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

by Sean Rayment

  Woody returns once again down the safe lane to retrieve the pressure plate and to position a fist-sized lump of military-grade plastic explosive next to the yellow palm-oil container containing the main charge.

  ‘It was a 20 kg device, or thereabouts,’ he says. His eyes are red with sweat and dust. ‘It was designed to take out a vehicle – it would easily take the track off a Warrior and if you were in a Mastiff you would know about it. If someone had stepped on it, they would have been killed. We are basically big bags of water, so you can imagine what would happen if you stepped on 20 kg of explosive.’ He holds up the pressure plate by a wire in the same way that a fisherman might show off a prize catch. The pressure plate is about a foot long and an inch thick, with two white plastic wires at one end. ‘That’s what will do the damage – it’s a ball-bearing pressure plate – works in the same way as a conventional pressure plate but the circuit is made by a ball bearing and a wire – simple but deadly.’

  Although Woody managed to find the bomb and the pressure plate, he hasn’t been able to locate the power pack and he appears slightly deflated. Every ATO likes to recover as much of a bomb as possible – it’s all part of their individual battle against the Taliban bomb makers. There is always the chance that a piece of forensic intelligence may be obtained from a power source or a pressure plate, so no bomb hunter feels entirely satisfied unless he manages to locate the whole device.

  ‘I can’t for the life of me find the power pack,’ says Woody, frustration written all over his face. ‘It may not actually be there, of course, but the ground is so hard it’s difficult to tell. But I absolutely hate it when I can’t find something. I feel as though the Taliban have got something over on me. I see it as all part of winning individual battles and if we all win our individual battles, then we will be OK and make it back. The bottom line is that the device may not have had a power pack attached. The bomb may have been placed there some time ago and the insurgents could have been planning to attach the power supply some time in the future. Who knows?’

  Boonie prepares to blow the main charge. Twenty kilos of home-made explosive is a big bomb, and although we are all about 100 metres from the device everyone gets into cover either inside the vehicles or standing in their lee. ‘Standby, firing,’ shouts Boonie, and seconds later there is an earth-shaking boom. Lumps of earth rain down upon us and the front of the convoy is engulfed in a plume of choking brown dust.

  Woody goes forward with Arianne to check that all of the HME has gone. There’s nothing left apart from a huge hole on the side of the road. The WIS photographs the site of the devices and the surrounding countryside. She wants to build up a picture of why the Taliban bomb team chose this particular spot. She and other intelligence staff in the CIED Task Force will then try to answer a number of questions. Are there Taliban sympathizers in the area? Can the bomb location be easily monitored? Is the route being used too frequently by NATO forces? All the intelligence gleaned will be fed into a database which one day, when enough information has been gathered, may lead to the identity of the bomber. With the bomb cleared, there is a tangible decrease in tension among the members of Brimstone 42. In their eyes they are no longer rookies. After six months’ intensive training they have just completed their first mission and everyone is relieved that it went smoothly.

  ‘That’s the first one under the belt,’ says Simon. ‘The lads won’t be as nervous as this now – they’ve broken the fear aspect. This is something we can build on. We were probably a lot slower than what Woody is used to, but we will improve and the lads will get quicker. From here on out we’ve got to maintain this level of professionalism, remain switched on for the next six months, remember all of what we learned in our training, and make sure that we all return home in six months’ time.’

  The job of the bomb hunters for this particular mission is now complete, but before the Brimstone team can return to the safety of FOB Shawqat they are sent on another mission. The ANP have found several IEDs close to Patrol Base Pimon and, rather than marking and leaving them in situ for an IED team to clear, they have risked injury or death by pulling them out of the ground and bringing them into the base. Woody has been tasked with disposing of them.

  PB Pimon is the home of the Right Flank company of 1st Battalion Scots Guards. The base sits high on the left shoulder of the Grenadier Guards’ area of operations, on a line which demarcates the desert from the Green Zone. It’s also an area which has been heavily laced with IEDs and is regarded as one of the most dangerous areas of the Nad-e’Ali district. There are only certain routes in and out and the Taliban have planted IEDs on all of them at one time or another.

  With everyone now back in the Warriors, we move off towards Pimon. It’s less than 5 km away but we are being forced to take a more circuitous route because of the threat on some of the roads and tracks which have not been secured by either the ANA or the ANP.

  As soon as the large armoured door on the back of our Warrior closes, the temperature again begins to soar. Within minutes everyone is sweating buckets. The vehicle commander offers a cursory apology. ‘Sorry about the air-con,’ he says in his thick Glaswegian tones. ‘We’ve tried asking for spare parts but there aren’t any. There’s such a shortage of working vehicles and they aren’t going to take this one off the road just because the air-con’s fucked.’

  ‘How do you cope when you’re on a long trip?’ asks Simon.

  ‘You just have to,’ replies the commander. ‘If it gets really bad we pour water over ourselves, but that’s about it. We can’t exactly stop, get out and have a breather. We had a lad who passed out with heat stroke the other day, and we nearly had to call the MERT out. Luckily we were returning to the FOB, so we went straight to the medical centre and he was carried out and put on a drip. So this will have to be fixed by the summer otherwise someone is going to end up dead.’

  After we’ve been bouncing around in the back of the Warrior for a few minutes, the conversation dies away to nothing. It is simply too hot to talk. Eyes begin to close and tired faces are intermittently illuminated by shafts of sunlight piercing the dark, dusty interior. Beneath my body armour and helmet I can feel my body temperature soaring. Then, just when I think I can’t possibly take any more, we arrive at Pimon and the sense of relief is extraordinary. The electrically powered armoured door can’t open quickly enough and a blast of cool, fresh desert air quickly fills the Warrior.

  ‘That heat was fucking unreal,’ says Woody. ‘Absolutely insane. An hour inside one of those and you would be next to useless.’

  The five of us stumble out of the rear of the Warrior, pulling our sweat-soaked body armour from our limp bodies. We all look exhausted and dishevelled and frankly not fit to do anything. I wonder how soldiers would cope if ambushed by the Taliban and forced to dismount from the vehicles after travelling inside for an hour or two. My trousers are soaked through with sweat and Simon’s face is a frightening puce colour. Woody looks as though he has stepped out from a shower, and even Mo, the terp, who comes from Kabul and is used to the harsh Helmand summers, is complaining about the heat.

  ‘Let’s go and find some cold water,’ says Woody, ‘and then sort out these bombs.’ PB Pimon is a massive camp, at least equal in size to FOB Shawqat, and is home to around 150 members of the Scots Guards and a detachment of Gurkhas. From the fortified sangars it is possible to view both the fertile Green Zone and the stark, brown desert, between which the camp lies. Of all the bases I have visited during numerous trip to Afghanistan since 2002, Pimon is the bleakest. Most bases are Afghan compounds which have been extended and fortified by the engineers, but Pimon seems to have been built on a vast expanse of flat land in the middle of nowhere. It is not a welcoming place and I can tell already that I will be pleased to leave. As we walk across the sun-bleached gravel I notice a lone soldier furiously working out on a punchbag. It is an almost surreal image. He is dripping with sweat and as we pass by he stops, smiles and says in a thick Scottish accent, ‘Beli
eve me, it helps,’ then continues punching.

  Woody tells Simon to get his men to clear an area outside the camp where the devices are to be blown up. He warns him that even though we are now within the confines of the camp everyone must treat the area beyond the wire as though they were inside enemy territory. ‘A few weeks ago a guy was killed walking to the ranges just outside Camp Bastion. The insurgents had been watching us beyond the wire there and probably thought, that’s an opportunity target. Maybe the troops had become a bit slack and weren’t clearing the areas properly, and the Taliban probably assumed our guard would be down because the ranges are so close to Camp Bastion – a massive base with thousands of soldiers, and let’s face it, who would think that the Taliban would have the balls to plant a device there? But after every range practice you get locals coming up to the ranges to collect the empty bullet cases and melt them down and sell the stuff.

  ‘Someone managed to get a device in and bury it without being seen, and from their point of view they got a result. The next morning a group of new guys go up to the range as part of their training package and someone steps on the bomb. They should have cleared all the way there and cleared their range area. Maybe they did and missed it, and maybe they didn’t. The guy who died had only been in Afghan a week – that’s not a good way to go. So make sure they don’t get too relaxed – the threat is everywhere. If it can happen in Bastion, it can happen here.’

  Simon acknowledges Woody’s concern and heads off to brief the search team.

  The soldier to whom Woody is referring was Lance Corporal James Hill of 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, who was killed on 8 October 2009, just a week after he arrived in Helmand.

  After meeting the base commander, Major Iain Lindsay-German of the Scots Guards, I accompany Woody to the Unexploded Ordnance, or UXO, pit just outside the main defensive Hesco wall of the base. Our small unit of four is led to a small, designated area where two yellow palm-oil containers are sitting in the dust.

  ‘Who brought them in?’ Woody asks one of the guardsmen.

  ‘The ANP, a couple of days ago. They said they found them on a track, pulled them out of the ground and brought them in. They pulled the detonators out with their hands. Can you believe it?’ says the soldier, shaking his head.

  Now Woody is bent over one of the palm-oil containers, looking but not touching. He has found the hole housing the detonator and he is peering inside. ‘I don’t know why the ANP feel the need to dig these out of the ground and bring them in. They won’t listen and it’s not as though they haven’t taken casualties. They’ve had guys killed and injured, they know the risks, and they still keep doing it. We keep telling them, “Just mark them and tell us and we’ll sort them out.” Do they listen? Do they fuck.’

  Woody explains that although the ANP are not yet issued with mine detectors they are very good at spotting ground sign or manage to persuade the local population to tell them where bombs have been hidden.

  ‘That one’s safe,’ he says, pointing to the larger of the two containers before carrying out the same forensic examination of the second bomb. Two minutes later Woody declares that both bombs are safe. He explains that the ANP disconnected the pressure plates, the detonators and the power sources when they were discovered a few days ago, but his examination was to ensure there ‘weren’t any surprises for us’.

  He continues, ‘The other reason why we want the ANP to mark and avoid and then tell us is because by the time they’ve pulled them out of the ground they’ve handled the det, the pressure plate, the power source, so there is virtually no chance that we can get any forensics. Part of the problem is that the ANP are always trying to demonstrate that they are fearless and strong. We used to get the same problem with the Afghan Army but they are a much more professional outfit now and they’ve got the message. Strength and courage are really important in the Afghan culture and they think that we might question their courage if they find a bomb and leave it. Instead they pull it out of the ground, risking life and limb, and bring it in as if to say, “Look how brave I am.”’

  Unfortunately for the ANP, the Taliban have noticed their propensity for perceived bravery and have started to modify basic pressure-plate devices by attaching a pressure-release switch. This is nothing sophisticated and can be as basic as the type of switch which turns on the interior light of a car. The unsuspecting ANP officer who finds the bomb will cut the power supply from the pressure plate in the belief that the bomb has been rendered safe, only for it to explode when he releases the pressure by pulling the bomb out of the ground.

  Woody lifts up the larger of the two containers and says, ‘That one weighs about 20 kg. That would have been enough to take out a vehicle.’ Pointing to the other, he adds, ‘That’s got about 10 kg of HME. That would definitely kill or injure. At the very least it’s going to take your legs off and it would probably destroy a smaller vehicle. So we’ve got two bombs, one larger than the other, and we know that they were placed along the same stretch of track, so that makes you wonder what the Taliban were trying to achieve. I think they were probably trying to take out a vehicle and then get another casualty with the small device in a follow-up clearance.’

  Warriors have been used elsewhere in Helmand since 2007, but they have been in this part of the province for only a matter of weeks. The Taliban are masters of observation. Whenever any new unit, piece of equipment or type of vehicle arrives in an area the local commander will almost always start a small-scale intelligence-gathering operation before attempting to carry out an attack. The Taliban will simply watch, wait, record, and then react.

  Although there is some migration of Taliban tactics across Helmand, some units of insurgents can become quite insular and dislocated from the main Taliban central command. If the Taliban were a pan-Afghan cohesive force conducting mutually supporting operations across Helmand and the rest of the country, they would pose a much greater threat to NATO. But since 2006, when British troops first entered Helmand, their tactics, although often deadly, have never really moved beyond ‘shoot and scoot’.

  Sitting down by the two bombs, Woody begins to explain how the Taliban are becoming increasingly sophisticated in some of their attacks. ‘One of the current concerns is that the Taliban will try and take out a Warrior – that would be a bit of a coup for them. The Warriors have only been in this part of Helmand for a few weeks and we know the Taliban are looking and watching. They have all the time in the world, so it is easy for them to put a device in with a certain amount of explosive, say 10 kg, and wait and see what effect that will have on a Warrior. The type of vehicle you have will reflect the size of the main charge the Taliban use. Taliban tactics aren’t haphazard; they may have been a bit like that a couple of years ago, but not any more. They are still basically hit-and-run but with a lot of thought behind them. They will put a 10 kg device in the road and see what happens. The next day or week another one will go in with 15 kg and then another with 20 kg, until they get the desired effect, and they will build their tactics around what happens. They’re in no rush, they have no timeframe, they are always going to be here. The clock is ticking for us, not them.’

  Woody is ready to dispose of the two bombs but the search team have failed to materialize. I can sense his frustration but he keeps his thoughts private. Rather than wait for the searchers to turn up, Woody decides to reconnoitre an area 200 metres to the front of the base, in what is effectively no man’s land. I watch him disappear into the distance, clearing the ground in front of his feet with the Vallon. One of the Scots Guardsmen with our team senses my concern for Woody and assures me that he is pretty safe. ‘He will be covered by the sangar and the boys up there have got a .50-cal HMG and a 7.62-mm GPMG and a sniper.’

  Ten minutes later Woody returns to the perimeter wall. ‘Right, I’ve found a site – it’s about 200 metres north from here. Boonie, I’ll need a couple of sticks of PE and we’ll blow the two bombs together. Any sign of the search team?’

  ‘Haven
’t seen them,’ replies Boonie.

  In the world of IED disposal it is vital that rules and procedures are followed to the letter and that when an order is given it is acted on. Every member of the IEDD and search teams must have an absolute understanding of their role and that of every member of the team. Woody likes to run a relaxed ship but that method of leadership will only work if everyone toes the line. ‘OK,’ he says to no one in particular, ‘there are going to have to be words.’

  Twenty minutes later Woody returns and tells Boonie that the bombs are primed and ready to be blown. He has placed a couple of sticks of military-grade plastic explosive between the two containers and attached a detonator to a length of det cord which is connected to the PE. Woody hands Boonie a length of wire the end of which is connected to the detonator 200 metres in the distance. Our small party moves back inside the camp and takes cover behind an 8 ft Hesco wall.

  ‘Get ready for a loud bang,’ says Woody, now smiling again. Boonie shouts, ‘Controlled explosion in figures two,’ then repeats the warning. Two minutes later he presses a black button on his green firing box and, almost instantaneously, a massive explosion fills the air around us. I can feel the force of the blast in the pit of my stomach and within a few seconds pieces of the desert which have been sucked into a large mushroom cloud begin to shower down on us. The massive explosion was caused by just 30 kg of home-made explosive and it seems almost impossible that anything, apart from the largest and most heavily armoured tank, would escape either total destruction or severe damage. The effect on a human body would be devastating. ‘If you stepped on something that big you would be vaporized,’ says Woody. ‘You would be literally blown to pieces, but the pieces would be very small. There wouldn’t really be anything left to send home.’