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

  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.

  ‘Then you get some devices which may have a pressure-release switch with a pressure plate, so it can go off if you put pressure on or take pressure off. What the Taliban try and do to catch us out is put a number of pressure-plate devices down a route, so you get quite comfortable, and then they will throw a cheeky one. So you might arrive at the site and there in front of you is a pressure-plate IED. So no dramas – normal stuff. You have the pressure plate, power source and main charge, and then in parallel to the circuit there might be a pressure-release switch with a bit of rock or metal weighing it down. And this is all buried under the ground, so you move or someone moves the bit of rock to get a better working position, and bang, you’re dead.’

  Woody laughs, then goes on, ‘There was this one time where I had to deal with a pressure-release device which had been in the ground for a while. It had been found by soldiers who had conveniently put loads of rocks around the device, which was their way of marking it, and you think, brilliant, now which stone has got the bomb under it? It was one of those classic situations where someone is trying to be helpful but actually making your job very difficult. I’m always aware that not every device I come across is going to be a pressure-plate, so you need to keep your wits about you. I’m not so nervous when you come across a new type of bomb. The way I look at it is, that’s another one ticked off the list. There are a lot of different devices out there, so you want to find at least one of each fairly early on. That gives you the confidence to know that you are going to be able to deal with anything you might come up against – or at least that’s what you tell yourself.’

  But in bomb disposal there is never a 100 per cent guarantee of success or survival. Luck always has a part to play. Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, who now has almost legendary status in the EOD world, was a close friend of Woody’s. Both were men at the very top of the profession.

  ‘Oz was a one-off,’ says Woody. ‘I’d known him since he was an ammunition technician when he first joined the trade. He was a great laugh and a bit of an animal with a drink inside of him. He would come up and lick your face. He was a genuine soldier, he loved it, every minute.’

  Like many soldiers who knew Oz Schmid, Woody was devastated when he learned of his death. The news was broken to him while he was driving from his home in Stoke to Didcot. ‘I was in the car and I got this call. It was something like, “Got some bad news for you, Woody. Oz is dead.” I was utterly stunned. I just couldn’t believe it. I got the news just before I hit this big roundabout and I kept going round and round it, thinking, this can’t be happening. I still can’t really believe that’s he’s gone. I’ve been so busy since he was killed that I’ve hardly had time to take in what’s happened and then every now and then his death hits home and you realize he’s gone for ever.

  ‘Oz was a good ATO, he was an assault IED operator, the same as me, so that’s an extra string to your bow, and there are not many that have got it. He had passed his High Threat and he had done quite a few IEDs and he loved Sangin, and no one wants to go to Sangin. It’s horrible and he loved it, which tells you a lot about the sort of bloke he was.

  ‘Oz’s death was the start of a really bad period for us all. First there was Gaz O’Donnell in 2008, then Dan Read, and that was bad enough. Then Oz was killed and two weeks later I was on a course and I got a text saying that Corporal Loren Marlton-Thomas had been killed and WO2 Ken Bellringer had been badly injured and his legs were broken. Then, a few hours later, I got another text, which said that Ken had lost both legs below the knee, then another which said they had gone right at the top. And back in the UK you’re thinking, what the fuck is going on out there?’

  On New Year’s Eve Sapper Dave Watson, a high-risk searcher, was killed during a patrol close to Route 611 in the area of PB Blenheim, just south of FOB Inkerman. The blast blew off both his legs and an arm and he later died of his wounds. On 11 January Captain Dan Read was killed and on 8 February WO2 Dave Markland was blown up and killed in one of the shaping operations prior to Operation Moshtarak. A week after Dave Markland was killed, Sapper Guy Mellors was blown up during a clearance patrol, again on Route 611, near PB Ezaray, a few hundred metres from the point where Dave Watson had been killed.

  I’d met Dave Watson a few months earlier in November 2009, while I was on an earlier embed with the Grenadier Guards battlegroup. I accompanied him on a routine change-over of troops south of Nad-e’Ali district centre. The journey to the base was only about 6 km but it took the Mastiff convoy almost six hours. Every few hundred metres the vehicles would stop and the soldiers would begin another search. Many of the troops going into the base were very inexperienced and, frankly, scared. I could see that Dave’s calm confidence was a great boon to the young soldiers who were also helping in the search for bombs. He was a friendly and warm soldier who impressed me enormously. The spate of deaths shattered morale in the EOD world. It wasn’t just the bomb hunters who were struggling with the losses, but also their families, wives, mothers, fathers, husbands, sons and daughters. More bomb hunters had now been killed in just a few weeks than in the past thirty years.

  Woody tells me, ‘All those guys killed and injured in such a short space of time – there had been nothing like that since the 1970s in Ulster. I knew all the ATOs, some I knew very well and they were good operators, just as good as me, and you can’t help but think if it can happen to them then it can happen to me. The thing is, in Afghan you don’t have to do anything wrong to get yourself killed – you can’t say, “His death was caused by a mistake.” You can be doing everything correctly and be killed – it’s just the way it is in Afghan.’

  Every time an ATO or any soldier is killed by an IED an investigation is conducted to try to establish the sequence of events that led to the death.
But there are often significant problems in trying to piece together that sequence of events and work out what the bomb was composed of.

  ‘There are many explanations as to what happened to Oz,’ Woody tells me. ‘It could have been another command wire that was missed, it could have had a booby-trap. You never really know because that bit of the bomb has functioned as intended and when that goes off all the components get destroyed – there’s nothing left.

  ‘We know that when Oz arrived there were three main charges in the area. He dealt with one, he was dealing with another one when he got killed, and there was another one remaining which his No. 2 dealt with to make the area safe so that his body could be extracted. Other than that there are just a few explanations as to what happened. An investigation is conducted and you try and establish first of all whether all the proper procedures were followed. Did they do all the things they were supposed to do, such as a proper isolation? But it’s very rare that you can nail it down to one specific event. I know Oz had been quite ill before he died. He had D and V for at least a week, ten days before he was killed. D and V is pretty grim and that would have taken its toll. All of the guys killed died around the four-month point. That might have just been a coincidence but it may be that they had become exhausted by the workload. We used to do four-month tours at one time. Four months in Iraq and four months in Afghanistan. I think the Army saw it as a way of getting eight months on operations out of us. Now that Iraq is over we are doing six-month tours in Afghan and that is a long time, very long – like I said before, there are only so many times you can roll the dice before you get a double six. Oz had dealt with a fair few bombs, sixty-four in four months, and he did twenty-three in one day and was killed. But Badger [Staff Sergeant Karl Ley] did 139 in six months and went home. So how do you explain that? It’s just luck, I suppose – good luck if you make it, bad luck if you don’t.’