Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit

by Sean Rayment

  I didn’t come across a single ATO who complained about his workload, even though they are some of the most hard-pressed troops in Helmand. But it was painfully clear that vastly more bomb hunters were needed in Afghanistan. The shortage has been caused, in part, by a recruiting cap a few years ago – a purge which was imposed upon the Royal Logistic Corps by the bean counters in the Ministry of Defence.

  The search for additional resources within the EOD world has been dubbed by some as the ‘Oz Schmid effect’. Following Oz’s death the press became mesmerized by the stoicism and fortitude of his wife, Christina, and suddenly bomb hunters were big news. For the first time it became clear to the public that ATOs were being pushed well beyond the limit of what could ever reasonably be expected of them. Ripples of panic ran through the government and the Ministry of Defence, who were worried that they would be seen as doing too little to counter a threat which was killing and injuring soldiers every day, and so the order went out that more ATOs needed to be trained. What the politicians failed to grasp, however, was that the job of an AT or an ATO is a trade. ATs are trained to store, handle and work with all types of explosive and ammunition – and only part of that trade is IED disposal. It can take up to seven years for a soldier of non-commissioned rank to become fully qualified in IED disposal. In an attempt to boost numbers, the Defence EOD Operators’ course was created.

  Explosive ordnance disposal is conducted by the Royal Engineers, the Royal Navy and the RAF, as well as the Royal Logistic Corps. The EOD groups within these units also carry out IED disposal, but only those who have completed the High Threat IED course are qualified to serve in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of these are members of the RLC.

  Soldiers can train to become an Ammunition Technician (AT) from the age of 18. Officers at the rank of second lieutenant can also train to become an Ammunition Technical Officer (ATO). After five to six years’ service ATOs and their equivalents in the other parts of the armed services, and lieutenants or junior captains who have around seventeen months’ service, will be considered for the sixteen-week Defence EOD Operators’ course at the Felix Centre, which is housed in the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search School at Kineton in Warwickshire. The course is also now open to any senior non-commissioned officer or junior officer from any other part of the armed forces who is shown to have the aptitude for bomb disposal.

  Those who pass the course, around 50 per cent, will then be qualified for conventional munitions disposal, which can range from RPG warheads to Second World War grenades. They will also be qualified to deal with IEDs, but only in the UK and areas such as Cyprus, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. After a year’s further training and experience of commanding an EOD team, some of the officers and NCOs who demonstrate the right aptitude will be offered the opportunity to join the seven-week Advanced EOD Operators’ course at Kineton, where they will learn how to dispose of IEDs primarily found in Helmand. Around 17 per cent of trainees pass the advanced course first time, while the second-time pass rate is around 40 per cent.

  At the moment only those who have passed the advanced course can deploy to Helmand and undertake IED disposal, but that could change. There is a school of thought in the EOD world that believes that servicemen who have passed the sixteen-week Defence EOD Operators’ course could also be deployed to Helmand but would be restricted to dealing with specific devices such as disposing of RPG warheads or IED which can be neutralized remotely using robots. It then follows that the more advanced operators would be available for the more dangerous IED-disposal missions.

  Within the EOD world such a departure is proving controversial. Many ATOs believe that the gold standard for IED disposal should be the Advanced EOD Operators’ course and that any change to that practice is exposing soldiers and the newly trained Defence EOD operators to very real risk. The other school of thought argues that there is a role in Helmand for those who have passed only the Defence EOD course. The US Paladin teams and the rest of the NATO IED disposal units are trained to the standard reached by Defence EOD operators, yet deploy to Helmand as IED operators. So, if that standard is good enough for the US and the rest of NATO, then why should it not be good enough for Britain? By setting the bar at a lower level than the British, US Marines are almost able to embed an IED operator with every platoon of thirty men. The British Army can only achieve embedding of a single ATO at battlegroup level – 1,500 men.

  The question for the country’s defence chiefs is how much risk they are prepared to take. There is no doubt that, from the MoD’s position, the strategic harm which comes from the death of an ATO is far more damaging than the death of an infantry soldier. Over 300 British soldiers have been killed in Helmand and very few people in the country could name them all. Five ATOs have been killed and their names have a much higher profile. Interestingly, such a distinction does not exist within the US Marines, where the death of an IED operator is treated with no greater or lesser importance than that of a Marine.

  Financial incentives are also being offered to ATOs who have completed one tour in Afghanistan but agree to a further four years’ service, which could include another tour in Helmand. Those who sign up will be paid an extra £50,000 over four years in addition to the extra £15 a day ATOs receive as part of their skills pay.

  But increasing numbers of ATOs is not the sole answer to the problem of dealing with IEDs. Bomb-hunting teams always deploy as an eleven-man unit composed of the IED disposal team and the search team. One cannot deploy without the other. Producing additional ATOs is only half the battle. Additional high-threat searchers will also need to be trained, an issue which hasn’t yet been resolved.

  ‘There is only one ATO in the Nad-e’Ali battlegroup – me,’ Woody says with more than a hint of exasperation. ‘This place is absolutely saturated with IEDs and yet there is only one ATO – one IED disposal team, one search team. That means you come in off one job and you immediately go out on another. There are always more jobs than there are ATOs. Every battlegroup has a stack of devices for us to deal with. You are constantly in demand – you are doing planning for the ops, going to O-groups [Orders groups] and I have still got four reports to write. I will go out tomorrow and I’ll have to write up some more reports. It’s not just doing the bomb, it’s all the other stuff that goes with it, the administration, the planning.

  ‘Six months is a long time but as long as you are managed correctly it’s about achievable. But it’s tough – there are no easy tours in Helmand – and I think some ATOs might struggle, especially if your team has suffered casualties. You need to trust the people above you, and you need to believe that the headquarters will not put you in somewhere if you are too exhausted. Trouble is, we’re always knackered – it’s part of the job. We always say an ATO never has trouble sleeping but there can come a point when you are so knackered that you can become a danger to yourself and that’s when you need people above you to step in and say, “We’re pulling you out for a rest.” But then that will put greater pressure on other ATOs. We will always be rotated around the various operational areas so that you don’t get stale – and also because they all have different operational tempos.

  ‘Sangin is very busy, it’s horrible. You wouldn’t last six months in Sangin – you would either be a nervous wreck or be dead. I will go to Sangin at some stage. If I’m honest, I’d rather not, but you have to take it as it comes. The devices being laid in Sangin are not really any different to anywhere else, there are just more of them and the insurgents based there will target ATOs. The Taliban also have a very effective dicking screen. You will be watched every time you are on a job. For example, you always pull a device out of the ground using a hook and line and not by hand. If you pulled a bomb out of the ground by hand in Nad-e’Ali you might get away with it, but not in Sangin. Try that in Sangin and you will die. You might get away with it once but the Taliban will be watching and it will be, “OK. So he pulls it out by hand. OK, we’ll use that.” And next tim
e you did it – and I mean the next time – it would be bang, you’re dead. They will target routine, they will target obvious routes, they will target our casevac procedures. They know there are only so many places where you can put an HLS if you take a casualty, so they will target that too.

  ‘Sangin is different. The ground is different – on one side you have a sniper threat and on the other you have lots of hamlets and alleyways, so it’s really easy to channel soldiers into killing zones. And I think the Taliban are different too. They come in from Pakistan. They will have a play, try new ideas, new tactics. They all want to prove themselves, the foot soldiers and commanders, so you get taken on nearly all the time. Once they’ve proved their worth in Sangin, they get sent elsewhere in Helmand – that’s the current theory anyway.

  ‘There are also a lot of checkpoints for troops to man, so you don’t have the depth in numbers you might have in other areas and that can also be exploited by the Taliban, giving them greater freedom of movement. So a lot of the time, for the soldiers and the ATOs, Sangin is a real struggle. But it’s not the only area which is dangerous for ATOs. We’ve had guys killed and injured in every area – it wasn’t only Oz who died in Sangin. Gaz O’Donnell died in Musa Qala, Dan Shepherd was killed in Nad-e’Ali, Ken Bellringer lost his legs in Gereshk, and Dan Read was blown up in Musa Qala. So yes, Sangin is dangerous, but so is everywhere in Helmand. You’ve always got to try and stay one step ahead – it’s cat and mouse. The Taliban aren’t stupid. They will take you on if they think they can get away with it. I’ve been out on jobs where the support from ground troops has been brilliant. When we cleared 6 km of Route Dorset, which is on the eastern edge of Nad-e’Ali, we had four Vikings, six Scimitars and a Danish tank. The isolation was split into two: we had twenty blokes on each side of the road. We had fast air up as well. If I was the Taliban I would be thinking, do I want to take these guys on? Answer: no. But then I’ve been on similar jobs and all we’ve had is a Mastiff and half a dozen soldiers because that is all that can be spared. And you know that the Taliban will think, let’s have a go. They will use multiple IEDs in ambushes, they will target casevac routes, and if your drills are bad you will be targeted too.

  ‘The Taliban know how we react when we have a contact – they have seen it. A guy gets blown up and loses both legs – there’s a lot of panic and shouting, the adrenalin is pumping, he’s close to death, and at the forefront of everyone’s mind is getting him out of the killing zone and back to the HLS. The Taliban know this, so they target the route to the HLS. Now, if in the midst of all this panic, blood, gore and mayhem you charge off to the HLS you will become a casualty too. It’s happened here many times. Guys have died rescuing their mates because they forgot the basic drills. Rather than slowing everything down and making sure they carefully clear the route to the HLS, the fog of panic descends and then bang, you’ve now got one double amputee, another couple of severely injured guys, and possibly some KIAs – and that’s a big mess. We’ve to constantly make sure that we play by our rules and not the Taliban’s, we fight on our terms, not the Taliban’s. But that’s one of those things which is far easier to say than do.’

  Woody falls silent and stares into the empty paper cup he has cupped between his hands. Just as I’m about to ask if everything is OK, he lifts his head and says, ‘I’ve got a bit of a confession to make.’ There is a slight curl at the ends of his top lip and I intuitively realize that he is about to explain that something almost went wrong on an operation a few days ago. I remember Woody having a serious conversation with the WIS and Kev, the RESA, after he returned from the compound for the last time. Shortly after their conversation finished, I asked Woody if everything was OK. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ was all he said.

  ‘I was almost killed the other day,’ he says without the slightest hint of either bravado or concern, ‘and I’ve been going over in my mind whether I could or should have done anything differently and the bottom line is, I couldn’t – I was just lucky.’

  Woody is referring to the operation a few days earlier when he had to climb over the wall of a compound which had at one time been a Taliban firing point and had since been booby-trapped with a pressure-plate IED. The compound had become very overgrown with brambles and weeds, which meant that Woody was forced to hack his way through to the doorway where the bomb had been buried.

  As he approached the doorway he could see a wire protruding from the compound’s earth floor. He immediately knew it was linked to the power pack. ‘When you are faced with that sort of situation, you make a mental assessment of where you think the various components are located. You can do a bit of searching with the Vallon. That will give you a general idea of where the device is located but you can’t narrow the location down in the way that you can with the hand-held metal detector. So I set about working and I placed the IED weapon on the ground near the battery, I was happy with that, and I started uncovering the rest of the device. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that the pressure plate was directly beneath the weapon. The problem was – and this is always the problem you face as an ATO – the device was very poorly laid out. You try not to have any preconceived ideas of how a bomb might be set up but you have to go in with some sort of basic plan and the acceptance that the bomb is designed to kill people. Whoever buried it didn’t want it to be found – or at least that is the premise you work on. I had picked up quite a strong metal signature in the doorway, so that’s where I assumed the pressure plate would be. But it wasn’t. It was right beneath where I was working. I didn’t realize that until I returned to the compound after I had extracted everything. When I returned to the compound with the WIS he asked where and how the device was laid out so he could write his report. I said, “The explosive was there, the pressure plate there, and the power pack there.” And that’s when the penny dropped and I realized that I had placed the weapon on top of the pressure plate. The pressure plate was low metal content. It was effectively made of cardboard – there was almost no metal signature and it had two thin wires running along the inside. It was the thinnest wire I’d ever seen on a pressure plate. The device was very cleverly made but was really poorly placed, which suggests that the person who made the bomb was not the person who laid it out – same tactics as the IRA. The bomb maker is the more valuable asset, so why risk him?

  ‘Looking back, I could have caused the device to function and if it had blown up I would have been killed – no doubt about that.’

  Woody laughs as he makes this last point but I also sense concern. He knows, as I know, that he did everything by the book, he followed all the rules, all the procedures, and used all the experience he’d built in Helmand to find and defuse the bomb. But he still came close, too close, to being killed.

  Again smiling, he adds, ‘It didn’t play on my mind at the time, but I have thought about it a bit since coming back. It’s just one of those things really, and I suppose I got a bit lucky. Maybe that’s another life I’ve lost.’

  While life for bomb hunters in Helmand is clearly dangerous and demanding, Woody, like most ATOs, believes that it is the wives, families and girlfriends back home in the UK who really suffer. For many of the wives the pressure and worry are sometimes too much to bear.

  ‘There is a saying in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal world that EOD actually stands for “every one’s divorced”.’ Woody laughs as he says this, but he’s also being serious. After the special forces, whose members spend months away from home or on courses sharpening their killing skills, bomb-disposal operators have the highest divorce rate in the Army.

  ‘We all know guys whose marriage has gone tits up because they put the job first. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want to have a family life. The missus wants me to leave. I could join the police force – it’s better money and I wouldn’t have to come back to Afghan. I would go home every night, and that’s very tempting. Guys are getting killed and injured every day by the bombs I’m defusing. It’s not me who is feeling the p
ressure, it’s the wife. She’s the one whose heart stops when there’s a knock on the door or the phone rings. None of us thinks about the dangers but we all know they’re there, niggling away at the back of your mind, and I suppose now that I’ve got children you start to question what you’re doing. I’ve got twins and I want to see them grow up – I don’t want to miss too much of their childhood.’

  It is the separation from their families which most soldiers seem to struggle with, especially at the beginning of a six-month tour. No married soldier, no matter how experienced, gets used to saying goodbye. Even the toughest, most battle-experienced sergeant major goes watery-eyed when talk turns to families back home, and Woody is no different.

  He continues, ‘There are a few of them who are mad for it [bomb disposal in Afghanistan] but most ATOs just want to get the tour done. I’ve never met an ATO yet who has finished his tour and wants to come back – it’s the stresses and dangers that eventually get to you, they get to everyone, especially when guys are getting killed and injured. If you survive the tour out here as an ATO you know you’ve been lucky – good at the job, yes, but lucky too. On Op Herrick 10 there wasn’t one team that hadn’t been blown up. I’ve been blown up, Dan Perkins [another ATO] has been blown up, Captain Rob Swan was pinned down by snipers, Badger was under fire, Harry French’s team had two guys taken out by a grenade lobbed over a wall. The thing is, none of us were doing anything wrong. That’s just the way it goes out here.’