Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (27 page)

At around 9 a.m. Daz Chant and his men went out again to picket, or guard, the main route to allow a British Immediate Replenishment Group, a supply convoy of armoured vehicles, to safely pass through Shin Kalay. But on this occasion the police refused to go on patrol with the soldiers. Such acts of petulance were nothing new. Afghan soldiers and police officers alike would often refuse to go out on patrol with the British soldiers, usually claiming they were too tired. Route clearances are long and boring but always potentially dangerous. A route must be cleared of IEDs before a convoy can pass through, and it was little surprise that the police had no interest in joining the soldiers. The Grenadiers used to call the practice of guarding the route ‘street lining’ in reference to their ceremonial duties back in London, where they would stand at attention on either side of the road waiting for a Royal cortège to pass.

While the soldiers were picketing the route, Sergeant Telford and Lance Sergeant Baily were preparing a lesson on how to use trip flares. The device uses the light of the flare to illuminate an area of tactically important ground, such as a track or a stream crossing. The flare ignites when a wire ‘guarding’ an area of ground is ‘tripped’.

Daz was keen for the soldiers to receive some sort of military training every day to ensure boredom wouldn’t set in and to keep the soldiers sharp. The lessons was planned to take place at around 3 p.m., when the soldiers had finished lunch and completed some general duties. Just before the patrol returned, Lance Sergeant Baily, the tactical headquarters signaller, who was responsible for all communications, had noticed that one of his radio antennae was broken. The only way of establishing communication with the main base was to move the radio set onto the roof and hope for a better signal.

The relationship between the soldiers and the police had been pretty good. But there was one individual, named Gulbuddin, whose behaviour and attitude had started to irritate some of the soldiers, especially Lance Corporal Culverhouse. Gulbuddin was likeable enough but had the annoying habit of grabbing some of the soldiers’ backsides, which on two occasions had almost led to a fight. His behaviour forced Sergeant Major Chant to have words with the police commander. On one occasion the Afghan grabbed Culverhouse from behind and tried to force him to the ground. The lance corporal reacted angrily and a scuffle broke out which only came to an end when Sergeant Telford stepped in.

After lunch Lance Sergeant Baily, who by now had established a radio link with the battalion headquarters, was joined on the roof by Lyons and the two RMP corporals, Steven Boote and Nicholas Webster-Smith, and the four of them shared a welfare box of goodies such as cheese and onion crisps, biscuits and boiled sweets sent to the troops by members of the Women’s Institute. It was a sunny, late autumn day and for a few moments the soldiers forgot about the war, the constant fear of death and the Taliban as they relaxed together. The talk was of home leave, wives, girlfriends and the English football premiership.

Baily stayed up on the roof, leaning against a wall reading a well-thumbed paperback while keeping an ear open on the radio. Down in the small courtyard below the soldiers began to assemble for the lesson, sitting on a small wall which had become the communal gathering place. In one of the buildings where the troops slept, Lance Corporal Culverhouse and some of the other soldiers were having a competition to see who could catch the most mice. Then, without warning, the killing began.

A volley of machine-gun fire split the still afternoon air. Another longer burst followed, then another and another. The deafening sound seemed to fill the compound and could even be heard at FOB Shawqat, nearly 2 km to the east.

Daz Chant was the first to die. It is thought that he was less than 2 ft away from Gulbuddin, who moments earlier had been on guard duty, when the Afghan fired the first volley. The burst struck Chant in his unprotected flank. Assuming they were secure within the confines of the compound and among comrades, none of the soldiers was wearing body armour. Sergeant Telford, 37, died next, killed almost instantaneously by the same burst of fire from Gulbuddin. Steve Boote, 22, was shot through the head in a second burst of fire and also died. Young Jimmy Major, 18, had also been hit several times and was close to death, as was 24-year-old Nicholas Webster-Smith.

Gulbuddin fired burst after burst into the bodies of the dead and the wounded before moving into the troops’ sleeping quarters. The soldiers instinctively ran for their weapons when he burst through the door and fired another burst from his AK-47 into the corridor. Russian-made 7.62-mm short rounds ricocheted off walls, causing even more chaos and confusion.

Lance Corporal Culverhouse was hit six times in the first burst, with bullets striking him in the head, both arms and both legs. Lance Corporal Woodgates, Guardsmen Lyons, Bone and Loader and Lance Corporal Namarua were also hit by the same lethal volley. They didn’t stand a chance.

‘I remember getting hit in the face with something and I remember shouting and swearing,’ recalled Lance Corporal Culverhouse, who lost an eye in the attack. ‘I remember saying, “Fucking hell, what was that?” and I covered my face and turned around to see the back of an Afghan, one of the police officers, shooting the lads. It just all went so fast, and then when he saw me he just basically unloaded a magazine, firing at me. He only managed to hit me six times. Thank God.’

Culverhouse was lying face down in a bloody, crumpled heap on the ground when Gulbuddin walked over to him. The wounded soldier, by now in agony, squeezed his eyes shut tight, held his breath, and prayed.

‘The guy came and checked that I was dead. I heard his footsteps and I could hear dust being kicked away from his feet. And then it stopped, and then it went back, so I don’t know what he was doing at the time. I know he must have been checking I was dead because he stood over me. When I was playing dead, I was thinking, he’s going to shoot me again, he’s going to shoot me again. But he didn’t.’

Up on the roof, Lance Sergeant Baily’s initial thought was that either the compound was being attacked by someone very close or one of the soldiers had opened fired at an insurgent.

‘I was a bit confused because when you come under fire you usually get a crack where the bullet passes close by, but I didn’t get any of that. I sent an initial contact report to HQ: “Contact. Wait, out.” That’s when the screaming started. I heard screaming downstairs and I thought, someone’s giving orders down there, but then it became apparent that it was a painful scream, a really agonizing, grating scream, the sort of thing you hear when someone’s in a lot of pain. It will live with me for ever.

‘The best thing that I could do was to stay on the roof until someone tells me what has happened. As the radio operator my job is to stick by the radio come what may. I’m the link to the outside world and, apart from anything else, I had left my body armour, helmet and rifle in the ops room downstairs. Then there was another burst, this time from inside the accommodation. That’s when I thought, fucking hell, someone’s inside and they are shooting. At first I thought the Taliban had managed to get inside the base and were attacking the soldiers. It was really confusing and you can imagine the sense of panic.

‘I dived into the sangar behind me and the guy on duty was armed with a general-purpose machine gun, I saw his rifle behind him, so I grabbed hold of it and waited for the Taliban to attack us. Then one of them came up the stairs and said, “One of the ANPs has just gone mad and is shooting everybody. We need medics. People have been hit.” I got straight onto the radios and began feeding the information back to the headquarters.’

The whole shooting incident lasted around thirty seconds. A thin veil of blue gun smoke hung over the central courtyard. Nine of the sixteen British soldiers were dead or injured.

By this stage Gulbuddin had already fled the compound and disappeared into the surrounding countryside, leaving in his wake a scene of bloody chaos. Neither the British troops nor their police counterparts had time to react. Many of those injured had not even realized that they had been shot by a member of the police. Shortly after Gulbuddin fled, the Taliban began shooting at Blue 25, an act which has led to the suggestion that Gulbuddin was a Taliban agent and the attack was part of a well-coordinated plan. There is no real evidence to support such a claim and the Taliban could have simply been responding to the sound of shooting inside the base.

Meanwhile, in the area where the soldiers slept, one of the beds had caught fire. A round had ignited something in one of the rooms and ammunition was starting to explode. There was a real possibility of a major fire breaking out. Fuel jerry cans were close by but further damage was prevented by one of the interpreters, who grabbed the cans and moved them to another room.

Up in the sangar, Pete Baily sent a request for medics. He also sent one of the soldiers down to the scene of the crime to find out the full extent of the casualties. ‘I needed to know who had been hit and where. I needed that sort of information so that I could get the ball rolling. At this stage I still didn’t know that we had fatalities.’

When the soldiers returned to Baily, they broke the news that Sergeant Major Chant was dead. ‘I was in a different world at that time,’ Baily recalled. ‘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. I was reeling. Nothing made sense. The thought going through your mind was, this isn’t real, it can’t be happening. I thought, now I’m in charge, and I was terrified. My initial instinct was to man that radio and get any information I could back to the headquarters – that was my job. At one point it was like a training session where you are suddenly hit with all of these different scenarios to see how you would react. It just felt like that, it was unreal.’

Daz Chant and Sergeant Telford had been killed instantly. Guardsman Major hung on for a little while longer. He had been hit in the torso but a bullet had passed through his head. His friend, Guardsman Alexander Bone, had tried to keep him alive but his wounds were simply too grave. Corporal Boote had also been shot through the head and had died instantly. Despite sustaining severe injuries, Corporal Webster-Smith made it onto the helicopter, but died later.

Lance Corporal ‘Woody’ Woodgates was the most seriously injured. One bullet had hit him in the leg and two more had hit him in the lower back and exited his body through the stomach. ‘He was carried upstairs and placed in the sangar,’ Lance Sergeant Baily explained. ‘The whole situation was still really confused and the rooftop was the safest place to be. The gate was open, the police had gone, we had mass casualties and there was always the chance of a follow-up attack. The only thing going through my head was: get the guys to cover their arcs [of fire], look after the wounded, and pretty much wait for the cavalry to arrive. Woody was in a really bad way and at one stage I didn’t think he was going to make it. He was in a lot of pain and all the medical kits were downstairs. He was screaming for water and morphine and was drifting in and out of consciousness. I put Woody in the sangar on his own because he was the most seriously wounded and I had one guy looking after him. I kept talking to him, encouraging him to hold on, telling him he was going to be OK. At one point he stopped talking. I had thought he was gone, dead. I was shouting out his name and then I went to have a look in the sangar. There was blood everywhere but he was still alive.

‘At that stage I wasn’t really sure how many dead and injured there were. Liam was downstairs, he was too badly wounded to be moved, and one of the terps [interpreters] stayed with him. I was really scared at the time and I just grabbed hold of that radio like it was a lifeboat and started passing over all the information. I sent the message to the headquarters that Sergeant Major Chant was dead. He had his own callsign, which was “Mongoose 99 Charlie”. I sent the message “Mongoose 99 Charlie is down”, which meant that the sergeant major was dead, then I sent “Mongoose 96 is down”, which was Sergeant Telford. I was just in automatic mode. I knew that the HQ would want to know as much as possible; they needed to know who was killed and injured and it was down to me to pass on as much info as possible.

‘The radio operator at the other end was fantastic, he was very calm and simply said, “Yep, Roger.” He didn’t panic at all. Every time I sent over details of the dead and injured I just got a “Roger” – and that’s what I needed. God knows what they thought was happening in the ops room, it must have been mayhem. I can’t remember a lot of what I said or what I did. The adrenalin was pumping and things happened so quickly, but I do remember passing over the callsigns of the dead.’

Back at Shawqat the news was greeted with disbelief, but immediately, like a well-oiled machine, the operations officer and his team began organizing the casualty evacuation. An emergency air medical evacuation request was sent to Camp Bastion informing the hospital that there was a mass-casualty situation with at least four dead and four T1 – the highest level – casualties with multiple bullet wounds.

The order was simultaneously given for the soldiers from the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team, the OMLT, pronounced ‘omlet’, who formed the Quick Reaction Force (QRF), to charge down to Blue 25 to assist with the casualty evacuation and to help in the event of a full-scale Taliban attack.

Lieutenant Colonel Walker was out visiting another checkpoint when he was told that there had been a contact at Blue 25. The colonel’s convoy was only 5 km away from the incident but the threat from IEDs buried along most of the transit routes effectively meant that it would take at least an hour to reach the stricken troops. In November 2009, as it is today, only routes which are overwatched by ISAF troops, the police or the Afghan Army are effectively risk-free. All others must have every inch checked by troops equipped with mine detectors. Any IEDs discovered are then ‘marked and avoided’ or cleared
in situ
. There was no ATO in the commanding officer’s convoy – being such a rare asset, the ATO and his IED disposal team were already deployed on another operation.