Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  Lee and I went straight into the Ops Room only to be greeted with looks of hostility by new members of the EOD Task Force HQ who’d recently arrived from the UK. While we were covered in shit they would be sitting in an air-conditioned tent, dressed in pristine combats, well rested and clean-shaven, enjoying one of their posh selection of coffees courtesy of the mountain of welfare parcels stacked in the corner. Neither of us were in the mood to take any shit from anyone, irrespective of rank, and we looked at the Ops Room staff as if to say ‘Fucking oxygen thieves, you don’t know what war is’, while they looked at us as if to say ‘Who do you think you are, the SAS?’

  Lee and I briefed the chain of command, although there wasn’t much more to say than had already been said. They knew the score, had seen the reports and were aware that the team had been through a punishing week.

  The first evening back in Bastion I asked everyone to make sure they were in the tent by 2000 hrs so we could go through a debrief of the previous week. Everything was covered, what worked, what didn’t, how we might approach things differently in the future. It was all constructive. No one was singled out for any criticism.

  I then asked whether anyone had any issues with what they had seen. One by one I went around the room asking Lee, Dave, Malley, Foz, Chidders, Lewis, Harry and Stu. No one wanted to admit that they had been deeply affected or traumatised by what had happened in Sangin. But I think we all were. Watching a soldier disfigured by mutilation die a slow, painful death was traumatising. Every member of the team probably all had nightmares, I certainly did, but none of us openly admitted that we did and no one was going to say: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ So like men everywhere around the world, we locked those dark thoughts away. ‘We’ll deal with it when we get back home,’ I added and everyone nodded in agreement.

  The following morning we laid into our personal admin big time, getting clothes washed and equipment exchanged. Sangin felt like a world away and the banter flowed. The piss-taking was merciless and no one was spared. Music was played at a loudness designed to piss off the camp rats who never ventured beyond the wire. Occasionally someone would stick their head into the tent and asked for the volume to be lowered. The response varied depending on the rank of the complainant. Staff sergeant or lower would be told to fuck off, while apologies would be made to those of higher rank but the volume would be increased almost immediately they were out of earshot.

  Once personal admin was out of the way, we headed to Camp Leatherneck, the part of Bastion owned by the US Marines, where you could get a pretty awesome Frappuccino or a coffee or buy something none of us needed from one of the large US servicemen’s stores or Postal Exchange, known as the PX. From Camp Leatherneck we got a lift back to NAAFI and killed some more time drinking coffee or Mountain Dews, gradually ticking off all the things we promised ourselves during those dark days in Sangin.

  After dinner it was back to the tent to watch a film, read or just chill. But by the second day the ‘Bastion bullshit’ started to creep in. It was the same pattern every time we came back to Bastion. Often in the first twenty-four hours, the lads would cut around in shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops – it was an opportunity to relax, forget about the war, and try to air your feet. But our attitude and mode of dress would start to get under the camp rats’ noses. Complaints would be lodged and I’d be called into the Ops Room and asked to sort it out. Unfortunately for us the bullshit factor went through the roof with the arrival of a new sergeant major who loved pointing his pace stick at anything and everything, as if he was some Guards sergeant major outside Buckingham Palace.

  He had arrived while we had been out on the ground and I first came across him when I went into the Ops Room a few days after I arrived back from Sangin. I was in super-relaxed mode and probably looking a bit scruffy. He stood up and looked at me with complete disdain as I entered. I was about to offer my hand when he said, ‘Can I help you?’ But what he actually meant was ‘Who are you and why are you coming into the Ops Room dressed like that?’

  Perhaps I was being a little petulant, but I walked straight past him and went over to the new SAT, WO1 ‘Sandy’ Little, and shook his hand. Sandy was a straight-talking Scot with a great sense of humour. He was a seasoned operator who understood the soldiers and their needs. I could feel the sergeant major’s eyes burning into the back of me as he looked at Sandy and me chatting like old friends.

  A few hours later as I was coming back from the showers I clocked him pointing his pace stick at one of my guys while dishing out a bollocking.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said angrily.

  ‘Is he one of yours?’

  ‘He’s part of my Counter-IED team. If that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Well, he’s incorrectly dressed. This is a military camp. Discipline is important and he doesn’t look like a soldier.’ It was a typical comment from a ‘Z’ sergeant major, someone who has to justify his existence by carrying a pace stick around with him.

  ‘He’s spent the last ten days pulling bombs out of the ground, dodging bullets and living with the shits. His uniform is being washed and he’s in shorts for a couple of hours because he’s got bollock rash. I told him to dress like that so he’s fit to go back out on ops in a few days’ time. If you have a problem with him take it up with me, sir.’

  The sergeant major looked lost for words and could see that I wasn’t going to back down. After a brief stand-off he said, ‘I’ll let it pass on this occasion but things are going to change around here.’ This was the bullshit that gradually came to infect Bastion and some of the larger FOBs in Helmand.

  The first signs of boredom began to appear just forty-eight hours after we returned to Bastion. Almost in unison, the entire team began checking and repacking kit, cleaning their weapons, testing pieces of equipment, which were in perfectly good order. The banter died away and morale gradually started to dip. I became twitchy and irritable and later during that second morning I headed over to the Ops Room and asked for the team to be placed on QRF. The QRF teams were on thirty minutes’ notice to move and had to be ready to deploy almost immediately. Teams could be bounced around Helmand from one FOB to another for up to a week and the days would fly by. The work was often dangerous and always demanding but it was what a bomb disposal team had been trained to do.

  As I walked into the Ops Room, an IED find came across the J-Chat system, a secure version of an instant messenger. A unit somewhere in Helmand wanted an EOD team urgently flown into their location.

  I dashed back to my tent and ten minutes later every member of Brimstone 42 was standing outside Ops Room, ready to be deployed. The SAT appeared and said, ‘What are you doing?’ looking half confused and half pissed off.

  ‘A ten liner’s come in. We’re ready to go. We’re on QRF.’ My team were standing there like a pack of hounds that had just picked up the scent of a fox, desperate to get out onto the ground. The Ops Room staff looked on in confusion with a look of ‘Why do you want to go beyond the wire?’

  The SAT waved us away as if we were irritating children. ‘You’re not going out on this one. The infantry are going to mark and avoid it. You lot are meant to be having some downtime. The war isn’t going anywhere and Terry hasn’t stopped making bombs. If you want something to do I’ll get the sergeant major to give you tasks – there are always plenty of Bastion duties going.’

  Bastion duties could be anything from working in the cookhouse as a dogsbody to sentry duty in one of the watchtowers. It was more of a punishment than a duty and the EOD teams were often seen as an easy target. Usually teams on downtime were pretty safe but by asking to be placed back on QRF I had signalled that we were available again and that made us vulnerable to being pinged for duties. It was a perception thing. EOD teams did most of their work beyond the wire, in isolated bases away from headquarters, and so a lot of the camp rats only ever saw us when we were chilling or knocking around Bastion in shorts and flip-flops. Hence they thought we were having an easy life while the
y were sweating their nuts off fourteen hours a day in the Ops Room.

  Suitably warned, we headed off to the training area partly to combat the boredom but also to escape the clutches of the sergeant major and his list of duties. Lee and I created complex scenarios and really put the team through its paces, challenging them with all sorts of possible situations, from multiple-IED attacks to leadership tasks. Over the next few days we smashed first-aid training, range work and spent more time on the Barma lanes, practising and refining new metal detector skills, than I thought possible. EOD teams were used to being worked hard, we wanted to work hard and we were trained to work hard. The problem was no one trained us to deal with boredom.

  After four days Sandy announced that we were back on the QRF and the following morning Brimstone 42 flew out of Bastion back to where we felt most comfortable – beyond the wire.

  21

  They Want to Kill Me

  If there’s one abiding golden rule by which every bomb disposal expert should live by it’s this: Never do the same thing twice. Once an ATO starts setting patterns he becomes an easy target for terrorists. The Taliban were masters of observation. They would sit and watch, mentally noting how EOD teams worked and what tactics were used and whether they were becoming predictable. For predictable read lazy. It was vital not to give the Taliban anything otherwise they’d use it against you. The IRA were the same. Set a pattern and you were a marked man.

  But not setting a pattern in Afghan was easier said than done. If you’ve got to pull twenty bombs out of the ground in a relatively small area you are going to end up repeating yourself – it was inevitable and one of those classic situations where the theory in training didn’t chime with the reality on the ground.

  Many of the ATOs based in Afghan in 2009 believed – it was an unwritten rule if you like – that if you did the same thing twice you were in danger of being targeted. Follow the rules and the chances are you would survive – use the robot (if it works), never pull anything out of the ground by hand – that’s what a hook and line is for – and always cut wires remotely. But the reality of operational life in Afghan meant that many of the standard operating procedures weren’t followed, not through carelessness or laziness, but because of the environment and the nature of operations.

  A classic example was the bomb suit. In theory, every Counter-IED task should be conducted with the ATO wearing a full bomb suit complete with 50kg of woven Kevlar and armoured plate. But in Afghan, where the temperatures would routinely reach 45°C and there was a 360-degree front line, the bomb suit was a non-starter. Anyone wearing a suit would succumb to heat exhaustion within half an hour and its weight meant that you were unlikely to be able to move anywhere quickly if you came under attack.

  The Taliban had a pretty efficient intelligence-gathering operation running in Helmand in 2009. Much of the local population were sympathetic to the insurgents’ cause and those that weren’t were often placed under enormous duress to help them. Intelligence on the movements of British troops, such as numbers, vehicles, weapons and tactics were of enormous value to the Taliban.

  Counter-IED teams were not immune and one of the main problems faced was dicking, being watched. The teams had to assume they were being dicked all the time. Every time an ATO was killed or injured, either one of our own or an allied country, an investigation would be conducted to establish what went wrong and adapt our training, tactics and procedures (TTPs) to try and prevent it from happening again.

  When IEDs really started to be used in large numbers at the back end of 2008, the Estonian troops began taking a lot of casualties. Their modus operandi was simple: walk down the road, disable the device and pull the bomb out of the ground. It was a tactic that worked well for a while until the Taliban dickers got wind of what the Estonians were doing and began booby-trapping the devices. It was a tough lesson for the Estonians to learn.

  It was also vital, of course, that when a British Brimstone team came into a FOB to relieve another, the two teams had a comprehensive handover. I would sit down with Oz or Captain Dan Reid or whichever operator was taking over and go through every bomb I had cleared in the area. Over a brew, in a quiet corner of the base, every relevant operational detail would be discussed: the design of the bombs, the areas being targeted, the type of explosive, detonator and power source being used, the procedures used to neutralise them, the approach to and the time spent clearing the device, even the placement of the ICP and cordons were covered so they couldn’t be targeted as part of a secondary attack. The level of information was sometimes overwhelming but it was crucial if an ATO new to an area was going to make an accurate threat assessment.

  Another consideration that formed part of the assessment was identifying the Taliban’s target. Was it the infantry or a Counter-IED team? The idea was that no two bomb disposal teams would ever operate in exactly the same way in the same location. But there are only so many options available and sometimes there might only be one possible route to the bomb. Circumstance might force two different teams to operate in a very similar way. I got around that potential problem by the abundant use of smoke grenades, so much so that Brimstone 42 was sometimes known as ‘Team Smoke’.

  The Army has several different types of smoke grenade used for signalling and screening. Signalling grenades are used to attract attention, such as a helicopter coming into land. Screening grenades produce an excessive amount of smoke in a very short period of time, making a smokescreen and allowing troops to move freely without being seen. Screening grenades come in two different types: training and operational. The training variant when thrown produces smoke by burning a large smoke composition pellet within the grenade body, whereas the operational grenade has a central burster that when thrown explodes and discharges red phosphorus, which burns and produces smoke.

  On one occasion I mixed up the red phosphorus grenade and normal training smoke. I should have thrown the grenade twenty to thirty metres away from where I was working but instead I dropped it at my feet. By the time I realised what I’d done it was too late. Red phosphorus was thrown everywhere but by a stroke of luck none landed on me. After witnessing the effects up close, I realised red phosphorus grenades were no use for providing an effective smokescreen. Training grenades were far better. Pull the pin, let go of the fly-off lever and smoke would begin pumping out of the end. By the end of the tour we had used in excess of 550 smoke grenades. On some jobs five or six were used to complete the task.

  By late August 2009, Brimstone 42 had spent more days in FOB Keenan than any other Counter-IED team. From a purely operational viewpoint, we should have been rotated out because we ran the risk of setting patterns. It had been an intense period and it often seemed like there wasn’t a road, track or alleyway that hadn’t been targeted. There were times when we honestly felt that for every bomb we’d clear another two went into the ground.

  During that period we became so familiar with the work of the Taliban in the area that we managed to discover their patterns. They were laying bombs all the time and so they needed to have some sort of map or visual markers to prevent getting blown up by one of their own IEDs. After a couple of weeks it became clear that the Taliban would nearly always place the battery pack at the base of a tree, while the pressure plate and the main charge would be positioned within a ten metre radius. Once the plate had been located it was left alone – it was the danger zone. Next I’d conduct a detailed examination of the area looking for ground-sign or other potential markers that could have been used. Only then, when nothing else was found, would I start to clear the ground around the pressure plate.

  On one routine day in Keenan, Brimstone 42 was despatched to deal with a pressure plate found during a morning foot patrol. I carried out my normal drills and during the detailed search discovered that the battery pack had been buried around five metres away from the pressure plate at the base of a tree, an obvious marker. It was only after I had cleared about five devices that it became obvious the same bomb tea
m had planted all of the IEDs. The battery pack for each device was buried next to a tree. Initially I thought: ‘Great, I’ve got this fucker sussed.’ Find the pressure plate and then look for a tree, find the battery, cut the wire, job done. Then I realised I was potentially setting a pattern and my actions could have been picked up in a matter of days, and in some cases hours, by the enemy. I had to consider that this was all part of an elaborate plan to lull my team into a trap. The feeling that we were possibly being targeted was reinforced a few days later at the end of a long day in the sun.

  My Brimstone team had been pulling bombs out of the ground until the late afternoon and were heading back to Keenan for a shower and an ice-cold Mountain Dew. The team, along with a platoon of soldiers from Keenan who had spent the day watching our backs, were slowly walking in single file along a track that would eventually lead back to the base when a local Afghan civilian approached us. Almost as one we all brought our weapons up to our shoulders fixing him in our sights.

  Most of the military bases across Helmand were located near small hamlets or villages, containing a bazaar with a few run-down shops or stalls selling everything from chillies to radio parts. Troops going on patrol might stop and chat to locals if they were heading through the bazaar and likewise the locals would chat – if they spoke English – or approach the Terp (interpreter), sometimes just to say hello but more often than not to have a whinge, usually about the corrupt Afghan police. But out in the countryside the Afghans left you alone, probably concerned that if they approached ISAF troops they might be mistaken as Taliban.

  As the Afghan came closer the Terp ordered him to stand still and lift up his clothing to show that he wasn’t wearing a suicide vest. Two soldiers gingerly walked forward and searched him, one patting him down all over his body while the other aimed his rifle at the guy’s face. It was an undignified experience for anyone and you could see the contempt in the man’s eyes. He had the chiselled face of a Pashtun warrior. He wore a biblical beard and his skin was a rich brown colour and heavily lined from a lifetime in the Helmand sun.