style="font-size:15px;"> ‘There’s going to be a bang in about fifteen seconds. Stand by, stand by,’ Stu shouted before pressing a black button on the green box, which he held in his hands. Less than a second later a bang, not unlike the sound of a shotgun, echoed around the valley.
So far so good, Badger thought. He had stuck to the book and so far everything had gone like clockwork. ‘We’ll give it a few minutes and then I’ll go back down,’ he told the team. This is known as the ‘soak’ period. In Northern Ireland, operators would wait several hours before attempting to defuse a bomb. That luxury was not available in Helmand, where the Taliban were always watching. As Badger waited in the sweltering heat, it now became crystal clear to him why ATOs did not wear bomb suits in Helmand. Like the rest of the team, he was struggling to keep cool wearing just body armour. In the summer even this acted like a thermal jacket, making it feel like the temperature was about 10° hotter. With a bomb suit weighing around 40 kg and the thermometer in the mid-40s for nine months of the year, it was simply a non-starter for almost all ATOs. The fact that it was blue was also not lost on the team, all of whom knew there was nothing a Taliban sharpshooter would like to bag more than an ATO.
Badger returned down the cleared lane and checked to see if the wires had been cut. Yes, the IED weapon had done its job perfectly. He taped the ends of the wires to ensure that a circuit could not accidentally be created, removed the battery pack, and then began to extract the device itself. Extracting a pressure plate is achieved with a hook and a line. Basically a hook is attached to the plate, the ATO retreats to the ICP with the other end of the line, then he and usually his No. 2 pull on the line until the plate is pulled free. If the device detonates for any reason, no one is hurt. It’s a simple but safe and effective method.
When Badger returned for a third time to the device, he was astonished by what he found. The pressure plate contained a central metal contact which could be detonated by pressure being either applied or released. This was the first time such a bomb had been seen in Helmand, and the device had been specifically designed to target ATOs and soldiers attempting to confirm its nature.
Beneath the pressure plate were several rocket warheads which would have killed anyone in a 20-metre radius of the device, and the chances are that there would have been very little, if anything, left of Badger. He took photographs of the site, the plate and the explosive, which was later detonated by the side of the track.
It had been a long, very hot day. The device had taken around two hours to disarm but it had been worth it. To obtain a brand-new device intact was a real coup. The weapons intelligence specialists who pored over bomb-making material hoping to obtain forensic data would be delighted. But, most importantly for Badger, the day had gone without a hitch, the team had coped well in the heat and under pressure, and there had been no accidents.
I met Badger as he was coming to the end of the tour. It had been a gruelling six months for the CIED Task Force. Six members had been killed and more than twenty injured, and several of these had sustained life-changing injuries. Not since the bloody days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s had the world of Army bomb disposal lost so many men in such a short period of time. The losses had taken their toll on everyone serving within the Task Force, for bomb disposal is a close-knit world where the loss of even a single colleague is a bitter blow. Although ATOs are some of the most highly trained and professional soldiers in the British Army, no one in the field of bomb disposal had foreseen the huge surge in the use of IEDs by the Taliban. In 2008–9 these changed the face of the war in Helmand. Huge tracts of the country had been turned into minefields and the workload of bomb hunters went through the roof. It wasn’t unusual for ATOs to defuse ten or twenty IEDs in a day, while under fire and working in temperatures in the 40s. The situation was unsustainable, and casualties inevitable.
A six-month tour in Afghanistan is both physically and emotionally exhausting for every front-line soldier. For Badger it was no different. In the six months from September 2009 to March 2010 two of his closest friends were killed and several more were injured. He came under fire on numerous occasions and had several close calls with IEDs, but he went home without as much as a scratch even though he had defused 139 IEDs.
Badger, with his compact, wiry frame, short brown hair, keen eyes which sparkle with mischief, and a mellow Sheffield accent, had acquired his nickname as a young soldier eleven years earlier following a drunken incident in a nightclub involving a bottle of Tippex, his pubic hair and a group of divorced women. It has remained with him ever since.
The South Yorkshireman joined the Army on 14 November 1999 as a private in the Royal Logistic Corps. His academic prowess at school – he obtained A-levels in geography, history, sociology and general studies, having earlier gained nine GCSEs – could have taken him to university and then on to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to train as an Army officer. He had been offered places at university, including King’s College London, to pursue war and peace studies, but the idea of spending three years ‘locked in lecture halls’ and then facing a large debt at the end of his degree didn’t appeal.
‘I just had this vague notion of wanting to join the Army,’ Badger told me. ‘Some of my friends had already joined, so I went to an Army careers office and they must have been short of ammunition technicians that week because they sold it quite well to me.’
Ten years later Badger was posted to Helmand as part of Operation Herrick 11. His bomb-disposal team was one of dozens of units attached to 11 Light Brigade. Somewhat surprisingly, given the scores of soldiers killed by IEDs, Badger describes the task of defusing home-made bombs as his ‘comfort zone’. ‘The infantry think my job is scary, they are terrified of IEDs because they are this unseen threat in the ground which just keeps killing and wounding them, but they are my comfort zone. It is all about what you are used to.
‘The infantry expect to get into firefights with the Taliban and many of them actually want to. That’s what they joined the Army to do – go to Afghanistan and kill the Taliban. And when the shooting kicks off you can actually see that some of these guys are really in their element, it’s what they were made for. But not me. Firefights terrify me. Give me an IED to defuse any day. It’s all about your comfort zone. I hate coming under fire, it terrifies me. I will try and dig a hole with my spoon to get into some sort of cover.’
In September 2009 Badger was dispatched to Patrol Base Woqab, near Musa Qala, to attend to a device which had recently been discovered by the local infantry battalion. The bomb was a PP IED and in itself didn’t present much of a challenge to the bomb hunters. Outside of Sangin, the Musa Qala Taliban were regarded as the ‘hardcore’ element in Helmand – always ready to take on ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, and experiment with new devices in the hope of catching out an ATO. It wasn’t lost on Badger that this was the same area where Gaz O’Donnell had been killed on 10 September the previous year.
It was an ordinary shout. The search team deployed, cleared the area, checked for command wires, but none were found. Badger cleared a safe lane down to the device and began defusing the pressure plate, which went without a hitch. The plate had been cleared and the time had come for Badger to destroy the home-made explosive in situ. ‘We don’t recover the main charge. It’s just too risky, so what we do is destroy it using conventional military high explosive. I set up the explosive, the last thing I did was to connect the detonator, then moved back to the ICP, where Stu fire-connected it to the firing circuit and detonated the main charge.’
As soon as the explosion rumbled across the valley, the local Taliban sprang into action, assuming that one of their devices had been triggered and that ISAF or the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) – which draws on the ANA, the ANP and other police units – would have casualties, in which case they would be vulnerable and therefore ripe for ambush. What they found when they arrived at the scene was a lone, unarmed British soldier walking slowly in open ground – the perfect target.
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