Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  The aircraft arrived at RAF Akrotiri early the following morning. The sky was aqua-blue and the airfield was immaculate, with green manicured lawns and palm trees gently swaying in the Mediterranean breeze. It felt as if we’d landed on another planet.

  As the soldiers trooped off the aircraft with stale breath in creased, sweat-soaked uniforms, two PTIs dressed in shorts and pristine polo shirts were waiting to brief us. Standing in my stinking desert uniform just hours after leaving a war zone, I wanted to tell them to go and fuck themselves. I held them both in utter contempt. ‘All you do is sunbathe all day and fuck around doing water sports while we were fighting and dying in the world’s biggest shithole,’ I thought but kept it to myself.

  ‘Right, lads, this is what’s going to happen. Strip off now and get into your shorts and T-shirts. Put your uniform into a laundry bag with your name on and we’ll get it back to you cleaned and pressed for the morning. From here you’ll be bussed down to the beach where you’ll have fun.’

  I hadn’t really bought in to the enforced joviality of ‘decompression’ and I certainly didn’t want to be told by a couple of gym queens that ‘I was going to have fun.’ But I was actually pleasantly surprised.

  Everyone who’d been on the flight was loaded onto a bus and driven to a private beach, where water sports, ice cream, food and fizzy pop were freely available. It was like an all-inclusive holiday. The atmosphere was chilled and fun. The more we laughed the further Afghan drifted away. We got our hands on some kayaks and inflatable waterslides and as the hours ticked by I suppose we learned to enjoy ourselves again. My team chatted about the tour, the things that went wrong, about what happened to Sam and those members of the Task Force who didn’t make it.

  As the sun began to slip slowly beneath the horizon, we headed back to the transit camp to a barbecue and a couple of beers, our first drink in months, all rounded off with a bit of a show with singers and a comedian. After a few beers, maybe four, most of the soldiers were pissed and ready for a few hours’ kip and a chance to dream about other things rather than their own death.

  Morning greeted us with a cooked breakfast and clean uniforms, as promised. Later that morning we boarded the five-hour flight back to RAF Brize Norton. That last leg home was oddly surreal. Afghan felt like a million miles away and the last six months could have almost been a dream. I don’t know whether that was the point of decompression, but if it was, the idea certainly worked.

  It was a typically British autumn day. The sky was gunmetal grey and an icy wind barrelled across the runway. One by one, in a sort of single file, the soldiers made their way into the arrivals hall, through customs to the awaiting wives, husbands, children and families. The air was filled with a mixture of relief and excitement. Everyone had a loved-one to hug, to welcome them home – except me. As we collected our bags, my team began to say goodbye to each other and one by one they departed. We’d spent the last six months living closer than brothers and now it was all over. There were man-hugs and promises to stay in touch. Stu Dickson and Lee Ridgeway, my two pals who had picked me up at the start of my R & R, were once again waiting for me.

  I clocked their faces among the waiting families and was lifted by their smiles. They immediately went into the relentless piss-taking mode once again, my weight or lack of it being the main point of attack. I knew they were trying to give my morale a bump but to be honest the impending reunion with my wife weighed too heavily on my mind.

  I loaded my bags into the boot of Lee’s car and placed my body armour on top. The vest still had all of my Afghan insignia attached – the Velcro badges identifying me as a member of the EOD Task Force, my ATO tabs and blood group. It was stained with sweat and the blood of those whose broken and traumatised bodies I helped to recover.

  Pausing for a few seconds, I wondered if and when I would ever return to Afghan. The feeling was indescribable, as though you were saying goodbye to something you had grown to depend on. Afghan takes something from everyone – if you’re unlucky, it’s your life, or possibly an arm or a leg or some sort of horrendous mental wound, like PTSD. I suppose I had lost what I craved most, a job I had loved. Afghan defined me and now it was gone, possibly forever and I felt empty and lost. I had spent the last six months living a dream I didn’t want to end.

  ‘Come on, Kim!’ Lee shouted. ‘You do want to get home?’ he added laughing.

  The next couple of hours passed in a bit of a blur as we chatted about what was going on in Afghan and about how Paddy had only been in theatre for two minutes before he was thrown into the cluster fuck on the training area. As we drove along country lanes and through small quintessential English villages, Stu and Lee brought me up to speed with what was happening back at the Bomb School. They also confirmed that I would be joining the High Threat team as an instructor – it was a brilliant job and the one I wanted, but my mind was elsewhere.

  Inevitably the conversation slowly edged towards my disaster of a marriage.

  ‘So what’s happening, Kim? Are you two going to sort your shit out?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Nothing’s changed. I called home once a week while I was in Afghan, mainly to check on my son. More often than not there was no answer and I just left a message. But it’s over. We’re done and nothing’s happened which is going to change that. She’s gonna let me stay at the house for a few days to get my shit sorted.’

  ‘Then what? The Mess?’ Stu asked.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ And the conversation ended. The Warrant Officers and Sergeants’ Mess was full of single soldiers, or those whose families lived in other parts of the country and people like me – the few whose marriage couldn’t withstand the pressures of service life. I knew then that the moment I walked into the Mess I would be greeted as a casualty of war – another soldier who’d sacrificed his marriage for the job. There is a saying in our trade that EOD actually stands for ‘everyone’s divorced’. Looking back, my marriage was probably doomed from day one – married too young, too busy with work, wanting more than just slippers, a family and the easy life. It wasn’t my wife’s fault – actually far from it, she was great. I just wasn’t ready for it.

  The car turned slowly into the married quarters at Marlborough Barracks in Kineton and my heart began to beat faster. I was just hoping there wouldn’t be a scene on the doorstep, not in front of my mates. The car came to a slow stop at the back of my house. Stu and Lee offered to help with my gear but I told them not to bother and that I’d catch up with them later. Both of them lived on the same patch and part of me wondered whether I would be knocking on their doors in the next ten minutes or so asking for a bed for the night. As the car pulled away I headed up the garden path and hesitantly knocked on the door.

  ‘Come in, Kim,’ my wife sang from the kitchen. I opened the door and she greeted me with a smile, a hug and a kiss, but on the cheek. It was good to see her again.

  My son appeared from the sitting room. He looked older but was the same smiley little boy with happy blue eyes and light-brown scruffy hair. I dropped to my knees and he ran into my open arms shouting: ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ I buried my face into the space between his neck and shoulder and hugged him tightly.

  My eyes filled with tears. ‘Hello, son.’ It was the best feeling in the world and I was overcome by the emotion of the moment. I had feared that my son wouldn’t recognise me but my wife had been brilliant. Despite our differences and the fact that the marriage was over she had ensured that he knew who I was. Suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, I felt exhausted – almost as if I had been ambushed by the mental trauma of serving six months in Afghan. For him to hug and recognise me was probably one of the highlights of my life. He had changed massively from when I was on R & R and although my wife had sent pictures of him to me he was not the boy I had left behind. Over the next couple of hours I played with him just like any father and son who had been separated for months while at the same time forcing myself not to think of the immediate future. My wife sat back with a
brew watching us play and I would occasionally catch her staring, looking sad and perhaps wondering what might have been.

  For the next few days, I spent as much time as I could with my son but I also got acquainted with my new role at the Bomb School. Going into the office was part of a normalisation process to allow families to get used to seeing each other again. It is meant to ease that often fraught period when soldiers return home after so long away. Then once a couple have got used to one another again, the soldier will go on his post-operational leave.

  During that first week I spent a couple of hours a day in the office sorting out the boring, mundane things in life like seeing the chief clerk to make sure you get your post-operational bonus sorted, booking back into the Mess so they know you’ll be coming in for lunch – or in my case living in – and handing in and withdrawing kit from the stores.

  At home, I was sleeping in the spare room preparing myself for moving out of the family house and into the Mess. I wished it could have been different, that we could have been a happy family like everyone else, but it was not to be. Our son was going to grow up with divorced parents. My relationship with him wouldn’t be like most other dads, and that hurt more than I ever thought possible. Eventually, the day came for me to move out. I packed up my car and drove the 150 yards or so to the Sergeants’ Mess, picked up my room key and headed for the annexe.

  ‘Jesus,’ I mumbled to myself as I opened the door. I hadn’t expected much but I was still shocked by the state of my room. It was dark and gloomy with a single dirty window, moth-bitten curtains and a smell of damp. It measured just seven by six feet and felt more like a cell than a bedroom. It had a sink in the corner that had probably been pissed in more than washed in – a hot and cold running urinal.

  There was barely room for me, let alone my kit. I sat on the bed and put my head in my hands. ‘I survived Afghan, come home, my marriage is over and now this. A shitty little room for how long? Two years?’ It felt like a punishment and I hadn’t felt so low in months. Worst of all, I now had a month of post-operational leave to fill.

  After about an hour of being utterly miserable I slapped myself around the face, figuratively speaking, and got my shit together. I called my wife and said that I would like to see as much of my son as possible over the next month and she was more than happy.

  Within a week I had been given a bigger room in the Mess, which meant that my son could come and stay. In the evenings I met up with pals I hadn’t seen in months and slowly my morale began to improve.

  Towards the end of October, Lee, Stu, another pal called Simmo and myself decided to get away for a lads’ weekend. The four of us grabbed some clothes, our passports, filled our wallets with cash and headed to Birmingham International Airport and the enquiries desk. The deal was we would just rock up and get the first available flight out of the UK, no matter where it was. ‘I can offer you Amsterdam,’ said a very attractive sales assistant.

  The weekend away was just what was needed – almost a continuation of decompression. It was carnage. I got so drunk I ended up getting a tattoo on the inside of my left arm. It was an image of praying hands with rosary beads. The nights were spent in a city-centre hostel and our room was reminiscent of something from a Russian labour camp, with steel bunk beds and rubberised mattresses. The walls were made of breeze blocks and the floor was raw concrete with a drain in the middle, presumably to allow the owner to hose the room down after his customers had puked and pissed all over the place. I’d stayed in better accommodation in war zones, but the hostel served its purpose.

  Just being with three good mates helped me get some perspective back on my life. A group decision was made to isolate ourselves from Kineton and the Army during the weekend so phones were switched off, there were no calls home and emails went unchecked.

  On the Sunday we headed back to the airport, nursing hangovers and all of us feeling that we needed another break to get over the one we’d just had. As we moved through passport control looking like death and stinking of booze, Lee turned his phone on. Almost immediately it began to bleep furiously with a deluge of text messages.

  Lee stopped, his face went white, he looked up and said, ‘Oz has been killed.’

  He was referring to Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, known to everyone in the EOD world as Oz.

  ‘What?’ I said, convinced that Lee had made a mistake. ‘I was with him a few weeks ago. He’s fine.’

  But Lee shook his head and showed us the text. It seemed impossible. Just a week ago Oz was being his normal larger-than-life self and now he was gone. It was difficult to believe. I felt numb, sick and angry all at the same time.

  The flight home was spent in a depressing silence. We all felt guilty that we had been having a great time on the piss without knowing that Oz had died. As the plane began to descend through the clouds into a gloomy-looking Birmingham, I began to ask myself how did I manage to survive Afghanistan? My team had pulled more bombs out of the ground than Oz’s because we had been in Afghan longer, yet we had survived virtually unscathed. It didn’t make sense. It seemed to prove the old adage that when your time is up, your time is up.

  Disbelief that Oz had gone was soon replaced with acceptance. Death and bomb disposal often go hand in hand. Every bomb disposal operator who’d been deployed to Afghanistan had come close to death and, as harsh as it may sound, there was no point dwelling on it; Oz definitely wouldn’t have wanted that.

  I spent the rest of my leave spending as much time with my son as possible and preparing to go back to work. My relationship with my estranged wife was about as good as could be expected. We both knew that our marriage had run its course and there was no mutual, lasting animosity. By the time my leave was over my life was back on track. Oz had been buried and there was a rumour that he was going to be awarded a posthumous George Cross. A few weeks later, all members of the Counter-IED Task Force who served on Herrick 10 were reunited at a medals parade at Carver Barracks, Wimbish, in Essex, the home of 33 Engineer Regiment (EOD). It was great to see soldiers and families celebrating the end of a gruelling six months. Sam had also managed to make the parade; he had only been given a 20 per cent chance of surviving his wounds so his recovery was remarkable. He’d lost an eye and suffered a brain injury and had been told that, in all likelihood, he faced being medically discharged. But his spirits were high. He wanted to get fit and reassess his future.

  By mid November, I was ready to get back to work. My life felt as though it had come full circle. A year earlier I was a keen-eyed student on the High Threat course feeling as though I was out of my depth and now I was an A-Team instructor, training the next generation of High Threat bomb disposal operators.

  I arrived at the Felix Centre early on Monday 16 November 2009, clean-shaven, combats pressed and hair cut to regulation length. One by one the students – some officers but mainly SNCOs (some faces were familiar but most weren’t) – trooped into the classroom and waited for me to tell them to sit down. I scanned the room looking at their faces and remembered those in the EOD world who hadn’t returned.

  ‘Gentlemen, welcome to the High Threat course. We are now going to spend the next eight weeks teaching you how to survive Afghanistan. Firstly the most important piece of equipment you will need is this . . . a paintbrush.’

  Epilogue

  January 2017

  It’s almost two years since the British Army left Helmand and the Western world’s focus has shifted once again to Iraq and the conflict against the Islamic State terrorist group. Improvised explosive devices remain the primary weapon of the majority of terrorist groups around the world and people like me – bomb disposal experts – are right now, as I write, on standby across Britain ready to react and to put their lives on the line to keep the country safe.

  I’m now a Warrant Officer Class 1 serving in 11 EOD Regiment RLC. I can’t tell you what I do except to say that the soldiers under my command train every day in a bid to keep one step ahead of the terrorist. The work is
often difficult and dangerous but every one of my soldiers would willingly lay down his life to keep members of the British public safe from the threat of terrorist IEDs.

  My time in the Army is almost over. I’ve had a fantastic career but it hasn’t been without its difficulties and frustrations – what would you expect – it’s the Army. But learning recently that the Taliban are still causing issues in parts of Lashkar Ghar, Helmand’s provincial capital – and before that it was Sangin, Musa Qala and Nawzad, all areas where hundreds of British soldiers were killed and injured – was very difficult to accept. The Taliban were often quoted as saying ‘You have the watches but we have the time.’

  So I’m left asking myself the question: was it worth it? It’s a very difficult question to answer and soldiers who served in Helmand, who killed and watched their mates being killed, will have their own opinions. I’m not sure yet whether the war was worth the cost in lives or the billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money that funded the conflict. But I will say this: I enjoyed almost every minute of the challenge and the reward. I got to do what I had been trained to do in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. But I was lucky. I survived six months of pulling bombs out of the ground almost without a scratch. But for those who were killed and injured – it’s probably a different story.

  Appendix

  Staff Sergeant Kim Hughes’s George Cross Citation

  On 16 Aug 2009, Staff Sergeant Hughes, a High Threat Improvised Explosive Device Disposal (IEDD) operator, along with a Royal Engineers Search Team (REST), was tasked to provide close support to the 2 RIFLES Battlegroup during an operation to clear a route, south west of Sangin.