Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (35 page)

Somewhere over the Gulf, an announcement on the intercom informs us that as part of the RAF’s ‘beers for the boys’ programme we are all entitled to a can of lager or bitter. A few of the more boisterous soldiers cheer. It’s 6 a.m. The beer tastes good and I sleep soundly.

The TriStar enters UK airspace and down below I can see the green English countryside – and the contrast with Helmand is striking. It’s almost like flying into another world, and suddenly I’m hit with a wave of euphoria. The aircraft lands at Birmingham Airport to offload the injured. The detour adds another hour to our journey but no one complains. The soldiers stare, some with watery eyes, as their colleagues are taken to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital at Selly Oak, to begin another journey.

Finally, the Tristar lands at RAF Brize Norton and everyone is eager to depart and join loved ones. As we walk across the tarmac to the arrival lounge we are lashed by rain and wind, but it feels good.

There is no ceremony, no fanfare, as soldiers hug wives and children. The women look happier than the men, many of whom have left behind friends who will never return. ‘Why them and not me?’ some are no doubt wondering.

On the long taxi ride to my home in Kent I reflect on the war in Afghanistan and how it has developed. The mistakes, the setbacks and the successes, of which there are painfully few. After years of fighting in Helmand, we are told that NATO has a strategy capable of delivering progress. It is instructive that few, if any, generals or politicians will use ‘victory’ or even ‘success’ to define NATO’s desired end state. Today the key phrase is progress. Progress, I suppose, allows a greater degree of flexibility than success or victory and, given that Afghanistan was the epitome of the failed state up until 2001, progress is easier to achieve.

David Cameron has decided that British forces will not play a part in combat operations after 2015. By then, in theory, the Afghan security forces should be able to cope on their own. Britain and other NATO countries will still have a mentoring role; they will still help to train and shape the Afghan Army. But what happens if the Taliban become more capable and the Afghan Army are unable to deliver success? Are British troops simply going to cut and run or refuse to leave their bases as the Taliban kill and butcher their way to Kabul? Where is the ‘Plan B’? The reality is that NATO and the West are now drinking in the last chance saloon. This is the last role of the dice – there is no ‘Plan B’.

As I walk through the front door of my house my two sons, Luca and Rafe, and Daisy, the family dog, attack me. I kneel on one knee and my wife joins the happy scrum. Tears well in my eyes as I think of all those who have died and what their families will miss.

Ten days after I left FOB Shawqat, Woody’s CIED team, Brimstone 32, were dispatched on a short-notice mission to help extricate a Mastiff patrol which had become marooned in Taliban territory after striking an IED. The bomb hunters were flown by helicopter to a patrol base in the north of the Nad-e’Ali district before linking up with cordon troops who had moved into the area to help protect the stranded patrol.

The soldiers from 1st Battalion Royal Welsh battlegroup had become trapped in what was effectively an improvised minefield. The two Mastiffs were stuck on a narrow track bordered by a canal on one side and a high mud wall on the other, with at least one IED at the front and another at the rear. The challenge for Woody was to free the troops within the four remaining hours of daylight. Earlier the Royal Welsh troops had moved down the track as part of a routine security patrol. Some of the soldiers had dismounted from the vehicles to clear the road ahead with their Vallons. As they moved towards a track junction, an IED was discovered. With no room to manoeuvre, the patrol commander decided to withdraw, at which stage the troops came under Taliban fire. As one vehicle moved forward to engage the enemy it struck another, undiscovered IED. The blast blew a wheel off the vehicle but the crew and troops inside were unharmed. After the firing subsided, the long process began of reversing the vehicles, including the damaged Mastiff, back up the previously cleared route. A few minutes later another IED was found which had been missed on the route in. The troops were trapped.

‘It took us forty-five minutes to clear a safe lane down to where the Mastiffs were stuck,’ recalled Woody. ‘Almost straight away you could see that it was a pretty good ambush site. I could see where the first IED was almost as soon as I arrived. It was a low-metal pressure-plate device with a remote power pack, which is why it was missed in the first search.’ The bomb was pulled from the ground using a hook and line and the main charge of around 20 kg was blown.

The bomb hunters came under fire almost from the moment they arrived in the area. The accuracy varied: some of it was poor, but other rounds came close, hitting the wall along the side of the track just above the soldiers’ heads. But returning fire was a problem for the British and Afghan soldiers on the cordon, who risked a blue-on-blue incident unless targets could be clearly identified.

The bomb hunters cleared a safe path down to the second of the two vehicles and discovered a further two IEDs. Woody isolated the power supply to each bomb and began attempting to extract the first device using the hook and line, but it was stuck fast.

Woody wrapped the line around his hand and told the other team members, Boonie, his No. 2, and Baggage, the ECM operator, to stop pulling, but the message wasn’t properly heard or understood. And, determined to shift the bomb, the other searcher gave the line one last, violent tug. The bones in the first two fingers of Woody’s right hand snapped like dry twigs and his palm was sliced open. He collapsed to his knees in agony.

Sergeant Simon Fuller, the RESA, assumed that Woody would have to be evacuated back to base and another ATO flown in. But Woody refused and insisted that a medic dress the wound, splint his fingers, and put his arm in a sling. Within fifteen minutes Woody, who was sweating with pain, was back at work. ‘No one else was going to come in – there wasn’t the time. So you just get on with it. I’m right-handed, so that presented a bit of a problem. I’d never defused bombs with my left hand before.’

Using just his left hand and while in considerable pain, Woody neutralized a further three devices in twenty minutes. With the track now clear the Mastiffs began to reverse slowly back along it. It was a process fraught with danger, especially for the driver of the damaged Mastiff, which was manoeuvring on just three wheels. A misjudgement could have easily caused the vehicle to tumble down the embankment into the canal. Manoeuvring 800 metres along the track took almost two hours, and by the time the patrol reached the edge of the cordon it was almost dark. The delay was caused by a fifth bomb, which had been missed on the initial move down the track. As with the previous four devices, Woody removed the power source and blew the main charge.

Exhausted but safe, the bomb hunters were flown back to FOB Shawqat later that evening. Woody’s exploit that day were not forgotten. No one would have blamed him had he chosen to withdraw from the operation for medical attention. But he chose not to. He didn’t want to leave his team behind and he wanted to finish the mission. It was a staggering feat of ordnance disposal by Woody, who for most of the operation was both under fire and in great pain.

After Woody returned from two weeks of much-needed R&R at the beginning of June, he felt as if he had landed in another country. The harvest, which had kept many ‘part-time’ Taliban fighters in the fields, was over and the number of attacks increased massively. On 27 June Corporal Jamie Kirkpatrick, known as KP, who was serving with 101 Engineer Regiment (EOD), was shot dead in the area of Nahr-e-Seraj. His death came at the beginning of a bloody six-week period for the CIED Task Force which saw the unit suffer three KIAs and about a dozen serious casualties.

On 8 July Woody’s team returned to the patrol base line close to PB Malvern, east of Gereshk, in an area which in recent months had become increasingly kinetic. Woody knew the area well. Back in April his team had been blown up by a command-wire IED and his ECM operator had suffered minor shrapnel wounds. But 8 July would be different. The mission that day was to find and clear at least three command wires in a wood line some 200 metres from PB Malvern. Brimstone 32 woke at 4 a.m. and were ready for action at the outer cordon of troops, who had secured the area within the hour.

As the sun began to rise Woody and his team of bomb hunters began searching. During the isolation search of the area the team discovered three command-wire devices, none of which were the ones they had been originally sent to clear. By 8.30 a.m. a good part of the area had been covered and cleared and the team began the hunt for the final command wire. Woody told two of his searchers to move to a tree line about 5 metres from where he was standing. The soldiers moved off one behind the other, about 5 metres apart, in single file with the lead searcher at the front. The tranquillity of the early-summer morning was destroyed by a massive explosion. The lead searcher had stepped on a low-metal victim-operated IED. The force of the blast knocked Woody to the ground. Initially he and the team assumed they had been attacked by an RPG.

‘There was this massive explosion. It was quite disorientating and I couldn’t see a great deal because of the dust. The search team leader said that it had come from an area where his two searchers were working. I told everyone to stand still, grabbed a Vallon and began to clear a path up to the site of the explosion. My ears were ringing from the blast and I realized at this stage that someone had probably stood on a pressure plate.’

Woody inched his way forward, listening for the quietest of Vallon alarm tones. He knew that the bomb would have been missed only if it had had a very low metal content.

‘I got to the site of the explosion and I saw the lead searcher sat there with no legs. I shouted back that he was alive and called for medics. I then began to search around the area of the crater to make sure it was safe and all the time in my head I was saying, oh my God, oh my God, because I knew I was going to have to get in there and sort him out. We were talking to one another. I was saying, “Don’t worry, mate, you’re gonna be OK, I’ll be with you in a minute” – stuff like that.’

Once the immediate area was cleared, Woody jumped into the hole and began applying tourniquets to the shattered limbs.

‘He was fully conscious, although in shock. There was no screaming, in fact he was being a bit humorous. He had been talking about buying a new car when he returned to the UK and he was saying stuff like, “Now that I’ve lost my legs I’ll have to buy an automatic.”’

The medics, who had accompanied the bomb hunters for the clearance operation, arrived within a few minutes and the casualty was evacuated back to Camp Bastion by helicopter. Woody continued, ‘It was pretty shocking, horrendous to be honest, not something I would like to experience again.’ After the casevac, the search was abandoned and Woody’s team were withdrawn back to Camp Bastion. Such was the damage to Woody’s hearing that he was not allowed to deploy on operations for the rest of the tour, which ended at the beginning of August.

On 17 July 2010, just over a week after Woody’s team was blown up, Staff Sergeant Brett Linley, a fellow ATO and close friend of Woody’s, was killed while attempting to neutralize a device in the Nahr-e-Seraj area. He was 29 years old. The death hit Woody hard. In the space of a little over six months two of his closest friends had been killed and many more injured. Nine days later Sapper Mark Smith, 26, who was serving with 36 Engineer Regiment (EOD), who was also a member of the CIED Task Force, was blown up and killed in Sangin.

The deaths brought to a bloody close Woody’s tour, during which time he was blown up for times and defused more than fifty bombs. He survived, he believes, because he was lucky. Like most of the ATOs I have interviewed for this book, Woody believes the tour length of six months is too long.

‘At some time your luck has to run out, so the more bombs you do, the more risk you take. Four months would be fair. It wouldn’t have saved Brett’s life but some of the others might have made it back. We made it back because I had a brilliant team and we were lucky. But the war goes on.’

After returning to the UK I interviewed Staff Sergeant Kim Hughes, who won the George Cross in August 2009 for an outstanding act of gallantry. I wanted to know whether he thought the tour length of six months was too long for a high-threat operator. The interview took place in the presence of a senior officer, but Hughes was undaunted.

When he serving was in Afghanistan, Hughes found himself face to face with Bob Ainsworth, the then Defence Secretary, who was visiting the country. ‘What would make a difference to your life in Afghanistan?’ Ainsworth asked, no doubt hoping for an answer to which he could positively respond. ‘More troops,’ replied Hughes, who went on to tell reporters who witnessed the exchange, ‘What was he going to do, send me home? It has been a ridiculously busy, ridiculously hard tour. We have lost two guys. Clearly more troops are needed on the ground, but then the same could be said for equipment.’

Staff Sergeant Hughes answered my question about the current length of the tour by recalling an incident which took place on his very first operation. ‘On our very first job someone was shot – it was a one-in-a-million chance,’ he said as we sat in a classroom at the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search School at Kineton. ‘We were doing compound clearances on an operation. One of the guys went into a compound which was supposed to be clear, and was chased out by a dog. This thing was massive – it was the size of a bear, and one of my searchers, Sapper Harry Potter, spun round and shot the dog. If he hadn’t the dog would have mauled the searchers. Unfortunately the round passed through the dog, hit the floor, ricocheted off the wall, bounced off another wall at forty-five degrees, and hit one of my searchers in the face. The bullet passed through his eye and went into his brain. He survived but he was in a bad way for a while. It was our first operation, and that wasn’t good at all. It was no one’s fault but it was the worst possible way to start a six-month tour. That’s what can happen in Afghan.

‘The bomb teams are out on the ground every day neutralizing stupid amounts of devices. But I always felt under control. I had a fantastic search team – I thought they were the best in theatre. I trusted them with my life. At the end of the tour we were all completely knackered. Six months is a long time for what we do in Afghanistan. We were all exhausted. I’d say it was too long; four months would be about right. Everyone who goes out to Afghan has a job to do, but going out neutralizing bombs day in day out is too long. It’s not just bombs; it’s being a soldier as well. Gone are the days when the RLC guys could say, “I’ll leave that to the infantry.” Now, in Afghan, whatever job you do, you are always a soldier first. During operations the bomb-hunting teams can expect to be in full-on contact with the enemy. They will be at the point when they are on their last magazine of ammunition, and then, when the firefight has been won, they still have to go forward to find and clear bombs and then come back to the base and do it again, every day for six months. I’d say it was too long, absolutely, much too long. Six months is a long time for doing what we do – it should be four months. The consequences of that, well, who knows? Would those guys still be alive today? I don’t know. Four days later I had to take my team into Wishtan, an area in Sangin where lots of searchers had been killed and injured. I was pretty worried about the job. Two guys had been killed, Sergeant Paul McAleese and Private Jonathon Young. The soldier stepped on a pressure plate and was killed and the sergeant went in to get him and he was killed. For me that was one of the most scary jobs we did because then Wishtan was a very, very dangerous place.

‘When I did the job for which I was awarded the GC I was at the five-month point and I’d defused eighty devices – that’s a lot. I was pretty tired by then. Guys are going out every day clearing a ridiculous number of bombs.’

Every member of the bomb-hunting teams mentioned in this book will return to Helmand in the next two to three years for another six-month tour of duty.