After a week staying in Camp Victory we were all looking forward to getting down to our new camp in the holy city of An Najaf. It was an hour-and-a-half drive south from Baghdad but was mainly on good roads. We were picked up by a group of US Army guys in four humvees and two Ford F350s — four-door, bright white pick-up trucks. None of them were armoured and one of them had a tray on the back like a small truck. This hummer did, however, have a .50 calibre machine gun mounted on the back, which made me feel a little better. Before we left they briefed us on what we could expect and what we should do in case of any contact with the enemy on our way down. It was then that I realised that these guys were National Guard who had only been in Iraq for a week. In fact less than two months ago they were working civvy jobs with no prior military experience other than one weekend a month and two weeks a year. They admitted they had never been to Najaf before, but they had a map and reckoned it ‘should’ be okay.
During the brief they were talking to us as if none of us had any military experience at all. It was getting to the point where it was embarrassing until one of the guys in the group just stepped in and told the young commander that we all had prior military experience. The young sergeant commented with a smirk on his face that it would have been a long time since any of us had seen a uniform. Instantly, every single one of us put him and his men in their place. All but one of us had done at least 20 years of full-time service and that guy had only a week ago resigned as a captain from the Aussie Army. Most of us including me had been deployed to many combat situations during our military career. However, because I was the only ex-infantry soldier in the group I was the only one who had been awarded the Infantry Combat Badge. It was obvious that these weekend warriors were trying to be as tough as they could be. Unfortunately for them their first assignment was escorting a bunch of ex-military smartarse Australians who took great pride in shooting them down in flames. We all split up and got into the hummers and the F350 pick-ups. I ended up in the rear of the flat bed with the guy with the .50 cal. We must have made our point during the briefing because the second we were out of the Camp Victory gate the bloke who was manning the machine gun asked me if I would mind holding onto his M16 during the trip in case we did run into any trouble. Obviously I gratefully accepted. We arrived in Najaf about an hour and a half later with no trouble at all during the trip.
Our new camp was an old Iraqi ammunition supply point (ASP). What used to be the barracks and offices were shot to bits. There were two old tents set up that were supposed to be our living quarters and a dozen or so portable toilets that reeked so badly you could smell them 100 metres away. There was no perimetre fence at all other than a small pile of sand — a berm — about a metre high. The view from the camp was awe inspiring. As far as the eye could see was nothing but sand, dust and the horizon. There were a few igloo-shaped dirt piles off in the distance that we recognised as ammunition bunkers. These bunkers were soon to become the biggest and most dangerous pains in the arse that any explosive ordnance technician had ever encountered on the planet and I doubt ever will again.
The American contingent for the project had arrived a few weeks prior to us and had set up in the tents. We all moved into an old brick building that was set up as an office and accommodation. This was to be our ‘base camp’ for the better part of a year. The only security personnel on site were a platoon of Honduran soldiers who obviously didn’t want to be there and two ex-US Army turned security guards, one of them a hopeless alcoholic called Viper.
When I first met him he introduced himself as John something, then ‘but my friends call me Viper.’
I said, ‘Pleased to meet you, John.’ There were also a small group of Polish EOD techs camped in a tent beside us who were also blind rotten drunk every night.
We were soon to find out that the food here was crap. The Hondurans would bring us what looked like scraps from their own mess hall in Najaf City. I think each one of us preferred to eat US Army issue ration packs and they were possibly the second worst thing I have ever passed over my gums. During this whole time there wasn’t any one day that at least one of us didn’t have diarrhoea and believe me it was definitely the worst case of the shits that any of us had ever had. Most of the time we ended up on an IV drip just so we wouldn’t dehydrate. Anything we drank or ate would go straight through without stopping even to say hi to any of the major organs.
All of us were sleeping on folding camp beds in our army issue sleeping bags up one end of the old building. The snoring and farting going on in that building of a night-time was incredible. I think that only a couple of people ever got any sleep and they were obviously the blokes doing the chainsaw impersonation. Believe me, snoring in a concrete building with concrete floors echoes like the Grand Canyon and the amount of flatulence would have lifted the Hindenburg.
5
Taking Inventory
North Korean 107mm High Explosive Rocket, R107
These were just another example of Iraq buying anything that other countries were selling cheap and in bulk. The North Korean 107mm High Explosive Rocket was originally designed and built by the Chinese and used a lot by the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. North Korea copied or attempted to copy most Chinese weapons and munitions. We destroyed literally thousands of Chinese and Korean rockets during our away missions. Because they contained and extremely high quantity of explosives plus the solid rocket fuel contained in their tail tubes they really made a nice crack when we set them off. We always lay them alternately top to tail so the High Explosive round would totally destroy the solid fuel, tail and base of the rocket.
We were woken up at 5am, 7 days a week, for a safety meeting at 5.30. The meetings normally went until 6am when we got into our F350 pick-ups and headed out into the ammunition supply point, about ten kilometres outside the city of An Najaf. The ammunition supply point itself was over 16 square kilometres of desert and had huge bunkers full of high explosive ammunition, bullets and missiles. There were piles of mortars and old artillery ammunition just lying in the desert. We never got to do a complete total count of it all simply because there was too much, but it had to be well over 200,000 tonnes of extremely dangerous munitions. And we were all in heaven — we were going to get to blow this stuff up. As Tripe said, we were being paid rock star wages to play with explosives and bombs. As far as we were concerned it was better than being a male gigolo at a Miss World pageant. In the past people working in our trade would be lucky to blow up a single piece of unexploded ordnance once a month during an army live fire exercise and here we were expected to blow up thousands every single day. We actually were chastised if our total weights were low for a day. These were never less than 50 tone of ammunition alone.
The large steel bunkers were built by a German company before the first Gulf War and were extremely well made. They were about 30 metres across and 15 metres high. They were constructed using very heavy rolled corrugated steel sheeting arched like a large igloo. The entrances were filled by huge shell-like blast-proof doors that took a lot of muscle to open and close due to the fact they were large enough to fit a large truck through and probably weighed 5 to 10 tonne each side. There were two long bars on each side that turned and locked the door closed from the inside. A smaller side door with locks similar to that you would expect to see on a ship was used to gain entrance inside. Again this door was blast-proof and very heavy. We used stainless steel pad locks to secure the doors from the outside and had each bunker numbered on each door. There were so many bunkers throughout the area that it took us weeks to remember the numbering system.
Initially we were responsible for completing some sort of inventory of what ammunition was on the site. The idiots back in the US who were calling the shots and making the ridiculous decisions had no idea of what we were up against. The very first bunker that I was sent to had a large amount of stick propellant scattered all over the ground out in front. Stick propellant looks a lot like large uncooked dark brown sticks of spaghetti and is basically gunpowder.
It comes in many forms but is mainly packed in thin cotton bags that fill the inside of an artillery shell. The other type of propellant we came across every day was basically an igniter propellant for the larger bags and looked like the guinea pig food my kids used to give their pets. This was also packed inside thin cotton bags, but a lot smaller.
Before the coalition forces could secure the ammunition supply point after the takeover of Baghdad the area was completely looted for anything the locals could get their hands on. Brass artillery cases and the copper rifling bands that surrounded the projectiles were the most valued, but simple items like wooden boxes and pallets that the ammunition was packed in were also bringing good money at the local markets. We often found small cold chisels made from car axles lying in the bunkers and handmade mallets that the looters used to bash the bands off with.
It was obvious that the locals were either desperate or stupid and more than likely both for them to sit on top of a 155 millimetre artillery round that was filled with high explosives and even had a fuse fitted into the nose, and beat the crap out of it for 5 cents worth of copper. A few of the bunkers had been blown up from the inside proving that it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Not far from one of the bunkers we found a hand dried up in the desert sand that had been blown off at the wrist. Again the Aussie warped sense of humour came out in us when Flash put a packet of M&Ms in the open palm so everyone could get a photo.
The result from the looting made the job of conducting an accurate inventory of all the bunkers an almost impossible task. The bunkers had propellant piled up in places over a metre high. A single spark — even a static charge from a woollen coat — would ignite the whole lot in less than a second and incinerate us all instantly. The ‘official’ term for all of this stuff was ‘captured enemy ammunition’ or CEA. Apparently Saddam’s purchasing people just bought whatever they could get their hands on, whether they had the weapons to fire it from or not. A lot of the ammunition in these bunkers was given to Iraq by countries like the United States during the war between Iraq and Iran. One of these bunkers had thousands of 155 millimetre howitzer high explosive artillery projectiles with two shaking hands and ‘In mutual support from your friends in the United States of America’ sprayed on each and every round. Apparently all of Saddam’s howitzers were all wiped out during the first Gulf War anyway, so they were no good to him.
During the day the heat made work in these bunkers even more dangerous than ever. The propellant would sweat a form of nitroglycerine that made it even more volatile. Just touching the stuff would thin out your blood and cause the worst migraine headaches you can imagine. We had to take constant breaks and move outside the bunkers into the fresh air to get away from the fumes the propellant was giving off. Every single time we went in during the initial days at the ASP we were well aware of the dangers, but the knowledge that we were making huge salaries for our risks somehow justified what we were doing.
In amongst the mess in these bunkers was a mixture of every sort of explosive ordnance known to modern man manufactured by almost every nation with the technology to manufacture such items. We were given a list of ammunition and other explosive ordnance we were likely to encounter during our inventory and found almost every single item on the list. It was as if the US Army knew what was going to be found and just needed us to confirm their suspicions and count it.
6
Playing with Explosives
155mm High Explosive Fragmentation MK 10 Model 2
Made in Canada. This 155 millimetre bomb weighs 43 kilograms. Almost 7 kilograms of that is TNT; that leaves 36 kilograms of steel fragmentation cone that gets blown into white-hot razor sharp chunks of steel that vary in size from a baseball cap to a piece of sand. The 155 field Howitzer that fires this chunk of destruction can put a round in an area the size of a family car from almost 15 kilometres. The Iraqis love to use this piece of ordnance in roadside IEDs because of the after-effects from a single round.
One of the main problems we had with counting these bunkers out of Najaf had to do with the huge quantity of mixed ammunition in them and the fact that there was so much rubbish and crap thrown on top of it all. A couple of bunkers had mixed ammunition piled 3 metres deep from one end to the other. The fact that there were tonnes of very unstable propellant mixed in amongst it made it a very difficult and dangerous task.
During the early weeks at Najaf all of the teams on site used to rotate through working in the bunkers and picking up ammunition that was lying around in piles. These piles were normally stacked in openings in sand berms. The ammunition in these berms — walls that were just piles of sand — was stuff that the Iraqi Army still had weapons for.
We guessed that they knew that there was a good chance the bunkers would be blown up by coalition aircraft so they moved anything of value outside in smaller piles so that they would be less of a target and overlooked. It was a good job clearing these because it was all outside work and nowhere near as dusty as it was inside the igloo bunkers. There was still a huge propellant risk to deal with but because it was outside the headaches weren’t anywhere near as bad.
After a few weeks our staff of local labourers grew to just over 100 people. It was a huge relief for those of us who were actually working as we now could basically just supervise the locals. Although the majority of us got stuck in and worked shoulder to shoulder with them, there were still a lot of pure lazy bastards who just sat in the F350s all day with the air-conditioning on and although they did sweet FA they were always the ones who took credit for a good day’s work back at the office. Deep down I think the senior bosses knew who was doing all of the work but for some reason they protected the fat, lethargic bastards who supervised through a windscreen all day. It was extremely obvious of a morning when all of the Aussies and a few of the good Yanks would partner up in teams and all the dim-witted sloths would all head off telling each other how everyone else was useless and didn’t know one end of a bomb from another. Tripe and I just used to laugh at them and pull the piss out of them at every opportunity simply for sport — it was our only entertainment — and they bit back every time.
After training the local labourers to a level where they were competent enough to work safely inside the propellant-contaminated bunkers, we formulated a procedure that made the whole process a little less scary. We started off the day by picking up our own teams of around 20 men each and heading out to a specific bunker. Our mission was to leave each bunker with a clean dirt floor and have all of the ammunition properly stacked in large plywood boxes ready for demolition.
On arriving at the bunker we would drench the outside area with a water truck. This reduced the possibility of a spark igniting the propellant and also lessened the possibility of getting nitro headaches. We would then pick up all of the propellant and place it in shot boxes off to one side. Once that was done we picked up all of the ordnance lying around the outside in front of the doors.
We had a fleet of US Military pallet loading trucks. This truck was a fantastic piece of off-road machinery with ten-wheel drive and a six-wheel steering system. They all had an abbey crane behind the cab and a roll-on roll-off rear tray system that allowed you to drop the whole tray flat onto the ground for loading. When it was loaded you simply reversed back to the tray and pulled it back up with a large hook. These trucks would pull up with large trailers loaded with at least 20 shot boxes that would be off loaded with large 966 Caterpillar forklifts.
The shot boxes we used were built by a local company that charged about USD$150 each for them. They were built out of 15 millimetre crappy ply and had a few pieces of cheap pine underneath so the forklift could get under them. The forklifts would pre-position the boxes in front of each bunker and then the water truck would come in again, hose and soak as far back into the bunker as it could reach. This was a good way to reduce the possibility of a spark but turned the whole place into a mud bath. Because most of this ordnance had been stacked up for so long there was easily a half inch o
f powder like dust over everything. A little bit of water would turn it into a sticky paste and too much would make the projectiles slippery and hard to handle. The latter is a bad thing considering that a lot of this ammunition was extremely unstable and dropping something like a fused 130 millimetre high explosive projectile onto its nose could really upset your weekend plans.
We would slowly make our way to the rear of the bunker laying each round as fast as safety would allow us into the shot boxes. When each box was loaded we would wrap three or four steel bands around it, write the contents on the side of the box and get the forklift to move it outside, and then repeat the process all over again until the bunker was completely empty.
It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. We had to mix each box with ordnance in a special way so that when the explosive charges were set on top the contents of the box would sympathetically detonate the rest of the ammunition in the box, especially the rounds on the bottom. To do this we would lay something like a 122 millimetre high explosive fragmentation artillery projectile, which has a relatively thin fragmentation band but has a large amount of explosives, inside the projectile itself either side of a piece of ammunition like a 152 millimetre armour piercing APHE, which works mainly on kinetic energy and has a very small amount of explosive. We would always make sure that each projectile with a large amount of explosive was lying on top of or beside another so during the domino effect of one projectile detonating the next and so on the projectiles with little explosive would be destroyed from their blast.
During the initial phase of loading these shot boxes we found many hundreds of thousands of projectiles that had a high explosive content and an almost equal amount of projectiles that didn’t. Unfortunately not all of the bunkers had a mix of high and low explosive rounds so we soon had to alter our system and shift all of the boxes to what we called the laydown lot, repack them there and then send them to the demolition range. If we didn’t mix them properly we would always end up with unexploded ordnance being kicked out of the blast and not detonated. This was a big pain in the arse as someone had to go out into the desert and pick all of this crap up again. Another problem we faced was that if we continued to use all high explosive ammunition in boxes not mixed with low yield explosive ordnance we would soon run out of the only one thing we had to get rid of all of the crap. We also discovered that the sloth teams were too lazy to set their boxes up properly in the bunkers and would send out boxes of straight high explosive ammunition and totally separate boxes of crap that wouldn’t completely detonate in a million years regardless of how much C4 you put on top of it.
Kicking Bombs Page 4