VIDEO: Saving lives in Helmand, Afghanistan

Captain Andy Edwards from 33 Engineer Regiment, is completing his final training package now that he has just arrived in Helmand, Afghanistan as part of 11 Light Brigade.

Andy, from Bristol, is an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer and will spend the tour finding and disposing of IEDs that are planted by the Taliban.

11 Light Brigade are replacing 19 Light Brigade in October 2009 as the lead formation of UK forces in Afghanistan.

Helmand’s Bomb Fight, Up Close and Personal with US EOD

By Noah Shachtman from Wired

The robot was back in the armored truck, and the truck was parked across the canal. That meant US Gunnery Sgt. Tony Lindsey had to get right up close to the pair of improvised bombs, and try to get rid of the things by hand.

This isn’t the way he is supposed to operate. During the Iraq war, the military gave explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians like Lindsey a heap of new gear to help them dispose of jury-rigged bombs in relative safety. Forget the “pull the red wire” cliché. These newly-outfitted bomb squads drove up to the hazard zone in hard-shelled, blast-deflecting vehicles. Radio frequency jammers blocked the signals that remotely detonated the explosives. Bomb-handling robots picked the weapons apart, while the EOD teams stayed inside their heavily-armored trucks.

But the improvised explosive device (IED) fight has shifted here in Helmand province — the epicenter of America’s renewed war in Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, there aren’t many paved roads for the robots and the armored vehicles to roll down. And it’s so hot, EOD technicians like Lindsey don’t even bother wearing the heavy protective suits that are supposed to give them some semblance of protection. Besides, the bombs here are so big and so deadly, the suits wouldn’t help much, if everything went bad.

Which left Lindsey staring at two steel pipes, each 15 inches long, six inches wide, and packed with homemade explosives. Spark plugs, motorcycle gears and ball bearings provided the improvised shrapnel.

Lindsey says he wasn’t any more nervous than usual when he goes out on a bomb disposal call. But he knew he was taking an extra risk. “Any time we gotta leave the truck, the threat is stepped up. Ordinarily, we sit inside the truck so if something blows up, we’ll be alright,” he tells me.

The bombs were sitting off the side of a dirt road bisected by a canal, a few hundred meters south of an outpost from Echo company of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines. Lindsey and his partner, Staff Sgt. Andrew Toothman, did manage to get rid of the IEDs — detonating them in place with explosives of their own.

Which meant there were only two more bombs to go. A few hundred meters to the west, near a canal winding through a tree-lined corn field, an Echo company Marine had noticed a wire poking out of the dirt. He brushed it away with his hand, and saw a metal tube — another IED. A second was next to it. Most of his squad had walked right by them both.

Taliban militants have been trying all sorts of trickery to keep their bombs from being seen. They’ve used pressure-triggered IEDs, tied together with wood and rubber, to avoid being picked up by metal detectors. They’ve buried bombs underground, or placed them near small footpaths and berms, where they can blend in with the foliage.

Some of the bombs have been huge: 40- or 50-pound-jugs filled with homemade explosives. That’s enough to rip a Humvee in half — or send a soldier with the Afghan National Army flying dozens of feet in the air. Which makes Toothman and Lindsey’s inability to use their robots and their bomb-resistant trucks even more frustrating. They’ve had to trudge through mud, and swim through a goat-dung-filled canal just to handle the deadly threats.

Lindsey and Toothman blew up the second pair of IEDs – sending a chest-thumping shockwave more than a hundred meters away. Then they walked back, got inside their armored vehicle, a drove about a kilometer back to their base.

Facing death every day: The most dangerous job on earth - Daily Mail

They are armed with just a pair of pliers and raw courage. As the widow of a hero bomb disposal expert prepares to collect his medal, ROBERT HARDMAN meets the bravest (and most modest) of the brave...

How on earth are you supposed to keep your cool in this thing? You can hardly bend your legs, you feel as if you are trapped in a diving bell and the whole lot weighs more than 7st. But this is the uniform of a small elite who must always keep the coolest of heads while all around are losing theirs. In fact, they might even crack a joke while they're at it.

They are the people with what is, arguably, the worst job in the world. They don't see it that way, of course. In fact, they are devoted to their profession and are universally regarded as the world leaders in their art. Which is just as well because, right now, the world needs Britain's bomb disposal experts more than ever.

Last week, the spectre of an Al Qaeda superbomb in northern England prompted an enormous police operation and many arrests.

Concrete details have yet to emerge, but one thing is beyond doubt: if any such bomb should surface, it will be the men and women of 11 EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) Regiment who will end up walking towards it while the rest of us are stampeding in the opposite direction.

As I stand here alone, holding a missile the weight of a small child with a mobile phone detonator attached, I cannot comprehend what makes anyone sign up for this sort of work. When one of my hosts cheekily calls the mobile attached to the bomb and it starts ringing - very funny, chaps - I am on the cusp of a coronary.

All right, I know I am at 11 EOD Regiment's Oxfordshire headquarters. I know this thing is a fake. I know I am being watched by some of the best and boldest experts in the world - and they are all laughing. But this thing still looks like a bomb, it's in my hands and it's going 'Brrring brrring. . .'

In recent days, this assiduously low-key branch of the Armed Forces has been propelled back into the spotlight for the saddest but noblest of reasons.

In last month's list of gallantry decorations from the Ministry of Defence, it was announced that Warrant Officer Gary O'Donnell had been awarded the George Medal for 'repeated and sustained acts of immense bravery' in Afghanistan, where he had defused more than 50 bombs.

What made this award so exceptional was the fact that WO O'Donnell already held the George Medal for similar heroism in Iraq, where he had tackled several devices under enemy fire.

It was the first time in 26 years that this decoration - just below the Victoria Cross and George Cross - had been given to the same person twice.

But the announcement was a posthumous one. The 40-year-old father-of-four had been killed by a Taliban device, which was threatening troops and civilians last September, just nine weeks after the birth of his son, Ben. It will be his widow, Toni, who goes to Buckingham Palace shortly to receive the Bar to his original George Medal.

The Mail has now learned that WO O'Donnell is to receive another honour. Next Thursday - on St George's Day - the men and women of 11 EOD Regiment will gather with his family at his old headquarters to watch a new wing be named in his honour. The O'Donnell building will be home to 40 members of this remarkable unit.

It is impossible to say how many lives this one man has saved. In one case, WO O'Donnell stopped a bomb going off in Afghanistan by jamming his finger into its clothes peg detonator. Another time, he was attempting to defuse a bomb when he realised that a man in a nearby crowd was trying to detonate the thing by mobile phone (he managed to deflect the signal using lead screens).

His commanding officer summed him up as follows: 'Bigger than life. Brave as a lion.'

The rest of the Army were in awe of him. The Parachute Regiment does not mess with words. Major Russell Lewis of 2 Para, himself the holder of the Military Cross and who knew WO O'Donnell in Afghanistan, said: 'I have seen many brave soldiers and he was one of the bravest. What he did was above and beyond the call of duty.'

Warrant Officer O'Donnell did not see it like that, of course. As his widow has explained: 'He just got on with it. He loved his job.'

That was the same response given this week by Captain Tom Bennett, 28, shortly after taking out a 45lb bomb near a crucial bridge in Afghanistan's Helmand Province.

As he approached the device - knowing there could be a remote detonation any second - he was ambushed by enemy fire on three sides, but pressed on under covering fire and attached a charge to the thing before withdrawing to press the button. Only half of the device went off, so the gallant captain had to run back through the enemy bullets and do it all over again. 'Just another job,' he said later.

So what does makes these men tick? I have come to 11 EOD Regiment of the Royal Logistic Corps in Didcot to find out. It could be any old military complex except for the odd truck saying 'Bomb Disposal Unit' and the flaming 'A' symbol on various uniforms (it stands for Ammunition Technician).

Inside I find Warrant Officer Class 1 Martin Laverack, 38, who has just returned from Afghanistan after six months. He hasn't even been home yet as he needs to debrief the regiment on all his discoveries. And he doesn't pause for a moment when I ask him what his worst moment was in Helmand Province.

'Losing Gary,' he says. 'I'd known him for 15 years. He was in the tent opposite me. We waved him off on a few jobs and that was it. It could have been anybody working on the one that killed him.'

Don't moments like that make him rethink his career? He looks baffled. 'If I couldn't do the job properly, I wouldn't be allowed to do it,' he says. What I cannot understand is why, given all the technology available, anyone needs to get killed any more.

WO Laverack explains there are often situations when you can't use a remote-controlled robot (known as a 'wheelbarrow'). Similarly, there are often situations where there is neither time nor space to use the hefty 7st bomb suit which took me 15 minutes to put on.

'If you are arriving by helicopter and people are shooting, your options are limited,' he adds.

So why not just shoot the blasted thing or spray it with petrol and light a match?

'Because we need to discover what we are up against.'

For obvious security reasons, he can't tell me much about techniques. But he says he signed up to be an ammunition technician in 1991 and, after five years' training, he faced his first job - a suspected IRA car bomb in Preston, Lancashire.

What was he thinking as he took what they call the 'long walk' from the ICP (incident control point) to the target?

'I was probably wondering what I was having for tea that night,' he says. WO Laverack does not do melodrama.

He loves the job, he says, because of the challenge and the unusual level of responsibility. He points out that it is not unusual for a young ammunition technician to have a colonel hanging on his every word as soon as an IED ( improvised explosive device) is discovered.

The outside world, he says, finds it very hard to grasp what he actually does, so he doesn't tell many people. His colleague, Warrant Officer Steve Fallon, says his own parents-in-law did not believe what he did for a living until he turned up outside their house in a truck with 'Bomb Disposal Unit' on the side.

But then this curious breed of men - and there are now a few women, too - have always been a modest bunch.

At the outbreak of World War II, there was not a single specialist unit charged with handling unexploded bombs. By the end of the war, during which the Luftwaffe dropped more than half a million bombs on Britain, the Armed Forces had tackled 45,000 which did not go off.

Quite apart from the death and destruction it could cause long after landing, an unexploded bomb (UXB) could cause as much disruption as an explosion if, say, its mere presence shut an entire airfield.

On land, the early bomb disposal teams were drawn from the Royal Engineers. Their kit consisted of a shovel, a pick-axe and a bit of string to pull out the fuse from a 'safe' distance if they could run far enough.

The best candidates, so the joke went, were 'unmarried and good sprinters'. Their life expectancy was less than ten weeks.

One of the bravest, and most modest, veterans I've ever met is Colonel Stuart Archer, now 94, who found himself leading a bomb disposal team in Swansea in 1940 when that city was being thumped by the Germans. On one occasion, two hefty UXBs were blocking a vital Battle of Britain airfield, so the young Archer simply dug them up, hauled them on to a lorry and drove them away - alone - to a nearby field for demolition.

Soon afterwards, he was called to defuse a series of bombs in, of all places, a blazing oil refinery. While everything around him was exploding, he spent hours in the inferno dismantling a single bomb and managed to extract not just a new type of fuse, but also a new breed of German booby trap.

These things had killed many UXB teams but he had the first specimen intact, to the delight of the boffins back at base. 'This was luck, luck, luck,' he said later. It was also monumentally brave, and George VI had no hesitation in awarding him one of the first George Crosses.

As the years progressed, a new breed of enemy evolved - the terrorist. While the Royal Engineers handled industrial ordnance dumped from the air, it required very different skills to tackle the improvised bombs of today's enemies.

That task fell to the ammunition experts of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, now part of the Royal Logistic Corps.

Bob Harvey, 70, learned the trade using a fishing rod to 'jerk' homemade bombs in Cyprus and Malaysia, and was presented with one of the first car bombs in Northern Ireland in 1972.

'It was 20lb of explosive with an alarm clock,' he recalls. 'We tried shooting it but when that didn't work, I had to go up and deal with it.'

He remembers the frantic on-the-job learning curve in those days - and the casualties.

'We lost three men in a week,' he recalls. 'There was real pressure to "get things back to normal", and the terrorist had the edge. It [the explosions] damaged my hearing and the stress affected me a lot. But I'd do it again.'

Mark Ritchie, 69, also remembers the pressure to 'get on with it' from his days as a warrant officer in Ulster, where he once dismantled 500lb of gelignite concealed in milk churns in County Londonderry.

'If you join the Army, you've got a job of work and you don't want to be seen as not up to the job,' he says.

The game of cat and mouse between terrorist and bomb disposal teams would last for years - which is why Forces all over the world still call on 11 EOD Regiment for its unique expertise.

The Army's kit was much-improved by October 1989 when WO Barry Johnson found himself tackling a set of mortar bombs next to a hospital in Derry. The remote-controlled 'wheelbarrow' was of little use and he decided to handle all the bombs himself. The last one blew him right across the road. But even as he lay there critically injured, he continued to give instructions.

Having been awarded the George Cross, Barry Johnson GC could have retired with distinction. But he didn't. 'I just wanted to get back to my family for Christmas, get my sight back and then get back to work,' says the 56-year-old father of two. And, in due course, he did all three.

He thinks he had it easy compared to today's bomb disposal teams.

'They're having to chuck smoke grenades just to get near the device without being shot at,' he says.

He has huge admiration for his fellow GC, Captain Peter Norton, who supervised a major bomb disposal operation in Iraq in 2005 despite having suffered dreadful injuries himself.

But let us never forget those who are left behind. Flo Grosvenor, 69, was a young mother with a six-year-old son when her first husband, Staff Sergeant Chris Cracknell, was killed with Sergeant Anthony Butcher while defusing an IRA car bomb 37 years ago.

'I remember the three officers in uniform coming to the door and they just looked at me,' she recalls. 'I was absolutely devastated. I just thought: "What do I tell my son?"'

Over the years, she has been greatly comforted by the friendship within the War Widows Association and by a 'lovely memorial' in Belfast. But it all floods back every time she hears of a military casualty.

'You never get over it. You live with it,' she says. 'Chris was always quiet about his job. He said that only a fool would not be frightened. But he loved his work.' So did Gary O'Donnell.

The world never gets any safer. But wherever there is terror and panic, just be grateful for the quiet soul making that 'long walk' into the unknown, armed with nothing more than a pair of pliers and the heart of a lion.

Royal Engineers destroy munitions in Helmand

Members of 33 Engineer Regiment (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) have recently assisted the Afghan National Army and Police in destroying nearly 70 items of dangerous, unexploded munitions in a series of controlled explosions.

The disposal of the munitions took place at the police headquarters in Lashkar Gah and at the Kandahar Gate area on the outskirts of the town.

The Afghan National Security Forces operating in this area have been increasingly successful at seizing and finding weapons, munitions and unexploded ordnance, items which are used by the insurgency and are also legacy items from previous conflicts.

As part of continuing efforts to make these items safe, the British Royal Engineers were called in to assist in the destruction of the more dangerous and unstable items.

The items included 107mm rockets, mortar shells, anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines, rocket-propelled grenade warheads and propellant, recoilless-rifle rounds and projectiles. Some were in an advanced state of disrepair, rusty and damaged, so it was not safe for them to be moved; they were therefore made safe in place.

Afghan National Security Forces provided a security cordon in the area to keep the local population at a safe distance while the Royal Engineers carefully moved the most unstable items to a safe area of the headquarters compound before destroying them.

Lance Corporal Thomas Watson, 33 Engineer Regiment, said:

"These items could have caused some severe injuries or death to anyone. Even in the places where local people are lucky enough to know that unexploded ordnance exists, having to steer clear prevents rural workers from farming their land - making their lives even more difficult.

"By helping to remove these devices, not only do we keep people safe and prevent them being used against us but we also help to win the hearts and minds of local people."

To prevent disturbing the area with further explosions, the remaining items, which were safe enough to be moved, were loaded by Afghan and British forces into vehicles and driven to the Kandahar Gate area of Lashkar Gah where they were then destroyed.

Captain Ben Sinclair, 33 Engineer Regiment, said:

"The Afghan Security Forces are increasingly having to deal with these potentially deadly weapons and unexploded munitions to protect the local population and we were happy to assist them in the safe destruction of nearly 70 items.

"These sorts of munitions were old, damaged and unstable - they posed a significant threat to local civilians who could easily have come across them during their normal daily business. In addition, such weapons could have been used by the insurgency in the form of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] - the sort of indiscriminate tactics which have been killing and maiming Afghan and ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] security forces but, all too often, Afghan civilians too.

"Developing the capability of the Afghan Security Forces to deal with IEDs and unexploded ordnance forms part of the long-term strategy for Helmand, working with them in this sort of activity is a key part of that process."