Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  While the rest of the country seemed to be against the possibility of war – I was aware of the controversy, the mass protests in London and the resignations by government ministers – the feeling in the Army couldn’t have been more different. Firstly, soldiers obey orders, that’s the job. Very few, if any of us, were willing to question the chain of command. We’re trained not to and besides if anyone was unwilling to go to war at the behest of the government then they were in the wrong job. Soldiers do not endlessly sit around wringing their hands wondering whether they are doing the right thing, that’s not the culture. You suck it up and get on with it.

  No one I came across was overly gung-ho, it was just that as a soldier you want to experience combat – after all, that’s the job. The real fear was whether Saddam Hussein would be prepared to use his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against invading troops. Intelligence reports suggested that he had tons of chemical and biological agents, which if used would result in potentially thousands of British and American deaths.

  While the preparations for war gathered pace, I was on another course at Kineton cursing my luck and realising that with every day that passed my chances of being deployed to Iraq were diminishing. I tried desperately to get sent back to my unit so I had a chance of going but I was told to wind my neck in and get on with the course. It was like watching a ship with all your mates on board sailing off for some distant adventure while you were left behind.

  George W. Bush unleashed ‘shock and awe’ on Iraq on 20 March 2003 and, like thousands of other soldiers in the UK or Germany who’d been left behind, I hoped the war wasn’t going to be over too quickly. The last time the West invaded Iraq in 1991, the war was over in ninety hours. But Operation Telic, the code name for Britain’s involvement in Iraq, was going to be different. The fighting was fiercer and there were more casualties.

  Although I wasn’t sent off to war, I was sent on the Joint Service IEDD course that was run at the top school in Kineton. As a consolation it wasn’t too bad given that I was now on the path to becoming a proper bomb disposal expert. The course was six weeks long and the highlight was getting into the bomb disposal suit for the first time. I was like a kid at Christmas. It was a big moment but the excitement lasted for about three seconds. Then I was hit by a smell, which can best be described as ‘sweaty arse-crack’. The smell was nauseating, almost overpowering, and I was left wondering how I was meant to work in a suit that made me gag.

  It was one of those situations in life that was completely unexpected. For the past three years I had dreamed about the moment when I would eventually put on a bomb suit and when I did it stank. The training suits were issued from the stores at the Felix Centre and so there was no great desire for anyone to look after them. Dozens of people had sweated, bled and probably pissed in them, at least that’s how they smelt. The solution was to pour half a bottle of Fabreze inside the suit.

  I was a corporal at the time but had been given the rank of acting sergeant for the duration of the course and I later found out that having a junior rank and a perceived lack of experience I was expected to fail. The Iraq War served as backdrop to the course and most of the students were glued to the television every night getting updates on the progression of US and British troops. Although success seemed to come relatively easily there was a sense that we were witnessing the beginning of a lengthy conflict.

  Towards the end of the course I was called in to what was then the Joint Service Team’s office.

  ‘Sergeant Hughes – you are the fly in the ointment,’ the team leader said looking perturbed.

  ‘Sorry, sir?’ I responded, confused and wondering whether I was about to be binned right at the end of the course.

  ‘The course is primarily for students with the substantive rank of sergeant. You’re a corporal and frankly you were expected to fail, but you passed, and you passed well. So well done. You have given us something to think about.’

  I was buzzing. Back then it was almost unheard of to be singled out and praised while you were on the course. It remains one of the proudest moments of my career. I felt as if I had achieved something massive. If you’re someone used to success I suppose you take things like passing courses in your stride. But I wasn’t. Success in my life up until that point had been mostly absent. It was as if the Army was coming good on its promise to turn you into something you couldn’t possibly have imagined. I realised that despite failing at school, I had hidden depths of determination and resilience that the Army was drawing to the surface.

  But the sense of satisfaction was short-lived. Although now qualified an EOD Operator, I was heading back to Germany with almost no chance of putting my newly learned skills into practice.

  Over the next couple of years I managed to get back to the UK to cover for the bomb disposal teams while some of the EOD Operators went on leave or different courses. The work was mainly conventional munitions disposal – the sort of thing where someone discovers that the grenade paperweight that has been sitting in grandfather’s office since the Second World War is actually live.

  By 2004, I was once again serving in Germany, this time in Bielefeld, with 921 EOD Squadron, part of 11 EOD Regiment, which is part of the Royal Logistic Corps. I was now a troop sergeant and my eagerness to go to war hadn’t diminished. By that stage so many soldiers had served in Iraq that I felt as though I was in the minority. I felt like a war dodger. I had volunteered numerous times but had always been knocked back by my HQ for different reasons, such as covering for people on courses. The endless refusals to send me were incredibly disappointing and I often wondered whether I was cursed.

  My luck changed a few months later when another trawl for volunteers to go out to Iraq was issued. I applied and was accepted. It was as if a massive burden had been taken off my shoulders. I was going to war, I’d return home with a medal, no longer would I feel inadequate. The only downside for me was that even though I was trained in bomb disposal I would be deployed only as a member of the Ammunition Inspectorate, ensuring that the hundreds of tons of ammunition sitting in Iraq were being properly looked after. While I was delighted, my wife wasn’t very pleased. It was the year that she had planned to start a family, but despite her disappointment she was very supportive.

  A month’s pre-deployment training followed, which was the same training I received when I went to Bosnia but with different pictures. I gave my wife a hug, promised to write and call and arrived in Iraq in November 2004. My home for the next six months was the Shaibah Air Base, once the main military air base in southern Iraq, a vast complex surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers and cut in two by a huge, concrete runway. It was home to various logistic units, the British Army’s main headquarters and quite a few civilian contractors. Although the threat from insurgent rocket and mortar attacks was high, it was pretty quiet during the six months I was based there. I shared a room about the size of an ISO container – effectively a reinforced Portakabin – with another SNCO from the HQ. It was cosy, air-conditioned and we did our best to make it comfortable and to give each other a bit of privacy.

  As wars go, being based at Shaibah wasn’t too bad. The facilities were decent, food was good but best of all we had a bar with supposedly a ‘two can rule’ – which meant you were allowed two cans of beer a night. It was a rule that was often broken and the reality was that I was drunk quite a lot. Although I wasn’t involved in any bomb disposal, working for the Ammunition Inspectorate was interesting. I visited various different units right across southern Iraq, to inspect their ammunition storage facilities to ensure they followed MOD regulations. If there were ever any ammunition accidents, such as negligent discharges or breech explosions, I would carry out an investigation to determine who, if anyone, was at fault. If the problem was with the ammunition then I’d impose a theatre-wide ban on that type of ammunition. I might have been a REMF – rear echelon motherfucker (someone who never leaves the wire) – but at least I was in a war zone.

  While li
fe in Shaibah was pretty comfortable and quite a lot of fun, for those soldiers on the front line, in isolated bases often cut off for days on end, the war was very different. Bloody battles had become a daily occurrence. Convoys were being attacked and ambushed every day. Some of the main convoys from Basra Air Base into the city were dubbed ‘Operation Certain Death’ by the soldiers because the threat of attack and casualties was so high.

  Not since the Korean War in 1950 had British troops been involved in such bitter fighting. Occasionally soldiers who’d been fighting for months on end would turn up at British headquarters looking haggard and exhausted, whereas most of the people behind the wire had to workout every day to stop putting on weight. It was sometimes hard to believe we were both fighting the same war.

  The nature of the conflict was also changing. When I arrived in late November 2004, around 1,400 IED attacks were taking place in Iraq every month. Hundreds of tons of military grade explosive, which had been looted from Iraqi Army ammunition depots after the fall of Saddam, were being used in IEDs to kill coalition troops. In the early days of the insurgency, the bombs were deadly but relatively simple in design. But by 2005, the insurgents had developed a vast array of sophisticated IEDs. Some could be triggered by mobile phones, or remote-control key fobs, others were designed only to destroy track vehicles. But the most deadly were composed of shaped charges able to penetrate most armoured vehicles. Production of those IEDs needed precision engineers and skilled armourers and many of those were supplied by Iran, who were happy to see thousands of British troops tied down in southern Iraq, an area which the Iranians believed fell within their zone of influence. Although no one knew it at the time, the use of IEDs in Iraq to kill British troops provided a taste of what was to come in Afghanistan.

  I returned to the UK in April 2005, had a month’s leave and as a reward for my service in Iraq was offered a place on the High Threat course, now known as the Advanced EOD Operators course. The course came with a reputation of a high failure rate and every EOD Operator attending was expected to be at the top of his or her game. Despite the course’s reputation I was confident in my skills even though I was still relatively inexperienced. But within a week I knew I was well out of my depth. It was as if I had turned up for a very basic French course and everyone else was studying degree-level Mandarin Chinese. I couldn’t even grasp the concept of a high threat environment. I muddled my way through to the assessment phase where my performance continued to go further downhill. I was failing almost all of the tasks but the instructors were very supportive and I was allowed to continue, not as a student under assessment but as an opportunity to watch, learn and gain some experience. It was a fantastically mature way of dealing with a student who would otherwise have failed.

  During the six weeks I was at the Felix Centre news began to drift in of the developing conflict in Afghanistan. A brigade-sized force based around 3 Para battlegroup had arrived in Helmand in April, established Camp Bastion, which back then was little more than a fence, a makeshift runway and a few tents, and began what it hoped was going to be several years of reconstruction and development.

  Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the north, east and west of the country had gone through the same process with varying degrees of success. While the British and Americans had become distracted by the war in Iraq, other NATO countries had been hard at work in Afghanistan training the police and the army and trying to reconstruct parts of the country which had been devastated by thirty years of internal tribal warfare. Now it was the turn of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands to come good on an agreement made a few years earlier to commit several thousand combat troops to assist in the reconstruction of the south. When the agreement was signed the assumption was made that the Iraq War would be over or nearing its end. The reality was very different. Iraq was rapidly getting out of control and Britain and the United States had fallen into the fatal trap of fighting wars on two different fronts.

  British troops arrived in Helmand prepared for a fight but hopeful they could continue with the mission of security and reconstruction. But the Taliban had other ideas. Following the collapse of the regime in 2001, a large number of Taliban headed south into Kandahar and Helmand and across the border into Pakistan and waited. By 2006 they had returned and a new war was about to start.

  Despite failing the High Threat course I returned to the Felix Centre again in 2007 but this time as a B-team instructor at the IEDD wing, teaching the Joint Service IEDD course – the basic bomb disposal course. It was a top job, the one I really wanted, and a fantastic opportunity at an extremely busy and fast-moving period in the world of EOD. The conflict in Afghan had developed into a full-blown insurgency and IEDs, although rudimentary, were being used to attack British troops.

  I was now a father, with a one-year-old son, whom I adored. Although professionally my career was going well, deep cracks had begun to form in my marriage. I had made that age-old squaddie mistake of confusing lust with love and marrying too young in the hope of keeping a relationship alive when it should have been left alone to die a natural death.

  Rather than confront my personal issues, I buried myself in my work. As my time as an instructor came to an end, I was offered a place on the High Threat course for the second time and if I passed my reward would be a six-month tour in Afghanistan – the most dangerous country on earth. It was an opportunity I seized with both hands.

  But joining the course wasn’t that straightforward. I had to prove I had the skills to attend the course, which meant going to Northern Ireland to 321 EOD Squadron to complete what is known as Exercise ‘Hard Prep’ – effectively a selection process for the High Threat course. Successful completion demonstrated that an AT or ATO was ready for the course and I managed to pull it off. I finished as an instructor at the Felix Centre on the Friday and I was back as a student on the Monday on the High Threat course.

  It felt very odd. I knew the set-up, the instructors, I even had my own tea mug in the brew area but I had to put all that behind me and focus on the next six weeks and make sure I acted and was treated like any other student. With my marriage rapidly imploding, I moved out of the family home and into a room in the Sergeants’ Mess. It was a big decision and I wasn’t sure whether it was the right one. But the course meant more to me than saving my marriage.

  That first morning as a student I felt like an eleven-year-old again getting ready for my first day at school but those self-doubts that had dogged me all those years earlier had gone. I had developed into a more mature and confident individual. I arrived cleanly shaved in an immaculate uniform with razor-sharp creases. I had a new notebook, pen and more than just a few butterflies.

  The course opened with a welcome brief in a classroom quickly followed by a theory exam to ensure that everyone was at the minimum standard required. The pass mark was 75 per cent and anyone who didn’t achieve it would be on the next train home. Those who passed were split into three-man teams and each was assigned a bay outside the main teaching area on one side of a large parade square, known as the pan. The bays were small brick-built rooms, very similar to garages, each crammed with all the EOD equipment required for the next six weeks.

  The first few days were an intense battering of everything to do with EOD. At just six weeks long there wasn’t enough time to revise the basics of bomb disposal so anyone who wasn’t up to speed immediately fell behind and risked being binned. Days started early and finished late and were filled with practical sessions and theory lessons while evenings were consumed with hours of revision.

  Every now and again news would filter down of another IED attack in Afghanistan in which soldiers were killed or injured. Intelligence reports on the latest attacks were placed in a ‘first look’ folder, which we were encouraged to read and digest when time allowed.

  Most of the theory lessons took place in a series of newly built classrooms. Maps of Afghanistan hung on the walls, each marked with dozens of red dots showing where IEDs had been found
and cleared. The dots grew by the day, so much so that by the end of the course whole areas were covered in red. In the classrooms were examples of IEDs, which had been used by various international terrorist groups. Although they were all different in design, the basic model was the same – switch, detonator, main charge.

  The meat of the course was spent dealing with the type of IEDs that troops were encountering in Afghanistan, such as pressure-plate IEDs – which are triggered by someone treading on the plate; remote-controlled – initiated by a mobile phone or other transmitting device; or command-pull – where the trigger is activated by someone pulling a length of string or wire. Instructors also produced scenarios involving booby-trapped bodies, or dead suicide bombers who were still wearing live vests, which the students were required to evaluate and defuse.

  At the same time as the operators’ course was being taught, the Counter-IED team No.2s and the ECM Operators were also taking part in their equivalent of the High Threat course. During the various tasks we would all come together and work as a team and the fact that we gelled immediately helped enormously. The course was unrelenting and the schedule punishing. A task in which someone performed well could easily be followed by another that was almost a failure. None of us ever felt comfortable, the pressure was intense and despite my initial feelings of confidence most of the students, me included, were dogged with self-doubt. As the course progressed the scenarios became more complex with the additional complication of a time factor. When one device was cleared, students were bounced onto another, and then another. There was no time to clear your head and reassess as the hours slipped by.

  On my very last assessment, my best mate, Stu, was my DS and I was convinced I had messed-up. The scenario was Afghanistan-based. A car had been abandoned and on inspection was found to contain 107mm rockets pointing at a patrol base. The vehicle had also been booby-trapped with a victim-operated device making the approach to the target quite difficult.