Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  With any suspect IED, the first job the operator has to do is try to get as much intelligence about the device as possible from the local police or military who should provide some good intel on the ‘pattern of life’ in the area. The role of the main witness was played by Stu and he wasn’t being helpful.

  Almost from the beginning things started to go wrong. I also had problems with my robot, which kept breaking down and causing huge delays. My No.2 eventually got the robot working and tried to remove the rockets from the firing tubes but all we succeeded in doing was pointing them towards a village full of people. I had a three-hour window to complete the task and I was hugely behind schedule. I also had the added pressure of knowing that I had to complete the task successfully if I was going to pass the course. I had already failed one task and couldn’t afford to fail another.

  I thought it was all going horribly wrong right up to the point where I turned to Stu and said, ‘Look, mate, I’ve fucked up. Why don’t we stop wasting each other’s time and just leave it.’

  Thankfully Stu was having none of it and turned to me and said, ‘Just shut up and get on with the task.’

  Eventually I managed to defuse the device and clear the area. God knows how but I passed the final assessment and the course. I was so utterly amazed that I had now qualified as a High Threat Operator that I had to sit down on my own for five minutes and take it all in. I was now a member of a very exclusive club and it didn’t seem real. Had I really come so far? The fat kid with the girl’s name who could barely read or write was now a bomb disposal expert, qualified to work in the world’s most dangerous war zones.

  In a matter of days I would be sent to Afghanistan and expected to deal with every device the Taliban had in their armoury. Self-doubt began to creep in. The successful students were given the weekend off and on the Monday morning we met up again for a week-long Specific to Theatre Training (STT) package.

  The course wasn’t exactly ‘Forget about everything you have just learned – this is the reality in Afghan’ – but it was close. It was taught by two operators who had just come back from Afghanistan so they were able to give up-to-the-minute intelligence reports and talk us through the types of IEDs we were likely to come across. Their knowledge was gold dust.

  ‘All of that kit in your EOD wagon – forget it,’ one of the guys said as he threw a day-sack on the ground in front of us. ‘If it doesn’t fit in there you aren’t using it. This course has taught you the “gold standard” of operating in a High Threat environment. I’m now going to teach you to operate in Afghanistan with nothing but the kit on your back.’

  6

  First Bomb

  Every operator remembers their first bomb, just like you can remember your first proper kiss. It’s a seminal moment, you’ve come of age. No matter what happens in the rest of your life you can call yourself a bomb disposal expert.

  I’ve defused loads of IEDs but most are now blurred by the passing of time. One becomes difficult to distinguish from another. But not the first. I can remember every little detail, every second, the layout, the composition, the date, the time, the ground, the taste of sweat on my lips, even the smell that hung in the air. It’s been seared into my consciousness, imprinted on my mind. And more than anything else I remember the relief, the overwhelming relief, that I didn’t fuck it up.

  My team got the shout less than twenty-four hours after Sam had been shot in that first fucked-up mission. Everyone was still feeling raw, especially Harry. But there was no time to dwell on what was just bad luck and everyone needed to snap out of it – our first bomb disposal mission was an opportunity to get back on the horse straight away.

  Like every Counter-IED mission, the tasking came from the EOD Task Force Ops Room, the nerve centre of all bomb disposal missions in Helmand, which was housed inside a huge air-conditioned tent filled with computer monitors and radios. On the walls were the same maps as those in the Felix Centre back in the UK, where red dots showed where IEDs had been found or exploded. The place buzzed with a constant stream of data providing real-time information on contacts, IED blasts and casualties.

  In overall command was a major, called the officer commanding EOD Task Force. His right-hand man was a warrant officer, known as the Senior Ammunition Technician or SAT, who was assisted by a small team from a variety of military disciplines, including the Royal Military Police and the Royal Signals. As well as monitoring insurgent activity around the province, Ops Room staff also had to make sure the five IEDD teams in Helmand were sent to the right place at the right time. Given that the province was roughly the size of Wales, balancing supply and demand was often an impossible challenge.

  Our first bomb disposal mission came on 15 May 2009. It was a Friday but the days had already begun to merge together, one almost indistinguishable from the next. Danish soldiers, who were also fighting in Helmand, had found a device in their area and needed it cleared.

  ‘You’ll find out more when you get there’ were the last words I heard as I sauntered out of the Ops Room and climbed onto the waiting 4-tonner. My team looked at me eagerly as the lorry bounced along the dusty Bastion track towards our rendezvous with a waiting Chinook, blades already turning.

  ‘What we got?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘We have a bomb somewhere in Afghan. That’s all I know. Usual briefing, you know the score.’

  Ten minutes later we were airborne, flying north across the Helmand plain and into seemingly endless blue sky to a small Danish Army outpost called Patrol Base Armadillo. Leaving Bastion was like taking a journey back in time, especially when you were able to view the landscape from the safety of a helicopter. Helmand from above had an unusual majestic beauty almost in defiance of the simplicity of life in rural Afghanistan. Huge mountain ranges and steep valleys towered over villages and hamlets that had probably remained unchanged for centuries.

  Our route shadowed the twisting Helmand river, which cut through the desert like a silver ribbon, creating a fertile floodplain, the Green Zone, where farmers tended immaculately groomed fields of wheat, melons and often opium poppy. The river, which never dried up, was fed by snow melt from the mountains hundreds of miles away in the Hindu Kush. It was the Green Zone’s life-support system. Farmers worked every day apart from Fridays, managing their crops and caring for their livestock, while wives and daughters remained behind closed doors. Children cooling themselves off in the streams would dance and shout unheard words as the Chinook thundered above. As we flew past I wondered how many of those looking up at us were Taliban or at least their sympathisers.

  One of the problems NATO soldiers faced was that the ordinary civilians were indistinguishable from the Taliban. They wore the same clothes, spoke the same language, lived in the same towns and villages and carried the same weapons. It was quite normal to see a farmer working his land with an AK47 slung across his back. Working out who among the population was an insurgent was horrendously difficult and often came down to the basic rule that if they were firing at you, they were the enemy. It had been drilled into us during our months of pre-deployment training back in the UK that the British Army was in Helmand to win hearts and minds. But whose hearts and whose minds? I often found myself asking, when most of the time you had no idea who the enemy were.

  The Chinook banked and climbed and dived, never flying a straight course, never setting a pattern and hopefully never allowing the Taliban to get a bead on us. The flight served as a brief, but welcome, interlude between Bastion and the war – it was my Zen time, when I could sit and think but usually dozed. Afghanistan had been gifted with an abundance of natural beauty and, in more peaceful times, would probably have been a must-go place for those more adventurous Western tourists happy to spend a small fortune to spend a night or two in an isolated farm to experience a more simple, forgotten existence for a few days.

  Armadillo was a standard strongpoint strategically positioned on a high, barren plateau above the Green Zone. It was the definition of the isolated ou
tpost and was occupied by around twenty-five Danish troops. None of us had ever worked with the Danes before but they had acquired an awesome reputation as superb, friendly hosts and fearless warriors. From the relative safety of their base the Danes could track virtually all movement into and out of the surrounding area and could provide a friendly unit patrolling that portion of the Green Zone with real-time intelligence on any Taliban movement. Invading armies had used the exact same location to monitor unruly insurgents in the valley for two hundred years. The Russian Army before us and the soldiers of the British Empire a century before them had come to conquer the same area and all had failed. I couldn’t help wondering whether we, the massed ranks of NATO’s finest, would be any different.

  The Taliban, who were masters of reading the land, recognised the strategic importance of the plateau and would crawl into the area during the hours of darkness to lay IEDs in the hope of killing a few of the returning troops the following day. Fortunately, the Danes were fully aware of the threat facing them and never took any short cuts – they would search carefully every location, new or old.

  The patrol base was too small to have a landing zone inside, so the chopper landed outside the wire, on a relatively flat piece of unremarkable desert, a few hundred metres from the base. Within seconds of landing we had exited the aircraft and taken up a defensive position clear of the downdraught from the Chinook’s rotors. On the crest of a hill nearby were two Danish Piranha armoured vehicles waiting to pick us up and take the team to the patrol base.

  The Danes were pretty relaxed, lying on their vehicles sunbathing. One of the soldiers sat up as we approached and lifted his Raybans, smiled and lay back down, while a tall bearded Dane approached us with his weapon slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Hi, I’ve come to pick you up,’ he said.

  ‘All right, pal, I’m Kim, the ATO,’ I said as I stuck out a hand.

  ‘Hi and welcome to our patrol base. Jump on board and we’ll take you to the Ops Room. Our ops guy will brief you on your bomb.’

  The place was pretty basic and had once belonged to an Afghan farmer but was now one of hundreds of compounds being ‘rented’ for a small fortune by NATO. Its thick mud walls had been reinforced with Hesco, steel cages about two metres high and wide, filled with earth and stacked on one another. Inside were two single-storey dwellings, with domed roofs, reminiscent of biblical images of Jerusalem. The Ops Room was located in one building while the soldiers slept in another.

  The other two corners were dominated by makeshift guard towers, allowing a 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. A mortar pit with two tubes ready to rain down fire at a minute’s notice were positioned in the middle of the compound. Soldiers washed using solar showers and there were a couple of ‘desert roses’, which were tubes buried in the ground at a 45-degree angle as a makeshift urinal, and the odd ‘long drop’ (deep hole with a toilet put on top) completed the sanitation.

  Just as I was checking through my equipment prior to deploying I heard one of the lads say, in a very loud and disbelieving voice, ‘Fuck me.’ I turned to see all of the guys looking up at one of the armoured vehicles. Standing half out of the driver’s hatch was a ridiculously hot chick.

  It was almost as if she was demanding our attention. She removed her helmet and did that thing women do with their hair, slowly moving her head from side to side so that the long blonde hair unfurled down onto her shoulders. She looked like a supermodel, bang tidy and fit. I was left speechless and all I could do was laugh.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said probably too loudly.

  It was then that I noticed Lee, the RESA, had disappeared.

  ‘Where’s Lee?’

  ‘In the Ops Room,’ someone said. I was furious. On what planet did Lee think it would be OK to shoot off into the Ops Room without me?

  By the time I got to the Ops Room Lee was already getting a full brief from the Danish commander.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ I interrupted. ‘I’m the ATO. It’s my job to clear this device for you.’ I glared at Lee and instantly he knew I was pissed off.

  ‘Do you mind starting your brief again?’

  ‘Erm, yes of course,’ the officer replied, slightly confused as to who was actually in charge. After the briefing we left the Ops Room and I pulled Lee to one side.

  ‘What are you doing?’ He looked shocked and as he was about to answer I cut in, ‘We’re a team – we go into these briefings together, not run off like some kind of arsehole thinking you’ll have the upper hand if you get in there first. We’ve already seen how shit goes south in a heartbeat with Sam. The Danes have found the device, it’s a clearance op, not a search. Got it?’ I stormed off before he could respond.

  By the time we arrived at the place of the IED find, the sun had reached its zenith and it was properly hot. I scanned the area for signs of enemy activity but there was no chance of being dicked, a term which was a slang hangover from the days of Northern Ireland – being dicked meant you were being watched by the enemy.

  ‘Get the lads to clear us a working area over there,’ I said to Lee, pointing fifteen metres to our front. ‘After that they can chill, not much here for them to do.’

  Lee nodded and headed towards his search team to issue instructions. I wanted the guys to remain switched on but as relaxed as possible.

  ‘Dave, get ready. As soon as the search team have cleared an ICP [Incident Control Point] we’re cracking on.’

  I carried out a last quick kit check: paintbrush, trowel, snips, pistol. Checked and rechecked my metal detector and made sure my man bag contained everything needed for the task. Dave checked his ECM, fitting batteries and antennas, while Lewis made sure that his EOD weapons and firing cables were in good nick. Chappy gave us the nod that the area was clear and Dave and I began the approach to the target. I scanned the ground ahead looking for any obvious ‘ground-sign’ left behind after an IED is recently buried. I took the first step, then another. My mouth felt dry and my throat tight. My handgrip on the metal detector handle strengthened as I swung it from left to right, covering the ground to my front in an arc. The earth beneath my feet had been left parched by the early summer sun and made a crump, crump sound with each step, almost as if I was walking on snow.

  I cleared an area for Dave, close enough so that his ECM would provide me with a security bubble in which to work but not so close he would be injured if the IED exploded. Dave was also my ‘scribe’, which meant that he took notes of my actions while I was on target so that if something went wrong and I was killed or seriously injured there would be a log of my actions.

  The area around the target was virtually flat apart from a few almost imperceptible undulations, where a smattering of small, thorny, leafless plants had laid claim and were probably the only living things that could survive on such a barren, arid landscape.

  I moved ever closer towards the device, consciously trying to remember everything I was taught during my training. No need to rush, nice and steady, the bomb wasn’t going anywhere.

  I paused for a few seconds and was surprised by the intensity of the silence. It was so quiet that even my own breathing had become a minor distraction and I suddenly felt calm and peaceful. My target was a red circle about forty metres dead ahead where the Danish soldiers had spray-painted the ground after discovering the suspect device.

  After every few steps I marked my path with yellow spray-paint. By the time I reached the device two yellow parallel tracks about three feet wide, like two miniature railway tracks, stretched back all the way to the ICP.

  I cleared another area close to the device, my working area, and carefully moved down on to my knees and then my stomach so that my face was just inches above the red circle. The earth smelt old and dusty and I began to probe gently with my fingers. It was me against the bomb – those were the odds and they were the best I was going to get. I took some comfort in the knowledge that if I did make a mistake I wouldn’t be around to deal with the consequences.

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nbsp; ‘I can see the pressure plate, going for a closer look.’

  ‘Roger, be careful,’ Dave replied.

  Reaching into my man bag, I retrieved my paintbrush and slowly, methodically, almost grain by grain, began to sweep away the sand, like an archaeologist uncovering a prehistoric fossil. A single bead of sweat ran on a track from my temple to my chin before dropping onto the sand. My lips were salty with the taste of dried sweat. It was going to be a long, hot day.

  The pressure plate was oddly similar to those I’d trained with back in the UK, and I felt myself noticeably relax, almost as if I was back on the training area in Kineton. But this bomb was real and I was on my own. There were no instructors tapping me on the shoulder telling me to be a little less heavy-handed, suggesting I try ‘this’ instead of ‘that’. I looked over my shoulder and through the watery heat haze I could see my team anxiously looking back, willing me to succeed.

  The pressure plate was about a foot long and three inches wide and consisted of two pieces of wood, one on top of the other, separated by rubber spacers. On the inside of the two pieces of wood were two hacksaw blades positioned to touch when pressure was applied and the whole thing was wrapped in plastic, providing some rudimentary weather protection. It was a basic switch, the sort of thing an eleven-year-old might build in a science class. When pressure from a human foot forces the hacksaw blades to touch, the current flows, the detonator explodes followed immediately by the main charge buried underneath.

  The NATO force gathered in Afghanistan was the most technologically sophisticated military coalition ever to be assembled in the history of mankind but it was being pushed towards defeat by basic schoolboy science and men who went into battle wearing flip-flops carrying 30-year-old Russian assault rifles.

  I continued the excavation, sweeping the dust away and every so often letting Dave know what I was doing. I dug and probed with my fingers and flicked away more sand and then, just as I was beginning to question my actions, there it was just beneath the surface. A white piece of Iranian twinflex wire. I took a deep breath and silently congratulated myself. I was on the home straight.