Azizullah was going to die.

I had Khalid and the soldiers ask Azizullah about bicycles. That got a response; He wanted a red one, he said.

There were other moments that I'll never forget like when Azizullah told us he wanted to go home, even as the soldiers and Alan fought to keep him from bleeding out, or when his father came and pleaded with the soldiers to let him take his son home to die in front of his mother.

There was a discussion about moving the weapons back. No one knew how Azizullah's father would react. The soldiers decided to move them back a bit. They had all taken off their weapons to attend to the boy.

I think it had been about half an hour when we heard that a medevac helicopter was on the way. A half-hour later though we learned that it would be another half-hour, then we were told it was turned back because of bad weather just minutes before it would have arrived. I remember asking the platoon sergeant how much longer it would be and getting a not-so-reassuring look back. Eventually, two Marine helicopters came in, but it had already been over two hours since Azizullah had been shot.

Azizullah's father could not cope. He was a wreck. I later learned that he was looking for firewood in the area when he heard the shots and came running. When he got there, he was floored, convinced his son wasn't going to make it. The other soldiers and I took it upon ourselves to try to sign to the father, to tell him that he needed to be strong for his son, and keep his son with us, to help make a wrong right. In the end, it didn't work, and we had to take him away to keep him from interfering with the lifesaving effort.

For two hours, we -- including the soldier who shot him -- all labored over Azizullah. It seemed so hard to believe and hopeless at times, but we all knew that if he stopped breathing, the disbelief, and surrealism would slip away.

The helicopters left with as much furor as they'd landed. I picked up my camera and headed for the car. Alan decided to fly away with the boy to the hospital to help him on the way and to make sure the next doctor would know exactly what had already been done to him in terms of stabilizing him.

The convoy pushed on. That is, until the land mines went off in front of us. The blast came from the shallow gulley of a dried up stream bed just behind the Humvee carrying Alexey. The convoy halted. Two anti-tank land mines that had been daisy-chained together went off and they were "command detonated" -- meaning someone was watching us and set those mines off. The soldiers later found an antenna for the remote control that was used to set them off. When we were sure everyone was OK, and the local policemen who had taken the convoy down this road "because the other one was mined" had had a talking to, we set out again. We rolled into Terwa at nightfall.

The soldiers who had warmed up to us over the last four days were all of the sudden uncomfortable with us being around, no one wanted to talk.

The soldier's mistake became subject number one for our remaining off-camera conversations. What was our angle going to be? Do we think he did the wrong thing?

That night in the darkness the soldiers wrote sworn accounts of what had happened.

I asked the soldier who shot the boy if he would do an interview: "I don't even know why you're asking me after you saw what happened ... I don't think the colonel wants you showing that. We told you to stop shooting."

What could I say; I told him I would respect his decision not to talk.

But eventually the soldiers did talk, and talk a lot. They told me how they had children themselves, and how hard it hurt to see the boy on the ground, and how sorry they felt, and how confusing of a battlefield it can be.

When we called the military's public affairs office from the field to request permission to shoot in the hospital where Azizullah was being treated, we were told there shouldn't be any problems. But when we got to the 325th on Friday, three days after Azizullah was shot, we were told we couldn't film him because Azizullah didn't have any relatives with him to give us permission. His father, we were told, would be coming via helicopter, more than nine days later.

Eventually, we found Azizullah's father ourselves. I called the governor of Paktika Province, and he sent out a policeman to bring him to the provincial capital, and from there to Kabul. It took Azizullah's dad two days to get to the capital. We met him on Saturday morning and brought him to the hospital. Azizullah had just been taken off the respirator that morning, and when he saw his father twice pulled his oxygen mask off to whisper into his father's ear. Azizullah's dad wept as he told us his son was asking him to take him home.

Azizullah's father told me how he walked for two days straight to get home after he got on the helicopter with his son the day he'd been shot, and how 55 of his cattle and 15 goats -- his entire livelihood -- had run off while he was away. But what struck me most was what he said about his wife. She had lost her mind, he said, and camped out in the spot where Azizullah was shot and wouldn't leave. She had told him to bring her a photo or an audio recording of his voice to prove to her that he was still alive.

When Azizullah's father said goodbye to this son Saturday, and began the long journey back to Paktika, he promised Azizullah he would return soon. He took with him photos of his son to show the boy's distraught mother.