Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (25 page)

‘Six months is a long time but as long as you are managed correctly it’s about achievable. But it’s tough – there are no easy tours in Helmand – and I think some ATOs might struggle, especially if your team has suffered casualties. You need to trust the people above you, and you need to believe that the headquarters will not put you in somewhere if you are too exhausted. Trouble is, we’re always knackered – it’s part of the job. We always say an ATO never has trouble sleeping but there can come a point when you are so knackered that you can become a danger to yourself and that’s when you need people above you to step in and say, “We’re pulling you out for a rest.” But then that will put greater pressure on other ATOs. We will always be rotated around the various operational areas so that you don’t get stale – and also because they all have different operational tempos.

‘Sangin is very busy, it’s horrible. You wouldn’t last six months in Sangin – you would either be a nervous wreck or be dead. I will go to Sangin at some stage. If I’m honest, I’d rather not, but you have to take it as it comes. The devices being laid in Sangin are not really any different to anywhere else, there are just more of them and the insurgents based there will target ATOs. The Taliban also have a very effective dicking screen. You will be watched every time you are on a job. For example, you always pull a device out of the ground using a hook and line and not by hand. If you pulled a bomb out of the ground by hand in Nad-e’Ali you might get away with it, but not in Sangin. Try that in Sangin and you will die. You might get away with it once but the Taliban will be watching and it will be, “OK. So he pulls it out by hand. OK, we’ll use that.” And next time you did it – and I mean the next time – it would be bang, you’re dead. They will target routine, they will target obvious routes, they will target our casevac procedures. They know there are only so many places where you can put an HLS if you take a casualty, so they will target that too.

‘Sangin is different. The ground is different – on one side you have a sniper threat and on the other you have lots of hamlets and alleyways, so it’s really easy to channel soldiers into killing zones. And I think the Taliban are different too. They come in from Pakistan. They will have a play, try new ideas, new tactics. They all want to prove themselves, the foot soldiers and commanders, so you get taken on nearly all the time. Once they’ve proved their worth in Sangin, they get sent elsewhere in Helmand – that’s the current theory anyway.

‘There are also a lot of checkpoints for troops to man, so you don’t have the depth in numbers you might have in other areas and that can also be exploited by the Taliban, giving them greater freedom of movement. So a lot of the time, for the soldiers and the ATOs, Sangin is a real struggle. But it’s not the only area which is dangerous for ATOs. We’ve had guys killed and injured in every area – it wasn’t only Oz who died in Sangin. Gaz O’Donnell died in Musa Qala, Dan Shepherd was killed in Nad-e’Ali, Ken Bellringer lost his legs in Gereshk, and Dan Read was blown up in Musa Qala. So yes, Sangin is dangerous, but so is everywhere in Helmand. You’ve always got to try and stay one step ahead – it’s cat and mouse. The Taliban aren’t stupid. They will take you on if they think they can get away with it. I’ve been out on jobs where the support from ground troops has been brilliant. When we cleared 6 km of Route Dorset, which is on the eastern edge of Nad-e’Ali, we had four Vikings, six Scimitars and a Danish tank. The isolation was split into two: we had twenty blokes on each side of the road. We had fast air up as well. If I was the Taliban I would be thinking, do I want to take these guys on? Answer: no. But then I’ve been on similar jobs and all we’ve had is a Mastiff and half a dozen soldiers because that is all that can be spared. And you know that the Taliban will think, let’s have a go. They will use multiple IEDs in ambushes, they will target casevac routes, and if your drills are bad you will be targeted too.

‘The Taliban know how we react when we have a contact – they have seen it. A guy gets blown up and loses both legs – there’s a lot of panic and shouting, the adrenalin is pumping, he’s close to death, and at the forefront of everyone’s mind is getting him out of the killing zone and back to the HLS. The Taliban know this, so they target the route to the HLS. Now, if in the midst of all this panic, blood, gore and mayhem you charge off to the HLS you will become a casualty too. It’s happened here many times. Guys have died rescuing their mates because they forgot the basic drills. Rather than slowing everything down and making sure they carefully clear the route to the HLS, the fog of panic descends and then bang, you’ve now got one double amputee, another couple of severely injured guys, and possibly some KIAs – and that’s a big mess. We’ve to constantly make sure that we play by our rules and not the Taliban’s, we fight on our terms, not the Taliban’s. But that’s one of those things which is far easier to say than do.’

Woody falls silent and stares into the empty paper cup he has cupped between his hands. Just as I’m about to ask if everything is OK, he lifts his head and says, ‘I’ve got a bit of a confession to make.’ There is a slight curl at the ends of his top lip and I intuitively realize that he is about to explain that something almost went wrong on an operation a few days ago. I remember Woody having a serious conversation with the WIS and Kev, the RESA, after he returned from the compound for the last time. Shortly after their conversation finished, I asked Woody if everything was OK. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ was all he said.

‘I was almost killed the other day,’ he says without the slightest hint of either bravado or concern, ‘and I’ve been going over in my mind whether I could or should have done anything differently and the bottom line is, I couldn’t – I was just lucky.’

Woody is referring to the operation a few days earlier when he had to climb over the wall of a compound which had at one time been a Taliban firing point and had since been booby-trapped with a pressure-plate IED. The compound had become very overgrown with brambles and weeds, which meant that Woody was forced to hack his way through to the doorway where the bomb had been buried.

As he approached the doorway he could see a wire protruding from the compound’s earth floor. He immediately knew it was linked to the power pack. ‘When you are faced with that sort of situation, you make a mental assessment of where you think the various components are located. You can do a bit of searching with the Vallon. That will give you a general idea of where the device is located but you can’t narrow the location down in the way that you can with the hand-held metal detector. So I set about working and I placed the IED weapon on the ground near the battery, I was happy with that, and I started uncovering the rest of the device. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that the pressure plate was directly beneath the weapon. The problem was – and this is always the problem you face as an ATO – the device was very poorly laid out. You try not to have any preconceived ideas of how a bomb might be set up but you have to go in with some sort of basic plan and the acceptance that the bomb is designed to kill people. Whoever buried it didn’t want it to be found – or at least that is the premise you work on. I had picked up quite a strong metal signature in the doorway, so that’s where I assumed the pressure plate would be. But it wasn’t. It was right beneath where I was working. I didn’t realize that until I returned to the compound after I had extracted everything. When I returned to the compound with the WIS he asked where and how the device was laid out so he could write his report. I said, “The explosive was there, the pressure plate there, and the power pack there.” And that’s when the penny dropped and I realized that I had placed the weapon on top of the pressure plate. The pressure plate was low metal content. It was effectively made of cardboard – there was almost no metal signature and it had two thin wires running along the inside. It was the thinnest wire I’d ever seen on a pressure plate. The device was very cleverly made but was really poorly placed, which suggests that the person who made the bomb was not the person who laid it out – same tactics as the IRA. The bomb maker is the more valuable asset, so why risk him?

‘Looking back, I could have caused the device to function and if it had blown up I would have been killed – no doubt about that.’

Woody laughs as he makes this last point but I also sense concern. He knows, as I know, that he did everything by the book, he followed all the rules, all the procedures, and used all the experience he’d built in Helmand to find and defuse the bomb. But he still came close, too close, to being killed.

Again smiling, he adds, ‘It didn’t play on my mind at the time, but I have thought about it a bit since coming back. It’s just one of those things really, and I suppose I got a bit lucky. Maybe that’s another life I’ve lost.’

While life for bomb hunters in Helmand is clearly dangerous and demanding, Woody, like most ATOs, believes that it is the wives, families and girlfriends back home in the UK who really suffer. For many of the wives the pressure and worry are sometimes too much to bear.

‘There is a saying in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal world that EOD actually stands for “every one’s divorced”.’ Woody laughs as he says this, but he’s also being serious. After the special forces, whose members spend months away from home or on courses sharpening their killing skills, bomb-disposal operators have the highest divorce rate in the Army.

‘We all know guys whose marriage has gone tits up because they put the job first. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want to have a family life. The missus wants me to leave. I could join the police force – it’s better money and I wouldn’t have to come back to Afghan. I would go home every night, and that’s very tempting. Guys are getting killed and injured every day by the bombs I’m defusing. It’s not me who is feeling the pressure, it’s the wife. She’s the one whose heart stops when there’s a knock on the door or the phone rings. None of us thinks about the dangers but we all know they’re there, niggling away at the back of your mind, and I suppose now that I’ve got children you start to question what you’re doing. I’ve got twins and I want to see them grow up – I don’t want to miss too much of their childhood.’

It is the separation from their families which most soldiers seem to struggle with, especially at the beginning of a six-month tour. No married soldier, no matter how experienced, gets used to saying goodbye. Even the toughest, most battle-experienced sergeant major goes watery-eyed when talk turns to families back home, and Woody is no different.

He continues, ‘There are a few of them who are mad for it [bomb disposal in Afghanistan] but most ATOs just want to get the tour done. I’ve never met an ATO yet who has finished his tour and wants to come back – it’s the stresses and dangers that eventually get to you, they get to everyone, especially when guys are getting killed and injured. If you survive the tour out here as an ATO you know you’ve been lucky – good at the job, yes, but lucky too. On Op Herrick 10 there wasn’t one team that hadn’t been blown up. I’ve been blown up, Dan Perkins [another ATO] has been blown up, Captain Rob Swan was pinned down by snipers, Badger was under fire, Harry French’s team had two guys taken out by a grenade lobbed over a wall. The thing is, none of us were doing anything wrong. That’s just the way it goes out here.’

The soaring rates of amputees returning from Helmand because of the surge in the Taliban’s use of IEDs has inevitably led to conversations among the bomb-hunting fraternity about whether life is worth living after surviving a double or triple amputation.

Woody gives me his view on the subject. ‘None of us really ever discusses how we would feel until you hear that someone has been hurt and has lost both legs and sometimes both legs and an arm. And then someone will say, “I wouldn’t want to live like that.” The thing all the soldiers are scared about is losing their balls – you hear people say, “As long as I don’t lose my balls, I could cope, but if I lose my legs and my balls I’d rather be dead.” And I’ve thought about that too. I’ve asked myself the question: would I want to live with no legs and no balls? We all know that you’re going to have a lifetime of struggle. But I always say, well, at least I would be able to cuddle my children – they can’t take that away and that’s worth living for because that’s the best feeling in the world. Anyway it’s pretty rare for ATOs to lose our legs because we are normally right over the device, so if an IED detonates it’s usually all over. Ken [WO2 Bellringer] was standing up when he stepped on a pressure plate, so he’s fortunate because he survived even though he had terrible injuries, but he will be able to cuddle his children again.’

Woody falls silent again, lost in thought, perhaps about his twin daughters back home.
The Hurt Locker
has now finished and the soldiers are leaving, some to get some sleep, others for sentry duty on the front gate.

‘Right,’ Woody says, slapping his hands on the table. ‘Time for bed, I think. We’ve got another job on tomorrow. A route clearance – probably several bombs on the road. Should be interesting. Can sometimes get a bit cheeky out there. You up for it?’ he asks with a smile.

‘Yep, I’m up for it,’ I reply.

Woody finishes his tea and adds, ‘We’ve got a new search team coming in tomorrow, so that should be interesting. Now I’m going to finish my reports and get my head down.’

‘It was like being hit with a sledgehammer. It just didn’t seem real. One second everything was normal, the next there was chaos and death – it was that quick.’

Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, Signaller, Grenadier Guards

I awake to the news that a soldier who was badly injured in February by an IED in Musa Qala has died the previous evening, 15 March 2010, at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Captain Martin Driver of 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment was blown up while on patrol and suffered a double amputation of his legs as well as serious injuries to other parts of his body. Shortly after he was injured he was evacuated back to the UK and survived for a further three weeks before succumbing to his injuries. It must have been a terrible ordeal for his family but it is a tragedy which has been played out hundreds of times over the past four years.

One more life lost, one more family shattered. At the back of my mind I’m thinking, what’s the point? Captain Driver, like all of those who have died before him, will no doubt be called a hero and I’m sure he was – anyone who spends six months fighting the Taliban is a hero as far as I am concerned – but who will remember him or his family’s suffering in five years’ time? Captain Driver’s loss is another reminder that death in Afghanistan is never far away. Since I arrived two weeks ago, five soldiers have been killed and at least a dozen more have been injured, the majority by IEDs.

By 7.30 a.m. I’m back in FOB Shawqat’s vehicle park, waiting to leave on the next IED mission. Warrior drivers are gunning their engines in preparation for this latest mission and the air is thick with the pungent smell of diesel. Woody is standing at the centre of a small group of soldiers and I can see from the look on his face that there is a problem. The incoming search team – callsign Brimstone 42, nickname Team Stallion – has just arrived as expected, but the helicopter which has flown them in has also extracted the old search team. The plan had been for the two search teams to work together for at least a week so that the outgoing team could pass on all of their knowledge of the local area to the incoming team. That process will now not take place and, to make matters worse, half of Brimstone 42’s kit was put on board the wrong helicopter and is sitting in Sangin.

And so Brimstone 42 are about to go out on their very first mission with almost no understanding of the ground or the local Taliban tactics.

‘It’s not what I would say is ideal,’ says Woody out of earshot of his new team. ‘It’s their first job and they are going to go into it cold. They are a good bunch of lads and some of them have been on operations before, but Afghan is different. You don’t get a second chance here. Fuck up out here and you’re going home in a body bag.’

Brimstone 45 have been called back to Camp Bastion earlier than expected because they are needed to man the High Readiness Force, which is regarded as a greater priority than having them remain in Nad-e’Ali and show their replacement team the lie of the land. If there were more bomb-hunting teams available, commanders would not be forced to make difficult compromises like this.

For many within the bomb-disposal world, however, shortages of bomb hunters is nothing short of scandalous, given that it has been obvious since 2008 that the production and deployment of IEDs against NATO forces, especially in the south of Afghanistan, has been part of the Taliban’s main effort.

In 2008 WO2 Gaz O’Donnell, then a George Medal holder (later awarded a posthumous Bar) and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, confided in me that he was amazed that there were just two IEDD teams in Helmand – back then the main war effort was in Iraq, where roadside bombs were killing British troops every week. Gaz and other members of the EOD group were staggered that senior commanders in the Ministry of Defence in London did not view Helmand as a high-threat IED environment even though the numbers of IED incidents had increased by more than threefold in two years. In 2004 there were just 304 IED incidents – an incident means a find or a detonation – in the whole of Afghanistan. In 2009 the number of IED incidents had risen to over 10,000, the vast majority of which occurred in Helmand. Gaz told me at the time, ‘It suits the MOD to be able to say that Helmand isn’t a high-threat area because then they can justify the numbers. Iraq is a high-threat environment, so there are a lot more IEDD teams in Basra. If they admitted that Helmand was a high-risk area too, then they would have to increase the number of ATOs here as well. The problem is that there aren’t enough ATOs for both operations and we have got the short straw.’

Six weeks after Gaz vented his frustrations to me in August 2008, he was dead and became the first ATO to be killed in Helmand. The number of CIED teams and search teams has increased fivefold but there are still too few and the consequence of this is that practices such as the team handovers, which are designed to save lives and prevent injury, are abandoned.

A message comes via the operations room informing Woody that our mission has been delayed by at least an hour. A few soldiers grunt disapprovingly but most are indifferent to the news. Brimstone 45 have a whole six months ahead of them, so why complain about an hour’s delay? Like the soldiers around me, I take off my body armour, drop it against the wheel of a Mastiff and use it as a makeshift seat. Rushing only to wait is part of Army life, especially in a war zone. I’m staring absent-mindedly out across the vehicle when I notice Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, one of the survivors of an incident which became known as ‘Murder at Blue 25’, heading towards the operations room.

The killings took place on Tuesday, 3 November 2009, a day which began as it always did for the soldiers located at the small British Army patrol base known as Blue 25. The soldiers rose from their beds in the hour before dawn, made tea, loaded their weapons, and waited for the Taliban to attack. It had been the same routine every day for the past two weeks – and the Afghan police whom the troops had been sent to ‘mentor’ joined them.

Led by Regimental Sergeant Major Darren ‘Daz’ Chant, a living legend within the Brigade of Guards, the sixteen-strong unit had been detached to Blue 25 in a last-chance bid to shore up relations between the local population and the Afghan Police. The police were so utterly hopeless that there was every chance that the local population would turn to the Taliban to uphold law and order unless urgent and drastic action was taken. The plan had worked well. The presence of the British soldiers had helped to partially restore the locals’ confidence in the police, who also seemed to appreciate the effort being made by the Grenadiers. But by the middle of the afternoon five British soldiers would lie dead and another six would be injured at the hands of a policeman whom they thought of as a trusted friend. Even in a war as dirty as that being fought in Helmand, the murders were a despicable act and had the potential to undermine the delicate relationship between the British Army and the Afghan Police. As the details of the mass killings broke in the UK, many newspapers questioned the whole nature of the mission in Afghanistan, with several asking why British troops were risking their lives for a nation where individuals employed by the government could act with such treachery.

When the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in Nad-e’Ali in September 2009, Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the battlegroup commander, knew that if he was to fulfil his orders to secure Nad-e’Ali and separate and secure the population from the insurgents he would have to work hand in glove with the Afghan security forces, namely the police and the military.

‘The three legs of the stool were the International Security and Assistance Force [ISAF], the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police,’ he explained over a coffee one morning in March 2009 while I was embedded with his battlegroup in Nad-e’Ali. ‘We knew that we would have to work with them all if we were to be successful in Nad-e’Ali and if we wanted to make real progress. What I didn’t know when we arrived was that one of the legs of the stool, the police, was rotten, rotten to the core.’

Up until late 2009 the Afghan National Police had not received anything like the same levels of strategic investment afforded to the Afghan National Army and were widely regarded by those British military commanders unfortunate enough to work with them as at best a bad joke and at worst a liability which threatened to undermine the Army’s efforts to win hearts and minds. In Helmand, as in much of Afghanistan, the police were an utter shambles. Many of the officers were addicted to opium and would routinely sell their weapons and ammunition – even to the Taliban – in order to fund their habit. In one case a police unit sold all its supplies of bullets and rockets to insurgents. A few days later the same group of insurgents attacked the police and several officers were killed.

The police were ill-disciplined, untrained, poorly led, and would openly ‘tax’ or steal from the local population, often because they had not been paid by their commanders. Corruption within various units was rife, and young teenage policemen risked being sexually assaulted or raped by senior commanders. While ISAF had concentrated its efforts on building up the Afghan Army, the police had been left to wither on the vine, and for that a price was being paid.

While relations between the British Army and the Afghan soldiers were based on mutual respect, most British soldiers regarded the country’s police as being worse than useless. But there was some sympathy for the police’s predicament. Whereas the Afghan soldiers were often recruited from areas outside of Helmand and lived in barracks or secure camps, the police lived a dangerous life among the people they were supposedly protecting and were often easy targets for the insurgents.

Shortly after the first elements of the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in September 2009, reports began to emerge of some of the dangerous everyday antics involving the Afghan police, which often left the locals in a state of abject terror. Village elders began to complain about the goings-on in one police checkpoint where almost every day the force would be high on drugs and often fire wildly down a road used by civilians.

British soldiers working close to or alongside Afghan police officers had to always be prepared to factor in the unexpected when planning operations, as Lieutenant Mike Dobbin, of Queen’s Company, Ist Battalion Grenadier Guards, explained. An incident which took place on 7 October 2009 typified the problems the British soldiers faced when dealing with the Afghan police. ‘During a routine patrol in Basharan area, my platoon, which at that time was partnered with the Afghan police, found an IED on a major route in the area,’ he explained while giving a summary of his experiences of working with the Afghan police. ‘We were unable to destroy the device because there was no bomb-disposal team with us, so we marked the area with green spray paint to bring it to the attention of locals and to stop anyone driving or walking over it. All of this was much to the frustration of the police, who simply wanted to tear it out of the ground and blow it up.

‘It was clear to us that the insurgents, knowing we had discovered the device, were likely to come back, take it out and replace it in another area with the aim of killing British or Afghan troops. We therefore planned with the police to return that night and ambush them while they did this. At around 9 p.m. I led a twelve-man team up to a cemetery in the area, which was around 500 metres away from the IED’s location. Overwatching the cemetery was a police checkpoint with good arcs of observation across the open ground. The Afghan police knew that we were in the area and that an ambush was being planned. As the patrol pushed on through the cemetery, approximately 300 metres from a checkpoint, the police opened fire, pinning us down with a heavy weight of rocket and machine-gun fire. Eventually, through a series of mobile telephone calls and radio messages, the police became aware that we were actually friendly forces and they stopped their firing, but it was clear that our position had been given away. There was a clear lack of understanding between ISAF and our Afghan partners. We later found that the police unit in the checkpoint were lazy, untrained and highly addicted to opium.’

Another example of the police’s ill-discipline came to light one lunchtime at the police training college in Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital. The college was divided into two, a junior term and a senior term, the latter of which were afforded special privileges, such as being first in the queue for meals. During one lunchtime, scuffles broke out between the two sets of students after the junior term managed to get into the lunch queue first. A British soldier who was overseeing the process intervened and tried to restore order, only to have both sets of students turn on him. Those among the crowd who had weapons cocked them and threatened to shoot the young corporal. Order was restored only when the soldier grabbed a rifle from one of the trainees and with a single swift blow managed to knock him out.

One evening early in the tour, the commander of Queen’s Company received a message disclosing that a police checkpoint in one of the local communities was perilously close to falling to the insurgents. Two police outposts, one on each side of it, had apparently fallen earlier that day and five Afghan police officers had already been killed at this checkpoint, and during the recovery of the injured soldiers the police’s casualty evacuation vehicle had been destroyed by an IED.

Lieutenant Dobbin explained, ‘My platoon crashed out in three vehicles at about 1800 hours with orders to hold the checkpoint until dawn. We met some police at a nearby checkpoint and they led us to a point where we took over in the more armoured vehicles due to the IED threat. We rolled into the village at about 2200, driving in on black light – that is, using night-vision rather than white headlights. It’s great for covert insertions but can make driving very tricky. We came to a crossroads at the centre of the village and had to turn quite a sharp corner. The first two vehicles got round with no problem, but the third must have pushed a little over to the left because as it turned the road gave way and the Mastiff slipped into an irrigation ditch. The vehicle weighs 20 tons and many roads in Helmand are not capable of bearing such a weight. Members of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers spent several hours using their incredibly powerful recovery vehicle to pull this out.’