Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  Back at the ICP a Royal Military Police captain who I’d previously met in Germany earlier in my career had now arrived to conduct the post-incident investigation. All events in which soldiers are killed are investigated by the RMP. We shook hands and chatted briefly before I turned to the team: ‘I know it’s not a nice job but I’m going to need a hand with the body.’

  One of the lads from the Rifles, who was sitting on the quad bike, stood up and handed me a body bag.

  ‘I’ll help,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘It’s OK, mate, we’ll do it,’ I said hoping to spare him from any further trauma.

  Lewis and Malley both volunteered to help but their faces revealed their true feelings – no one gets used to handling the dead.

  ‘We’re going to move around to where he is lying following the cleared path. We’ll then put him in the body bag as quickly and respectfully as possible and then bring him back here and the quad will take him to Wishtan.’

  In single file, with our weapons slung across our backs, we made our way around the corner followed by the RMP captain, who needed to take notes and pictures of the scene for his report. There was a feeling, something like embarrassment, as we caught each other’s eyes when manoeuvring the dead soldier into the body bag. We stumbled and struggled, underestimating the difficulty of lifting a lifeless, damaged body into a large black sack. Soldiers dropped their heads or turned away, looking at anything but us. A few flicked stones into the dirt or sucked heavily on cigarettes. The dead soldier was carefully lifted onto the quad’s trailer. Everyone was silent as he was slowly driven away to Wishtan.

  ‘He was a good lad,’ said a young red-eyed Rifleman from the same section as the dead soldier. ‘He’d only been in Afghan a couple of weeks and only told me this morning that he was missing home so much. What a waste. His whole life was in front of him.’

  As the search team began clearing the alleyway and a wider area around the blast zone, a message came through from the Wishtan Ops Room stating that an RPG had been fired into the base and had landed on the HLS. The warhead hadn’t exploded but no helicopters would be able to land until it had been cleared.

  ‘Chidders, an RPG has been fired at the PB. It’s gone blind. You finish up here. I’m going back to Wishtan to sort it out. We’ll RV back at the base.’

  I got on the radio to the Wishtan Ops Room: ‘Hello, Zero, this is Brimstone 42, we’ve recovered the body. The pressure plate was part of the first device, my call sign is en route back to your location to sort the UXO. Out.’

  ‘Hello, Brimstone 42, this is Zero. Don’t worry, we have a combat engineer who will deal with it. Out,’ the Ops Room watch-keeper responded.

  A combat engineer can undertake certain demolition tasks, like blowing tracks off a vehicle, but an unexploded RPG was a bit out of his league and it sounded like some sort of chip-shop lunatic looking to make a name for himself.

  As I walked through the gate accompanied by a soldier who had been acting as my escort, I could see the engineer crouched over the RPG preparing what looked like a demolition charge. He was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice me peering over his shoulder.

  An RPG consists of two elements, a high explosive warhead and the tail unit, containing a rocket motor to propel the grenade during flight. Both contain an explosive material, but once fired the tail unit becomes inert as its propellant charge is expended. After the RPG was fired, no doubt by a Taliban chancer hoping for a lucky strike, it had hit a wall and the warhead and tail unit had separated. The warhead was nowhere to be seen and the tail unit had come to rest on the HLS decking, and was a threat to no one. He was about to destroy the tail unit with more plastic explosive than was actually contained within the RPG. The blast would have blown a massive hole in the decking of the HLS, rendering it useless.

  I leaned over his shoulder and picked up the tail unit. He jumped up and looked at me like he was about to shit himself.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, clocking my ATO badge.

  ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘We’ve got to blow this,’ he added without any great conviction.

  ‘You’re about to blow a fucking great hole in the HLS and put it out of action for an inert tail unit, you twat.’

  I was absolutely furious. Maybe he was bored, maybe he hadn’t done much on his tour but he was clearly big-timing it and thought he was going to get the chance of blowing something up when all he would have done is bounced the tail unit across the compound.

  ‘Idiot,’ I thought as I walked over to the Ops Room.

  I was still seething as I entered the dark Ops Room, which was lit by a single fluorescent lamp hanging precariously from the ceiling. Maps with red dots signifying IED strikes hung on the walls and in the corner was the obligatory filter coffee machine gently bubbling away.

  I almost threw the tail unit on the desk in front of the company second-in-command, a young Rifles captain. It landed with a clunk, which made him jump a little.

  ‘HLS is now clear, sir.’

  ‘Oh right, we were told it needed to get blown up.’

  ‘Does it fuck, sir. It’s inert,’ I said and wondered if I was coming across as a bit of an arrogant arsehole. Just as I decided I was going to head back out onto the ground a message came over the radio announcing the search had finished.

  My team trooped back in through the main gate looking tired and sad. In the past four days they’d had to deal close up with the deaths of five soldiers. Up until that point none of them had ever seen a dead body and recent events were beginning to take their toll.

  I had been told to expect a lift back to FOB Jackson later that evening but there were no specific timings. I dumped my day-sack next to one of the compound walls and made a makeshift pillow, lay down and closed my eyes. I must have been dozing for just a few moments when there was another explosion.

  My stomach turned and my mind raced. The blast must have come from the area where we had been working an hour or so earlier. There were no soldiers on the ground. Had something been missed?

  19

  Chocolate Fireguards

  The echo from the explosion bounced off the walls inside Wishtan. I sat up and instinctively grabbed my weapon. ‘IED,’ I said out loud.

  Lee and I raced to the Ops Room only to be met with looks of barely disguised hostility as we entered.

  ‘What’s going on, sir,’ I said to the Rifles captain, who had a look on his face that basically said ‘Wankers’.

  ‘An explosion has just taken place in exactly the same area that your men supposedly cleared, Staff.’ His tone was direct and uncompromising.

  My heart sank.

  ‘The question for you, Staff, is what is going on?’

  The awkward silence was broken by a message over the radio confirming that there had been an IED strike in the cleared area. Thankfully there were no casualties, only the bucket of the combat engineering digger had been damaged.

  Instantly I looked at Lee as if to say ‘Did you clear that area?’

  Our credibility as a Counter-IED team was now in doubt and I felt as though I’d just been slapped in the face with a bag of shit. A wave of panic surged through my body.

  ‘Right, sir, we need to find out what happened. I’m going out to see what’s going on.’

  ‘Yes, you do that, Staff,’ the captain said when what he really meant was ‘Now go and do your job properly.’

  As we walked out of the Ops Room I turned to Lee. ‘This can’t be happening. Are you sure you cleared the ground properly?’

  ‘Yes. No doubt about it. We all went in there – you, me, everyone. All with metal detectors.’

  Fifteen minutes later we were back on the ground in the location that had been cleared two hours earlier. The digger that detonated the IED had been flattening the earth torn up in the two earlier blasts by repeatedly dropping its earth-moving bucket on the ground. It was during that process that another IED was detonated.

  I didn’t want to a
dmit it but I was convinced I already knew the truth. Somehow we had missed an IED. Accidents happen in Afghan. Sometimes IEDs weren’t detected. But a search team missing an IED was a different story.

  ‘Right, Lee, Chidders. Point out exactly the area you cleared earlier.’

  ‘We cleared that area,’ Chidders added and I could tell he was getting pissed off with my questions.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve been all over that as well. But we need to be objective about this. We somehow missed a device, all of us, and we now need to find out why that happened. The buck stops with me. I’ll fight our corner but I need to know how and why this happened.’

  Utterly confused, I couldn’t help but begin doubting myself. I had never missed a device before, either in training or on ops. Something had gone seriously wrong.

  I turned to the team. ‘The area needs to be searched again. There are engineers working here and they need to be confident we have done our job properly.’

  I led the way and we cleared the seat of the explosion while the engineers and soldiers from the Rifles watched us suspiciously. It was absolutely vital that the infantry trusted us. If the trust was somehow lost then we might as well pack up and go home.

  There were no clues as to what had happened. On the face of it, the search team’s drills had failed. But the facts just didn’t seem to add up. There was always the possibility that one person could miss a device – but the area had been cleared by the whole team.

  Firstly the search team went into the area conducting several sweeps, checking walls, the churned-up ground and mounds of earth, which had clearly not been touched in months. Nothing was found, which didn’t make us feel any better.

  The team returned to base by 1615 hrs and Lee and I headed to the Ops Room. Again people were looking at us as though we were a bunch of arseholes. I approached the Operations Officer who had earlier doubted our competence and waited for him to finish a phone call on the secure line.

  ‘Sir, the area was cleared. We found no evidence of IEDs. I don’t know what’s happened. My team stepped all over that area. I even took the RMP in there.’

  Then I had a thought, a possible reason why the IED couldn’t be detected.

  ‘Sir, give me five. I’ll be back.’

  I grabbed the two pressure plates that had been placed in forensic bags earlier and headed out of the Ops Room.

  In an area free of any pieces of metal, I threw the pressure plates on the floor and ran my metal detector over the top of them. Nothing, not a sound. Everyone stared at me in disbelief.

  ‘Chidders, give me your metal detector.’

  I ran the second metal detector over the plates. Again nothing. I turned the metal detector to its most sensitive setting, something rarely done because you simply get too many false readings. But only then could the faintest of bleeps be heard.

  I opened my penknife and sliced the pressure plate open and pulled it apart. This went against standard practice. IEDs are usually kept intact to preserve any forensic evidence. Inside I could see that the metal content had been significantly reduced. This was something new, something never seen before in Helmand. No one wanted to say it at that moment but the Taliban had made an IED that was almost, but not entirely, impossible to detect. Our equipment, the militarised metal detector, which had saved the lives of thousands of soldiers, had become, as one of the lads pointed out, almost as much use as a ‘chocolate fireguard’.

  An hour later, we were back in FOB Jackson. I told the team to get some rest and headed to the Ops Room. As soon as I walked through the door I was accosted by the battalion’s chief of staff.

  ‘What’s the story with the pressure plate?’

  I explained everything and watched as the blood seemed to draw from his face.

  ‘I need to reassess this with my team and my HQ and find out what the score is, sir.’

  ‘I want to know what you plan to do about this in thirty minutes.’ There was no room for manoeuvre in his voice.

  ‘Sir, I need to do some more tests to make sure we’ve got our heads around this and speak to my boss.’

  ‘Fuck that, Staff,’ he responded. ‘I want to know in thirty minutes whether you can detect these things. I want your plan of action.’

  Back at the Hesco House, Lee was already checking the search team’s specialist equipment to see if it performed any better but the results were the same. I explained that the Rifles’ chief of staff was demanding answers and we had to formulate some sort of plan.

  Lee turned to me. ‘Nothing works, Kim. Soldiers from this base will be doing an evening patrol in about an hour and at the moment they have no protection against these IEDs.’

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ said Malley.

  ‘What can we do?’ added Chidders. ‘This is bad.’

  ‘OK, lads, don’t worry, this is above our pay grade. I’m heading back to the Ops Room. Have a think about our next move.’

  The chief of staff had his hands on hips with a look of thunder on his face. He wanted to blame someone for what was turning into the world’s biggest nightmare and I was his target.

  ‘Well?’ he said, now not even referring to my rank, which was starting to piss me off. We’d worked our bollocks off since we arrived, saved the lives of his men and done whatever we were asked and I wasn’t about to be treated like an idiot in front of the battalion Ops Room because the Taliban had made an undetectable IED.

  The room fell quiet and all eyes were on me.

  I threw the pressure plate onto the table in front of him.

  ‘We can’t detect them, sir. We’ve used all our kit but the metal content is too low. This is not an issue with my team, you need to understand that. This is not a failure of drill. The Taliban have made a pressure plate that can’t be detected.’

  His face was gripped with confusion. ‘You must be able to. You’re the so-called experts.’

  ‘Sir, there’s not enough metal in these bombs to be detected. My team has used all our equipment, which is more than any infantry unit has got, and we’re not getting any hits.’

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, then turned and headed to the CO’s office. One by one the rest of the Ops Room went back to work. I hung around for half an hour or so and then returned to the rest of the team. They were despondent and not without reason. If the Taliban had developed a pressure plate that couldn’t be detected then specialist searchers were almost redundant.

  ‘Listen, Terry has obviously been quite clever here but he’s not as clever as us. We’ll work something out. Tomorrow we need to get among the Rifles and start training them on how to spot ground-sign and make sure they know where Terry is going to place bombs.’

  It was a seminal moment in the Afghan War and once again the initiative was with the Taliban. As an EOD Operator I couldn’t help but feel some grudging respect for what they had managed to achieve. The Taliban were adapting. Like all ‘successful’ terrorist organisations the insurgents tended to repeat successes and rethink failures. They had seen how metal detectors were used to detect bombs.

  Within the hour Patrol Minimise, which was effectively no patrolling unless of urgent operational necessity, was put in place in Sangin and other areas across Afghanistan. Over the next forty-eight hours, the Rifles were taught how to improve their ability to identify ground-sign and how to avoid being channelled into killing areas. If there was an obvious crossing-point over a river it was also likely to be an area where the Taliban would place a device. If the only option was to wade through five feet of water, then tough, suck it up, they were told, and get your feet wet. But the soldiers also knew that they could know exactly what the Taliban were up to only to be smashed by some random, undetectable IED – that was the nature of the war in Afghan.

  Early on in the tour most of the IEDs found had all the components placed together. The battery pack, containing most of the metal, would be placed next to the pressure plate, which was positioned on top of the main charge. But the Taliban changed
this set-up and began to vary their tactics.

  There was little choice but for soldiers to change their tactics too. They adapted to the new threat surprisingly quickly and came to rely more on their operational awareness and how to spot ground-sign rather than relying on the bleep of a metal detector.

  Over the next few weeks we found more low-metal devices but also high-metal ones too. The next generation of IEDs contained no metal at all. Bare wires were replaced with conductive carbon rods removed from D-Cell batteries and crush-sensitive explosives replaced the need for any power sources or switches. However by the time these devices started to appear towards the end of the tour search teams were equipped with ground penetrating radar which could be used to detect non-metal objects.

  Just as the Taliban adapted we were forced to adapt too.

  20

  Boredom and Bullshit

  Someone once said, ‘War is Hell.’ There’s no doubt about that, but perhaps they should have added that war can also be boring, intensely boring. For many soldiers, bomb disposal teams included, a lot of what people describe as ‘war’ is actually hanging around waiting to do something, to fly somewhere or to get a briefing from somebody. The hardest moments came between the periods of intense activity, when there was time to think and question, when you might wonder whether you were going to make it home and see your family again. Fighting boredom was often harder than fighting the Taliban. Everyone sent to Helmand was trained to fight, taught how to spot an IED and could deal with a traumatic amputation. But there was no preparation on how to cope with the lengthy lulls in operational activity when there was literally nothing to do. Boredom was like a virus – it could undermine morale and team cohesion – but occasionally a little bit of boredom was exactly what was needed.

  After the Sangin period, Brimstone 42 returned to Bastion in the hope of a few days’ rest and a period of downtime before the next mission. The team arrived back in Bastion looking like the Dirty Dozen, unshaven, stinking, body armour stained with blood, sweat and dirt and our weapons hanging off us like we’d just finished a week-long firefight.