BOMB PROOF
So vivid you can almost hear his heart thumping, a George Cross hero’s minute-by-minute account of how he disarmed an entire Taliban minefield using only pliers – as horrifically injured comrades lay screaming around him . . .
BRITISH soldiers had a nickname for Sangin. We called it ‘a town called Malice’, and with good reason.
Its maze of compounds, mud-baked walls and alleys channelling soldiers into killing zones carefully constructed by the Taliban made it a graveyard for British troops serving in Afghanistan. It was a place of pure evil.
I’m Staff Sergeant Kim Hughes, an Ammunition Technician by trade, but in Afghanistan I’m known as an ATO (Ammunition Technical Officer).
My bomb disposal team and I arrived here in 2009 when British troops were getting badly smashed. Choppers were coming under fire, and every day our boys were being killed or maimed as the Taliban routinely sneaked in under cover of darkness and laid bomb after bomb just yards from our base.
IEDs — improvised explosive devices — were hidden in walls and trees, in rubbish dumps, abandoned buildings, even in dead animals. The place was a minefield where every road, every street, every step had to be cleared.
Otherwise... well, we all knew the consequences. A large device, say 20 kilos or more, will blow you into so many pieces that a mop will be needed to deal with what’s left. But at least that’s quick and painless. If you’re unlucky, the blast will cut you in half, take away your legs and leave you disembowelled. You might survive, but not for long.
Taliban bombs weren’t sophisticated — even children could make them. Two pieces of wood, hacksaw blades, some wire, a Christmas tree light and a few kilos of homemade explosives is all that it took.
The quality was c**p — but there were an estimated 10,000 of them buried in the ground throughout Helmand Province which were taking a terrible toll in limbs and lives.
THE only real defence against them was the small band of bomb disposal operators, front-line experts like my team who dodged death every day as we lay face down on the ground to sweep away the sand from a buried pressure plate with our most important piece of equipment — a paint brush.
Out there in Afghanistan, all the high-tech, life-saving devices we were supposed to have at our disposal were useless. Robots struggled to operate over the rough terrain and were too heavy to carry anywhere. Heavyweight protective bomb suits made from woven Kevlar and armoured plate were too hot in the 37c heat and would weigh you down if you had to beat a retreat under enemy fire.
I carried the bare essentials — a pistol, helmet, field dressing, tourniquet (in case you lost a leg or two), morphine (to dull the pain of a traumatic amputation), wire snippers, smoke grenades and that brush, which I used like an archaeologist uncovering a fossil. I loved the work, the sheer thrill of it. Whenever I reached a suspect device I could feel my heart thumping with excitement, like a child at Christmas unwrapping a present.
I was wholly in my element as I dug away with my trowel and swept the sandy earth from around the bomb with gentle brushstrokes, searching for a wire, a corner of a pressure plate, anything.
Chin down and face-to-face with an IED, I was in the zone, pitting my wits against the Taliban’s, even though the sun was beating down on my head and large flies feasted on the dried salt on my face. My back ached and my knees were sore, but the sense of achievement was often overwhelming.
I took a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that with every bomb removed and neutralised, we were potentially saving one of our own from death and injury, and beating the Taliban at their own game.
All the time you’re aware that it’s all too easy to screw up, in which case what’s left of me gets flown home in a box and I become just another sorry statistic on an ever-growing casualty list.
In fact, the best you can hope for at the end of a six-month tour is to be alive — preferably with arms, legs and your b***s intact. Anything beyond that is a bonus.
And this was increasingly so back in 2009 as the Taliban grasped the effectiveness of using IEDs in massive numbers, and the conflict got more and more dangerous and unpredictable by the day. Never before had bomb disposal experts been so important.
This was now my war, the one I had trained hard for. I felt proud of my own success in simply being here with a crucial job to do.
Just a few years earlier, I was a kid from a West Midlands housing estate, a failure at school where I felt useless and undervalued. I was going nowhere, knocking around with wasters whose only goal was to get p **** d and smoke weed. I could have easily gone the same way.
My only childhood passion was fireworks, and on each November 5 I would spend my savings on as many different types as I could afford. I would spend hours locked in my bedroom, taking them apart to see how they went bang and what made the different colours. I wanted to know why rockets exploded and why Roman candles sent balls of fire into the air.
I once blew up my stepfather’s prized garden birdhouse after I emptied the contents of a couple of fireworks into a plastic cup, made a fuse and placed it inside.
The Army had given me a chance to put that passion to good use. It gave me a sense of direction and purpose, and now I was leading a team doing some of the most dangerous and demanding work that can be done in a war zone.
A couple of decades before, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their height, a bomb disposal operator could have expected to deal with six to eight complex bombs in six months, often a lot more in some parts of the Province. In our first week in Afghanistan we pulled more than 40 bombs out of the ground.
The trouble was that the Taliban simply returned and planted them again. We were increasingly on the back foot.
And so, in the second half of our six-month tour, we found ourselves at Sangin, and my team, codenamed Brimstone 42, assembled one morning at 4am for a search-and-clearance mission just outside the town with a unit of riflemen.
Half were just kids, barely past puberty but sent to fight a dirty war in the world’s biggest s***hole. The glow of cigarettes in the predawn darkness illuminated the
youthful faces of soldiers prematurely aged by the stress of war.
Everyone knew the likelihood of taking casualties was high. They had all seen friends suffer appalling injuries and die.
We were fighting a war that was never meant to happen against an enemy who had no concept of defeat, and all we could do was suck it up.
We set off in the dark in single file and were passing along a wadi (a dry riverbed) when the earth shook ahead and the sound of a blast pierced the silence. Word came down the line that Lance-Corporal ‘Fully’ Fullarton, who had been leading the way, was down. He’d stepped on an IED. We then heard a second massive explosion and a few minutes later a platoon sergeant appeared to say there had been another strike, with multiple casualties. My team was urgently needed up front.
When I reached the head of the column, the smell of explosives hung heavily in the air and the ground was still smoking. Soldiers were lying in frozen positions and at first, it was impossible to tell who was dead or alive.
I could see ahead of me a small mound, almost like a bundle of rags, scorched black and red. Then slowly, very slowly, an arm rose into the air. It was a soldier, horrifically wounded, covered in blood with the lower half of his body missing. He seemed barely conscious.
A piercing scream split the air. Nearby, a female medic was lying in a crumpled heap with one leg so badly damaged it appeared to be attached by only a few sinews.
No one dared move, grimly aware that we had stumbled into the middle of a minefield. The dead, dying and wounded lay trapped in an area of hell about a third of the size of a football pitch.
The sergeant filled me in, breathing heavily, his eyes wide and empty, his hands trembling and his white, mournful face spotted with dirt and blood.
‘Lance-Corporal Fullarton stepped on an IED,’ he reported. ‘Both his legs have gone above the knee. We tied tourniquets around what was left and got him onto a stretcher. As we started the evacuation, the two stretcher-bearers triggered another IED. We think they are dead.’
As he spoke, the haunting sound of the Muslim dawn call to prayer echoed around the valley. The explosions would have alerted the Taliban. Gunmen would be here soon. We had to move fast.
‘We have three more casualties,’ the sergeant said. ‘The medic who has sustained a bad leg injury and two other soldiers with unknown injuries, but they’re conscious and don’t appear critical. No one is moving. The sergeant major has ordered everyone to stay still.’
It was a shocking scene, but the priority was to get the wounded out and back to the British hospital at Camp Bastion. Dealing with the dead would have to wait.
My assessment was that the female medic, though in a lot of pain, did not appear to have lifethreatening injuries. Fullarton, however, had multiple injuries. He’s been blown up twice and was barely conscious. He was in shock and had lost a lot of blood.
I sent one of my team to search out a safe path up to Fullarton and mark it out with spray-paint. It was a slow process — agonisingly so as the sun began to come up and we knew enemy fighters would be coming. But it was the only way to ensure that everyone stayed inside a safe area.
WE BEGAN to do the same for the wounded female medic as well. ‘Work quickly, lads,’ I urged them, ‘but be careful. No more casualties today.’
The rest of my team then set out in a wide arc to search for any other devices and discovered a network of wires, which added even more confusion to an already desperate situation.
By now, the medics had finally got to Fullarton and put him on a stretcher to carry him out of the killing area to an emergency helicopter landing site.
We had also reached the injured woman medic, to discover that the bottom half of her leg was barely attached and she was going into shock and beginning to slip away. We were trying to lift her out when suddenly an anxious cry went up: ‘Kim, we’ve got another IED!’
It was in the gravelly bottom of the dried riverbed, barely an arm’s length away from where the casualties lay waiting to be rescued.
Normally I would have thrown up a cordon around the entire area and evacuated everyone before getting to work on the IED. That’s what the training manual said. But this was real life, and there were simply too many injured and dead people on the ground.
There was a grave and immediate threat to life. The rules had to be ignored. I had to conduct what’s called a ‘manual action’ — get inside the bomb, cut the wires and pray it wasn’t booby-trapped. It was a risk but a calculated one. I had trained for this very situation.
I dropped down, lying flat, and slowly ran my Hoodlum — a small, hand-held metal detector — over the ground. I got a hit almost instantly. A high-metal pressure plate was buried just below the surface of the dried riverbed.
I searched around with my fingers and uncovered a length of white twin-flex wire. I pulled my snips
out from the front of my body armour, held my breath...and carefully cut one of the wires.
it worked, effectively putting a ‘switch’ into the system. Digging deeper, i found a pressure cooker filled with explosives and deadly pieces of scrap metal, just waiting to be triggered and sent flying into human flesh.
But the bomb was now almost safe, and the urgent evacuation of the injured medic began, only to be instantly halted when one of the team called out a warning. he’d found another ieD!
with my metal detector, i cleared another path through to where the corner of a pressure plate had been exposed. i followed the same procedure again. search, locate wire, cut.
And so it went on, as more and more bombs were discovered. Over the next 15 minutes, three more ieDs were found, bringing the total to seven. Five of the charges were contained in pressure-cookers and two were in plastic containers. they were all stuffed full of nails, nuts and bolts, ready-made shrapnel to slaughter and maim.
As more daylight crept in, i began to see the full scale of the operation. Disturbed soil showed where more bombs were buried — a further ten. But this minefield was also more sophisticated than anything i’d come across before.
i realised that there were no batteries to power the individual ieDs, as you would normally expect. instead, everything was wired up to a central power line, which the taliban could connect or disconnect as they saw fit.
in other words, they could disarm the whole minefield with one switch, allowing themselves to drive across it without setting off one of their own devices. But when they saw British forces on the move up the wadi, they simply reconnected the battery and the whole area became alive with active bombs.
As A tactic it was outstanding and something never seen before in helmand. they were an adaptable and versatile enemy and we underestimated them at our peril. [For this action, hughes was awarded the George Cross.]
But this time, at least, we had managed to contain the carnage. within 30 minutes of the first explosion, the wounded soldiers had been evacuated. now we prepared to recover the dead.
i stood for a second, trying to take in the sheer horror. there were two large blast craters just a few feet apart, the ground around them stained with blood and littered with bandages. the smell of death hung heavy in the air.
the two dead soldiers remained undisturbed, one in some reeds, the other in the open, almost as if they were peacefully sleeping. i dropped down on my knees next to one of them and reached for his identity tags, which were required for the records to confirm that he was kiA [killed in action].
the bomb had caused appalling injuries. what was left of his body was battered and torn beyond recognition and stripped of all dignity. i hoped his death had been quick and painless. i patted him on the shoulder as if to say: ‘rest now. Your job is done.’
As his comrades stepped forward, their eyes full of tears, to carry him in a body bag to a waiting helicopter, i knew that somewhere in the Uk, an officer dressed in his best military uniform was going to make that dreadful journey to the next of kin. there would be that knock on the door, a moment of confusion, then disbelief and anger followed by unimaginable sorrow and pain.
the same thing would be happening to the next of kin of Lance-Corporal Fullarton. i was told he died on the helicopter to Bastion.
But now was not the time to be angry or sad; there was still work to be done. i gathered my team. the least we could do was destroy that minefield.
we laid charges and destroyed the bombs in a series of controlled explosions. A cloud of smoke, dust and debris mushroomed into the sky. Usually, there was a cheer from the soldiers when an ieD was destroyed, but not that day. there was nothing to celebrate.
the suddenness with which death came in Afghan was always shocking. An hour ago the dead soldiers had been vibrant and carefree, full of life, smiles and fun. now those same sons, husbands and brothers were dead and everything they were and everything they were going to be was gone. we returned to base just 90 minutes after we had left it. in the time it takes to play a game of football three soldiers had been killed, more were wounded, one seriously, and God only knows how many traumatised.
i threw my body armour and weapon on my bed. i was physically and mentally drained. the only comfort was that the professionalism and training of my team had shone through.
that professionalism, however, was soon to be questioned — as i will reveal on Monday.