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

by Sean Rayment

  The soaring rates of amputees returning from Helmand because of the surge in the Taliban’s use of IEDs has inevitably led to conversations among the bomb-hunting fraternity about whether life is worth living after surviving a double or triple amputation.

  Woody gives me his view on the subject. ‘None of us really ever discusses how we would feel until you hear that someone has been hurt and has lost both legs and sometimes both legs and an arm. And then someone will say, “I wouldn’t want to live like that.” The thing all the soldiers are scared about is losing their balls – you hear people say, “As long as I don’t lose my balls, I could cope, but if I lose my legs and my balls I’d rather be dead.” And I’ve thought about that too. I’ve asked myself the question: would I want to live with no legs and no balls? We all know that you’re going to have a lifetime of struggle. But I always say, well, at least I would be able to cuddle my children – they can’t take that away and that’s worth living for because that’s the best feeling in the world. Anyway it’s pretty rare for ATOs to lose our legs because we are normally right over the device, so if an IED detonates it’s usually all over. Ken [WO2 Bellringer] was standing up when he stepped on a pressure plate, so he’s fortunate because he survived even though he had terrible injuries, but he will be able to cuddle his children again.’

  Woody falls silent again, lost in thought, perhaps about his twin daughters back home. The Hurt Locker has now finished and the soldiers are leaving, some to get some sleep, others for sentry duty on the front gate.

  ‘Right,’ Woody says, slapping his hands on the table. ‘Time for bed, I think. We’ve got another job on tomorrow. A route clearance – probably several bombs on the road. Should be interesting. Can sometimes get a bit cheeky out there. You up for it?’ he asks with a smile.

  ‘Yep, I’m up for it,’ I reply.

  Woody finishes his tea and adds, ‘We’ve got a new search team coming in tomorrow, so that should be interesting. Now I’m going to finish my reports and get my head down.’

  Chapter 7: Murder at Blue 25

  ‘It was like being hit with a sledgehammer. It just didn’t seem real. One second everything was normal, the next there was chaos and death – it was that quick.’

  Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, Signaller, Grenadier Guards

  I awake to the news that a soldier who was badly injured in February by an IED in Musa Qala has died the previous evening, 15 March 2010, at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Captain Martin Driver of 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment was blown up while on patrol and suffered a double amputation of his legs as well as serious injuries to other parts of his body. Shortly after he was injured he was evacuated back to the UK and survived for a further three weeks before succumbing to his injuries. It must have been a terrible ordeal for his family but it is a tragedy which has been played out hundreds of times over the past four years.

  One more life lost, one more family shattered. At the back of my mind I’m thinking, what’s the point? Captain Driver, like all of those who have died before him, will no doubt be called a hero and I’m sure he was – anyone who spends six months fighting the Taliban is a hero as far as I am concerned – but who will remember him or his family’s suffering in five years’ time? Captain Driver’s loss is another reminder that death in Afghanistan is never far away. Since I arrived two weeks ago, five soldiers have been killed and at least a dozen more have been injured, the majority by IEDs.

  By 7.30 a.m. I’m back in FOB Shawqat’s vehicle park, waiting to leave on the next IED mission. Warrior drivers are gunning their engines in preparation for this latest mission and the air is thick with the pungent smell of diesel. Woody is standing at the centre of a small group of soldiers and I can see from the look on his face that there is a problem. The incoming search team – callsign Brimstone 42, nickname Team Stallion – has just arrived as expected, but the helicopter which has flown them in has also extracted the old search team. The plan had been for the two search teams to work together for at least a week so that the outgoing team could pass on all of their knowledge of the local area to the incoming team. That process will now not take place and, to make matters worse, half of Brimstone 42’s kit was put on board the wrong helicopter and is sitting in Sangin.

  And so Brimstone 42 are about to go out on their very first mission with almost no understanding of the ground or the local Taliban tactics.

  ‘It’s not what I would say is ideal,’ says Woody out of earshot of his new team. ‘It’s their first job and they are going to go into it cold. They are a good bunch of lads and some of them have been on operations before, but Afghan is different. You don’t get a second chance here. Fuck up out here and you’re going home in a body bag.’

  Brimstone 45 have been called back to Camp Bastion earlier than expected because they are needed to man the High Readiness Force, which is regarded as a greater priority than having them remain in Nad-e’Ali and show their replacement team the lie of the land. If there were more bomb-hunting teams available, commanders would not be forced to make difficult compromises like this.

  For many within the bomb-disposal world, however, shortages of bomb hunters is nothing short of scandalous, given that it has been obvious since 2008 that the production and deployment of IEDs against NATO forces, especially in the south of Afghanistan, has been part of the Taliban’s main effort.

  In 2008 WO2 Gaz O’Donnell, then a George Medal holder (later awarded a posthumous Bar) and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, confided in me that he was amazed that there were just two IEDD teams in Helmand – back then the main war effort was in Iraq, where roadside bombs were killing British troops every week. Gaz and other members of the EOD group were staggered that senior commanders in the Ministry of Defence in London did not view Helmand as a high-threat IED environment even though the numbers of IED incidents had increased by more than threefold in two years. In 2004 there were just 304 IED incidents – an incident means a find or a detonation – in the whole of Afghanistan. In 2009 the number of IED incidents had risen to over 10,000, the vast majority of which occurred in Helmand. Gaz told me at the time, ‘It suits the MOD to be able to say that Helmand isn’t a high-threat area because then they can justify the numbers. Iraq is a high-threat environment, so there are a lot more IEDD teams in Basra. If they admitted that Helmand was a high-risk area too, then they would have to increase the number of ATOs here as well. The problem is that there aren’t enough ATOs for both operations and we have got the short straw.’

  Six weeks after Gaz vented his frustrations to me in August 2008, he was dead and became the first ATO to be killed in Helmand. The number of CIED teams and search teams has increased fivefold but there are still too few and the consequence of this is that practices such as the team handovers, which are designed to save lives and prevent injury, are abandoned.

  A message comes via the operations room informing Woody that our mission has been delayed by at least an hour. A few soldiers grunt disapprovingly but most are indifferent to the news. Brimstone 45 have a whole six months ahead of them, so why complain about an hour’s delay? Like the soldiers around me, I take off my body armour, drop it against the wheel of a Mastiff and use it as a makeshift seat. Rushing only to wait is part of Army life, especially in a war zone. I’m staring absent-mindedly out across the vehicle when I notice Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, one of the survivors of an incident which became known as ‘Murder at Blue 25’, heading towards the operations room.

  The killings took place on Tuesday, 3 November 2009, a day which began as it always did for the soldiers located at the small British Army patrol base known as Blue 25. The soldiers rose from their beds in the hour before dawn, made tea, loaded their weapons, and waited for the Taliban to attack. It had been the same routine every day for the past two weeks – and the Afghan police whom the troops had been sent to ‘mentor’ joined them.

  Led by Regimental Sergeant Major Darren ‘Daz’ Chant, a living legend within the Brigade of Guards, the si
xteen-strong unit had been detached to Blue 25 in a last-chance bid to shore up relations between the local population and the Afghan Police. The police were so utterly hopeless that there was every chance that the local population would turn to the Taliban to uphold law and order unless urgent and drastic action was taken. The plan had worked well. The presence of the British soldiers had helped to partially restore the locals’ confidence in the police, who also seemed to appreciate the effort being made by the Grenadiers. But by the middle of the afternoon five British soldiers would lie dead and another six would be injured at the hands of a policeman whom they thought of as a trusted friend. Even in a war as dirty as that being fought in Helmand, the murders were a despicable act and had the potential to undermine the delicate relationship between the British Army and the Afghan Police. As the details of the mass killings broke in the UK, many newspapers questioned the whole nature of the mission in Afghanistan, with several asking why British troops were risking their lives for a nation where individuals employed by the government could act with such treachery.

  When the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in Nad-e’Ali in September 2009, Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the battlegroup commander, knew that if he was to fulfil his orders to secure Nad-e’Ali and separate and secure the population from the insurgents he would have to work hand in glove with the Afghan security forces, namely the police and the military.

  ‘The three legs of the stool were the International Security and Assistance Force [ISAF], the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police,’ he explained over a coffee one morning in March 2009 while I was embedded with his battlegroup in Nad-e’Ali. ‘We knew that we would have to work with them all if we were to be successful in Nad-e’Ali and if we wanted to make real progress. What I didn’t know when we arrived was that one of the legs of the stool, the police, was rotten, rotten to the core.’

  Up until late 2009 the Afghan National Police had not received anything like the same levels of strategic investment afforded to the Afghan National Army and were widely regarded by those British military commanders unfortunate enough to work with them as at best a bad joke and at worst a liability which threatened to undermine the Army’s efforts to win hearts and minds. In Helmand, as in much of Afghanistan, the police were an utter shambles. Many of the officers were addicted to opium and would routinely sell their weapons and ammunition – even to the Taliban – in order to fund their habit. In one case a police unit sold all its supplies of bullets and rockets to insurgents. A few days later the same group of insurgents attacked the police and several officers were killed.

  The police were ill-disciplined, untrained, poorly led, and would openly ‘tax’ or steal from the local population, often because they had not been paid by their commanders. Corruption within various units was rife, and young teenage policemen risked being sexually assaulted or raped by senior commanders. While ISAF had concentrated its efforts on building up the Afghan Army, the police had been left to wither on the vine, and for that a price was being paid.

  While relations between the British Army and the Afghan soldiers were based on mutual respect, most British soldiers regarded the country’s police as being worse than useless. But there was some sympathy for the police’s predicament. Whereas the Afghan soldiers were often recruited from areas outside of Helmand and lived in barracks or secure camps, the police lived a dangerous life among the people they were supposedly protecting and were often easy targets for the insurgents.

  Shortly after the first elements of the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in September 2009, reports began to emerge of some of the dangerous everyday antics involving the Afghan police, which often left the locals in a state of abject terror. Village elders began to complain about the goings-on in one police checkpoint where almost every day the force would be high on drugs and often fire wildly down a road used by civilians.

  British soldiers working close to or alongside Afghan police officers had to always be prepared to factor in the unexpected when planning operations, as Lieutenant Mike Dobbin, of Queen’s Company, Ist Battalion Grenadier Guards, explained. An incident which took place on 7 October 2009 typified the problems the British soldiers faced when dealing with the Afghan police. ‘During a routine patrol in Basharan area, my platoon, which at that time was partnered with the Afghan police, found an IED on a major route in the area,’ he explained while giving a summary of his experiences of working with the Afghan police. ‘We were unable to destroy the device because there was no bomb-disposal team with us, so we marked the area with green spray paint to bring it to the attention of locals and to stop anyone driving or walking over it. All of this was much to the frustration of the police, who simply wanted to tear it out of the ground and blow it up.

  ‘It was clear to us that the insurgents, knowing we had discovered the device, were likely to come back, take it out and replace it in another area with the aim of killing British or Afghan troops. We therefore planned with the police to return that night and ambush them while they did this. At around 9 p.m. I led a twelve-man team up to a cemetery in the area, which was around 500 metres away from the IED’s location. Overwatching the cemetery was a police checkpoint with good arcs of observation across the open ground. The Afghan police knew that we were in the area and that an ambush was being planned. As the patrol pushed on through the cemetery, approximately 300 metres from a checkpoint, the police opened fire, pinning us down with a heavy weight of rocket and machine-gun fire. Eventually, through a series of mobile telephone calls and radio messages, the police became aware that we were actually friendly forces and they stopped their firing, but it was clear that our position had been given away. There was a clear lack of understanding between ISAF and our Afghan partners. We later found that the police unit in the checkpoint were lazy, untrained and highly addicted to opium.’

  Another example of the police’s ill-discipline came to light one lunchtime at the police training college in Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital. The college was divided into two, a junior term and a senior term, the latter of which were afforded special privileges, such as being first in the queue for meals. During one lunchtime, scuffles broke out between the two sets of students after the junior term managed to get into the lunch queue first. A British soldier who was overseeing the process intervened and tried to restore order, only to have both sets of students turn on him. Those among the crowd who had weapons cocked them and threatened to shoot the young corporal. Order was restored only when the soldier grabbed a rifle from one of the trainees and with a single swift blow managed to knock him out.

  One evening early in the tour, the commander of Queen’s Company received a message disclosing that a police checkpoint in one of the local communities was perilously close to falling to the insurgents. Two police outposts, one on each side of it, had apparently fallen earlier that day and five Afghan police officers had already been killed at this checkpoint, and during the recovery of the injured soldiers the police’s casualty evacuation vehicle had been destroyed by an IED.

  Lieutenant Dobbin explained, ‘My platoon crashed out in three vehicles at about 1800 hours with orders to hold the checkpoint until dawn. We met some police at a nearby checkpoint and they led us to a point where we took over in the more armoured vehicles due to the IED threat. We rolled into the village at about 2200, driving in on black light – that is, using night-vision rather than white headlights. It’s great for covert insertions but can make driving very tricky. We came to a crossroads at the centre of the village and had to turn quite a sharp corner. The first two vehicles got round with no problem, but the third must have pushed a little over to the left because as it turned the road gave way and the Mastiff slipped into an irrigation ditch. The vehicle weighs 20 tons and many roads in Helmand are not capable of bearing such a weight. Members of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers spent several hours using their incredibly powerful recovery vehicle to pull this out.’

  The situation in the village was very comple
x. There were several police commanders, working independently rather than together, and a sizeable Taliban force which had been emboldened by a series of dramatic successes against the Afghan police.

  Lieutenant Dobbin continued, ‘That night we tried to understand the situation … there were three police stations on the one crossroads. The Taliban had attacked them with machine guns and rockets from seven separate firing points surrounding the crossroads. The three stations, one in the tower, one in a mosque and one in a school, each had their own problem. The tower had poor policemen, lots of weapons and limited ammo; the school had good policemen, few weapons and limited ammunition; the mosque had poor policemen, good ammo supplies, few weapons. Annoyingly, the three commanders would not speak to each other or distribute the resources.

  ‘I split my men, five to each station, and we sat out the night with no attacks. The following day it became clear that many of these police were high on drugs and fairly ill-disciplined. Then something remarkable happened. A police commander whom I had heard of but never met walked into the village at the head of an Army patrol with a civilian, who was clearly under arrest. The police officer, Lieutenant Daoud, caught an insurgent red-handed connecting a battery to an IED and was about to blow up the patrol, which was composed of soldiers from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment.

  ‘I chatted to him about what had happened and he then told me this amazing story of how, just days earlier, he had been blown up by an IED while travelling in his police ranger [a four-wheel-drive Toyota], resulting in the death of the other two officers in the vehicle. He survived with only minor injuries. A week before that he had been walking to the police station on his own when he was ambushed by eight Taliban gunmen. He took cover in a small shop on this crossroads and had the locals filling his magazines with ammunition while he kept the Taliban away. He was hugely respected by the locals because he was forceful in his zero-tolerance approach. The ISAF mentor who worked with him said he was outstanding but because of his tribe he was not the commander of the checkpoint. He was extremely blasé about being attacked and ambushed and almost killed and, as with other competent police commanders, realized that he was a wanted man by the Taliban.’