Bomb Hunters Read online

  As soon as he was out of the helicopter Badger automatically began to assess the situation around him. Rather than just focusing on the bomb, he was also assessing the tactical situation, the terrain, and the disposition of friendly and potential enemy forces.

  The convoy commander explained the situation to Badger, who immediately suspected the device was a pressure-release IED; that, he thought, would explain the sound of grinding metal. Badger was aware that the Taliban knew that British soldiers and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) or Afghan National Police (ANP) would sometimes move rocks or stones when trying to confirm a device. Someone, somewhere had set a pattern and the Taliban were trying to exploit it. Badger knew he would have to be on his guard. Like all ATOs operating in Helmand, he was acutely aware that for the Taliban there was no greater prize than killing a member of a bomb-disposal team.

  The ANP had already developed a reputation for having a robust approach when dealing with IEDs. Rather than call for assistance from the British or US, many commander, would attempt to deal with the devices themselves and several of their number had been killed or seriously wounded by the devices. It seemed that many police commanders viewed calling in an operator to deal with an IED as a slight on their honour, and that seeking help was tantamount to an admission of cowardice. So instead the ANP would try to deal with the device – sometimes they were successful, and, tragically, sometimes they weren’t.

  The convoy had pulled back to a position around 150 metres from the device, but Badger and the RESA wanted to set up their ICP as close to the area as possible while still remaining in the safe zone. They commandeered one of the Mastiffs and moved to within 80 metres of the bomb so that they could get good ‘eyes on’ the area.

  The first stage of the operation was to select and clear the ICP, which the engineers did quickly and without incident, and when it was declared secure they moved off to conduct an ‘isolation’ of the bomb to make sure there were no others in the area. Scanning the area with a special wire-detecting device, the engineers moved cautiously in a wide arc around where the device was believed to have been buried. The engineers were hoping to detect command wires attached to IEDs positioned close to the main charge. Trust is key in this particular operation. The ATO must be absolutely sure that the area is clear of all devices. His life is in the engineers’ hands and he must be free of any external concerns if he is to be able to focus on defusing the device. Around half an hour later the engineers returned. ‘Everything’s clear. Over to you, Badger,’ said the team commander.

  Adrenalin trickled into Badger’s veins and his heart beat a little faster as he made his final preparations before moving towards the device. He checked his personal equipment one last time, touching each piece of equipment as he went through a mental checklist. He tightened the strap on his helmet and adjusted his knee pads. It was the same routine every time – check, check, and check again. That was the mantra of the IED operator. There were no short cuts – not in Helmand.

  By now it was stiflingly hot and neither Badger nor any of his team was properly acclimatized to the heat. Even in September the temperature in the Helmand desert could soar above 40°, and while the raw, unforgiving heat of the summer might have passed, the midday sun was still avoided by anyone with any sense.

  ‘I thought it was meant to get fucking cooler in the autumn, Stu,’ Badger said to his No. 2. ‘This heat is crippling, so I’m going to take it really slowly. The last thing I want is to pile in halfway through the job. Make sure everyone back here is properly hydrated. The last thing we’ll need on our first job is a heat casualty.’

  Badger picked up his Vallon, switched it on, and gave it the mandatory test by swinging it over a rifle lying on the ground by his feet. The alarm sounded and he smiled. Everything was set.

  ‘Right, see you in a bit,’ Badger told the rest of the team, who were now settled in the ICP. They watched silently as he moved off into the distance, swinging the Vallon in front of him and waiting for the alarm to sound. The approach was slow and measured, everything being done in accordance with the rulebook. After reaching the device Badger cleared an area around it so that he could work comfortably, also ensuring that he had enough room for his feet.

  His plan of attack was simple. The device was probably a pressure-plate device, so Badger went to work using his fingertips and a trowel, working carefully but as quickly as possible. Within fifteen minutes he had located a wire and then the power source – eight 1.5-volt batteries taped together and wrapped in plastic. A small smile of satisfaction moved across his face as he prepared to isolate the bomb from the power source.

  Badger checked and rechecked that the firing mechanism was properly armed and that the electric cable connected to the rear end of the device was intact. Happy, he moved back to the ICP, where he handed the other end of the cable to Stu. ‘It’s all set up,’ he said to Stu and the RESA as he wiped the sweat from his face. ‘I’ve found a wire – the device seems fairly straightforward but I’ll know more once the power source has been isolated. I tell you what, this heat is something else – I’m absolutely fucking baking.’ As Badger sat down and drank lukewarm water from a plastic bottle, Stu connected the wire into the green box known as a firing circuit.

  ‘There’s going to be a bang in about fifteen seconds. Stand by, stand by,’ Stu shouted before pressing a black button on the green box, which he held in his hands. Less than a second later a bang, not unlike the sound of a shotgun, echoed around the valley.

  So far so good, Badger thought. He had stuck to the book and so far everything had gone like clockwork. ‘We’ll give it a few minutes and then I’ll go back down,’ he told the team. This is known as the ‘soak’ period. In Northern Ireland, operators would wait several minutes before attempting to defuse a bomb. That luxury was not available in Helmand, where the Taliban were always watching. As Badger waited in the sweltering heat, it now became crystal clear to him why ATOs did not wear bomb suits in Helmand. Like the rest of the team, he was struggling to keep cool wearing just body armour. In the summer even this acted like a thermal jacket, making it feel like the temperature was about 10° hotter. With a bomb suit weighing around 40 kg and the thermometer in the mid-40s for nine months of the year, it was simply a non-starter for almost all ATOs. The fact that it was blue was also not lost on the team, all of whom knew there was nothing a Taliban sharpshooter would like to bag more than an ATO.

  Badger returned down the cleared lane and checked to see if the wires had been cut. Yes, the IED weapon had done its job perfectly. He taped the ends of the wires to ensure that a circuit could not accidentally be created, removed the battery pack, and then began to extract the device itself. Extracting a pressure plate is achieved with a hook and a line. Basically a hook is attached to the plate, the ATO retreats to the ICP with the other end of the line, then he and usually his No. 2 pull on the line until the plate is pulled free. If the device detonates for any reason, no one is hurt. It’s a simple but safe and effective method.

  When Badger returned for a third time to the device, he was astonished by what he found. The pressure plate contained a central metal contact which could be detonated by pressure being either applied or released. This was the first time such a bomb had been seen in Helmand, and the device had been specifically designed to target ATOs and soldiers attempting to confirm its nature.

  Beneath the pressure plate were several rocket warheads which would have killed anyone in a 20-metre radius of the device, and the chances are that there would have been very little, if anything, left of Badger. He took photographs of the site, the plate and the explosive, which was later detonated by the side of the track.

  It had been a long, very hot day. The device had taken around two hours to disarm but it had been worth it. To obtain a brand-new device intact was a real coup. The weapons intelligence specialists who pored over bomb-making material hoping to obtain forensic data would be delighted. But, most importantly for Badger, the day had gone w
ithout a hitch, the team had coped well in the heat and under pressure, and there had been no accidents.

  I met Badger as he was coming to the end of the tour. It had been a gruelling six months for the CIED Task Force. Six members had been killed and more than twenty injured, and several of these had sustained life-changing injuries. Not since the bloody days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s had the world of Army bomb disposal lost so many men in such a short period of time. The losses had taken their toll on everyone serving within the Task Force, for bomb disposal is a close-knit world where the loss of even a single colleague is a bitter blow. Although ATOs are some of the most highly trained and professional soldiers in the British Army, no one in the field of bomb disposal had foreseen the huge surge in the use of IEDs by the Taliban. In 2008–9 these changed the face of the war in Helmand. Huge tracts of the country had been turned into minefields and the workload of bomb hunters went through the roof. It wasn’t unusual for ATOs to defuse ten or twenty IEDs in a day, while under fire and working in temperatures in the 40s. The situation was unsustainable, and casualties inevitable.

  A six-month tour in Afghanistan is both physically and emotionally exhausting for every front-line soldier. For Badger it was no different. In the six months from September 2009 to March 2010 two of his closest friends were killed and several more were injured. He came under fire on numerous occasions and had several close calls with IEDs, but he went home without as much as a scratch even though he had defused 139 IEDs.

  Badger, with his compact, wiry frame, short brown hair, keen eyes which sparkle with mischief, and a mellow Sheffield accent, had acquired his nickname as a young soldier eleven years earlier following a drunken incident in a nightclub involving a bottle of Tippex, his pubic hair and a group of divorced women. It has remained with him ever since.

  The South Yorkshireman joined the Army on 14 November 1999 as a private in the Royal Logistic Corps. His academic prowess at school – he obtained A-levels in geography, history, sociology and general studies, having earlier gained nine GCSEs – could have taken him to university and then on to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to train as an Army officer. He had been offered places at university, including King’s College London, to pursue war and peace studies, but the idea of spending three years ‘locked in lecture halls’ and then facing a large debt at the end of his degree didn’t appeal.

  ‘I just had this vague notion of wanting to join the Army,’ Badger told me. ‘Some of my friends had already joined, so I went to an Army careers office and they must have been short of ammunition technicians that week because they sold it quite well to me.’

  Ten years later Badger was posted to Helmand as part of Operation Herrick 11. His bomb-disposal team was one of dozens of units attached to 11 Light Brigade. Somewhat surprisingly, given the scores of soldiers killed by IEDs, Badger describes the task of defusing home-made bombs as his ‘comfort zone’. ‘The infantry think my job is scary, they are terrified of IEDs because they are this unseen threat in the ground which just keeps killing and wounding them, but they are my comfort zone. It is all about what you are used to.

  ‘The infantry expect to get into firefights with the Taliban and many of them actually want to. That’s what they joined the Army to do – go to Afghanistan and kill the Taliban. And when the shooting kicks off you can actually see that some of these guys are really in their element, it’s what they were made for. But not me. Firefights terrify me. Give me an IED to defuse any day. It’s all about your comfort zone. I hate coming under fire, it terrifies me. I will try and dig a hole with my spoon to get into some sort of cover.’

  In September 2009 Badger was dispatched to Patrol Base Woqab, near Musa Qala, to attend to a device which had recently been discovered by the local infantry battalion. The bomb was a PP IED and in itself didn’t present much of a challenge to the bomb hunters. Outside of Sangin, the Musa Qala Taliban were regarded as the ‘hardcore’ element in Helmand – always ready to take on ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, and experiment with new devices in the hope of catching out an ATO. It wasn’t lost on Badger that this was the same area where Gaz O’Donnell had been killed on 10 September the previous year.

  It was an ordinary shout. The search team deployed, cleared the area, checked for command wires, but none were found. Badger cleared a safe lane down to the device and began defusing the pressure plate, which went without a hitch. The plate had been cleared and the time had come for Badger to destroy the home-made explosive in situ. ‘We don’t recover the main charge. It’s just too risky, so what we do is destroy it using conventional military high explosive. I set up the explosive, the last thing I did was to connect the detonator, then moved back to the ICP, where Stu fire-connected it to the firing circuit and detonated the main charge.’

  As soon as the explosion rumbled across the valley, the local Taliban sprang into action, assuming that one of their devices had been triggered and that ISAF or the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) – which draws on the ANA, the ANP and other police units – would have casualties, in which case they would be vulnerable and therefore ripe for ambush. What they found when they arrived at the scene was a lone, unarmed British soldier walking slowly in open ground – the perfect target.

  Around fifteen minutes after the explosion Badger had made his way back to the site. ‘I went back down the road to check that everything had worked and then the Taliban opened up good and proper. It was a case of “fuck me”. The Taliban opened up with everything. The bullets were cracking above my head. There was single shots, automatic fire, RPGs coming in. I could hear the bullets zipping past me. It was absolutely terrifying. I was thinking, “How they can they be so close without hitting you?” And you’re saying, “Those cunts, those cunts.” I thought, this is where I cop it; I’m going to be hit in the back and the lights are going to go out and that’s going to be it. No more life, no more wife, no more kids. And so I’ve gone from being in my comfort zone – defusing an IED – to being absolutely shitting myself in less than a second, and all the time I’m sprinting like a crazy man trying to get back.’

  Badger was on his own in open countryside, 80 metres from his team and safety. There was no cover to hide in, and if he moved out of the metre-wide safe lane he risked triggering an IED. The only option was to turn and run.

  ‘I ran like the wind itself – Usain Bolt had nothing on me. When you’re neutralizing an IED and the Taliban start shooting, the best thing you can do is to drop to your belt buckle and let the infantry win the firefight. In the past that’s what I’d done. As long as the rounds are landing too close, you’re pretty safe. I always ask the infantry commander what he wants me to do if we get involved in a contact and nine times out of ten he’ll say, “Sit tight, hide and we’ll win the firefight.” They don’t exactly expect us to do a great deal of fighting.’

  Badger came bounding back into the ICP and, although he was terrified, the rest of the team were in fits of laughter. ‘I was shaking like a shitting dog,’ he told me, a broad grin on his face. ‘I’d come about as close as you would want to come to being shot, and all your mates are laughing at you. It was because of the look on my face as I came running in. I was knackered and out of breath and you think, that was too fucking close.’

  Although his team frequently came under fire, Badger maintains that he never got used to being attacked. A month later, in October, he was teamed up with Warrant Officer Class 2 Dave Markland, a 36-year-old who had served in the Army for almost twenty years. Dave entered the world of ordnance disposal at a relatively late age. Much of his early career had been spent as a Plant Operator Mechanic – they’re known as ‘Planties’ – and passed his RESA course in the spring of 2009. Badger and Dave became firm friends – their different characters seemed to complement each other – and developed a working relationship that was the envy of many within the task force. Dave was physically large – 6 ft 4 in. tall and weighing in at around 16 stone – ‘but
his personality made him even seem bigger’, according to Badger. He was one of those individuals whose greatest enemy was boredom – and the long, dull days of inactivity in Camp Bastion.

  In late November 2009 Badger and Dave were dispatched to FOB Keenan, near the town of Gereshk in central Helmand, to take part in Operation Gumbesa. Gereshk sits astride Highway One, otherwise known as the ‘Afghan ring road’. It forms part of the old Silk Route and still has key strategic significance for both the Taliban and ISAF forces. It has been at the heart of many battles, with the military initiative constantly switching between the British troops and the Taliban. The presence of ISAF troops has brought some stability to the area. The town has a hospital with both male and female doctors and has around twenty schools, which are attended by around 20 per cent of the population.

  Taliban bomb teams were targeting FOB Keenan, and dozens of devices had been laid in the area with the aim of restricting the movement of the Danish battlegroup based locally. The FOB is sited directly behind a hamlet and the inhabitants of this were in just as much danger from the IEDs as the ISAF forces. Part of the CIED mission is to clear IEDs out of civilian areas. The local population is only too well aware of the damage the devices can cause, since hundreds of civilians are killed and maimed every year. An IED is totally indiscriminate, and although the Taliban will arm some devices only at certain times of the day to avoid civilian casualties, most are not monitored and will kill and injure anyone – man, woman or child – who detonates it.

  The first day of Operation Gumbesa began at around 0700 hours when Badger, the IED Team 4, WO2 Markland and the Royal Engineer searchers, together with their infantry force protection, patrolled out of the base. The cruel heat of the summer had subsided but the temperature could still reach the mid-30s in November, although by that stage Badger was fully acclimatized.

  The operation went as planned on the first day. Badger, Dave and the search team managed to find, defuse and recover seven devices in about ten hours. They were delighted with their efforts. That night interpreters in FOB Keenan could hear the Taliban angrily discussing the team’s success over their Icom radios. The Taliban’s two main methods of communication are mobile phones and Icom radios. The second broadcast on known frequencies and can easily be intercepted with an Icom receiver. The intelligence obtained, known as Icom chatter, sometimes proves useful and can forewarn troops of attack, but it needs to be used carefully. Because the Taliban know that their radio communications are monitored by the British, much of their chatter is designed to confuse.