From young boys playing around with friends at the nearby dam or river to those more adventurous diving off cliffs into the sea, the art of diving has been with us for a long time.

The divers will meet again next year in the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games.

The atmosphere was relaxed, considering this was the frontline of a conventional war, and it reminded me of some sort of huge outdoor picnic in the middle of the desert.

Libyan rebels offered me cups of sweet tea and tuna sandwiches and we tried to converse in my non-existent Arabic and their non-existent English.

All they could get across was: “Gaddafi crazy, Gaddafi crazy…!” as they sat on chairs and surveyed the battlefield stretching out to the west on the low ground.

Then our friendly chat was broken by the screaming of more rebel rockets being launched from a sand bank about 100 metres to our right.

Each salvo was met with a huge cheer from the rebels who would then shoot their AK47’s aimlessly into the air.

As we watched the rockets impact with a dull thud in and around the government positions some 5 kilometres away, my friend and driver, Abdullah, an ex Libyan army soldier, came from behind and grabbed my shoulder.

‘Kim we must go! The government soldiers will get their distance now! Let’s go!.

As we turned and started running down the hill to the car, a salvo of Libyan army shells, most probably from both tanks and artillery, came slamming into our position. Sounding like wailing banshees, they exploded around us; there was chaos as rebels and journalists ran for cover, some diving into ditches beside the road, others making for their cars, some simply standing bemused and shocked.

As I made the tar road and sprinted towards the vehicle with Abdullah just in front of me, a shell came spinning at warp speed, end over end just above our heads, crashing into the road behind us with a dull but menacing thud. As Abdullah drove like one possessed through the retreating rebel 4 x 4’s, shouting and screaming at them and the universe, my mind was racing, praying that we would not be hit by a shell as we went on our mission to make the safety of the Ras Naluf junction about 5 kilometres away.

Adrenalin fills the veins, all your senses are on full alert, you hold the dashboard with your free hand, cameras bouncing on your lap and hitting the car door as the car rams over shell holes in the road – and as you drive, time seems to stand still; even though you are running for your life, the human mind and senses work overtime, in a higher gear and thus, despite the speed at which everything is really happening, it conversely slows down, so every memory becomes recorded in your memory bank…

The next attack by Gaddafi forces war planes on the road junction outside the main enterence to Ras Naluf town had the rebels running for any weapons they could find from anti-aircraft weapons mounted on Toyota Land Cruisers, shoulder launched Sam 7’s and AK47’s.

Every rebel who was armed unleashed a massive barrage of lead into the sky as the rebels shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and stood unafraid of death in the open as the sound of spent shells hitting the tar road brings high notes to the otherwise explosive sounds of continuous fire.

Then, as the plane passes and disappears into the cold blue sky over Libya, a short silence falls over the junction.

In anticipation the rebels stand in the open waiting for the inevitable explosion of a 1000 pound bomb.

Hiding alongside a wall to the west of the junction, I look through the view finder of the 5D and wait for the explosion.

Without warning, the first of two massive, body rocking explosions rip through the junction as a 1000 bomb tears the tar to pieces and sends a shock wave rushing through the nearby environment… with shrapnel slamming into anything in its path. With that a rebel ran and dives into the sand drift next to me, his eyes wide with fear and excitement.

For what seems like an eternity my body and senses try to recover; my eardrums ring as I look around to see if there are any injured rebels. This time we were all lucky; both bombs left us rocking with the power of their explosions, but no-one was killed or injured.

As the conflict continues there are many who have not been so fortunate. With the recent passing of conflict photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondras, and the capture of friend, colleague and fellow photographer Anton Hammerl, those memories, and questions I ask myself, come back to fill my mind.

Like a computer defragmenting, I am trying to answer some questions that remain: Why did I survive the daily bombings on the front and not others?

Do my images make ANY difference in the world? What has happened to my driver and friend Abdullah? How do I process the absolute assault on my senses that a war brings (the massive barrage of sounds, smells and sights of wounded and dead soldiers, tanks and metal, sand and cold, wind and rain, no trees, no vegetation, men screaming and shouting at each other, nerves on edge…)?

But probably the most important questions is: How do I deal with the fact that although I put my life at risk to take photographs, I am thrilled by the excitement of covering war?

Is it that you took the risk and survived that leads you to feel invisible and invincible, or is it the fact that there’s no other drug on the market, no motorcycle fast enough, no fairground ride tall enough, that holds such danger that it captivates you to such an extent?

As the memories start to fade slowly into the background, I realised that the most difficult aspect of covering conflict, what I have a problem dealing with, is the fact that within hours of leaving my quiet and idyllic middle-class life in the suburbs of Johannesburg, I was dodging bombs in a bitterly cold and desolate foreign desert - and then mere hours after leaving the front line, the reverse happens. It’s like waking up from a dream to the reality. Now that I’m lying in bed at home the entire two weeks experience seems like an ultra-fast, acid induced dream that I remember clearly, but now seems to have been some sort of out-of-body experience.

And as the war rages on I watch with interest and pray that the needless attempt to depose a leader does not cost the lives of more journalists, photographers and civilian casualties. ….

But the hard facts are that war needs to be photographed as the eyes of the world are often than not focused on the still images created through the 35mm viewfinder of a camera and thus the need and want of photographers to risk their lives to bring the images to the mass media will continue.

Note: Pls view the images from Libya’s front line @ http://www.kimludbrook.com/photo-essays/ras-naluf-junction-2.html

Within a few days one town after another slipped from the Libyan leader’s grip, from Tobruk, Darna, al-Bayda, Benghazi and Ajdabiya in the east, to Zintan and Zawiya in the west. After a brief hiatus, important oil towns such as Ras Lanuf fell to rebels advancing from Benghazi and pledging to march on to Col Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte and, ultimately, the capital Tripoli.

One of the most hard fought towns was the town of Ras Naluf on the Eastern seaboard of Libya where days of fierce fighting by the Libyan Army and rebels witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting.

The ill equipped and trained rebels are made up of some well trained fighters but most of them have had no combat experience and only days or hours of training.  That coupled with no real command structure and no commanders on the ground in the frontline means they have to rely on the numbers and courage.

For days the rebels withstood daily bombardment by air, land and sea as they tried to hold onto the junction on the main road from Benghazi to Tripoli.

Living off tuna sandwiches the rebels would fire aimlessly into the air with their AK47’s to try to down the planes flying at high altitude.

The most effective weapon used by the Libyan armed forces was the air strikes as they had a massive effect on moral and although they did not cause major causalities, they forced the rebels into retreat.

With no effective anti aircraft weapons the Libyan air force flew their missions with impunity.

Eventually after trying to repel the attacks by the Libyan army they lost Ras Naluf.

This is a look at the battle for Ras Naluf Junction.