in Afghanistan since 2006 have died in Sangin town and the surrounding area. I have been on patrol in the area on several occasions, taken part in operations, and have come under fire on several occasions and I can still recall the sense of relief I felt every time a patrol ended.
The main British base in the Sangin area of operatons, FOB Jackson, sat on the periphery of the district centre and was bisected by the Helmand canal, which offered the troops based there temporary respite from the summer heat and boosted morale. Dotted throughout Sangin are smaller patrol bases, such as PB Tangiers, an ANA base close to the district centre, and PB Wishtan, at the eastern end of the notorious Pharmacy Road. The casualty rate in PB Wishtan was so high in the summer of 2009 that troops, with their customary black humour, renamed it PB Wheelchair.
The soldiers who have to patrol in Sangin day after day, sometimes twice or three times a day, often after having witnessed a fellow soldier having one or more limbs blown off, need truly remarkable courage. And it’s worth remembering that many of them are just 18 or 19 and on their first operational tour.
Despite the risks, Oz Schmid was in his element and relished the challenge. This easy-going, fast-talking Cornishman had an infectious smile and a fantastic sense of humour. He had named his squad ‘Team Rainbow’ after the gay pride emblem, because he claimed they were the only ‘all-gay IEDD team in Helmand’. The team members were nicknamed Zippy, Bungle and George, and their mascot, a duck, was known as Corporal Quackers. It was all part of the coping mechanism adopted by Oz and his team.
Like every ATO in Helmand, Oz knew that death lurked around every corner. Every bomb had to be treated as a unique event. Taking short cuts or making assumptions could end in a trip home in a body bag. As if to emphasize the dangers Helmand held for ATOs, Captain Daniel Shepherd, 28, was killed defusing a roadside bomb in Nad-e’Ali a month after Oz arrived in Helmand. He was the second ATO to die in Afghanistan. Like Gaz O’Donnell, who had died eleven months earlier, Captain Shepherd hadn’t made a mistake; he was just unlucky. As one soldier later told me, ‘That kind of shit can just happen in Afghan.’
In an interview he gave before he was killed that appeared in the Sunday Times on 8 November 2009 Oz referred to Dan Shepherd’s death and how it had shaped his view of the role of ATOs in Helmand: ‘There are times when I’m actually thinking about Dan and I’ll go down the lonely walk, as they say, get to the target and think, what am I doing here? But it’s a flash through my head, if you like.’ Oz was typical of most ATOs I have met: they never think about their own safety and are far more concerned with the lives of their fellow soldiers.
‘Nine times out of ten, in fact 99.99 per cent of the time, I’m down there and I’m doing it as quick as I can, because obviously the longer the guys are down on the ground the more they present themselves as a target.
‘And then obviously once we’re out on the ground, other things, atmospherics around us, you know I’m getting dicked as well – they’re trying to look and see what I’m doing, so it’s a lot of focus into what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. My brain’s always thinking about the device: how I’m going to render it safe. It’s not necessarily wandering off to: am I going to get home? Every device is different in its own little way … you have got to find exactly what it is and come up with the best way of dealing with that, so your mind is constantly focused on that. I don’t really think about the enemy. There have been a couple of piss-take jobs, though, where they are trying to have a bit of a joke. I found a dollar on top of a pressure plate in Nad-e’Ali the other week.’
On 9 August 2009 Oz took part in an operation to clear Pharmacy Road, which runs east from Sangin town centre out to PB Wishtan. By this time the area directly around the PB had become one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, with one in three of the soldiers based at Wishtan being killed or wounded that summer. Several of those had been killed or injured close to the base and the dozens of IEDs which had been laid in the area meant that patrolling was almost impossible. PB Wishtan was cut off from resupply by land. Bomb-damaged vehicles had been turned into a basic but effective roadblock and Pharmacy Road was riddled with IEDs. Three previous attempts to clear the road, which is lined by 15-ft-high mud walls, had all failed.
The operation began at 5.30 a.m., just before the sun appeared over the horizon. Specialist Royal Engineer searchers, flanked by soldiers from the Rifles, pushed out from FOB Jackson and began the search. The troops made steady progress until they came to a military digger which had been blown up by the Taliban during a previous operation. All around the vehicle the ground was littered with IEDs. At around 0800 hrs and with the temperature already in the mid-40s, Oz set to work. Within 100 metres he found and cleared the first IED of the day.
Oz had planned to use a remote-controlled vehicle to clear another device but as it moved into the danger area the robot struck an IED and was destroyed. Knowing that the Taliban were probably in the area and monitoring the progress of the operation, Oz moved forward again and cleared a route to within 5 metres of the vehicles.
‘We started searching forwards along the road again,’ he explained. ‘We found another bomb half a metre away from the lane that I’d used to search up to the vehicle. We sent two little robots out and they got blown up, so I went on my feet.’
His team then moved into a compound adjacent to the stricken vehicles and began preparing to take them off the road. Another device was quickly discovered, which Oz also cleared. The engineers in the compound blew a hole through the outside wall and winches were used to drag the vehicles off the road. Clearing bombs from the route to the vehicles had taken an hour, during all of which time Oz had been completely reliant on his own eyesight and his understanding of enemy tactics. As the light began to fade he once again led a high-risk clearance of the stretch of road from which the vehicles had been taken away and removed a further two devices.
The whole operation had lasted eleven hours. It had been fraught with danger, and luck had also played a large part in ensuring that there were no British casualties. Oz and his team were drained, physically, emotionally and mentally; they had discovered a total of thirty devices and defused eleven, but the road was open and C Company, 2 Rifles, were resupplied. Although it was clearly a team effort, the mission would have failed if it had not been for Oz’s heroic and selfless acts.
Despite the danger, Oz, like every other ATO working in Helmand, never wore his protective body suit. ‘It’s too hot to wear a suit out here and it’s tactically not feasible,’ he said. He saw the suit as an easy way for the Taliban to identify him. ‘Every time we’re out on the ground we’re obviously denying them their kill against us, so in effect we’ve become a high-value target for them, as they are for us. Certainly a few times, certainly in Sangin, we’ve been targeted and over the old Icom they say, “The bomb team is here, let’s hit them.” They call us the bomb team, according to the interpreter – probably “wankers” in the local language.’
Over the next few months Oz’s team were called out to dozens more IED incidents, some where soldiers had been killed and wounded and others where by luck the device had failed to explode. ‘I have been to a couple of devices that have been very unstable. The bomb makers’ construction of the devices isn’t brilliant. A loose wire in the wind could create a short, so when I have my fingers in there I have to pay attention.’
On 8 October 2010 Oz was dispatched to the district centre to deal with a device which the ANA had discovered while on patrol. The IED consisted of an artillery shell placed close to seven large cans of diesel. If the bomb had detonated it would have devastated the area. On arrival the ANA soldiers led Oz directly into the IED’s killing area. The Afghan soldiers had not warned the public for fear that the device might be detonated by the Taliban once they knew it had been found. Oz realized that he was not only at personal risk but so were around forty civilians who were in the immediate danger area, and time was not on his side.
Oz moved up close
