Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  The man just carried on pointing into a general area.

  ‘Tell him to go and point out where it is otherwise he doesn’t get paid.’

  He slowly stroked at his beard but his expression remained inscrutable – he wasn’t giving away any clues. The thought that we might be walking into a trap was never far from my mind. The field had been ploughed some weeks earlier and the broken soil had hardened like lumps of concrete. If there was an IED in there finding it was going to be a real balls-ache.

  Lee and Chappy got the rest of the team to clear a working area, the Light Dragoons established a protective cordon while Dave and I moved to the edge of the field. Dave took up a position beneath the shade of a tree in full bloom and I began the search, aiming for the approximate location given by the Afghan.

  I searched for more than an hour up and down, backwards and forwards, almost in lanes and found nothing. I could have sent the search team in but after what had just happened to Dan I felt an overpowering need to keep them safe. Every time the Terp asked the Afghan farmer to be more specific he just waved his finger contemptuously in the area I was standing in.

  With time passing quickly Lewis and I decided a ground clearance charge might prove successful in either uncovering the bomb or causing it to initiate. He quickly got to work attaching small 50g pieces of plastic explosive along a length of garden bamboo cane 1.5 metres in length. The explosive was linked together by det-cord with a detonator attached at one end, which in turn was attached to a firing cable.

  I returned to the field with the bamboo cane and laid it on the area to be cleared before withdrawing to where Lewis was waiting. Lewis flicked the switch and the charged worked like a dream. The sound of the explosion echoed around the surrounding countryside and thick, grey smoke and dust billowed into the sky.

  Back at the blast site there was nothing to indicate the presence of an IED and I was just about to give up when I spotted a piece of black plastic next to my boot. It was a low-metal pressure plate that I hadn’t been able to detect with the metal detector. At that stage of the war the Taliban were using two types of pressure plate, low- and high-metal. The metal content in the low-metal pressure plate had been reduced to the bare minium, making them more difficult to detect. I brushed some of the mud and dust away with my hand exposing a three-litre palm oil container filled with what I immediately recognised as an ammonium nitrate and aluminium mix known as ANAL – home-made explosive and a one-time favourite of the IRA. I was three inches away from being the second bomb disposal operator to be killed in twenty-four hours. I stood there frozen with disbelief, wondering whether I’d made a mistake or whether I’d been too preoccupied with Dan’s death. A very bad day had just got a lot worse.

  Rather than mess about trying to disarm and extract it I decided to blow it in situ. The sound of the ground clearance charge would have acted like a clarion call to all the local Taliban and besides I wanted to get over to Nad e’Ali. After the device was destroyed the Afghan, who appeared to age visibly the longer we spent in the sun, took the patrol to another area a few fields away where he claimed there was a second IED. Again he stopped short of the actual location and speaking through the Terp said that the IED was along a sloping path channelled between two trees, which screamed ‘walk this way’. As far as I was concerned it was the perfect ambush point. So how did he know where the bomb had been buried? I asked. But he simply shrugged and said, ‘Others had told him.’ I wasn’t happy trying to search with my metal detector downhill towards the location of the device because the ground was wet from being irrigated, and a low-metal plate IED could easily be missed. Again another ground clearance charge was used – this time with slightly less explosive.

  But when Lewis fired the charge there was an almighty explosion and the trees just disappeared. A 20kg main charge had detonated which produced a huge crater and would definitely have killed anyone who stepped on it. The explosion was so powerful that the Counter-IED team and half of the Light Dragoons were covered in dust. A few laughs broke out, the funereal atmosphere seemed to be lifting. We cleared another two devices that day before eventually heading back to Keenan hot and tired but also relieved that the hours had been filled with useful work. I’d hoped to find more. I wanted to be kept busy. The last thing I wanted was the team sitting around reflecting on what had happened to Dan.

  As we walked through the gate Major Plant greeted us and congratulated the team on a job well done. But none of us were really in the mood for small talk.

  ‘Thanks, sir. We’d better get on with our admin and I have a couple of reports to write.’

  Usually post-op admin is a pain in the arse but that day everyone stayed busy. While I wrote up my reports Lewis sorted out his kit, replenished his explosive and dets. He automatically did the same with my kit. He could see I wanted to be left alone. Dave recharged his batteries and ensured all of his ECM equipment was in good working order as did the searchers, while the RESA wrote up his search log in conjunction with the search commander.

  With the report almost complete Lewis and I began writing down the details of the bits of devices recovered. The dimensions of the pressure plates, colour and length, if there were any wires and what kind of tape was used were all carefully logged.

  Later that evening when our work was done Lewis made a quick brew, which was drunk in silence, both of us no doubt thinking about Dan and how on any other day it could have been one of us.

  Dave appeared with a towel under his arm and said, ‘We need to go for a swim and I know where. Come on – any idiot can be miserable.’ We followed him through a maze of tents until he reached a huge tank filled with water where the rest of the team were laughing and joking.

  It wasn’t long before my thoughts again turned to Dan – difficult questions surfaced. Had his body been recovered? Was there anything left to recover? Sleep didn’t come easy that night and when I did doze I dreamed of death. I woke at 5 a.m. unable to sleep any longer. In a few hours’ time I would be confronted with the evidence of Dan’s last moments on earth and I was dreading it.

  11

  Losing a Mate

  An early flight on an empty Chinook took us into FOB Shawqat, the main British base in the district of Nad e’Ali. The usual banter that filled those idle, empty minutes was absent. No one smiled. Dan was dead. And we were going to try to find out what killed him. Nothing good would come from this day and we all knew it.

  As we dragged our kit from the Chinook I was met by the Operations Warrant Officer (OPSWO) from Bastion and Major Danny Rae, who was OC of Weapons Intelligence Section (WIS, pronounced WIZ), a mixed unit of Royal Military Police, Intelligence Corps and Ammunition Technicians or ATOs, whose role, among other things, was to conduct post-blast investigations. The WIS unit would attempt to find out what happened through interviews with eye-witnesses and examining the evidence. It was often an unpleasant, difficult job.

  Stilted pleasantries were exchanged but there was no real attempt at small talk. Then out of the blue the Operations Warrant Officer announced, ‘Right I’m going to be running this operation.’

  I gave him a look that said: ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m going be using your team. You won’t be doing this task.’

  ‘You what?’

  The OPSWO continued but I wasn’t really listening. I had spent the previous evening wondering how I was going to feel being confronted by the scene of Dan’s death. Now he was telling me I wasn’t needed and he was taking over my team.

  ‘You know what, that’s not happening. If you want to use my team then I’m going to be there as well. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. If you have to be there then we’ll do it together.’

  The OPSWO immediately sensed my anger and despite outranking me rightly assumed that this was a battle he wasn’t going to win.

  ‘Yeah, sure, Kim, whatever you want. I just thought you might want to sit this one out.’

  Chappy, who’d been listening
to the conversation, was almost as angry as me and said, ‘Is he for real?’

  ‘Look, Chappy. It is what it is. We’re just going to have to deal with it. We need to really focus on the task, no distractions, and do what’s best for Dan.’

  We had barely been in Shawqat ten minutes and already emotions were running high. Fortunately a runner from the Ops Room appeared and announced that everyone taking part in the recovery operation was immediately required to attend a briefing.

  The Shawqat Ops Room was a huge wooden-framed room, reinforced with steel girders and designed to withstand a direct hit from either a mortar or rocket. Inside, the air was hot and stale. Clerks and officers tapped away on computers as we gathered around a large planning table covered with maps and aerial photographs of the surrounding area. My eyes were immediately drawn to a large red pin placed on a track about three kilometres south of the FOB. The location where Dan was killed. A surge of anger rose up inside me. ‘He had a name,’ I wanted to shout. ‘Why don’t you use his name instead of a red pin?’ I was still raw, still hurting and nothing bad was meant by the red pin. Whenever there was a contact IED a red pin was always used to denote the location – it was standard practice.

  The plan involved a small convoy of Mastiffs transporting the Counter-IED and WIS teams to a rendezvous point 700 metres from where Dan had been killed. A platoon of Welsh Guardsmen would also be on the ground to provide some added security. The blast site would be cleared of any further IED threats and then the WIS commander and his evidence team would begin their work, scouring the area for every shred of evidence.

  With the briefing over, I headed out into the daylight where my team was waiting, eager to get on with the job.

  ‘Dan’s IEDD team is still on the ground. They’ve been there for twenty-four hours securing the scene. Just be aware that they’ve had a shit time.’

  Almost as soon as I’d finished the brief the OPSWO appeared.

  ‘Kim – everything OK?’

  ‘All fine with me.’ My response was a bit childish and I regretted it immediately.

  ‘I mean with us, you and me.’

  ‘Look, mate. Dan was a mate of mine. My team knew him and worked with him. As shit as this job is they want to do it and they want me leading them. With all due respect, they don’t want you. So let’s just get on with it.”

  The OPSWO nodded, the penny had finally dropped.

  As we made our way over to where the Mastiffs were waiting, we walked past a makeshift gym where some members of the Welsh Guards were relaxing, lifting weights, listening to music, laughing and joking. They weren’t being disrespectful; they might not even have known that Dan had been killed. But it served as a reminder of how we had all grown used to coping with death. If you didn’t know the person who had been killed, you barely took any notice. The death of a British or NATO soldier was a daily occurrence and none of us had the emotional capacity to mourn them all. You had to pick who you shed tears for if you hoped to keep your shit together.

  The convoy of Mastiffs slowly trundled out of the camp, along an arrow-straight dusty track and into the Green Zone. The journey to the drop-off point took about twenty minutes and by the time we arrived it was almost 10.00 a.m. and burning hot. The search team swung into action conducting one isolation after another, effectively creating a cleared box into which the Mastiffs moved, waited and moved on again. The whole process was repeated until the searchers made contact with Dan’s team who had already cleared and established an ICP.

  Once out of the vehicle, I quickly orientated myself with the ground. A field full of maize ran along one side of the track while on the other was a series of orchards fed by an irrigation ditch which hand-railed the left side of the track. Water was bubbling along irrigation ditches, birds sang in the trees and the sky was a clear, beautiful blue. But less than a hundred metres down the track was where Dan had taken his last breath.

  Soldiers with blank faces and sad, tired eyes lined the track keeping guard as they had done for more than twenty-four hours. They looked at me almost suspiciously as we retraced Dan’s steps towards the location where he was killed.

  One of the last soldiers to see Dan alive was slumped against a wall. He’d been awake throughout the night, refusing to sleep, determined to keep the area secure. The soldier, a corporal, had been providing top cover in an armoured vehicle and had been watching Dan right up until the point he was killed.

  I dropped down to one knee, next to where he was resting eyes closed and gently asked if I could have a chat for a couple of seconds. He went to stand but I told him to remain seated. He explained that he had been watching Dan through his antique army-issue binoculars.

  ‘It was a basic no-dramas pressure plate IED,’ he said. ‘Dan was lying down on his stomach working on the IED. Everything seemed to be going OK. He was fully in control of the situation. He stood up to go and get his hook and line and then returned to the IED and it looked as though he was trying to attach his line to something.’

  This all made sense. Dan was doing this so that he could pull something out of the ground from a safe distance.

  ‘As he was doing this there was a huge explosion. When the dust cleared he was gone.’

  Based on the information provided by the corporal it seemed to me that Dan was carrying out some sort of manual action on the device when something went terribly wrong; what that was I had no real idea.

  Following the explosion, Dan’s search team had gone down to where Dan had been working hoping that he might have escaped serious injury. But his body had taken the full brunt of the blast. His death was instantaneous. The search team had little option but to gather up Dan’s remains in what were effectively bin bags. No wonder they all looked traumatised.

  The next stage was to isolate the target area, which was conducted by myself, the search team, the OPSWO and the WIS major following on. Malley led, moving out to the right-hand side of the target and around eighty metres beyond the point of the blast.

  Pieces of Dan’s shredded uniform were scattered across the ground along with pieces of mangled EOD equipment. His combat helmet lay on its side, dented and almost cracked in half. I wanted to pick it up, partly out of respect but also wanting to keep it safe, but it needed to be photographed in situ by the WIS team along with everything else. Dark-brown patches of dried blood stained the area around the scorched black crater. His body armour had also been torn to pieces and I felt my stomach turn as I imagined Dan’s last seconds.

  Any pieces of foreign debris that could possibly be linked to the bomb were collected for further analysis. But there was little of anything that could provide real intelligence. Almost nothing was left of the IED apart from small pieces of yellow melted plastic, the remnants of the container.

  The more we searched, the closer we came to the conclusion that Dan had just been a victim of bad luck. The device was probably faulty in some way, possibly with a loose wire that caused the bomb to detonate when Dan was attempting to attach his line. It was possible the device was booby-trapped but there was no evidence to suggest that was the case. From the size of the crater, 1.5 metres in diameter, it was estimated that the main charge was around 20kg – Dan wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  As the day progressed the blast area became increasingly busy with evidence collectors taking pictures of the scene and the surroundings to help with the final report, while other members of the WIS team began collecting Dan’s equipment. A narrow dusty track, almost like an alleyway bordered on one side by some trees, ran close to the site of the explosion and hanging in one of the branches was a piece of Dan’s uniform.

  ‘Bits of clothing up there. All going to have to come down,’ I said to one of the RMP corporals.

  But he shook his head dismissively. ‘Nah, we’re not going to bother with that. Not important – won’t give us anything.’

  ‘You will get it,’ I snapped. ‘Were you listening to the brief? Everything, every little thing comes back. Nothing gets left
behind.’

  The RMP soldier looked sheepish and said nothing.

  ‘Fuck it. I’ll get it.’ I jumped onto a wall and shinned up the tree trunk with my rifle slung across my back. The piece of uniform was darkened by dried blood and had stuck to the branch in the baking heat.

  ‘Bag it. Remember, we leave nothing behind,’ I said sternly while handing it to the corporal.

  ‘OK. Sorry, Staff.’

  I had expected to see some of Dan’s equipment, his metal detector, an EOD weapon, a patch from his uniform, and if I’m honest more of Dan – but there was nothing. The main charge must have been massive. The only large piece of Dan’s equipment left was the helmet.

  Once everything had been bagged and the exploitation of the area complete, everyone involved in the operation, including Dan’s team, moved south of the blast area and back to where the Mastiffs were waiting. The OPSWO departed so that he could get back to Bastion and begin preparing the report. Before he left we shook hands and thanked each other and both agreed that it had been one shit day.

  It was now dark and as we waited for the order to move back to Shawqat it dawned on me that back in the UK everyone in British Army bomb disposal would want to know what had happened. By now they would know that Dan was dead but the questions would soon become rumours and in our world that was best avoided at all costs.

  I pushed open one of the heavy armoured roof hatches and stood up, the top half of my body exposed to the night air. The Milky Way was like a spray of glitter across the dark, inky black sky. It was beautiful, almost breathtaking and it felt good to be alive. For a few brief seconds, I gazed in awe at the sky above, forgetting briefly about the day, before pressing the speed dial on my satphone. A few seconds later and 3,600 miles away at the Felix Centre, Lee Ridgway answered.

  ‘Hi, mate, it’s me,’ I said, my voice heavy and lacking any real emotion.

  ‘Kim, how are you?’