Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (23 page)

A knowing smile creeps across Woody’s face. ‘In an ideal word, yes,’ he says. ‘Another team would have come in and finished the job. But we don’t have that luxury. This isn’t an ideal world – this is war and we don’t have the men. So yeah, we have to do things you wouldn’t otherwise expect to do. We were the ones on the ground. We knew where the device was, so you ask yourself, “Can I still do this?”, and I don’t think any of us thought we weren’t up to it. It just wasn’t an issue. If we hadn’t disposed of it someone else would have had to do it.’

Woody grew up in a dull, uninspiring Staffordshire mill town, where he says ‘there was absolutely nothing to do’. He moved schools when his parents parted and ended up in the Army because he ‘couldn’t be arsed’ to work at school. But despite his lack of interest in all things academic, he still managed to gain nine GCSEs. His school’s careers office offered little that stimulated his imagination and so one day after school he ventured into the local Army recruiting office for a look. It was a path that has been taken by hundreds of thousands of other young men and women over the years: the search for a vocation with a bit of spice. Woody was interested in learning a trade and with his clutch of decent GCSEs the Army welcomed him with open arms and a big, fat smile.

‘When I went to the careers office they give you a test and based on that test they give you a list of jobs you can do. So I went home with a big list of all the units or corps you could join. I originally chose to join the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. I thought, best get a trade, and then later I learned about what the RLC get up to, and I thought, I’ll have some of that, and I then switched to become an ammunition technician. And I’ve never looked back. It’s a pretty intensive job, you get quick promotion, but there are lots of courses and exams and after about seven years you can start looking at becoming an ATO. At first you start off as a No. 2 operator, where you learn all about the kit and look after the ATO, drive the robots, and then you move on to becoming an operator.

‘Our job is very different to the sort of bomb disposal done by the Royal Engineers. They tend to focus on regular munitions, hand grenades, aircraft bombs, mines, that type of thing, but there is a bit of crossover now and we’ve got some bomb-disposal officers going onto the High Threat course. Our job is IED disposal. You can look in a textbook and see how an aircraft bomb works. You can’t look in a textbook and see how an IED works. For a start it’s buried in the ground so you don’t even know what you are dealing with. You have to use all your training, all the intelligence, all your experience to work out what bomb you think it is. The bomb at Blue 17 was always going to be a pressure-plate device – it was in a doorway, it’s a derelict building and was a former insurgent firing point. British troops are equipped with electronic counter-measures equipment, so my guess would be that they are not going to put a remote-controlled device in a place like that. The insurgents know we have ECM, so they don’t target us with remote-controlled devices, they keep them for the Afghan Army or Police. No command wires were found in the isolation, so, by that stage, you know that the device is really going to be a pressure-plate or pressure-release and I knew all that before I even got to the bomb. But there’s always the chance that you could be wrong and you always have to be conscious of that.’

Woody’s very first mission took place in late January 2010, curiously inside the British base in Musa Qala, which had recently been expanded to accommodate more troops. The new area was searched for IEDs and some were found, but unfortunately others were missed and Woody was sent in to clear them.

Musa Qala had been a war zone for decades. In the 1980s the Soviets and the Mujahideen fought for control of the area for much of the war. Even today, Russian trench systems are still occasionally used by the Taliban to attack the US forces now based in the area. By January 2010 areas not under the direct control of the British had become laced with IEDs. Their use on such a massive scale helped the Taliban to hold ground and limit the movement of ISAF troops. As well as having a psychological impact, the IED also had a significant military effect; it is what the Army calls a ‘force multiplier’ – in other words, it allowed the Taliban to punch above their weight.

The historic strategic importance of Musa Qala is undeniable. As a population centre, it is regarded as a valued prize by both ISAF forces and the Taliban. And before the current conflict, Soviet generals fought many battles in the area against the Mujahideen. Vast areas of the region are effectively no-go areas because of the threat from Soviet-era ‘legacy’ mines. British troops from 16 Air Assault Brigade first arrived in Musa Qala in May 2006 and remained there until October, fighting the Taliban almost daily. The Musa Qala base was separated from its helicopter landing site, which often made both resupply and casualty evacuation impossible when the base was under attack. The HLS was frequently declared ‘red’ and the soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment, who in late 2006 had almost become a forgotten fighting force, lived with the knowledge that commanders would not risk losing a helicopter and its crew to save the life of a wounded soldier.

The British had entered Helmand in 2006 horribly under-equipped, under-strength, and with virtually no intelligence and no coherent plan as to how they were going to pacify the region. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, who commanded the 3 Para battlegroup, admitted in 2006, ‘It wasn’t that our intelligence was wrong – we just didn’t have any intelligence.’

By the summer of 2006 the 3,300-strong British force in Helmand was fixed in the areas of Sangin, Gereshk, Musa Qala, Lashkar Gah, Nowzad, Garmsir and Camp Bastion. With no ability to manoeuvre and no reserve, their only choice was to stand and fight. Of all the areas where British troops were based, Musa Qala was the most difficult to hold, because of the difficulties of resupply, and so it was sacrificed. In October 2006 a controversial deal was struck between the local leaders, the British and the Taliban whereby it was agreed that under a truce both the Taliban and the British troops would withdraw from the area. And, in one of the most extraordinary scenes of the Afghanistan War, the entire 150-strong British force pulled out of the area in a convoy of Afghan trucks known as ‘jinglies’. The truce lasted barely into the New Year and by February 2007 Musa Qala was back in the hands of the Taliban until they were forced to leave again by a major NATO operation to retake the area in December of that year.

Talking about his task at Musa Qala, Woody says, ‘Your first job is always going to be a bit weird. I wasn’t exactly scared but you feel a bit nervous, and obviously you don’t want to get killed on day one. The last thing you want is people saying, “What a tosser – he got killed on his first job.” I was totally confident in my skills, and my preparation before coming out was excellent, so I was pretty confident. I knew that I would be able to deal with whatever I found.’

The shortage of bomb hunters in Helmand meant that there was little time for Woody and his team to acclimatize before undertaking their first mission. Within hours of Brimstone 32 completing their RSOI (Reception, Staging and Onward Movement Integration) training, they were declared ready for operations and became the High Readiness Force, under orders to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. ‘I made sure we spent plenty of time on the barma lanes [the area where soldiers practise searching for bombs, or ‘barma-ing’] in Camp Bastion. It was just knocking the dust off, really. I wanted to make sure that I was happy with my drills – digging in the Afghan desert is different to digging in Warwickshire.’ Woody is referring here to the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search School at Kineton.

On 30 January 2010, just twenty-four hours after finishing the theatre training package, Brimstone 32 got their first mission. Woody was having a brew with his team members when the Operations Warrant Officer appeared with the details of the ten-liner, handed it to Woody, and said, ‘Your helicopter leaves in forty-five minutes.’ The report revealed that a pressure-plate IED had been discovered and that, unusually, the bomb was actually within the perimeter of the camp.

‘Straight away you switch into automatic,’ says Woody. ‘The butterflies are there in the pit of your stomach because you don’t want to make a hash of it, but as well as a few nerves there is also a feeling of “Great. Job to do – let’s get on and do it.”

‘You always wonder what your first job will be like but it’s never going to be what you expect, and this was exactly that. I had been to Helmand before on Herrick 8 and 9, so I knew what to expect. We went into Musa Qala DC [district centre] and the device was in a patrol base to the south of the main base in the area. We arrived the night before, met the OC, got a brief on the job, and then we were told that there were another eight IEDs that they wanted us to clear. Happy days. It’s never just the one bomb – once they’ve got you there, there’s always more work to do. That’s basically the same wherever you go. The ten-liner says one bomb and when you get to the location you find that every device which has been found in the past month now has to be cleared. Sometimes you can do it, sometimes you can’t.’

Once on the ground Brimstone 32 were told that the area had been cleared before the expansion of the camp but at least one bomb had been missed and there was every possibility that there might be others. The IED Woody’s team had been sent to remove had been found purely by chance in the middle of the vehicle park. Somehow, and no one was quite sure how, it had been missed by man and vehicle alike for several weeks.

‘It was between 20 and 25 kg – that is a fairly big IED. That is going to give you an M-Kill on a Mastiff or an armoured vehicle but it could also take out a lot of blokes out in the open. You could easily have a situation where a group of guys are standing around prior to a patrol and one of them detonates the device and then you would have a mass-casualty incident.

‘Soldiers had been driving within millimetres of it – that’s no exaggeration. I don’t know how it was missed. There are some pretty lucky guys wandering around up in Musa Qala. The bomb had probably been there for a couple of months. It was in an area where you would expect IEDs to be. It was in an area of high ground, which is why we built there. It was a good tactical position and the Taliban probably knew we would move into that area. Classically, they put an IED there and, amazingly, it was missed on one of the searches.’

When Woody arrived at the base he discovered that the bomb wasn’t a pressure-plate IED but an improvised Russian land mine, known as an MUV. He explains, ‘An MUV fuse is a pressure switch that can be victim-operated – that is, a soldier stands on it or it can be detonated by a trip wire which when tugged will pull out the pin, just like pulling the pin out of a grenade. What the Taliban do is that they take out the safety pin and put a matchstick in so that it can be used like a pressure plate. When someone stands on it the matchstick breaks, the switch goes into a detonator and straight into a main charge underneath. It’s instantaneous, the speed of the detonation is 8,000 metres per second, so you stand on it and boom, you’re dead. From the Taliban’s point of view the MUV fuse is great because it doesn’t need a power source, so they can be left all over the place and the insurgents can bury and forget them. No batteries to die away, so they will always remain a threat.

‘Sometimes the device will have a bit of a booster between the detonator and the main charge, which can be det cord wrapped around a metal cooking pot, which gives it a massive signature [Vallon alarm], so they should be easy to find. Once you’ve found them, then it’s just a case of separating the components and destroying them. That’s what I did in this case. I was working in a controlled environment – there was no ICP to secure, no need for isolations, so I just separated the components and it all went according to plan. Then we found another one on the HLS and you think, how lucky are these guys? First the car park and then the HLS.’

The US bomb-disposal teams operate as part of Task Force Paladin and are known as Paladin Teams. When Woody arrived at Musa Qala he discovered that Paladin Teams were also taking part in the clearance operation. The Paladin Teams are three-man units and, according to Woody, their main role is clearance rather than exploitation. ‘The Paladin Teams will search up to the IED – put a charge on it, back off, and bang! But British operators will always try and recover some of the IEDs – that is one of our main roles. We have philosophies and principles as to how we operate which must always govern every mission, and they are: life, property, normality, and forensics. That’s the order of priority, and we can swap property and normality and sometimes forensics all around, but life is always paramount. Ultimately that’s our job: to preserve life.’

One of the greatest challenges ATOs face is the threat of complacency – not through any lack of professionalism but simply because the vast majority of the devices they deal with are pressure-plate IEDs. All ATOs have strategies and techniques to help them guard against the risk of complacency, and Woody was no exception. His technique was to focus on the often minute differences between devices.

‘Every bomb is different – even though they have the same characteristics. You never know where all the components are going to be, some may be stretched out – for example, the power supply could be several metres away. Other bombs will have all the components close together, almost on top of each other, and may actually be hidden in a different way. The device may be poorly built, which could make it very unstable, or it may have been in the ground a long time and may have deteriorated and all it needs for it to function is for someone to start dislodging something. So the matter of quality control actually plays into the hands of the Taliban.