Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (12 page)

‘There was this huge bang,’ recalled WO2 Hyde. ‘I was on top cover and the blast really took it out of me. The shock wave went right through the vehicle and I was left feeling like I wanted to vomit. The difference between high explosive and home-made explosive is unbelievable. The noise was deafening and inside the vehicle all the lights had gone. The blast had also taken off the front of the vehicle, the wheels had gone, and we were going nowhere. Fortunately we were in a Mastiff. If we had been in a Snatch or anything else we would have been dead.

‘I knew I was all right and I quickly checked to make sure everyone else was OK. And then it’s time to take a chill pill, calm down, everyone stays inside the vehicle, no one moves, everyone makes sure they are OK. On this job there were three vehicles in the convoy – another two behind us. At this stage I’m thinking that we can’t afford to let this vehicle fall into Taliban hands and get wrecked even further because we were running out of Mastiffs – they were our lifeline. By now we had around nine patrol bases along the road and we had to supply water to them all because there were no wells. So all the water, ammunition, rations, everything had to come from Inkerman.’

Hyde contacted the ops room and informed them that he had been in an IED contact. He knew that the chances of a follow-up attack were high and asked if there was ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) in the shape of a unmanned air vehicle such as a Predator, fast jet or attack helicopter.

‘I wanted any ISTAR to have a look on the ground around us to see if the Taliban were forming up for an attack, or whether there was someone waiting on the end of a command wire. I decided to get out and begin clearing the area and at the same time I was trying to formulate a plan as to how we were going to get back. At this stage I was also concerned about a secondary device. The Taliban in Sangin aren’t just going to plant one device, they are always thinking three or four moves ahead. I was clearing the area and I discovered a command wire running about 4 metres in front of me to a shape in the ground. It was another anti-tank mine ready to hit the team who were going to be sent in to recover us.’

Hyde had no idea how many other devices were in the immediate area, but it was clear that he and his team cound not extract themselves from their position without help from a bomb-hunting team. The time now was around 5 p.m. and the sun was beginning to set. Rob Swan and Brimstone 31 were a few kilometres away in FOB Jackson, waiting for a flight back to Camp Bastion, when they were told they would be needed for another mission. With darkness falling, Captain Swan and Lieutenant Colonel Nick Kitson, the commanding officer of 3 Rifles battlegroup, decided to wait until morning to extract the sergeant major and his team.

‘The only real option was to stay in the vehicle. There was sensitive equipment inside, we couldn’t really extract ourselves safely, so we settled down and waited. There were six of us inside the vehicle and we had support from sangars overlooking the position. It was cosy but smelly – we had been out for ten days and we all stank.’

That evening Captain Swan attended the orders group, where the plan for the recovery of the vehicle and the clearance of other IEDs was spelt out. The plan was as simple as any could be in Sangin. The troops would be moved out of their base just before first light and make for the ambush location. One of the main obstacles was a wide irrigation ditch, which is where the Rifles, the IED team and the Royal Engineer searchers all expected to be ambushed. The ditch was an obvious choke point. That was where the British soldiers would be most vulnerable, and everyone knew it.

The Taliban didn’t disappoint. The recovery operation had made good progress up until the irrigation ditch. Both sides had been secured and half the patrol had crossed the ditch when the Taliban opened up. An RPG whizzed overhead. ‘It wasn’t a very good shot but we all jumped into the river and we were up to our waists in water,’ Rob Swan recalled.

‘I was more worried about my fags than anything else,’ said Kelly. ‘They were in my pocket and they were the only packet I had left.’

The soldiers took up fire positions on the bank to suppress the enemy, and a ferocious battle ensued. Troops in the two sangars overlooking the road began to engage the Taliban, WO2 Hyde was pumping .50-cal rounds into the enemy positions, and the ground troops were engaging the insurgents with every weapon at their disposal. The battle raged for about an hour before the Taliban withdrew, allowing Swan to move forward and begin clearing the devices.

He added, ‘It’s rare, particularly in Sangin, to go out on a job and not be hit at some stage during the task. When it happens you don’t think, oh shit, I’m under fire, you just get on with it. It doesn’t feel real, just like another training scenario. Once the enemy were suppressed we moved forward into another ditch and set up an ICP and pushed the cordon up to the Taliban’s fire positions.’

Once the ICP had been cleared and established, the search team moved forward in the hope of clearing a safe lane to the vehicle, but within 30 metres of the ICP another pressure-plate IED was discovered.

‘It was the same device which had been used to blow up the Mastiff – a double-stacked anti-tank mine attached to a pressure plate,’ said Rob. ‘So I cleared that – it was quite a big device and would have easily taken out another vehicle. The Taliban had been quite clever. About 60 metres back they had exactly the same set-up – a pressure-plate IED with an anti-tank mine – that was designed to target the recovery or just an opportunity target. But in between the two there was a command-wire IED as well. That device had been designed to take out the recovery team – to kill soldiers. It was a pretty complex set-up.’

In the weeks that followed, the Taliban changed tactics again and began to plant IEDs in culverts running beneath roads. Pat Hyde had predicted that they would begin to exploit this opportunity, and he was proved right. Members of the Rifles were daily forced to risk life and limb clearing the tunnels, and on almost every occasion the Taliban were lying in wait.

One of the other great frustrations among the troops in FOB Inkerman was the lack of a permanent IEDD team. A team was based in FOB Jackson, where every day they would clear devices that were a threat to locals or the soldiers. But in Inkerman they had their own problems to contend with. WO2 Hyde explained, ‘There were days when I would have to drive down to FOB Jackson to pick up an ATO – but to do it I almost certainly had to drive close to or even over IEDs. We would have IEDs to clear and no one to clear them. I think, of all the problems we faced in Helmand, IEDs were the worst – a problem made worse by the shortage of ATOs.

‘By the end of the tour I, and probably most soldiers, could tell the difference between home-made explosive and military-grade explosive. I knew that a 5 kg bomb would take a leg off, 10 kg would take off both legs, and anything bigger and you were dead.’

By the time Operation Herrick 11 came to an end in April 2010, Pat Hyde had earned the dubious distinction of being the most blown-up soldier in the British Army. He survived eleven IED strikes on a vehicle, two 107 mm rocket attacks and two bomb attacks while on foot patrol. The only injury he sustained was when some red-hot rocket shrapnel dropped down the back of his body armour and burnt his back. A Company, 4 Rifles held the stretch of road between Sangin and Inkerman until April 2010, when they handed it over to 40 Commando, Royal Marines. During their six-month tour the company of 131 soldiers and the various attachments from the engineers, the artillery and 3 Rifles sustained fifty-three battle casualties and ten soldiers killed in action. The company had been involved in more than 500 small-arms attacks and 200 IED incidents. Sangin was later handed over to US Marine Corps control in September. All of the bases built by A Company, 4 Rifles were subsequently closed.

Rob Swan’s stay in Sangin was short-lived and eventful, but in terms of sheer fear did not compare with the action he’d seen a few weeks earlier during Operation Moshtarak – NATO’s big push into central Helmand.

The build-up to the operation had been getting plenty of attention in the media, with commanders hoping that the net effect would be that the Taliban, realizing they would be killed if they attempted to stand and fight, would depart. Before the operation, practically everyone taking part was hoping that the Taliban would have fled.

Brimstone 31 were attached to Right Flank, one of the Scots Guards companies involved in the operation, whose mission was to conduct a heliborne assault in the area of Sayedabad, around 5 km south of FOB Shawqat, a British base located close to Nad-e’Ali district centre. Troops from other battalions would be conducting similar operations near by. In the days leading up to the mission Rob Swan went to seemingly endless meetings and planning conferences. Nothing was being left to chance. Everything which could be rehearsed before the op was being rehearsed.

In the early hours of D-Day, 13 February 2010, Brimstone 31 and the other elements of Right Flank flew into three pre-reconnoitred compounds under the cover of darkness. The plan was for the three platoons to each secure and hold one compound, establish a foothold on the ground, and begin clearing the area of IEDs.

Rob and the RESA were attached to Right Flank’s tactical headquarters, while the rest of the IEDD team were dispersed among the other platoons. The first phase of the operation went without a hitch and all three platoons managed to secure their objectives within minutes of landing. In those few hours before dawn the sense of relief was tangible – but it was short-lived. As the sun rose over the Green Zone, the Taliban attacked en masse.

‘Within about twenty minutes of sunrise every compound came under accurate fire,’ Rob recalled. ‘We cut murder holes in the walls to try and observe the enemy’s movements but the fire was so accurate that it was actually coming through the murder holes. It was unbelievable. That level of accuracy is something you just don’t expect – we were pinned down and unable to move. It was top-class sniping fire. A gun team was sent out to put down some suppressing fire but they were hit straight away and one of the guys was hit in the leg. He had to be casevaced [casualty-evacuated] out and we basically had to sit it out for that day.

‘It was absolutely horrendous. We were all pinned up against one wall. We had a guy in the compound get shot through one of the murder holes, and how he didn’t get hit is beyond me. It went straight through his trouser leg and came out his backside. He was convinced he had been shot in the nuts and we had to convince him that everything was exactly where it should be. We’ve been under fire before where you know you are pretty safe and the bullets are thudding into the walls and you’re not worried, sometimes almost laughing – I actually have laughed while I’ve been under fire – but there was nothing remotely funny about this situation at all. I was very stressed. I thought I actually might cop it in there. It was about as bad as you could imagine it to be. If I had moved just a few inches to my left or right I would have risked being killed.’

At this point Seb added, ‘You don’t feel very safe sat in a compound when the enemy knows exactly where you are. It was 360 degrees, the bullets were whizzing past, coming in and hitting the walls above us and to the side. There was only a very small area which was safe, and we were in it.’

Even Kelly, who was renowned for her laid-back, unflappable nature, recalled, ‘I was just hoping we weren’t going to get hit, it was that bad. You couldn’t move. It was a shit fucking day. The Taliban had us exactly where they wanted us and there was bugger all we could do.’

Then Rob spoke again. ‘I don’t like small-arms fire. When I’m dealing with a device I feel like I’m in control, I know what I am doing. I was sat rigid in a compound – there were about forty of us against one wall for about thirteen hours. We didn’t need to be told not to move because you could see that if you did you would get hit. If you needed a piss, you did it where you were sitting.’

It is often noted in the British Army that ‘a plan rarely survives first contact’, and therefore one of the principles of warfare is ‘flexibility’. Right Flank were stuck fast and surrounded, with all three locations under fire. Urgent action was needed, and the company commander decided that the safest bet was to move the whole company into one location and robustly defend it. The soldiers knew that the Taliban attacks would fizzle out after dusk, because with little or no night-vision equipment they were in no position to take on British troops in the dark. As night fell, the insurgents melted away and the troops reorganized themselves.

‘We had loads of stores with us,’ said Rob. ‘We bought a generator in, a quad bike for casevac and loads of fuel but we couldn’t take it with us. So we had to help the engineers “dem” the generator and the quad and we blew it all up. We took what kit we could carry and began the move into another compound. It took about seven hours to move across and get into the same compound. When we met up I made sure everyone was all right really.’

Seb added, ‘You look back and you think that was pretty close, but the infantry are pretty good and they always look after you well.’

The fighting rolled on for a further five days. Some of the battles were lengthy, while on other occasions the fighting was small-scale and sporadic. But the obvious threat from small-arms attack effectively grounded Brimstone 31. Such was the scarcity of bomb hunters in Helmand that no commander would risk putting them out on the ground to clear IEDs when the Taliban were obviously in the area.

The owner of the compound which the troops had occupied, paying him a daily rate for its use, remained within one of the buildings and the troops hoped that he might provide some useful information on the local Taliban, such as their strengths and the type of weapons they possessed. But the man was insistent that he knew nothing about the Taliban, meeting any questions put to him via an interpreter with either a shake of his head or a shrug.