Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan with Britain’s Elite Bomb Disposal Unit. Sean Rayment
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the Army relatively late in life. The delay was due in part to a failed experiment as a rock guitarist – another tattoo of a cannabis leaf, also on his back, was a memento of a more hedonistic life.
From the day he joined up Gaz wanted to become an IED operator. But it was to be a long haul. After passing basic training he was posted to Germany to serve in 3 Base Ammunition Depot, learning the trade of the Ammunition Technician. But when the opportunity came to take the Improvised Explosive Device Disposal Course, he passed with flying colours. A feat he also managed to achieve on the IED High Threat course, to become one of just a handful of bomb-disposal experts to pass the course first time.
Like every bomb-disposal operator, Gaz was keen to get involved in the thick of the action in Iraq, but he was forced to wait until 2006, by which time he was a staff sergeant, before he finally got his wish. The war had gone belly-up, primarily because of the complete absence of post-operation planning. After defeating the Iraqi Army and deposing Saddam, the US and British forces managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A Shia insurgency in the south quickly followed a Sunni revolt in the north. Reconstruction of the shattered state ground to a halt and al-Qaeda, the Islamist force behind the 9/11 attacks, managed to gain a foothold in the country.
By 2006, attacks against the multi-national forces in the south were a daily occurrence. With the help of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard the Shia insurgents managed to develop a range of highly sophisticated improvized explosive devices called Explosively Formed Projectiles, or shaped charges, which could penetrate armour and were detonated by infrared triggers.
These IEDs took a terrible toll on the British troops, killing and maiming hundreds, especially those travelling in the now notorious Snatch vehicles. These were lightly armoured Land Rovers once used to patrol the streets in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Snatches were originally designed to protect troops from small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and shrapnel. When the insurgency exploded in 2004, the British Army found itself without a vehicle in which troops could conduct patrols in urban areas, and the Snatch was sent to fill the gap. But such was their vulnerability to attack that within months the troops had dubbed the vehicles ‘mobile coffins’.
By 2006 reconstruction plans for Iraq had become a faded dream. Troops rarely ventured out of their bases without being attacked. The first sign that the Iraqi people in the south were not as welcoming as the government and the top brass might have hoped had come on 2 July 2003, when six members of the Royal Military Police were attacked and killed by a 300-strong mob in the town of Majar al Kabir.
By the end of his tour Gaz was estimated to have saved the lives of hundreds of British soldiers and was subsequently awarded the George Medal. By 2008 he was in Helmand, one of only two bomb-disposal experts who could be spared to work alongside soldiers fighting in the most mined country on earth. In April of that year Gaz was deployed to the province as a member of the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Group team. A month later he had obtained almost celebrity status after defusing eight IEDs in six hours.
The operation began on 9 May, when a Danish vehicle patrol approached a track junction in the Upper Gereshk Valley in central Helmand. It was a classic vulnerable point, or VP, an ideal location for the Taliban to plant one or more IEDs. At the top of the junction, on a ridge line overlooking the valley, was a position which had been used many times before by the Danish troops to monitor movement in the notorious Green Zone. A fertile plain bordering the Helmand River, the Green Zone was where the Taliban held sway. It was ‘Terry’s Turf,’ Gaz said, ‘Terry Taliban’ being a nickname for the insurgents.
The patrol stopped short of the crossroads and two British soldiers from 51 Squadron Royal Engineers, who were accompanying the Danes, began to scan the area. The two British engineers knew that in all likelihood the Taliban had probably buried at least one IED and, using their standard-issue Vallon mine detectors, the pair began searching the area. Moving forward in slow, measured steps, the two young sappers began swinging the detectors from left to right.
Within minutes one of the alarms screamed, signalling the presence of a suspect device. The Royal Engineer knelt down, pulled out a household paintbrush – a vital piece of equipment for every soldier in Helmand – from the front of his body armour, and gently began to brush away dust from the area where the detector had gone off. Within a few minutes the tell-tale shape of an IED pressure plate emerged. The device was marked and the two soldiers moved, one to each side of the track. Minutes later the alarm sounded again. Over the next two hours a total of eight booby-traps were found in a 75-metre radius. It was the largest multiple-IED site ever seen in Helmand.
Back in Camp Bastion, while Gaz was tucking into a pot noodle, his favourite snack, and watching the TV, a ‘ten-liner’ requesting an IED operator suddenly popped up on a computer screen in the operations room of the Joint Force EOD Group. The ten-liner is so named because it reveals ten lines of information about an IED: date, grid reference (location), description, activity prior to find, rendezvous location and approach, incident commander, tactical situation, threat assessment, initial request, requested priority (immediate, pre-explosion, post explosion, urgent, minor, routine, no threat).
Gaz and his search team were on HRF standby and at a drop of a hat they could deploy to anywhere in Helmand to defuse IEDs armed with only the information contained within the ten-liner. And on the morning of 9 May 2008 Gaz was called to the ops room, where Major Wayne Davidson, the officer commanding the EOD squadron, told him he had a task. ‘Sounds relatively straightforward,’ were the major’s parting words as Gaz went to brief his team. The ten-liner stated that there were one or more pressure-plate IEDs in a vulnerable point in the Gereshk Valley.
Within ten minutes Gaz’s team, which consisted of his No. 2, or second in command, the electronic counter-measures (ECM) operator and the infantry escort, the last basically his bodyguard, were ready to move. A few moments later the REST and the RESA had assembled in the briefing tent.
‘This should be interesting,’ Gaz said, then explained the situation. ‘We’ve got multiple IEDs in an area which looks like an overwatch site into the Green Zone. Chances are it’s been used by ISAF before and a pattern has been set. We’ll learn more when we arrive. Questions?’ There were none – everyone knew the score. ‘Good – let’s go.’
Within forty minutes Gaz, his team and the search team were airborne, heading for the IED site in a Chinook helicopter.
Even before leaving the safety of Camp Bastion, Gaz knew the ‘bomb suit’ – an all-encompassing piece of body armour designed to protect ATOs from the effects of an explosion – was not an option. The bomb suit weighs almost 50 kg and the temperature was already 45°C. He knew that he was unlikely to last more than twenty minutes inside it. Besides, a bomb suit is really designed to protect the operator when either walking to or away from the bomb. Gaz took his chances; it was a calculated risk but one which he believed favoured him.
‘By the time I got to work,’ he explained later, ‘the wider area had been cleared by the search team and the area was secured. An incident control point had been cleared and I was happy. I moved forward, took a moment to gather myself, and then began to work methodically through the area. I have been an ATO for a long time and worked in some pretty nasty environments, but I had never encountered nothing like that before. It was pretty tense.’
Gaz spent hours on his hands and knees, his face just inches away from the IEDS. Had any one of them exploded, he would have been killed instantly.
It was the same routine for each bomb. Walk down the cleared lane, locate the device with the hand-held metal detector, and try to isolate the device from the power supply. Operators must always be aware of the potential for other threats in the area. There have been occasions where another device has been placed to target the operator, such as a so-called command IED, which could be something as simple as a hand grenade with a piece of wire or string tied to the ring pull at the end of which is an insurgent waiting for the right time to strike.
This is the most risky period for any IED operator. Once they ‘go down the road’ or ‘take the long walk’ to the bomb, they are on their own and effectively isolated – and make a very inviting target. Everyone else in the team, including supporting troops, must