Bringing the War Home; British soldiers construct and curate a new exhibit in London about their experiences in Afghanistan.

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

With dust flying everywhere, Lt. Russell Archer orders a half-dozen soldiers to drop their sandbags and get to work. The men, engineers from Britain's 16th Air Assault Brigade, are building protected bunkers, a mortar pit, a mobile army hospital and a fortification atop an existing building. Dressed in khaki camouflage, the men hustle about unloading flat packs, shoveling sand and nailing down protective metal coverings. It looks like any standard base in the dusty landscape of Afghanistan's Helmand province--dubbed "Hell Land" by the men and women who have served there.

But Archer and his colleagues are not in southern Afghanistan. Though it has the look and feel of a proper army camp, this "base" is being erected inside Britain's National Army Museum in the tony London neighborhood of Chelsea. It has been rebuilt by hand to give civilians an idea of what operations--and life--are like at Helmand's Camp Bastion. "We wanted to give people a flavor of what we can produce," says Archer, the engineer in charge of constructing the exhibition "Helmand: The Soldiers' Story."

The project was conceived in part out of the soldiers' frustration that their efforts in Afghanistan are much less visible than those of their colleagues in Iraq. "All the attention in the press has been on Iraq," says Spr. Sean Mckeowan, who drove supply trucks for the Army in Helmand and has been involved in constructing the exhibition. "People should really see what we are doing out there at the moment." The show, which began construction in July and opened Aug. 3, will run for the next 18 months and will be continually updated by British soldiers stationed in Helmand. Indeed, the exhibition is curated mainly by active troops who have donated photographs, personal paraphernalia, oral histories and video clips. "We got free rein in what went into the exhibition," says Maj. Alex Parks, who helped oversee its development. "It's a warts-and-all show that gives ...