Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit (21 page)

‘They are all the same fucking overpaid knobs,’ complains Richie. ‘I get paid £64 a day to find IEDs and they get paid 100 grand a week to play football. Why is that fair? People think football is pressurized but if you want some real pressure come out here and be the lead searcher in the team.’

After twenty minutes of searching Woody discovers the IED in the doorway. It’s a straightforward pressure-plate anti-personnel IED designed to kill or blow the legs off the victim – soldier, policeman, civilian, boy, girl.

Woody, working with the dexterity and intensity of a vascular surgeon, eventually picks out a wire connecting the bomb to the power supply. It’s the breakthrough he has been hoping for. He loads the IED weapon and carefully positions it so that when it is fired by Boonie back in the ICP, the bomb should, in theory, be neutralized. There are no time limits. As bomb hunters say, short cuts are the quickest route to an early grave.

Woody returns to the ICP and explains to Kev and Boonie the layout of the device. The explosive is contained within a yellow-plastic 5-litre palm-oil container, the detonator has been improvised, and the pressure plate is relatively standard, although it contains very little metal.

Taking off his helmet, Woody wipes the sweat from his brow. He is red from the heat and his eyes are bloodshot. He explains, ‘The device is definitely big enough to kill a soldier, that is what it was designed to do. It was a classic booby-trap, if you like, just placed in front of the door. The insurgents were hoping that someone would just walk into the compound, possibly as part of a route search, and would step on the device. It was probably aimed at either the ANP or ANA – I think they know by now that British soldiers don’t walk through the doors of derelict compounds, especially those that were former Taliban firing points.’

‘Controlled explosion in figures five,’ announces Boonie. Five seconds later he remotely fires the IED weapon. A loud pop echoes around us. The wires are cut and the bomb should now be safe. But as there is always the risk of a secondary device Woody must take great care.

He leaves the device to ‘soak’ for a few minutes. The amount of time an ATO allows the device after he has remotely cut the wires is up to him. Some wait ten minutes, others might wait thirty minutes or even an hour. A lot depends on the operational situation.

Woody leans back and is almost lost among the green stalks of young wheat. He clasps his hands behind his head and closes his eyes, and I think he is about to take a quick nap, but then adds, ‘The Taliban know that we carry out certain actions when we are working on a bomb. They know we return to the device after a certain amount of time, so you need to vary the time you return. It’s all about not setting patterns, otherwise one day you are going to get caught out. They have already tried to booby-trap devices, to target the operators. They might put another switch into the main charge so that if you try and lift the main charge out by hand then the device could explode. So we always try and remove the main charge by remotely removing it, which means pulling it out with a bit of rope and a hook so that if it does go bang you’re OK.’

After several minutes Woody prepares to extract the bomb from the ground using a hook and line. It’s an unsophisticated piece of kit but it works perfectly well. It allows the bomb to be pulled from the ground from a distance. ATOs have learned to their cost over the past thirty years that most of the actions they make while defusing bombs should be done from as far away as possible. By using the hook and line, Woody can pull the bomb out of the ground from more than 50 metres away if necessary. If there is a second bomb it will detonate now. But the ground is rock hard and it takes the combined strength of Woody and Boonie to pull it out. Everyone waits for an explosion which doesn’t come.

Woody returns to the compound with Corporal Richard Lacey, the weapons intelligence specialist, who photographs all of the components so that they can be studied in detail later. The pressure plate and the detonator are retrieved and placed in plastic bags for further forensic examination, but the explosive will be blown up inside the compound.

Corporal Adam Butler, the acting team commander, who took over when Loz was killed, has soft, kind eyes and the demeanour of a man who encourages others through gentle persuasion rather than aggressive shouting. He has a rich country accent and despite his age – he, like the others, is only in his twenties – is now on his second tour in Helmand. I ask him what life is like for a high-risk search team. ‘You get used to the dangers but you never get complacent,’ he tells me. ‘We know what the Taliban are trying to do and we just have to stay one step ahead. Team work is our route to making it out of Helmand alive. If someone makes a mistake, then he or all of us could be killed or injured. We can’t afford to have a bad day or switch off, so the pressure can be phenomenal, but I think we’ve all grown used to that. We all share the same risk, but Richie, as the lead searcher, does more searching, so I suppose you could argue that he is more at risk. He was the lead searcher when Loz was alive and so I decided to keep him as the lead when I took over. It’s not good to change things around too much.

‘But sometimes I might switch it around if we are doing lots of searches in one day – just to give Richie a rest. The other day when we did a route search there were quite a lot of isolations. We ended up doing about eight isolations over about seven or eight hours. Richie was in and out of the ditches all day long and so we changed things around a bit just to give him a break. You’ve got to rest them, otherwise they can go stale.’

The lead searcher is something of a talisman for the team, because their lives depend on him. Soldiers are very superstitious and it is very important that his mates believe Richie is a naturally lucky person. His role is to lead the way – he has to be 100 per cent focused 100 per cent of the time, and he admits, ‘It can be pretty tiring sometimes. The risks? You take a risk every time you cross the road, eh? I don’t really think about it. I suppose I just get on with the job and hopefully everyone makes it back. I don’t really worry too much about it. You’ve got to be good at the job, you’ve got to learn quickly because the Taliban aren’t going to give you a second chance, and I think you need that little bit of extra luck sometimes. You can be the best searcher in the world but one piece of bad luck and you could be killed. It’s got nothing to do with bad drills, just bad luck. In Afghan you always want to be lucky – being lucky is better than being good. Plenty of guys good at their job have been killed out here but the lucky ones survive.

‘I’ve had two close shaves in vehicles where we have been blown up, and Inkerman was pretty intense because there are so many threats. It’s very unpredictable and the Taliban will take you on all the time. The last time I was up there there was more pressure because they had been targeting isolations. So you’ve got to be really on the ball. In some areas the risk is less but in Inkerman and Sangin you can get channelled into alleyways, so the threat is greater.’

‘Sangin is an absolute hell-hole,’ Adam adds in agreement. ‘It’s basically one big fucking minefield. The Taliban will take you on wherever and whenever they can. When you get told you’re going to Sangin – it’s like, “Shit!” All anyone wants is just to get out of there alive. No one gives a fuck about hearts and minds, you just want to get out in one piece.’

Adam is married with a young son whom he misses terribly. As we chat in the ICP he talks longingly of his family back home, especially little Alfie. When he shows me a picture of his son I notice small tears beginning to form. ‘I can’t wait to see my little lad, he’s a lovely boy,’ he says, almost lost in thought. ‘I think about him all the time. He means the world to me. Sometimes I miss him so much it’s almost unbearable. That’s the thing about kids – you really miss them, but thinking about them just makes you sad. He’s only three and I’ve already deployed on two six-month operations since he was born. I’ve already missed a third of his life – and nothing will bring that back. For me that’s the hardest bit. Part of you thinks, I don’t want to do this any more, I want to watch him grow up and be with him. I want to play football with him and read books at night. That’s not much to ask, is it? I just want to be a normal dad. The thing which really scares me, more than any IED, is how my family would cope if anything happened to me.’

Adam first served in Afghanistan in 2007 on Operation Herrick 6. He says that the war was different, what he calls a ‘stand-up fight’. Now, he says, and his views are echoed by many soldiers, ‘It’s a dirty, nasty little war.’ He continues, ‘IEDs are everywhere and that has increased our workload massively. On Herrick 7 we only had two search teams, now we have a lot more, but we are still out every day. Personally, I haven’t seen any real improvements in this place since I was here last. I know Nad-e’Ali is safe now, but look at the manpower that was needed to secure this place. What did they say? Something like the biggest heliborne assault for fifty years, over 4,000 British troops. There are now checkpoints everywhere and you’ve got guys staging on 24/7, the blokes are really hanging out – there is no way you can do that in every AO. And if they are going make this place safe then you have to do that everywhere – that’s a massive undertaking.’

When I ask Adam whether he thinks Afghanistan is worth the sacrifice, he replies, ‘That’s a very difficult question to answer.’ Waving his arms around, he asks, ‘Is this worth Loz’s life? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s worth the life of a single British soldier. The politicians talk about sacrifice and duty but they are not the ones out here doing the fighting. Sacrifice is a lot easier to talk about when you’re not the one making it. But we are professional soldiers and we have got a job to do, so we get on and do it. We do it for each other – that’s it. The bottom line is, if we all do our jobs to the best of our abilities, then we’ve got a good chance of getting out alive. That’s the same for everyone.’

Kev interjects and explains the true feelings of soldiers in Afghanistan. ‘To be honest, I think many of the lads try not to think about the whys and wherefores too much – we just crack on and get through it day by day. Every day you stay alive you’re a day closer to getting home.’

The death of Loz returns to the conversation and the ICP falls silent. Adam was on a four-day Mastiff commander’s course when his boss was killed and it is clear that his absence on the day has led to some feelings of guilt. ‘Part of me wishes I was there because, you never know, it may have been different, maybe Ken wouldn’t have stepped on the bomb and Loz wouldn’t have been killed, but I know you can’t go through life thinking of all the what ifs. I knew Loz really well, he was such a great bloke, and we all miss him a lot. It was a really difficult time. The whole team took part in his repatriation ceremony back to the UK. We all carried his coffin onto the plane, which helped us come to terms with what happened and it allowed us all to say goodbye – but it was pretty heartbreaking. You can imagine how it must feel – we all came out together and then just before we go on R&R our commander is killed. It was shattering. Guys are getting killed all the time but you never think it’s going to be one of your mates, and when it does happen it’s the worst feeling in the world. We still talk about him quite a lot and then there will be things which remind us about him. I think that’s quite important. We’ll have a laugh and say, “Remember when Loz did this and that?”’

Adam is staring into the distance and he begins to sound sad and regretful. ‘We had quite a shit R&R, to be honest,’ he says, with his head now resting on his knees. ‘You think it’s going to be this great release, but at the back of your mind you know that you are coming back out to this place. It made life at home pretty difficult. I kept arguing with my missus over little things. I think I was still pretty stressed. You expect everything to be great when you go back but you soon realize that life hasn’t stood still. Your family has a life too and it’s pretty hard for them when you’re away too. We think we have it hard, but it’s a bloody nightmare for the wives and families. It’s six months of gut-wrenching worry and you turn up in the middle of it and say, “Hi, I’m home,” and they’re glad you’re home but you’re also messing up the routine, upsetting the kids, and they know you’re going to bugger off again in a couple of weeks.

‘I think it was because of what happened to Loz and knowing that you are coming back out here, so you can’t relax. R&R is vital, you need to get home, you need a break. I would rather we did a longer tour but less frequently, like nine months but every three years – I think if that was on the table the blokes would go for it. We’ll be back here in two years. None of us want to come out here again. Everybody in our team knows someone who has been killed or injured. One of our mates, Dave “The Leg” Watson, was killed on New Year’s Eve. He was knocking down the wall of a compound as part of an operation. It was nothing really dangerous, just a straightforward operation, and he stepped on an IED. The blast blew off three limbs – he was a triple amputee and he died on the operating table. He was a brilliant bloke, the fittest man I knew.

‘And there was Captain Dan Read. He was a great bloke for an officer. He came up through the ranks and he had a good understanding of the lads, although the officers in our trade are all pretty good. Anyway, his team were taking part in a route clearance in Gereshk district centre – again a routine task, nothing you would call dangerous. An IED was found and they set up an ICP and searched it, just like we’ve done today, but somehow an IED was missed – there was a pressure-plate device in the ICP and the WIS corporal, James Oakland, stepped on it and was killed instantly. Dan Read was injured in the blast – he took some frag in the chest and arm – and so were a couple of other guys. The worst thing was that Jim had actually been sent out as a battle casualty replacement and had been in Afghan for about three months when he was killed.’