‘I was almost killed the other day.’
Staff Sergeant Gareth Wood, ATO, 11 EOD Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps, serving with JFEOD Group
‘If you’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, you will leave Helmand with your team intact – no one killed or injured, no amputees. But you know you are going to get blown up, you know you are going to get shot at. You will have close shaves and you just have to hope that luck is on your side. But there are only so many rolls of the dice you can have before you get a double six. We all know that, but we train ourselves not to dwell on what might happen. I suppose you could say that we are living in denial but I don’t think there is any other way of getting through Afghan other than to have that sort of mentality.’
Woody and I are chatting over a cup of Army tea in one of the two steel-reinforced bunkers that serve as the canteen for the 150 soldiers operating from FOB Shawqat, the main headquarters of the Grenadier Guards battlegroup, to which Woody and his team are currently attached. It’s around 8 p.m. and the soldiers have finished their evening meal, a chicken curry followed by semi-frozen Black Forest Gateau, all washed down with an orange-coloured, sickly sweet squash. Curry is an Army staple – back in Camp Bastion the food halls where the soldiers eat offer it as a menu choice every day – but in Shawqat curry is a rarity and always a crowd-puller. It’s comfort food, it reminds the soldiers of home.
The bunker is lit by a series of low-hanging fluorescent lights emitting a dull-greenish hue. On one wall is an electric fly-catcher which periodically spits out a series of cracks every time a fly is zapped. The previous evening soldiers were betting on how many flies would be killed in one, five and ten minutes.
A 50-in. flat-screen TV fills a wall at one end of the building where three young soldiers sit engrossed in The Hurt Locker. It’s one of the many oddities of life in Helmand that many soldiers appear to relax by watching war films or playing violent computer games.
Woody looks over his shoulder and stares at the TV for a few seconds. Then he turns to me and a wide, toothy grin creeps across his face. ‘Hollywood,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You just knew they weren’t going to get it right. You wouldn’t last five minutes if you behaved like that out here.’
I’ve now been with Woody and his team for over a week. I’ve seen him pull bombs from the ground after hours of toil. I’ve seen him tense, frustrated, angry and relieved, and I’ve listened to him talk longingly of his wife and 3-year-old twin daughters. But with so much to live for and so much to lose, I still can’t quite understand why Woody is a bomb hunter. Helmand province, the largest in Afghanistan, is without doubt currently the most dangerous place on the planet. Woody knows the risks. He is horribly aware that a simple mistake, a momentary lapse in concentration, can spell disaster. He is no stranger to death. One of his best friends, Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, was killed in Helmand while Woody was completing his High Threat course.
Woody’s face is friendly and burnished to a rusty light brown by the hundreds of hours he has spent exposed to the desert sun. His eyes are quick and alert and his face carries a happy smile. The dirt and sweat have been washed away but the fatigue of war has taken its toll. His cheeks are hollow, he admits to often being too exhausted to eat after a particularly difficult job, and, like most of the ATOs operating in Helmand, he has acquired dark rings beneath his eyes.
To date Woody’s team have been blown up twice and he can’t remember exactly how many times they have come under fire since they arrived in January 2010. He thinks, though he can’t be certain, that he and his team have disposed of something like thirty bombs. But Woody tries not to count. I have never met a soldier who is not superstitious, and Woody is no different. Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid and Captain Dan Read both counted the number of bombs they defused, and both are dead, Woody tells me. He is now convinced that counting bombs brings bad luck.
Woody’s first brush with death occurred when he was part of the High Readiness Force in early March 2010. His team were flown by helicopter into FOB Inkerman to clear two recently discovered IEDs. The base was named after the Inkerman Company of the Grenadier Guards, under whose watch it was established in June 2007. It sits right on the edge of the fertile green zone and was built to interdict Taliban movement towards Sangin district centre. At the time the base held the dubious distinction of being one of the most attacked in Helmand. I have been embedded in Inkerman twice before, in 2007 with 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment and in 2008 with 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment, and on both occasions the base came under Taliban attack.
The IED threat in the Sangin area is so high that ATOs are only sent on attachment to the resident battlegroup after they have completed at least two months in Helmand. The same rules, however, do not apply to the HRF who fly in, do the job, and fly out.
For bomb hunter callsigns Brimstone 32 and 45, the high-risk search team, the mission, on paper at least, appeared to be relatively routine. Two bombs had been located in the area, a pressure-plate device on Route 611, the main transit link between FOB Inkerman and Sangin district centre, some 8 km to the south, and one closer to the base.
‘We were on HRF and were choppered into Inkerman the night before,’ recalls Woody, between sips of hot, sweet tea. ‘We were briefed on the task – it was basically a clearance op. We worked out our plan and we were all happy – well, as happy as you can be in Sangin.’
The bomb hunters left at first light in a convoy of Mastiffs supported by soldiers under the command of Company Sergeant Major Pat Hyde of A Company, 4 Rifles, a man who had developed the reputation of being a bomb magnet after having been blown up at least twelve times in five months.
Woody continues, ‘We got up in the morning at first light and headed south down Route 611 towards Sangin, where the first job was. The plan was to deal with that bomb, then return to the one closer to Inkerman and deal with that. But no job in Sangin is ever what you think it is going to be. We had been told that the first bomb was effectively a pressure-plate device but when we got there we discovered that there was a pressure plate and also a command wire linked to the bomb. Since the device was first discovered the Taliban had come in and changed it. It seems they had been monitoring the area and had obviously seen that it had been discovered. Once that had happened they knew that it would have to be cleared. It was on the 611, so it couldn’t be ignored. And the only people who clear bombs are ATOs. The route is overlooked by a number of patrol bases, so the enemy shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near it, but somehow they did. The Taliban are pretty cheeky in Sangin.
‘The main charge was an anti-tank mine and I think they had basically modified the device so that it could be detonated by command pull or by pressure. I think the idea behind the command wire was the hope that they might get a kill when a soldier made an approach during the confirmation.’
Despite the complication of the double trigger, Woody and his team were able to deal with the device relatively quickly. The soldiers knew the threat was high and that the risk of attack was very real, so no one wanted to hang around a minute longer than necessary. The isolation searches had to be quick but thorough. By late morning the troops were heading back towards Inkerman to complete the second and final task.
Woody explains, ‘We identified the area where the second device was buried – the soldiers from the Rifles had pinpointed it. The Mastiffs secured the area and we began clearing it. After the ICP was secured, the search team went out and began the isolation, a wide search of the area around the location of the bomb to ensure it was free from command wires.’
Above the ICP was a small outcrop on which sat an old, abandoned compound. Locals had recently been digging for rock in the area, possibly for use on their own homes. While the troops were preparing for the next stage of the mission they noticed a young boy, aged around 10, with a dirty face and matted hair, watching them closely. The soldiers waved and the boy, smiling, waved back.
A few of the troops shouted, ‘As-Salaam Alaikum’, the traditional Pashto greeting, which translates as ‘God be with you’ but also serves as a simple ‘hello’. The boy’s face lit up and he gleefully shouted back, ‘Hello, soldier.’ Everyone laughed and relaxed. The boy’s presence was, on the face of it, reassuring. But in Sangin nothing is quite what it might at first seem, and many soldiers believe the Taliban operate there with the sympathy and support of the local population.
‘I wasn’t really taking much notice,’ says Woody. ‘We’d just come back in off the isolation and people were sorting their kit out, dropping their bags, and I was concentrating on what I was going to do next, which was the first approach – going down the road. I was in my zone and the security of the area was the responsibility of the infantry.’
Woody and Kev, the RESA, were discussing the best line of approach, while some of the search team began to relax and light up cigarettes. Richie, the lead searcher, was folding the stock of his Vallon when the ridge line above them erupted and the ICP was hit by a volley of rocks and shrapnel. Punched by the blast, Richie fell to the ground holding his groin as a large plume of dust and smoke enveloped the soldiers. ‘Contact IED. Wait, out,’ was frantically dispatched over the radio as the sound of thunder echoed around the valley. ‘It was an almighty explosion, a fucking great bang,’ recalls Woody, now more animated than he had been earlier. ‘We were all showered with rocks and shit. It was really close, you could feel the shock wave. The detonation was about 30 metres away, and that’s pretty close. Your ears are ringing, your nose is running, there’s dust in your eyes, and you’re wondering who’s been hit. I can smile about it now, but at the time you’re thinking, what the bloody hell was that?’
Richie was rolling around on the ground, his knees bent up to his chest, shouting, ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ still unsure how badly he’d been injured. Sapper Dan Taylor-Allen ran over, grabbed Richie and asked him if he was hit. ‘In the nuts, man,’ said Richie. ‘I’ve been hit in the fucking nuts.’
Dan was joined by other members of the team, who told Richie to stop moving and quickly examined him. A wound in the groin from a piece of shrapnel can rupture the femoral artery and cause death within minutes. But whatever had hit Richie had not broken the skin: it had just given him one hell of a painful whack in the testicles. As they searched through his trousers they discovered the tip of a .50-cal bullet.
‘Initially we didn’t have a clue what had happened. We were all pretty shaken up. We called in the contact but we didn’t want to move up to the high ground because the likelihood was that we would be hit by the Taliban. Although we were pretty shaken up we still had a bomb to pull out of the ground. So there was nothing else to do but to push on with the job.’
Woody continues, ‘From the intelligence we gained afterwards we think that the Taliban had dicked us as we came into the area and while we were doing the isolation clearance word got back to the local Taliban. Two guys were seen in the area on a motorbike and we think they set an improvised claymore mine – which was basically a lump of explosive with lots of pieces of metal in there – like the .50-cal bullet tip which hit Richie. They set the device up – it would have been a compound pull or a command wire – gave the wire to the boy, told him to pull the wire when they disappeared down the road, and fucked off. They may have given him a few dollars or something, I suppose, as a bit of an incentive – that or threatened to kill his family. So the lad, who a few minutes earlier had been smiling and waving at us, pulls the wire and bang – we get blown up. If it had been 10 metres closer we would have taken some casualties. That’s the sort of shit that can happen in Afghan.’
Intelligence obtained later suggested that the Taliban had probably been monitoring the progress of the bomb hunters from the moment they left FOB Inkerman several hours earlier by using the well-established ‘dicking screen’. It’s almost certain that the bomb used against the patrol had been constructed some days or possibly weeks earlier but had been reconfigured to attack an opportunity target. Woody explains, ‘Command wires are pretty basic but very effective. The bomber just waits for a target and then touches the end of a wire against a battery and bang. The bomber can be over the other side of a wall from a bomb, or 100 metres away. The command pull is also pretty effective too. The command pull is generally a bit of string which will go to a command pull switch, generally a drinks bottle of some sort with a bare wire loop inside so there are two wires looped over each other on the insulated part and when you pull them they move to the uninsulated part, the circuit is completed, and the device functions. That device was either a command wire or compound pull.
‘There was no time to think about what might have been, so instead of shitting ourselves we all had a good laugh. We couldn’t believe that it was a child that did it. We were only waving at him a minute earlier – little bastard tried to take me out. So we went and searched down and found the device, which was a command-pull IED, and we dealt with that. It was a couple of anti-tank mines, so about 10–15 kg of explosive. We sorted that out and then went back to Inkerman – and that’s a fairly normal day out in Sangin.’
I suggest to Woody that having just been blown up is probably not the best preparation for defusing a bomb. ‘Wouldn’t it have been safer to call in another team, given that you were all probably shaken up?’ I ask.
A knowing smile creeps across Woody’s face. ‘In an ideal word, yes,’ he says. ‘Another team would have come in and finished the job. But we don’t have that luxury. This isn’t an ideal world – this is war and we don’t have the men. So yeah, we have to do things you wouldn’t otherwise expect to do. We were the ones on the ground. We knew where the device was, so you ask yourself, “Can I still do this?”, and I don’t think any of us thought we weren’t up to it. It just wasn’t an issue. If we hadn’t disposed of it someone else would have had to do it.’
Woody grew up in a dull, uninspiring Staffordshire mill town, where he says ‘there was absolutely nothing to do’. He moved schools when his parents parted and ended up in the Army because he ‘couldn’t be arsed’ to work at school. But despite his lack of interest in all things academic, he still managed to gain nine GCSEs. His school’s careers office offered little that stimulated his imagination and so one day after school he ventured into the local Army recruiting office for a look. It was a path that has been taken by hundreds of thousands of other young men and women over the years: the search for a vocation with a bit of spice. Woody was interested in learning a trade and with his clutch of decent GCSEs the Army welcomed him with open arms and a big, fat smile.
‘When I went to the careers office they give you a test and based on that test they give you a list of jobs you can do. So I went home with a big list of all the units or corps you could join. I originally chose to join the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. I thought, best get a trade, and then later I learned about what the RLC get up to, and I thought, I’ll have some of that, and I then switched to become an ammunition technician. And I’ve never looked back. It’s a pretty intensive job, you get quick promotion, but there are lots of courses and exams and after about seven years you can start looking at becoming an ATO. At first you start off as a No. 2 operator, where you learn all about the kit and look after the ATO, drive the robots, and then you move on to becoming an operator.
‘Our job is very different to the sort of bomb disposal done by the Royal Engineers. They tend to focus on regular munitions, hand grenades, aircraft bombs, mines, that type of thing, but there is a bit of crossover now and we’ve got some bomb-disposal officers going onto the High Threat course. Our job is IED disposal. You can look in a textbook and see how an aircraft bomb works. You can’t look in a textbook and see how an IED works. For a start it’s buried in the ground so you don’t even know what you are dealing with. You have to use all your training, all the intelligence, all your experience to work out what bomb you think it is. The bomb at Blue 17 was always going to be a pressure-plate device – it was in a doorway, it’s a derelict building and was a former insurgent firing point. British troops are equipped with electronic counter-measures equipment, so my guess would be that they are not going to put a remote-controlled device in a place like that. The insurgents know we have ECM, so they don’t target us with remote-controlled devices, they keep them for the Afghan Army or Police. No command wires were found in the isolation, so, by that stage, you know that the device is really going to be a pressure-plate or pressure-release and I knew all that before I even got to the bomb. But there’s always the chance that you could be wrong and you always have to be conscious of that.’
Woody’s very first mission took place in late January 2010, curiously inside the British base in Musa Qala, which had recently been expanded to accommodate more troops. The new area was searched for IEDs and some were found, but unfortunately others were missed and Woody was sent in to clear them.
Musa Qala had been a war zone for decades. In the 1980s the Soviets and the Mujahideen fought for control of the area for much of the war. Even today, Russian trench systems are still occasionally used by the Taliban to attack the US forces now based in the area. By January 2010 areas not under the direct control of the British had become laced with IEDs. Their use on such a massive scale helped the Taliban to hold ground and limit the movement of ISAF troops. As well as having a psychological impact, the IED also had a significant military effect; it is what the Army calls a ‘force multiplier’ – in other words, it allowed the Taliban to punch above their weight.
The historic strategic importance of Musa Qala is undeniable. As a population centre, it is regarded as a valued prize by both ISAF forces and the Taliban. And before the current conflict, Soviet generals fought many battles in the area against the Mujahideen. Vast areas of the region are effectively no-go areas because of the threat from Soviet-era ‘legacy’ mines. British troops from 16 Air Assault Brigade first arrived in Musa Qala in May 2006 and remained there until October, fighting the Taliban almost daily. The Musa Qala base was separated from its helicopter landing site, which often made both resupply and casualty evacuation impossible when the base was under attack. The HLS was frequently declared ‘red’ and the soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment, who in late 2006 had almost become a forgotten fighting force, lived with the knowledge that commanders would not risk losing a helicopter and its crew to save the life of a wounded soldier.
The British had entered Helmand in 2006 horribly under-equipped, under-strength, and with virtually no intelligence and no coherent plan as to how they were going to pacify the region. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, who commanded the 3 Para battlegroup, admitted in 2006, ‘It wasn’t that our intelligence was wrong – we just didn’t have any intelligence.’
By the summer of 2006 the 3,300-strong British force in Helmand was fixed in the areas of Sangin, Gereshk, Musa Qala, Lashkar Gah, Nowzad, Garmsir and Camp Bastion. With no ability to manoeuvre and no reserve, their only choice was to stand and fight. Of all the areas where British troops were based, Musa Qala was the most difficult to hold, because of the difficulties of resupply, and so it was sacrificed. In October 2006 a controversial deal was struck between the local leaders, the British and the Taliban whereby it was agreed that under a truce both the Taliban and the British troops would withdraw from the area. And, in one of the most extraordinary scenes of the Afghanistan War, the entire 150-strong British force pulled out of the area in a convoy of Afghan trucks known as ‘jinglies’. The truce lasted barely into the New Year and by February 2007 Musa Qala was back in the hands of the Taliban until they were forced to leave again by a major NATO operation to retake the area in December of that year.
Talking about his task at Musa Qala, Woody says, ‘Your first job is always going to be a bit weird. I wasn’t exactly scared but you feel a bit nervous, and obviously you don’t want to get killed on day one. The last thing you want is people saying, “What a tosser – he got killed on his first job.” I was totally confident in my skills, and my preparation before coming out was excellent, so I was pretty confident. I knew that I would be able to deal with whatever I found.’
The shortage of bomb hunters in Helmand meant that there was little time for Woody and his team to acclimatize before undertaking their first mission. Within hours of Brimstone 32 completing their RSOI (Reception, Staging and Onward Movement Integration) training, they were declared ready for operations and became the High Readiness Force, under orders to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. ‘I made sure we spent plenty of time on the barma lanes [the area where soldiers practise searching for bombs, or ‘barma-ing’] in Camp Bastion. It was just knocking the dust off, really. I wanted to make sure that I was happy with my drills – digging in the Afghan desert is different to digging in Warwickshire.’ Woody is referring here to the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search School at Kineton.
On 30 January 2010, just twenty-four hours after finishing the theatre training package, Brimstone 32 got their first mission. Woody was having a brew with his team members when the Operations Warrant Officer appeared with the details of the ten-liner, handed it to Woody, and said, ‘Your helicopter leaves in forty-five minutes.’ The report revealed that a pressure-plate IED had been discovered and that, unusually, the bomb was actually within the perimeter of the camp.
‘Straight away you switch into automatic,’ says Woody. ‘The butterflies are there in the pit of your stomach because you don’t want to make a hash of it, but as well as a few nerves there is also a feeling of “Great. Job to do – let’s get on and do it.”
‘You always wonder what your first job will be like but it’s never going to be what you expect, and this was exactly that. I had been to Helmand before on Herrick 8 and 9, so I knew what to expect. We went into Musa Qala DC [district centre] and the device was in a patrol base to the south of the main base in the area. We arrived the night before, met the OC, got a brief on the job, and then we were told that there were another eight IEDs that they wanted us to clear. Happy days. It’s never just the one bomb – once they’ve got you there, there’s always more work to do. That’s basically the same wherever you go. The ten-liner says one bomb and when you get to the location you find that every device which has been found in the past month now has to be cleared. Sometimes you can do it, sometimes you can’t.’
Once on the ground Brimstone 32 were told that the area had been cleared before the expansion of the camp but at least one bomb had been missed and there was every possibility that there might be others. The IED Woody’s team had been sent to remove had been found purely by chance in the middle of the vehicle park. Somehow, and no one was quite sure how, it had been missed by man and vehicle alike for several weeks.
‘It was between 20 and 25 kg – that is a fairly big IED. That is going to give you an M-Kill on a Mastiff or an armoured vehicle but it could also take out a lot of blokes out in the open. You could easily have a situation where a group of guys are standing around prior to a patrol and one of them detonates the device and then you would have a mass-casualty incident.
‘Soldiers had been driving within millimetres of it – that’s no exaggeration. I don’t know how it was missed. There are some pretty lucky guys wandering around up in Musa Qala. The bomb had probably been there for a couple of months. It was in an area where you would expect IEDs to be. It was in an area of high ground, which is why we built there. It was a good tactical position and the Taliban probably knew we would move into that area. Classically, they put an IED there and, amazingly, it was missed on one of the searches.’
When Woody arrived at the base he discovered that the bomb wasn’t a pressure-plate IED but an improvised Russian land mine, known as an MUV. He explains, ‘An MUV fuse is a pressure switch that can be victim-operated – that is, a soldier stands on it or it can be detonated by a trip wire which when tugged will pull out the pin, just like pulling the pin out of a grenade. What the Taliban do is that they take out the safety pin and put a matchstick in so that it can be used like a pressure plate. When someone stands on it the matchstick breaks, the switch goes into a detonator and straight into a main charge underneath. It’s instantaneous, the speed of the detonation is 8,000 metres per second, so you stand on it and boom, you’re dead. From the Taliban’s point of view the MUV fuse is great because it doesn’t need a power source, so they can be left all over the place and the insurgents can bury and forget them. No batteries to die away, so they will always remain a threat.
‘Sometimes the device will have a bit of a booster between the detonator and the main charge, which can be det cord wrapped around a metal cooking pot, which gives it a massive signature [Vallon alarm], so they should be easy to find. Once you’ve found them, then it’s just a case of separating the components and destroying them. That’s what I did in this case. I was working in a controlled environment – there was no ICP to secure, no need for isolations, so I just separated the components and it all went according to plan. Then we found another one on the HLS and you think, how lucky are these guys? First the car park and then the HLS.’
The US bomb-disposal teams operate as part of Task Force Paladin and are known as Paladin Teams. When Woody arrived at Musa Qala he discovered that Paladin Teams were also taking part in the clearance operation. The Paladin Teams are three-man units and, according to Woody, their main role is clearance rather than exploitation. ‘The Paladin Teams will search up to the IED – put a charge on it, back off, and bang! But British operators will always try and recover some of the IEDs – that is one of our main roles. We have philosophies and principles as to how we operate which must always govern every mission, and they are: life, property, normality, and forensics. That’s the order of priority, and we can swap property and normality and sometimes forensics all around, but life is always paramount. Ultimately that’s our job: to preserve life.’
One of the greatest challenges ATOs face is the threat of complacency – not through any lack of professionalism but simply because the vast majority of the devices they deal with are pressure-plate IEDs. All ATOs have strategies and techniques to help them guard against the risk of complacency, and Woody was no exception. His technique was to focus on the often minute differences between devices.
‘Every bomb is different – even though they have the same characteristics. You never know where all the components are going to be, some may be stretched out – for example, the power supply could be several metres away. Other bombs will have all the components close together, almost on top of each other, and may actually be hidden in a different way. The device may be poorly built, which could make it very unstable, or it may have been in the ground a long time and may have deteriorated and all it needs for it to function is for someone to start dislodging something. So the matter of quality control actually plays into the hands of the Taliban.
‘Then you get some devices which may have a pressure-release switch with a pressure plate, so it can go off if you put pressure on or take pressure off. What the Taliban try and do to catch us out is put a number of pressure-plate devices down a route, so you get quite comfortable, and then they will throw a cheeky one. So you might arrive at the site and there in front of you is a pressure-plate IED. So no dramas – normal stuff. You have the pressure plate, power source and main charge, and then in parallel to the circuit there might be a pressure-release switch with a bit of rock or metal weighing it down. And this is all buried under the ground, so you move or someone moves the bit of rock to get a better working position, and bang, you’re dead.’
Woody laughs, then goes on, ‘There was this one time where I had to deal with a pressure-release device which had been in the ground for a while. It had been found by soldiers who had conveniently put loads of rocks around the device, which was their way of marking it, and you think, brilliant, now which stone has got the bomb under it? It was one of those classic situations where someone is trying to be helpful but actually making your job very difficult. I’m always aware that not every device I come across is going to be a pressure-plate, so you need to keep your wits about you. I’m not so nervous when you come across a new type of bomb. The way I look at it is, that’s another one ticked off the list. There are a lot of different devices out there, so you want to find at least one of each fairly early on. That gives you the confidence to know that you are going to be able to deal with anything you might come up against – or at least that’s what you tell yourself.’
But in bomb disposal there is never a 100 per cent guarantee of success or survival. Luck always has a part to play. Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, who now has almost legendary status in the EOD world, was a close friend of Woody’s. Both were men at the very top of the profession.
‘Oz was a one-off,’ says Woody. ‘I’d known him since he was an ammunition technician when he first joined the trade. He was a great laugh and a bit of an animal with a drink inside of him. He would come up and lick your face. He was a genuine soldier, he loved it, every minute.’
Like many soldiers who knew Oz Schmid, Woody was devastated when he learned of his death. The news was broken to him while he was driving from his home in Stoke to Didcot. ‘I was in the car and I got this call. It was something like, “Got some bad news for you, Woody. Oz is dead.” I was utterly stunned. I just couldn’t believe it. I got the news just before I hit this big roundabout and I kept going round and round it, thinking, this can’t be happening. I still can’t really believe that’s he’s gone. I’ve been so busy since he was killed that I’ve hardly had time to take in what’s happened and then every now and then his death hits home and you realize he’s gone for ever.
‘Oz was a good ATO, he was an assault IED operator, the same as me, so that’s an extra string to your bow, and there are not many that have got it. He had passed his High Threat and he had done quite a few IEDs and he loved Sangin, and no one wants to go to Sangin. It’s horrible and he loved it, which tells you a lot about the sort of bloke he was.
‘Oz’s death was the start of a really bad period for us all. First there was Gaz O’Donnell in 2008, then Dan Read, and that was bad enough. Then Oz was killed and two weeks later I was on a course and I got a text saying that Corporal Loren Marlton-Thomas had been killed and WO2 Ken Bellringer had been badly injured and his legs were broken. Then, a few hours later, I got another text, which said that Ken had lost both legs below the knee, then another which said they had gone right at the top. And back in the UK you’re thinking, what the fuck is going on out there?’
On New Year’s Eve Sapper Dave Watson, a high-risk searcher, was killed during a patrol close to Route 611 in the area of PB Blenheim, just south of FOB Inkerman. The blast blew off both his legs and an arm and he later died of his wounds. On 11 January Captain Dan Read was killed and on 8 February WO2 Dave Markland was blown up and killed in one of the shaping operations prior to Operation Moshtarak. A week after Dave Markland was killed, Sapper Guy Mellors was blown up during a clearance patrol, again on Route 611, near PB Ezaray, a few hundred metres from the point where Dave Watson had been killed.
I’d met Dave Watson a few months earlier in November 2009, while I was on an earlier embed with the Grenadier Guards battlegroup. I accompanied him on a routine change-over of troops south of Nad-e’Ali district centre. The journey to the base was only about 6 km but it took the Mastiff convoy almost six hours. Every few hundred metres the vehicles would stop and the soldiers would begin another search. Many of the troops going into the base were very inexperienced and, frankly, scared. I could see that Dave’s calm confidence was a great boon to the young soldiers who were also helping in the search for bombs. He was a friendly and warm soldier who impressed me enormously. The spate of deaths shattered morale in the EOD world. It wasn’t just the bomb hunters who were struggling with the losses, but also their families, wives, mothers, fathers, husbands, sons and daughters. More bomb hunters had now been killed in just a few weeks than in the past thirty years.
Woody tells me, ‘All those guys killed and injured in such a short space of time – there had been nothing like that since the 1970s in Ulster. I knew all the ATOs, some I knew very well and they were good operators, just as good as me, and you can’t help but think if it can happen to them then it can happen to me. The thing is, in Afghan you don’t have to do anything wrong to get yourself killed – you can’t say, “His death was caused by a mistake.” You can be doing everything correctly and be killed – it’s just the way it is in Afghan.’
Every time an ATO or any soldier is killed by an IED an investigation is conducted to try to establish the sequence of events that led to the death. But there are often significant problems in trying to piece together that sequence of events and work out what the bomb was composed of.
‘There are many explanations as to what happened to Oz,’ Woody tells me. ‘It could have been another command wire that was missed, it could have had a booby-trap. You never really know because that bit of the bomb has functioned as intended and when that goes off all the components get destroyed – there’s nothing left.
‘We know that when Oz arrived there were three main charges in the area. He dealt with one, he was dealing with another one when he got killed, and there was another one remaining which his No. 2 dealt with to make the area safe so that his body could be extracted. Other than that there are just a few explanations as to what happened. An investigation is conducted and you try and establish first of all whether all the proper procedures were followed. Did they do all the things they were supposed to do, such as a proper isolation? But it’s very rare that you can nail it down to one specific event. I know Oz had been quite ill before he died. He had D and V for at least a week, ten days before he was killed. D and V is pretty grim and that would have taken its toll. All of the guys killed died around the four-month point. That might have just been a coincidence but it may be that they had become exhausted by the workload. We used to do four-month tours at one time. Four months in Iraq and four months in Afghanistan. I think the Army saw it as a way of getting eight months on operations out of us. Now that Iraq is over we are doing six-month tours in Afghan and that is a long time, very long – like I said before, there are only so many times you can roll the dice before you get a double six. Oz had dealt with a fair few bombs, sixty-four in four months, and he did twenty-three in one day and was killed. But Badger [Staff Sergeant Karl Ley] did 139 in six months and went home. So how do you explain that? It’s just luck, I suppose – good luck if you make it, bad luck if you don’t.’
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 time 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 pressure, 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.’
The soaring rates of amputees returning from Helmand because of the surge in the Taliban’s use of IEDs has inevitably led to conversations among the bomb-hunting fraternity about whether life is worth living after surviving a double or triple amputation.
Woody gives me his view on the subject. ‘None of us really ever discusses how we would feel until you hear that someone has been hurt and has lost both legs and sometimes both legs and an arm. And then someone will say, “I wouldn’t want to live like that.” The thing all the soldiers are scared about is losing their balls – you hear people say, “As long as I don’t lose my balls, I could cope, but if I lose my legs and my balls I’d rather be dead.” And I’ve thought about that too. I’ve asked myself the question: would I want to live with no legs and no balls? We all know that you’re going to have a lifetime of struggle. But I always say, well, at least I would be able to cuddle my children – they can’t take that away and that’s worth living for because that’s the best feeling in the world. Anyway it’s pretty rare for ATOs to lose our legs because we are normally right over the device, so if an IED detonates it’s usually all over. Ken [WO2 Bellringer] was standing up when he stepped on a pressure plate, so he’s fortunate because he survived even though he had terrible injuries, but he will be able to cuddle his children again.’
Woody falls silent again, lost in thought, perhaps about his twin daughters back home. The Hurt Locker has now finished and the soldiers are leaving, some to get some sleep, others for sentry duty on the front gate.
‘Right,’ Woody says, slapping his hands on the table. ‘Time for bed, I think. We’ve got another job on tomorrow. A route clearance – probably several bombs on the road. Should be interesting. Can sometimes get a bit cheeky out there. You up for it?’ he asks with a smile.
‘Yep, I’m up for it,’ I reply.
Woody finishes his tea and adds, ‘We’ve got a new search team coming in tomorrow, so that should be interesting. Now I’m going to finish my reports and get my head down.’