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

  ‘The Taliban were furious,’ Badger recalled with a broad grin. ‘They had spent ages planting loads of IEDs and we came along and started to remove them all. It had been a long, arduous day, really gruelling, and everyone was exhausted by the time we returned to base. You come back in, drop your kit, have something to eat, attend the evening briefing, prepare for the following day, and then try and hit the sack. You’re always knackered – either through the sheer length of the task or through fear of being attacked. No one ever has any trouble sleeping. One of the skills you quickly learn is to get sleep when and where you can.

  ‘Large-scale clearances are always the same. You really have to guard against switching off. Sometimes you can wait for hours and nothing happens. It can be so boring, and then you have to switch into work mode in an instant. But the effort was worth it when we were told how pissed off the Taliban were.’

  The following morning the whole process began again and the IEDD team deployed to the same area. Dave made his assessment of the locality and began directing the search team, while Badger relaxed nearby in a spot that he assumed was safe. While the two were shooting the breeze, unbeknown to them the Taliban were on the move.

  ‘All of a sudden the Taliban opened up on us – it was close, really close,’ said Badger. ‘Because we had been chatting we had not been paying much attention and we were suddenly caught on our own. We both hid behind some banking and I was trying to get as low as possible – the rounds were fizzing just above our heads. It was like, “Shit, where did that come from?” But Dave was a big bear of a man, huge – and I looked over at Dave and, although I was terrified, I suddenly started laughing – I mean really pissing myself, and I started taking the piss out of him. He was always going on about how much bigger he was than me. The bullets were whistling and cracking above our heads and it was not a good time to be big when you are trying to hide behind something so small.’

  Badger and Dave had no other option but to sit tight until the enemy position could be suppressed by soldiers from the Royal Anglian Regiment who were providing security for the bomb hunters. Once the enemy fire had stopped the two of them sprinted back to where the infantry were based and the search began again. By the end of the second day Badger had defused a further fourteen devices, followed by another seven on the third day – twenty-eight devices in three days.

  Badger is due to return home in the next few days and he has the look and behaviour of a man who has just won the lottery. He’s relaxed and carefree and looking forward to meeting his family. I ask him whether, given the buzz of the job, he wishes he was staying. Will he miss the unique bond of brotherhood, which is forged in war zones among soldiers who have faced death on a daily basis and seen their closest friends fall and die in battle? ‘Will I miss Afghan? Not for a fucking second. I’ll miss my mates, but that’s about it. No one wants to stay here for a moment longer than necessary. I just want to get home and hug the wife and kids – and to be honest I wouldn’t be bothered if I never came back here again. I’ve lost mates, really good mates, and that’s been hard, but compared to some people I’ve had it easy.’

  I’m chatting to Badger in a vast green Army tent crammed full of cots ready for fresh troops coming into theatre. The whole of Camp Bastion is in a state of flux because the several thousand men of 11 Light Brigade are leaving and the men of 4 Mechanized Brigade are beginning to arrive. It is a routine handover, known as a roulement or relief in place (RIP), which takes place every six months. It’s easy to spot the difference between the two sets of troops. Those who are coming to the end of their tour appear more rugged and suntanned, their uniforms are worn, and their eyes tell a different story from those of the new guys. The RIP is a fantastically busy period, and Camp Bastion swells to almost twice the number of British troops, many of whom are going through RSOI training. After a journey through the night they are pitched into a series of lectures in tents where the temperature hits 32°. Some of the men have not slept for twenty-four hours, and they struggle to stay awake. The troops are warned of the various dos and don’ts in Helmand – such as do drink plenty of water and do wash your hands every time you go to the toilet and don’t approach Afghan women, ever, or pick up anything which may be remotely interesting from the ground while on patrol because it might be attached to a bomb. Those troops going to the front line are pitched into a series of day and night live-firing exercises on ranges beyond the camp wire.

  Overall it is an exhausting and sometimes frightening experience, but especially so when they get onto CIED training. Much of this will have been covered in numerous exercises before their deployment, but here in Helmand the training is somehow more frightening. Everyone knows that the next time they carry out the same drills will be for real. The instructors – members of the CIED Task Force – have a captive audience. No one wants to miss out on a piece of information, a tip with the benefit of someone’s experience. Mistakes on exercises back in the UK are acceptable but in Helmand they may cost an arm, a leg or a life.

  The soldiers are taught how to search, confirm and recognize buried IEDs using Vallons. Over the next six months the soldier will learn how to recognize the detector’s various alarm tones. Again and again the instructors remind them to look for the ‘absence of the normal and the presence of the abnormal’.

  As we sit talking inside the 30-ft-long tent, which even in the dry heat of Helmand still smells damp, Badger tells me of the worst period of the tour. In the space of three weeks one of his best friends had been killed, another had been wounded and sent back to the UK, and a third had suffered a double amputation after stepping on a pressure-plate IED. The three men were all ATOs and were all doing exactly the same job as Badger when they were killed. The first of Badger’s friends to fall was Staff Sergeant Olaf Sean George Schmid. Oz, as he was known, was one of the true characters of the bomb-disposal world – he was known to everyone and loved by most. He was a huge personality, cocky and scruffy, but he was also an excellent bomb hunter. He had spent several years serving with 3 Commando Brigade and proudly wore his Para wings and famous Green Beret and revelled in his status as an Army Commando.

  Oz was irrepressible. His favourite saying when morale would take a bit of a dip was ‘Let’s man-up and get on with it.’ Every morning without fail those who walked past his bed in his tent in whatever part of Helmand he was working would be greeted with one of two phrases: ‘Suck us off’ or ‘Two sugars with mine.’ He once attended a memorial service in Sangin for a fellow soldier killed in the area a few days earlier but fainted through exhaustion. When he came round, a padre was standing over him, asking if he was OK. Oz opened his eyes and responded with, ‘Get off my fucking hair.’

  It was as a chef that Oz originally joined the Army in 1996, but while serving with an infantry unit in Northern Ireland he saw a bomb-disposal team at work and felt he had suddenly found his calling. Oz arrived in Helmand in July 2009 on Operation Herrick 10 and immediately took part in Operation Panchai Palang, or Panther’s Claw, a multi-national operation designed to push the Taliban out of central Helmand before Afghanistan’s ill-fated presidential elections. Oz, known as ‘Bossman’ by his team, was one of Badger’s closest friends. The two had known each other for around eight years and were on the same High Threat course before being deployed to Helmand.

  ‘Oz filled the room, absolutely filled the room,’ Badger said, a broad smile lighting up his face. ‘He was a fantastic bloke, a great laugh. He was the loudest man I knew, he was brilliant. Before you go on any course in the Army, you get a set of joining instructions and at the back of that is a course list. I would always flip to the back and look at the list and if Oz’s name was on it you knew it was going to be a good one. It would be two weeks of hard work but two weeks of hard drinking. Oz worked hard and played hard, that was his way.’

  In August 2009 Oz was attached to the 2nd Battalion Rifles battlegroup, based in Sangin, which was quickly developing a reputation as a graveyard for British troops. Sin
ce June 2006, when members of 3 Para moved into the valley, barely a week has passed without the Taliban launching some sort of attack. Sangin held special significance for the Taliban. It was one of the main opium centres in Helmand and thus had the potential to provide the Taliban with the hard cash they needed to sustain the insurgency. The Taliban knew they couldn’t defeat ISAF troops in a stand-up fight but what they could do was make commanders question whether holding on to Sangin was worth the growing casualty rates.

  Every battlegroup which deployed to the Sangin Valley knew they would not return to the UK without sustaining losses. By the end of their tour in April 2010, 3 Rifles battlegroup, based in the Sangin district centre, had suffered more fatalities than any other unit that had served in Helmand since 2006.

  The Taliban operating in the valley had developed a fearsome reputation for being ruthless and inventive, especially in their use of IED ambushes. Some soldiers have likened them to the IRA in South Armagh in Ulster during the Troubles in the 1980s and 1990s. The South Armagh Brigade was the only IRA unit which was never infiltrated by British intelligence. It was close-knit, tough and fearless, with commanders who were always seeking new ways to attack British bases and kill soldiers with specially designed bombs and mortars.

  For the ATOs Sangin was probably the least popular and most challenging of all the battlegroup locations in Helmand. Such were the dangers of serving there that IED teams were changed every six weeks and no new ATOs or search teams were ever sent to the area for their first tour.

  The narrow alleyways, the rat-runs and the lush fields of the Green Zone, criss-crossed with irrigation ditches, streams and canals, were exploited to the full by the insurgents. Patrolling British troops were channelled into classic ambush sites almost from the moment they left the front gate of the base. Once inside the Green Zone practically all movement was restricted to foot, and the field of view, especially in the summer with the crops tall, could be as little as a few metres. Fighting was at close quarters and often brutal – bayonets were always fixed and often used.

  IEDs are produced in Sangin in prodigious numbers and are used to channel and restrict the movement of British troops. The Taliban bomb makers in the area were regarded as the best and most innovative in all Helmand. New devices were often tested in Sangin before being exported to other parts of the province. The Taliban would watch every move the soldiers made, noting their favoured routes, crossing points and rendezvous points. They understood British tactics, knew how troops would respond in a firefight, knew how long it would take to call in an air strike and the Army’s casualty evacuation procedures. There were only so many places where a helicopter could land and evacuate an injured soldier, and the Taliban knew them all. Routine patrolling through some of the built-up areas close to the base was impossible. Rather than walk along a track or road, troops moved from compound to compound by scaling 15-ft-high walls in a bid to beat the bombers. The soldiers knew this activity as ‘Grand Nationaling’.

  Pharmacy Road in Sangin town was the most deadly street in the whole of Afghanistan. Since the British first moved into the area, hundreds, possibly thousands, of devices have been planted on it, killing dozens of soldiers. Any operation which required troop movement on this road had to be carefully planned and searched. By April 2010 160 soldiers of the 281 soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2006 have died in Sangin town and the surrounding area. I have been on patrol in the area on several occasions, taken part in operations, and have come under fire on several occasions and I can still recall the sense of relief I felt every time a patrol ended.

  The main British base in the Sangin area of operatons, FOB Jackson, sat on the periphery of the district centre and was bisected by the Helmand canal, which offered the troops based there temporary respite from the summer heat and boosted morale. Dotted throughout Sangin are smaller patrol bases, such as PB Tangiers, an ANA base close to the district centre, and PB Wishtan, at the eastern end of the notorious Pharmacy Road. The casualty rate in PB Wishtan was so high in the summer of 2009 that troops, with their customary black humour, renamed it PB Wheelchair.

  The soldiers who have to patrol in Sangin day after day, sometimes twice or three times a day, often after having witnessed a fellow soldier having one or more limbs blown off, need truly remarkable courage. And it’s worth remembering that many of them are just 18 or 19 and on their first operational tour.

  Despite the risks, Oz Schmid was in his element and relished the challenge. This easy-going, fast-talking Cornishman had an infectious smile and a fantastic sense of humour. He had named his squad ‘Team Rainbow’ after the gay pride emblem, because he claimed they were the only ‘all-gay IEDD team in Helmand’. The team members were nicknamed Zippy, Bungle and George, and their mascot, a duck, was known as Corporal Quackers. It was all part of the coping mechanism adopted by Oz and his team.

  Like every ATO in Helmand, Oz knew that death lurked around every corner. Every bomb had to be treated as a unique event. Taking short cuts or making assumptions could end in a trip home in a body bag. As if to emphasize the dangers Helmand held for ATOs, Captain Daniel Shepherd, 28, was killed defusing a roadside bomb in Nad-e’Ali a month after Oz arrived in Helmand. He was the second ATO to die in Afghanistan. Like Gaz O’Donnell, who had died eleven months earlier, Captain Shepherd hadn’t made a mistake; he was just unlucky. As one soldier later told me, ‘That kind of shit can just happen in Afghan.’

  In an interview he gave before he was killed that appeared in the Sunday Times on 8 November 2009 Oz referred to Dan Shepherd’s death and how it had shaped his view of the role of ATOs in Helmand: ‘There are times when I’m actually thinking about Dan and I’ll go down the lonely walk, as they say, get to the target and think, what am I doing here? But it’s a flash through my head, if you like.’ Oz was typical of most ATOs I have met: they never think about their own safety and are far more concerned with the lives of their fellow soldiers.

  ‘Nine times out of ten, in fact 99.99 per cent of the time, I’m down there and I’m doing it as quick as I can, because obviously the longer the guys are down on the ground the more they present themselves as a target.

  ‘And then obviously once we’re out on the ground, other things, atmospherics around us, you know I’m getting dicked as well – they’re trying to look and see what I’m doing, so it’s a lot of focus into what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. My brain’s always thinking about the device: how I’m going to render it safe. It’s not necessarily wandering off to: am I going to get home? Every device is different in its own little way … you have got to find exactly what it is and come up with the best way of dealing with that, so your mind is constantly focused on that. I don’t really think about the enemy. There have been a couple of piss-take jobs, though, where they are trying to have a bit of a joke. I found a dollar on top of a pressure plate in Nad-e’Ali the other week.’

  On 9 August 2009 Oz took part in an operation to clear Pharmacy Road, which runs east from Sangin town centre out to PB Wishtan. By this time the area directly around the PB had become one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, with one in three of the soldiers based at Wishtan being killed or wounded that summer. Several of those had been killed or injured close to the base and the dozens of IEDs which had been laid in the area meant that patrolling was almost impossible. PB Wishtan was cut off from resupply by land. Bomb-damaged vehicles had been turned into a basic but effective roadblock and Pharmacy Road was riddled with IEDs. Three previous attempts to clear the road, which is lined by 15-ft-high mud walls, had all failed.

  The operation began at 5.30 a.m., just before the sun appeared over the horizon. Specialist Royal Engineer searchers, flanked by soldiers from the Rifles, pushed out from FOB Jackson and began the search. The troops made steady progress until they came to a military digger which had been blown up by the Taliban during a previous operation. All around the vehicle the ground was littered with IEDs. At around 0800 hrs and with the temperature already in the mid
-40s, Oz set to work. Within 100 metres he found and cleared the first IED of the day.

  Oz had planned to use a remote-controlled vehicle to clear another device but as it moved into the danger area the robot struck an IED and was destroyed. Knowing that the Taliban were probably in the area and monitoring the progress of the operation, Oz moved forward again and cleared a route to within 5 metres of the vehicles.

  ‘We started searching forwards along the road again,’ he explained. ‘We found another bomb half a metre away from the lane that I’d used to search up to the vehicle. We sent two little robots out and they got blown up, so I went on my feet.’

  His team then moved into a compound adjacent to the stricken vehicles and began preparing to take them off the road. Another device was quickly discovered, which Oz also cleared. The engineers in the compound blew a hole through the outside wall and winches were used to drag the vehicles off the road. Clearing bombs from the route to the vehicles had taken an hour, during all of which time Oz had been completely reliant on his own eyesight and his understanding of enemy tactics. As the light began to fade he once again led a high-risk clearance of the stretch of road from which the vehicles had been taken away and removed a further two devices.

  The whole operation had lasted eleven hours. It had been fraught with danger, and luck had also played a large part in ensuring that there were no British casualties. Oz and his team were drained, physically, emotionally and mentally; they had discovered a total of thirty devices and defused eleven, but the road was open and C Company, 2 Rifles, were resupplied. Although it was clearly a team effort, the mission would have failed if it had not been for Oz’s heroic and selfless acts.