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

by Sean Rayment

  Lieutenant Dobbin, a fresh-faced 24-year-old and one of the most inexperienced but highly regarded junior officers in the battalion, also forged a close relationship with another capable Afghan policeman, Commander Israel.

  ‘He was an extraordinary individual, very brave and very capable and highly regarded by both his men and the population, but bizarrely he seemed quite happy in the knowledge that he would not be alive for much longer. Both Israel and Daoud had the air of a European ski instructor, weathered, relaxed and totally unfazed by fairly extreme situations. Both men were relatively quiet individuals. I think Daoud was local. I know Israel was a local to the area in which he served.

  ‘During one patrol with the Afghan Army we were being watched by the insurgents and could hear them chatting on their radios (our interpreter was listening in and translating for us). Over the radio they began to talk about the fact that they could see Israel with us and what they would do to him if they caught him – he was clearly well known to them for them to pick him out from an eighty-man patrol. When we told him what they were saying he just smiled and carried on. That was the type of character he was and I had a great deal of respect for him.’

  It would be wrong to condemn the entire police force as an incompetent and corrupt organization – that was almost the whole picture but not quite. There were a few commanders of quality who often demonstrated outstanding bravery which within the British Army would have been worthy of official recognition. But it was clear that officers like Daoud and Israel were the exception rather than the rule. Within weeks of arriving in Nad-e’Ali, Colonel Walker knew that he would have to invest a great deal of time and effort in improving the local police if he was to make headway in the battle for hearts and minds.

  Nad-e’Ali is a large, highly populated area of central Helmand. It covers an area of 250 sq km and has a population of around 200,000. Colonel Walker’s battlegroup numbered 1,500 men, which gave him just six men for each square kilometre of ground.

  It was clear almost immediately to the Grenadier Guards that Nad-e’Ali was not a hotbed of insurrection; instead the Taliban exploited local grievances between the farmers and some of the more powerful figures in the community. The Taliban offered an alternative, and possibly more secure, existence which, in some cases, managed to capture the public’s imagination. The local population had relatively simple demands – they wanted to be able to farm safely by day and night and have freedom of movement within the district – and they would ultimately support whichever side could deliver.

  By the time the Grenadiers arrived in September 2009, the insurgents had managed to create a series of screens and guards which kept ISAF troops away from the people the Taliban were trying to control. Colonel Walker explained to me how he set about the task of separating the local people from the Taliban and making life more secure for them. ‘We had to prove to the people that the Afghan government was more effective at providing for their needs than the Taliban were. We had to make them active participants in the success of their community. Everything we did would be done by, with and through the Afghans. Each of my six company groups were tasked to protect the community of the main population centres, which we had asked the governor to identify, and then we set about creating freedom of movement between them to stimulate the return to normality.

  ‘The second part of the plan was to work with the Afghan security forces and merge ourselves into one single entity with the single purpose of defeating the insurgents. The last object of the plan was to defeat the insurgents when we met them. One of our greatest concerns was civilian casualties. We observed and were told that the insurgents would deliberately seek us out in a fight to goad an over-reaction in order to kill civilians, so I had to ask the men to react with courageous restraint when attacked by insurgents, so as to reduce the risk of civilian casualties, and often they would have to walk away from a fight. But I did ask them to observe the enemy’s vulnerabilities and their predisposition to set patterns in our area, a crime I would not tolerate among my own soldiers but which the Taliban were happy to tolerate, and thus we would try and seek to discredit the Taliban fighters in the eyes of the community they would claim to be protecting. By discrediting the Taliban you create the conditions for reconciliation and reintegration. So the rules were pretty simple: don’t kill civvies and ruthlessly pursue the insurgents on our terms.’

  If the strategy was to succeed, the Grenadiers would have to work with and develop the capability of the police and, most importantly, get the public to trust them. One of the areas where they began this process in earnest was in the hamlet of Shin Kalay, which is sited on one of the main transit routes into the district centre, about 2 km west of the main British base. The local police commander was corrupt and brutal and had almost single-handedly managed to turn the entire population towards the Taliban. He was replaced by the senior police commander in the district, but the police unit had failed to build a working relationship with the local population, who had started to drift towards supporting, or at least accepting the presence of, the Taliban.

  Colonel Walker set about taking the Taliban’s influence away from the district centre, clearing a route to the Nahr-e-Burgha canal, and building a protected community around Shin Kalay. These changes would allow the Grenadiers to build a central belt of prosperity that would then serve as a example to the rest of the district of the advantages of going along with their government.

  In addition Colonel Walker decided to embed elements of his tactical headquarters within the police unit in Shin Kalay, who would act as mentors for the officers and help them win the trust and respect of the locals. The battlegroup’s tactical headquarters was composed of a mixed bunch of soldiers with a variety of different skills whose role on operations was to ‘fight’ the battle by establishing a communications network, assist with casualty evacuation, ammunition resupply and prisoner handling, as well as providing a bodyguard for the commanding officer.

  WO1 Darren Chant, as leader of the small force at Blue 25 on the outskirts of Shin Kalay, was a man who set high standards and demanded that the battalion’s officers and men adhere to them. On a previous tour of Afghanistan in 2007 he carried a wounded soldier in full kit for 2 km across uneven ground, all the while chatting about drinking, fighting, and his beloved Inkerman Company. Two members of the Royal Military Police, Corporals Steven Boote and Nicholas Webster-Smith, were also part of the team. Also present was Sergeant Matthew Telford, the regimental police sergeant, who was effectively the second-in-command of the patrol base and was known as ‘the daddy’. ‘If you had a problem you went to see him and it would get sorted, and it worked the other way too. If he had a problem he would come and see you. He was a giant of a man,’ recalled Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, 31, a veteran of twelve years’ service, another member of the team. The Grenadiers, like all Guards regiments, do not have the rank of corporal. The equivalent rank in the Guards is Lance Sergeant.

  Also serving with the tactical headquarters were Lance Corporals Liam Culverhouse, William ‘Woody’ Woodgates, and one of the battalion’s Fijian soldiers, Lance Corporal Peniasi ‘Nammers’ Namarua. Junior members of the unit included Guardsman James Major, who had been with the battalion for just under a year and at just 18 was one of the youngest members of the unit, Guardsman Steve Loader and Guardsman Pete ‘Treacle’ Lyons.

  When the Grenadier Guards arrived at the police compound, a former pharmacy, they were greeted by an ill-disciplined and shoddy bunch, some of whom wore police uniforms while others wore their own clothes. The compound was dirty and bullet-riddled. The police kept irregular hours, carried dirty weapons, were dishevelled, and clearly lacked respect for themselves and one another. Almost immediately Sergeant Major Chant began to stamp his authority on the situation. He explained to the commander that he was there to help and improve the police’s relationship with the locals, but it was clear to everyone, including the police, that life was about to change.

  Forty-year-old Daz Chant
was a physically imposing man with a huge character. Those who knew him said he was a ‘force of nature’ who was ‘cast from the original model of the Guards sergeant major’. He was ultra-fit and Para-trained, having once served with the Pathfinders, a specialist reconnaissance unit of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Within the battalion he was feared and loved in equal measure. He worked hard and played hard and expected everybody else to do the same. Back in Britain his wife, Nausheen, whom he had met at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst when she was a civilian administrator there and he was an instructor, was pregnant with their first child.

  The arrival of Chant and his team was a life-changing event for the Afghan police. The ‘please yourself’ ethos which typified the core of the police’s command structure was over. The twelve-man police unit would report for duty every day, in uniform, looking smart – no arguments. Within a week the unit had been transformed. The compound ‘stood to’ every morning before first light, the police saluted Sergeant Major Chant whenever they saw him, but, most remarkably of all, their relationship with the local community began to change.

  ‘The sergeant major was in his element,’ recalled Colonel Walker. ‘He had the police eating out of his hand. He had turned this rag-tag bunch into a unit which was relatively well disciplined. They were turning up for work on time, in uniform, wearing the proper head dress, with clean weapons. He had managed to instil a bit of pride. He also managed to make an impact with the locals, who would come up to him and tell him their problems, calling him Mr Daz.

  ‘After about two weeks I told Sergeant Major Chant that I was going to need him back at the headquarters, I had other things for him to be doing, but he kept saying, “Just a few more days.”’

  On that fateful November day at Blue 25, as the soldiers stood to at dawn they spotted some suspicious movement of civilians in a couple of empty compounds which had previously been used as Taliban firing points. They had patrolled down to the site a few days earlier and ringed the murder holes in the walls with white spray paint so that in the event of an attack they would be able to easily identify the firing positions.

  The Taliban had launched a couple of attacks against the base in recent weeks and Daz Chant wanted to be ready for anything. As the dawn sun began to climb into the cloudless Helmand sky, the haunting sounds of the call to prayer echoed around the kalay. Rather than wait for the Taliban to attack, Daz decided to seize the initiative and quickly issued orders for a patrol down to the abandoned compounds. The patrol was fully ‘kitted up’ and prepared for anything the Taliban might throw at them. But an extensive search of the compounds found nothing. Whoever had been there had gone. With the excitement over, the soldiers withdrew back to the base and began their usual morning routine. The British soldiers washed and shaved and had their breakfast of Army rations and hot, sweet tea, followed by a first cigarette of the day for those who smoked.

  After breakfast Lance Sergeant Baily and Sergeant Telford recced a set of emergency helicopter landing sites close to the base which could be used if a casualty evacuation proved necessary. The location of these sites would be changed every few days just in case they were identified by the Taliban and booby-trapped with IEDs.

  At around 9 a.m. Daz Chant and his men went out again to picket, or guard, the main route to allow a British Immediate Replenishment Group, a supply convoy of armoured vehicles, to safely pass through Shin Kalay. But on this occasion the police refused to go on patrol with the soldiers. Such acts of petulance were nothing new. Afghan soldiers and police officers alike would often refuse to go out on patrol with the British soldiers, usually claiming they were too tired. Route clearances are long and boring but always potentially dangerous. A route must be cleared of IEDs before a convoy can pass through, and it was little surprise that the police had no interest in joining the soldiers. The Grenadiers used to call the practice of guarding the route ‘street lining’ in reference to their ceremonial duties back in London, where they would stand at attention on either side of the road waiting for a Royal cortège to pass.

  While the soldiers were picketing the route, Sergeant Telford and Lance Sergeant Baily were preparing a lesson on how to use trip flares. The device uses the light of the flare to illuminate an area of tactically important ground, such as a track or a stream crossing. The flare ignites when a wire ‘guarding’ an area of ground is ‘tripped’.

  Daz was keen for the soldiers to receive some sort of military training every day to ensure boredom wouldn’t set in and to keep the soldiers sharp. The lessons was planned to take place at around 3 p.m., when the soldiers had finished lunch and completed some general duties. Just before the patrol returned, Lance Sergeant Baily, the tactical headquarters signaller, who was responsible for all communications, had noticed that one of his radio antennae was broken. The only way of establishing communication with the main base was to move the radio set onto the roof and hope for a better signal.

  The relationship between the soldiers and the police had been pretty good. But there was one individual, named Gulbuddin, whose behaviour and attitude had started to irritate some of the soldiers, especially Lance Corporal Culverhouse. Gulbuddin was likeable enough but had the annoying habit of grabbing some of the soldiers’ backsides, which on two occasions had almost led to a fight. His behaviour forced Sergeant Major Chant to have words with the police commander. On one occasion the Afghan grabbed Culverhouse from behind and tried to force him to the ground. The lance corporal reacted angrily and a scuffle broke out which only came to an end when Sergeant Telford stepped in.

  After lunch Lance Sergeant Baily, who by now had established a radio link with the battalion headquarters, was joined on the roof by Lyons and the two RMP corporals, Steven Boote and Nicholas Webster-Smith, and the four of them shared a welfare box of goodies such as cheese and onion crisps, biscuits and boiled sweets sent to the troops by members of the Women’s Institute. It was a sunny, late autumn day and for a few moments the soldiers forgot about the war, the constant fear of death and the Taliban as they relaxed together. The talk was of home leave, wives, girlfriends and the English football premiership.

  Baily stayed up on the roof, leaning against a wall reading a well-thumbed paperback while keeping an ear open on the radio. Down in the small courtyard below the soldiers began to assemble for the lesson, sitting on a small wall which had become the communal gathering place. In one of the buildings where the troops slept, Lance Corporal Culverhouse and some of the other soldiers were having a competition to see who could catch the most mice. Then, without warning, the killing began.

  A volley of machine-gun fire split the still afternoon air. Another longer burst followed, then another and another. The deafening sound seemed to fill the compound and could even be heard at FOB Shawqat, nearly 2 km to the east.

  Daz Chant was the first to die. It is thought that he was less than 2 ft away from Gulbuddin, who moments earlier had been on guard duty, when the Afghan fired the first volley. The burst struck Chant in his unprotected flank. Assuming they were secure within the confines of the compound and among comrades, none of the soldiers was wearing body armour. Sergeant Telford, 37, died next, killed almost instantaneously by the same burst of fire from Gulbuddin. Steve Boote, 22, was shot through the head in a second burst of fire and also died. Young Jimmy Major, 18, had also been hit several times and was close to death, as was 24-year-old Nicholas Webster-Smith.

  Gulbuddin fired burst after burst into the bodies of the dead and the wounded before moving into the troops’ sleeping quarters. The soldiers instinctively ran for their weapons when he burst through the door and fired another burst from his AK-47 into the corridor. Russian-made 7.62-mm short rounds ricocheted off walls, causing even more chaos and confusion.

  Lance Corporal Culverhouse was hit six times in the first burst, with bullets striking him in the head, both arms and both legs. Lance Corporal Woodgates, Guardsmen Lyons, Bone and Loader and Lance Corporal Namarua were also hit by the same lethal volley. They didn�
�t stand a chance.

  ‘I remember getting hit in the face with something and I remember shouting and swearing,’ recalled Lance Corporal Culverhouse, who lost an eye in the attack. ‘I remember saying, “Fucking hell, what was that?” and I covered my face and turned around to see the back of an Afghan, one of the police officers, shooting the lads. It just all went so fast, and then when he saw me he just basically unloaded a magazine, firing at me. He only managed to hit me six times. Thank God.’

  Culverhouse was lying face down in a bloody, crumpled heap on the ground when Gulbuddin walked over to him. The wounded soldier, by now in agony, squeezed his eyes shut tight, held his breath, and prayed.

  ‘The guy came and checked that I was dead. I heard his footsteps and I could hear dust being kicked away from his feet. And then it stopped, and then it went back, so I don’t know what he was doing at the time. I know he must have been checking I was dead because he stood over me. When I was playing dead, I was thinking, he’s going to shoot me again, he’s going to shoot me again. But he didn’t.’

  Up on the roof, Lance Sergeant Baily’s initial thought was that either the compound was being attacked by someone very close or one of the soldiers had opened fired at an insurgent.

  ‘I was a bit confused because when you come under fire you usually get a crack where the bullet passes close by, but I didn’t get any of that. I sent an initial contact report to HQ: “Contact. Wait, out.” That’s when the screaming started. I heard screaming downstairs and I thought, someone’s giving orders down there, but then it became apparent that it was a painful scream, a really agonizing, grating scream, the sort of thing you hear when someone’s in a lot of pain. It will live with me for ever.