Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (15 page)

This lush and fertile area is important to the illegal but flourishing narcotics trade which has been steadily increasing in Helmand since the arrival of the NATO force in 2006. ‘That’s poppy, that’s poppy,’ Major Boanas says, pointing at the sea of green fields surrounding the patrol base. ‘All of those fields over there are poppy. Pretty much poppy all around,’ he says, smiling. ‘But that’s not our problem, that’s for the counter-narcotics people to resolve. The last thing we want to do is to bound in here and steal their livelihood.’

Back in November I took part in a routine patrol to the north of the PB. It was fairly straightforward, the sort of minor operation undertaken by thousands of British troops every day in Helmand. But it is while on exactly this type of patrol that our soldiers sustain the most fatalities and injuries. Every day, sometimes twice a day, troops leave the safety of their base armed to the teeth and ready to do battle with the Taliban. After six months very nearly every man will have been involved in a firefight and seen his brothers-in-arms killed and injured in battle. It is during these routine, everyday events that soldiers demonstrate real courage.

On 30 November 2009 Lieutenant Douglas Dalzell of 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was leading a patrol into the Padaka, an insurgent stronghold in Babaji. As the patrol moved along a track, the soldier directly in front of Lieutenant Dalzell triggered an IED. The blast punched him to the ground, leaving him stunned and disorientated. Staggering to his feet, he saw that the young soldier who had stepped on the bomb had lost a leg. Lieutenant Dalzell, who was just 26 and on his first operational tour, rallied his guardsmen while coordinating the evacuation of the wounded soldier. The plan was to move back down the same alleyway with the injured man being carried by a stretcher party composed of Sergeant Paul Baines, who was attached to the patrol, Sergeant John Amer, the platoon sergeant, and four other soldiers

As the troops moved off, Sergeant Amer stepped on a second bomb, which blew off both his legs and left him with mortal wounds. The soldier on the stretcher lost his remaining leg in this blast and every member of the stretcher party suffered serious shrapnel injuries, including Sergeant Baines, who was bleeding heavily from wounds to the head, neck, and legs. It was a scene of utter carnage and as Dalzell and Baines composed themselves, Taliban machine guns rattled into life. Dalzell immediately took control of the situation, directing his men to return fire and clear a safe route to a helicopter. While medics began treating Amer, Baines picked up the other double amputee and carried him in his arms across a ploughed field to a waiting helicopter. In total five casualties were evacuated, four of whom carried rank. Baines immediately recognized the weakened nature of the patrol and refused to be extracted. Instead he picked up his rifle and helped Dalzell in the move back to the PB. Only then did Baines reveal the extent of his wounds and submit to evacuation. A week later he discharged himself from the field hospital in Camp Bastion and was back on the ground fighting. Back in the PB, Lieutenant Dalzell had the difficult task of informing his men that his close friend and their platoon sergeant had died. Four hours later the platoon was back on patrol.

The above account illustrates graphically the grave risks soldiers have to take in order to conduct the most ordinary of tasks. Every unit which has served in Helmand can probably tell similar tales. Lieutenant Dalzell carried on leading 2 Platoon until his twenty-seventh birthday on 18 February 2010, when he stepped on an IED while on patrol in Babaji and was killed instantly. He was posthumously awarded a Military Cross.

During the first three weeks of June 2010 fourteen soldiers were killed in action during routine patrols across Helmand. In Sangin alone, while much of Britain fretted over the future of the English football team at the World Cup in South Africa, four Marines were killed on four consecutive days. The Ministry of Defence refuses to provide timely details of the number of troops wounded in Afghanistan, but instead publishes monthly figures stating the number of soldiers wounded in action, describing them as either ‘very seriously ill’ or ‘seriously ill’. The details of the appalling injuries being suffered daily in Helmand, such as double and triple amputation, blindness, paralysis, brain damage and battle shock, are excluded.

I have been on many patrols, both as an embedded journalist and, back in the late 1980s, as a serving soldier. To walk out of the relative safety of any military base into hostile enemy territory takes courage. While serving in Northern Ireland I learned to live with the knowledge that I, like every one of the other 13,000 or so soldiers based in the province at that time, was an IRA target. Hard targeting – rapid acceleration of a vehicle through the gates of a British Army base in order to provide a ‘hard target’ for an IRA sniper – at Woodburn RUC Police Station in West Belfast in 1989 as the second in command of B Company, 3 Para, or commanding a Close Observation Platoon in a covert reconnaissance patrol on the home of a known IRA player, was an unnerving experience. To control my fears I would focus on the detail of the planning of the patrol, the target, and my own personal administration tasks, thereby filling my head with positive information rather than allowing fear to take control. But back in those days it was fairly rare for British troops to be killed by the IRA: between 1989 and 1991, 3 Para, which was the resident battalion in the Belfast area, had four soldiers killed by terrorist attacks and a fifth killed by a joyrider. In Helmand a battlegroup can lose the same number of soldiers in a day.

In November 2009 I went on patrol with the Grenadier Guards’ Inkerman Company in the Chah-e-Anjir area. It was a routine local security patrol, the bread-and-butter work of the majority of soldiers in Helmand. But routine does not mean safe. A week earlier Kingsman Andrew Campbell, 18, from Wigan, serving with the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, had been shot through the face while taking part in his very first patrol. The bullet struck him in the cheek and exited through the back of his head. Miraculously, he survived and walked away from the battlefield, and after being evacuated back to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham made a full recovery. A week before that attack, Sergeant Nathan Cumberland, of the Grenadier Guards’ Reconnaissance Platoon, lost both legs after detonating an IED while on patrol. His section was moving across a field on a track used by locals and Sergeant Cumberland was number three in the line. The first two soldiers walked over the device and he stepped on the pressure plate. One of his legs was blown off immediately, while the other was attached by muscle.

In the weeks after he was injured I spoke to Nathan and he told me that he could actually see one of his legs in a field a few metres away. ‘I knew immediately what had happened and at that stage you wonder two things: will I live, and how much damage has been done? One of the first things I checked when I got back to the hospital at Camp Bastion was whether I still had the family jewels, and thankfully I did. But then the Taliban opened up on us – some of my lads were pretty shocked – I could tell by the look on their faces, but when the Taliban hit us I had to grip them and started telling the guys to return fire. We were at a real risk of taking more casualties.’ The follow-up attack after an IED strike is a classic Taliban ambush, and while it seems a brutal and cowardly tactic it makes perfect sense from the Taliban’s point of view. The British troops were extremely vulnerable – they had a seriously injured soldier and were probably more focused on casualty evacuation than on a Taliban attack.

Another time, in a somewhat bizarre shooting incident, Lieutenant Paddy Rice was shot and wounded while trying to move a radio on the roof of a checkpoint called Compound 23 in Chah-e-Anjir. Paddy, aged 25 at the time, was shot by a Taliban sharpshooter through a murder hole of a compound a few hundred metres away. The bullet struck him in the back, just beneath the armhole in his CBA, travelled up through his back, along the outside of his spine and through his neck, which was sliced open, exiting his body just beneath his right ear. The bullet then passed through his helmet. Paddy realized immediately that he had been shot but was unaware how lucky he had been until he was taken back to Camp Bastion. The wound required twenty-nine stitches, but three weeks later he was back on duty.

The patrol I accompanied was composed of around a dozen members of the Grenadier Guards company, together with a section of troops from the Afghan Task Force (ATF) – a semi-covert unit of Afghan soldiers specially selected and trained by members of the British Army base. The plan was for the patrol to move from the company headquarters, located at PB Shahzad, into the surrounding countryside, visit some of the British checkpoints and examine a small bridge which had been blown up a few days earlier by the Taliban.

Patrolling through the Green Zone is an unnerving experience for everyone. Attack can come from absolutely anywhere and almost always without warning. I can recall my nervousness walking through the gates of the camp and expecting to be hit at any moment. My stomach was turning, shivers were running down my spine, and sweat was dribbling down my back. In some parts of Helmand the threat from IEDs is so great that soldiers throw up before going out on patrol, and I was certainly feeling weak-kneed and nauseous myself. But for one of those who was on patrol with me, fear is no longer the enemy it once was. Guardsman David Walton, a fresh-faced 18-year-old, had learned through experience that there was no point in worrying about what might happen. David was already a veteran of several battles and appeared to enjoy life as a soldier in Helmand. He once aspired to play professional football and was a member of Coventry City’s youth team, but those dreams were shattered when he broke his leg badly during a match.

‘I enjoy it most of the time – the Army is like a big family, so it’s quite a lot of fun,’ David told me, wiping sweat from his brow as we took shelter from the intense sun during a break in the five-hour patrol. ‘It’s not often in life that you really get a chance to help people and defend the country, and that’s what I think we are doing here. But it can be a bit scary. A few weeks ago one of my mates stepped on an IED but it wasn’t connected. If it had been we could have all been killed. That was a bit of a wake-up call.’

As the patrol moved along the dusty tracks, the sound of gunfire and explosions could be heard in the distance but neither the soldiers nor the farmers toiling in the fields took any notice. It seemed that everyone had grown used to the sounds of war.

‘My parents do worry about me,’ David added. ‘Especially my mum. When I call home and she asks me how things are, I always play it down and just say, “I’m OK, everything’s fine.” There’s no point telling her about the deaths and the injuries, she would only worry.’

Our route should have taken us along a track with a 5 ft mud wall running along either side. The patrol was about 1.5 km from the main base and close to the FLET. The two Vallon operators moved forward and began to scan the walls and the track. Within a few metres they began to get high tones, so a halt was immediately called. Captain Florinin Kuku, who was leading the patrol, decided that to proceed on the planned route was too risky. The Nigerian-born captain is one of the few soldiers in the British Army who has actually detonated a pressure-plate IED and managed not to lose a limb. He was blown up in 2007 near Gereshk, during the Grenadier Guards’ first tour in Helmand. Fortunately for him, IEDs were still in their infancy.

‘We are getting some pretty high readings along the walls and the track, so we are going to change our route and cut across that field,’ Captain Kuku told me after we arrived at one of the bases we were visiting on the patrol. ‘I doubt whether there are any IEDs along that route because it’s obviously being used by the locals and you would think they would know. But sometimes they just avoid the bombs and continue to walk along the same route because they know exactly where the bombs are. Frankly, for us it’s not worth the risk.’

As we cut across the ploughed field I begin to feel horribly exposed and vulnerable. I’m staring at the ground, trying to walk in the footsteps of the person in front of me. The nausea returns and my stomach begins to turn over. Images of myself reeling in agony on the ground, holding two bloody, mutilated stumps, begin to fill my head and it takes all my inner strength to carry on walking. I’m expecting an explosion with each wincing step. It is a feeling I’ve had many times before and my only solace is that I know it will pass. Later I take comfort from the soldiers who tell me that they have exactly the same feelings every time they leave the base. ‘Only a fool wouldn’t be scared,’ Captain Kuku tells me.

As we move towards the first checkpoint on the patrol, Captain Kuku spots a tourniquet lying on the ground. He tells one of the soldiers to take a note of the grid coordinates of the tourniquet from his satnav, and then explains that there’s a possibility the tourniquet could be linked to an IED. ‘That,’ he says, pointing at the tourniquet, ‘is unusual. It could have fallen from a soldier, or could have been used and discarded after someone was injured. But it’s definitely Army-issue. We know that the Taliban are attaching IED to pieces of NATO military equipment so that if it’s picked up by a soldier it will be detonated. The IRA used to do the same sort of thing. The basic rule is: “Never pick up anything on patrol.” We mark and avoid and then call in the details when we get back to the PB. Next time we have an ATO up here, if there is time, we’ll take him on patrol and get him to clear all the suspected IEDs. Until then we’ll just leave it.’

After we move into the checkpoint, a small compound occupied by a section of Grenadier Guards, I strike up a conversation with a corporal from another unit, working alongside the ATF. He tells me that he was here a few months ago, before the arrival of the Grenadier Guards, when the area was swarming with Taliban. ‘We were just moving across a field, which we just crossed and we were ambushed. It was pretty cheeky. I was almost cut off from the rest of my section – one of the Tiger Teams. But the lads did really well. They put into practice everything they had learned in training and we managed to extract under fire.’ Tiger Teams are the specially trained units of the ATF and they are in great demand across the whole of Helmand. The Tiger Teams’ members are all volunteers, mostly from areas outside Helmand, and they are trained and selected by special units within the British Army. Those who make the grade join the ATF, while those who fail are used as members of force protection teams guarding the camp.