Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit Read online

  The whole IEDD team is now back in the ICP and Kev announces that we will be moving out in two minutes. While Boonie is packing away the ATO’s equipment and the searchers are hauling on their packs, the distant rattle of machine-gun fire pierces the still afternoon air. ‘A fifty,’ says Adam. He means a .50-calibre heavy machine gun, and so it should be outgoing rather than incoming fire. But Richie says, ‘Or a Dushka.’ The DShk is a 12.7-mm Russian-made heavy machine gun which has been used by the Taliban.

  ‘Right, let’s get a move on,’ shouts Kev. ‘Same order of march. Richie, you lead. Let’s go.’ Once again we are in single file, marching at speed across the wheat field, but this time taking a different route back to Blue 17. As we patrol back the firing continues. Whoever is shooting it is at least 2 km from us and therefore not regarded as a threat.

  The team moves back into the patrol base and Woody tells Lance Sergeant Hunt that the mission has been successful. The searchers are now visibly more relaxed, talking and laughing among themselves, smoking cigarettes and gulping down fresh, ice-cold water. Clearing one IED has taken upwards of five hours and involved more than thirty soldiers. No one knows how many IEDs litter the tracks, fields and hamlets which make up Helmand, but the best estimates put the number in the thousands.

  It has been a long, hot day for the men of Brimstone 45. In the next forty-eight hours, providing there is a helicopter available, they will fly out of Nad-e’Ali and return to Camp Bastion. It will then be four days on HRF and then back home, via twenty-four hours’ ‘decompression’ in Cyprus, to their families, wives and girlfriends. They have almost made it.

  Chapter 6: The Lonely Walk

  ‘I was almost killed the other day.’

  Staff Sergeant Gareth Wood, ATO, 11 EOD Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps, serving with JFEOD Group

  ‘If you’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, you will leave Helmand with your team intact – no one killed or injured, no amputees. But you know you are going to get blown up, you know you are going to get shot at. You will have close shaves and you just have to hope that luck is on your side. But there are only so many rolls of the dice you can have before you get a double six. We all know that, but we train ourselves not to dwell on what might happen. I suppose you could say that we are living in denial but I don’t think there is any other way of getting through Afghan other than to have that sort of mentality.’

  Woody and I are chatting over a cup of Army tea in one of the two steel-reinforced bunkers that serve as the canteen for the 150 soldiers operating from FOB Shawqat, the main headquarters of the Grenadier Guards battlegroup, to which Woody and his team are currently attached. It’s around 8 p.m. and the soldiers have finished their evening meal, a chicken curry followed by semi-frozen Black Forest Gateau, all washed down with an orange-coloured, sickly sweet squash. Curry is an Army staple – back in Camp Bastion the food halls where the soldiers eat offer it as a menu choice every day – but in Shawqat curry is a rarity and always a crowd-puller. It’s comfort food, it reminds the soldiers of home.

  The bunker is lit by a series of low-hanging fluorescent lights emitting a dull-greenish hue. On one wall is an electric fly-catcher which periodically spits out a series of cracks every time a fly is zapped. The previous evening soldiers were betting on how many flies would be killed in one, five and ten minutes.

  A 50-in. flat-screen TV fills a wall at one end of the building where three young soldiers sit engrossed in The Hurt Locker. It’s one of the many oddities of life in Helmand that many soldiers appear to relax by watching war films or playing violent computer games.

  Woody looks over his shoulder and stares at the TV for a few seconds. Then he turns to me and a wide, toothy grin creeps across his face. ‘Hollywood,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You just knew they weren’t going to get it right. You wouldn’t last five minutes if you behaved like that out here.’

  I’ve now been with Woody and his team for over a week. I’ve seen him pull bombs from the ground after hours of toil. I’ve seen him tense, frustrated, angry and relieved, and I’ve listened to him talk longingly of his wife and 3-year-old twin daughters. But with so much to live for and so much to lose, I still can’t quite understand why Woody is a bomb hunter. Helmand province, the largest in Afghanistan, is without doubt currently the most dangerous place on the planet. Woody knows the risks. He is horribly aware that a simple mistake, a momentary lapse in concentration, can spell disaster. He is no stranger to death. One of his best friends, Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, was killed in Helmand while Woody was completing his High Threat course.

  Woody’s face is friendly and burnished to a rusty light brown by the hundreds of hours he has spent exposed to the desert sun. His eyes are quick and alert and his face carries a happy smile. The dirt and sweat have been washed away but the fatigue of war has taken its toll. His cheeks are hollow, he admits to often being too exhausted to eat after a particularly difficult job, and, like most of the ATOs operating in Helmand, he has acquired dark rings beneath his eyes.

  To date Woody’s team have been blown up twice and he can’t remember exactly how many times they have come under fire since they arrived in January 2010. He thinks, though he can’t be certain, that he and his team have disposed of something like thirty bombs. But Woody tries not to count. I have never met a soldier who is not superstitious, and Woody is no different. Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid and Captain Dan Read both counted the number of bombs they defused, and both are dead, Woody tells me. He is now convinced that counting bombs brings bad luck.

  Woody’s first brush with death occurred when he was part of the High Readiness Force in early March 2010. His team were flown by helicopter into FOB Inkerman to clear two recently discovered IEDs. The base was named after the Inkerman Company of the Grenadier Guards, under whose watch it was established in June 2007. It sits right on the edge of the fertile green zone and was built to interdict Taliban movement towards Sangin district centre. At the time the base held the dubious distinction of being one of the most attacked in Helmand. I have been embedded in Inkerman twice before, in 2007 with 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment and in 2008 with 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment, and on both occasions the base came under Taliban attack.

  The IED threat in the Sangin area is so high that ATOs are only sent on attachment to the resident battlegroup after they have completed at least two months in Helmand. The same rules, however, do not apply to the HRF who fly in, do the job, and fly out.

  For bomb hunter callsigns Brimstone 32 and 45, the high-risk search team, the mission, on paper at least, appeared to be relatively routine. Two bombs had been located in the area, a pressure-plate device on Route 611, the main transit link between FOB Inkerman and Sangin district centre, some 8 km to the south, and one closer to the base.

  ‘We were on HRF and were choppered into Inkerman the night before,’ recalls Woody, between sips of hot, sweet tea. ‘We were briefed on the task – it was basically a clearance op. We worked out our plan and we were all happy – well, as happy as you can be in Sangin.’

  The bomb hunters left at first light in a convoy of Mastiffs supported by soldiers under the command of Company Sergeant Major Pat Hyde of A Company, 4 Rifles, a man who had developed the reputation of being a bomb magnet after having been blown up at least twelve times in five months.

  Woody continues, ‘We got up in the morning at first light and headed south down Route 611 towards Sangin, where the first job was. The plan was to deal with that bomb, then return to the one closer to Inkerman and deal with that. But no job in Sangin is ever what you think it is going to be. We had been told that the first bomb was effectively a pressure-plate device but when we got there we discovered that there was a pressure plate and also a command wire linked to the bomb. Since the device was first discovered the Taliban had come in and changed it. It seems they had been monitoring the area and had obviously seen that it had been discovered. Once that had happened they knew that it would have to be cleared. It was on the 61
1, so it couldn’t be ignored. And the only people who clear bombs are ATOs. The route is overlooked by a number of patrol bases, so the enemy shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near it, but somehow they did. The Taliban are pretty cheeky in Sangin.

  ‘The main charge was an anti-tank mine and I think they had basically modified the device so that it could be detonated by command pull or by pressure. I think the idea behind the command wire was the hope that they might get a kill when a soldier made an approach during the confirmation.’

  Despite the complication of the double trigger, Woody and his team were able to deal with the device relatively quickly. The soldiers knew the threat was high and that the risk of attack was very real, so no one wanted to hang around a minute longer than necessary. The isolation searches had to be quick but thorough. By late morning the troops were heading back towards Inkerman to complete the second and final task.

  Woody explains, ‘We identified the area where the second device was buried – the soldiers from the Rifles had pinpointed it. The Mastiffs secured the area and we began clearing it. After the ICP was secured, the search team went out and began the isolation, a wide search of the area around the location of the bomb to ensure it was free from command wires.’

  Above the ICP was a small outcrop on which sat an old, abandoned compound. Locals had recently been digging for rock in the area, possibly for use on their own homes. While the troops were preparing for the next stage of the mission they noticed a young boy, aged around 10, with a dirty face and matted hair, watching them closely. The soldiers waved and the boy, smiling, waved back.

  A few of the troops shouted, ‘As-Salaam Alaikum’, the traditional Pashto greeting, which translates as ‘God be with you’ but also serves as a simple ‘hello’. The boy’s face lit up and he gleefully shouted back, ‘Hello, soldier.’ Everyone laughed and relaxed. The boy’s presence was, on the face of it, reassuring. But in Sangin nothing is quite what it might at first seem, and many soldiers believe the Taliban operate there with the sympathy and support of the local population.

  ‘I wasn’t really taking much notice,’ says Woody. ‘We’d just come back in off the isolation and people were sorting their kit out, dropping their bags, and I was concentrating on what I was going to do next, which was the first approach – going down the road. I was in my zone and the security of the area was the responsibility of the infantry.’

  Woody and Kev, the RESA, were discussing the best line of approach, while some of the search team began to relax and light up cigarettes. Richie, the lead searcher, was folding the stock of his Vallon when the ridge line above them erupted and the ICP was hit by a volley of rocks and shrapnel. Punched by the blast, Richie fell to the ground holding his groin as a large plume of dust and smoke enveloped the soldiers. ‘Contact IED. Wait, out,’ was frantically dispatched over the radio as the sound of thunder echoed around the valley. ‘It was an almighty explosion, a fucking great bang,’ recalls Woody, now more animated than he had been earlier. ‘We were all showered with rocks and shit. It was really close, you could feel the shock wave. The detonation was about 30 metres away, and that’s pretty close. Your ears are ringing, your nose is running, there’s dust in your eyes, and you’re wondering who’s been hit. I can smile about it now, but at the time you’re thinking, what the bloody hell was that?’

  Richie was rolling around on the ground, his knees bent up to his chest, shouting, ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ still unsure how badly he’d been injured. Sapper Dan Taylor-Allen ran over, grabbed Richie and asked him if he was hit. ‘In the nuts, man,’ said Richie. ‘I’ve been hit in the fucking nuts.’

  Dan was joined by other members of the team, who told Richie to stop moving and quickly examined him. A wound in the groin from a piece of shrapnel can rupture the femoral artery and cause death within minutes. But whatever had hit Richie had not broken the skin: it had just given him one hell of a painful whack in the testicles. As they searched through his trousers they discovered the tip of a .50-cal bullet.

  ‘Initially we didn’t have a clue what had happened. We were all pretty shaken up. We called in the contact but we didn’t want to move up to the high ground because the likelihood was that we would be hit by the Taliban. Although we were pretty shaken up we still had a bomb to pull out of the ground. So there was nothing else to do but to push on with the job.’

  Woody continues, ‘From the intelligence we gained afterwards we think that the Taliban had dicked us as we came into the area and while we were doing the isolation clearance word got back to the local Taliban. Two guys were seen in the area on a motorbike and we think they set an improvised claymore mine – which was basically a lump of explosive with lots of pieces of metal in there – like the .50-cal bullet tip which hit Richie. They set the device up – it would have been a compound pull or a command wire – gave the wire to the boy, told him to pull the wire when they disappeared down the road, and fucked off. They may have given him a few dollars or something, I suppose, as a bit of an incentive – that or threatened to kill his family. So the lad, who a few minutes earlier had been smiling and waving at us, pulls the wire and bang – we get blown up. If it had been 10 metres closer we would have taken some casualties. That’s the sort of shit that can happen in Afghan.’

  Intelligence obtained later suggested that the Taliban had probably been monitoring the progress of the bomb hunters from the moment they left FOB Inkerman several hours earlier by using the well-established ‘dicking screen’. It’s almost certain that the bomb used against the patrol had been constructed some days or possibly weeks earlier but had been reconfigured to attack an opportunity target. Woody explains, ‘Command wires are pretty basic but very effective. The bomber just waits for a target and then touches the end of a wire against a battery and bang. The bomber can be over the other side of a wall from a bomb, or 100 metres away. The command pull is also pretty effective too. The command pull is generally a bit of string which will go to a command pull switch, generally a drinks bottle of some sort with a bare wire loop inside so there are two wires looped over each other on the insulated part and when you pull them they move to the uninsulated part, the circuit is completed, and the device functions. That device was either a command wire or compound pull.

  ‘There was no time to think about what might have been, so instead of shitting ourselves we all had a good laugh. We couldn’t believe that it was a child that did it. We were only waving at him a minute earlier – little bastard tried to take me out. So we went and searched down and found the device, which was a command-pull IED, and we dealt with that. It was a couple of anti-tank mines, so about 10–15 kg of explosive. We sorted that out and then went back to Inkerman – and that’s a fairly normal day out in Sangin.’

  I suggest to Woody that having just been blown up is probably not the best preparation for defusing a bomb. ‘Wouldn’t it have been safer to call in another team, given that you were all probably shaken up?’ I ask.

  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 hundred
s 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.’