Just a finger's width away from death

Published on Sunday 22 June 2008 22:06

WARRANT Officer Gary O'Donnell was crouched over a Taleban bomb in Afghanistan's Helmand pro-vince when he spotted the crude wooden trigger, based on a clothespeg, beginning to shut.

The bomb disposal expert had only milliseconds to react, jamming his fingers into the gap to stop it detonating.

"It happened almost straight away," he said. "I saw it slipping and jammed my fingers in."

A team from the Royal Logistics Corps' elite bomb disposal unit had raced to the scene after soldiers from 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment found the deadly device buried in a desert track, near their Kajaki camp.

"The device had a pressure plate," WO O'Donnell said. "But not like the ones we normally see. The circuit was held open by what looked like a large clothespeg." The bomb was wired to explode when a soldier's weight pushed two metal contacts, made from strips of tin,

wrapped around the ends of the peg, together. A strip of rubber was at the opposite end, holding them open. But as soon as the father-of-four began brushing earth away to take a closer look, the band slipped.

WO O'Donnell, 39, from Edinburgh, said: "I was clearing the surface ground above the switch and the rubber started unwinding. I didn't have time to think, I just had to jam my fingers into the switch. If I hadn't done that, if it had shut, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

The clothespeg was wired to an 82mm-high explosive mortar round and a 107mm Chinese rocket. Between them they have over 2kg of explosive charge. The blast would almost certainly have killed a soldier on patrol if he stepped on it. At the very least it would have ripped a leg off. As WO O'Donnell was crouched over the device with his head above the bomb, it would have blown him to pieces, killing him instantly. "Two kilograms of explosives doesn't sound like a lot, but we are very aware of what it can to do a person," he said.

Three Special Forces soldiers and a woman from the Intelligence Corps were killed last week when their lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover hit a roadside bomb north east of Lashkar Gah.

OF THE 21 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, 16 died from bombs hidden in their path, three died in a suicide attack and two in a fire fight.

Normally bomb-disposal soldiers use a remote-controlled razor blade to cut the wires, while they take cover, in case the device is booby-trapped with a secondary circuit.

But WO O'Donnell, who won the George Medal in Iraq for similar work, was trapped with his fingers inside the trigger, and couldn't get away without detonating the bomb.

To make matters worse, he wasn't wearing a bomb suit to give extra protection. The massive, unwieldy suits weigh 45kg and they make it impossible for the soldiers to defend themselves if they get attacked en route to a bomb site.

"They are fine for Northern Ireland, but you'd be a sitting duck if you got caught in a fire fight wearing one of them," said Captain Mike Webb, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team's Operations Officer.

The highly-trained unit has robots at Camp Bastion which can defuse the bombs remotely, but these can't be used either because there is not enough space on the helicopters which take them in and out of the action.

Capt Webb, 26, from Aberdeen, said the extra risk is part of the job. "They don't take the robots and they don't wear the 45kg bomb suit," he said. "The guys have got to be able to fight, and they have had to fight, going to and from a job. If we are to support the guys on the ground, we have to take the extra risks."

WO O'Donnell said the first words that went through his head as he sat with his fingers trapped in the bomb were "You f****** bastards." But he didn't have time to be angry. "When you are there you are completely focused. I had to make an assessment that there was nothing else there, that there wasn't a secondary circuit. Then there was no other option but to cut the wires manually."

With his free hand, WO O'Donnell reached for his "snips", held his breath, and cut the trigger wire.

It was the closest he had come to disaster on a tour that has seen bomb disposal soldiers deal with more devices in ten weeks than the previous two rotations of troops saw in a year.

In a single day WO O'Donnell had to defuse eight Taleban bombs on a hill overlooking Helmand's deadly green zone, near the town of Gereshk. The insurgents have started targeting high ground with record numbers of massive Improvised Explosive Devices, because they know it is where the tanks and armoured cars go to provide back-up for soldiers in the valley below.

So far the Helmand EOD team have dealt with more than 80 incidents, an average of more than one a day since they arrived in Afghanistan. WO O'Donnell has dealt with more than 22 bombs in less than five weeks.

Their first priority is defusing bombs, but they also visit blast sites to find forensic clues to help them defend against future attacks and catch the bombers.

The soldiers, from the 11th EOD Regiment, are trained to deal with mines, mortars and all sorts of unexploded munitions which litter Helmand's war-ravaged countryside. But the busiest soldiers are those trained to defuse the deadly explosive adaptations the Taleban are so fond of – and WO O'Donnell is one of only two in theatre. They are on ten minutes' notice to move, and haven't spent more than three days in camp since they arrived.

THE Taleban, meanwhile, are using teams of trained bomb- makers to manufacture bigger and deadlier bombs in secret locations.

"They may have similar components, but you never know how they'll be put together," said WO O'Donnell. "You have to have a lot of respect, not only for the enemy, but also for their bombs. If you just touch two wires together, one could go bang."

The Taleban haven't yet begun using the shaped charges which cut through at least one Challenger battle tank in Iraq. But they are burying bombs in cast-iron cooking pots, which act like crude imitations in directing the force of the explosives, and it is feared they may yet get the equipment and expertise from Iran.

Intelligence officials in Helmand have identified a gun-smuggling route which runs from Iran to Now Zad, Musa Qala and Kajaki, in northern Helmand and they call it the "Gulf Stream". But even if the bombs do get more numerous and deadly, the soldiers defusing them are sure they can cope.

"We are the bane of their lives," said WO O'Donnell of the Taleban bombers. "We get rid of almost everything they put out."