I developed a God complex – and it could have killed me

BOMB disposal is all about confidence. But there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I crossed it on a lot of occasions.

One morning my team joined a convoy to look for bombs. A forward group spotted a shiny piece of metal suddenly moving across the ground in front of them. A hidden Taliban terrorist pulled a kite string attached to the firing switch of a roadside bomb just in front of their position.

By some stroke of luck, it didn’t go off, and we were sent in to deactivate the device.

When I got close to it I could see two metal washers sticking out of the ground, almost touching each other. This was the switch. Just a breath of wind or a heavy footstep could have caused them to move and detonate the active, primed device.

I was chuckling to myself about how ridiculously dangerous the situation had become.

It did occur to me that this laughter wasn’t normal, but I decided not to dwell on my behaviour. Instead, I just got on with dealing with the bomb.

Once the device was made safe, and after a little bit of digging, I located the main charge, 20kg of the Taliban’s finest home-made explosives, enough to turn me into red mist.

The next day, we were in Camp Bastion and I ran into Warrant Officer Class 1 Jim Hutchinson, my boss, who’d been a bomb disposal operator for almost 20 years. What he didn’t know about bomb disposal wasn’t worth knowing.

He asked how the job was and I replied, rather nonchalantly: ‘You know: same stuff, different day. Three pressure plates and an odd command-pull that the Taliban couldn’t even bury properly. Nothing really.’

Jim grabbed me. ‘Oi, d***head, stop being an a***.’ His face was so close I could smell the coffee on his breath. ‘Every one of those bombs can kill you. Respect them or I’ll pull you off the ground. If you become a danger to yourself, you’ll be a danger to the team. Now wise up.’

He was right, and in that moment I knew it. I’d grown used to living with fear, and in Afghan fear kept you alive. ‘God complex?’ I said to myself as I lay down on my bed. ‘Don’t be such an idiot. You’re just lucky. And don’t you forget it.’