Free Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit by Sean Rayment

which may be remotely interesting from the ground while on patrol because it might be attached to a bomb. Those troops going to the front line are pitched into a series of day and night live-firing exercises on ranges beyond the camp wire.
    Overall it is an exhausting and sometimes frightening experience, but especially so when they get onto CIED training. Much of this will have been covered in numerous exercises before their deployment, but here in Helmand the training is somehow more frightening. Everyone knows that the next time they carry out the same drills will be for real. The instructors – members of the CIED Task Force – have a captive audience. No one wants to miss out on a piece of information, a tip with the benefit of someone’s experience. Mistakes on exercises back in the UK are acceptable but in Helmand they may cost an arm, a leg or a life.
    The soldiers are taught how to search, confirm and recognize buried IEDs using Vallons. Over the next six months the soldier will learn how to recognize the detector’s various alarm tones. Again and again the instructors remind them to look for the ‘absence of the normal and the presence of the abnormal’.
    As we sit talking inside the 30-ft-long tent, which even in the dry heat of Helmand still smells damp, Badger tells me of the worst period of the tour. In the space of three weeks one of his best friends had been killed, another had been wounded and sent back to the UK, and a third had suffered a double amputation after stepping on a pressure-plate IED. The three men were all ATOs and were all doing exactly the same job as Badger when they were killed. The first of Badger’s friends to fall was Staff Sergeant Olaf Sean George Schmid. Oz, as he was known, was one of the true characters of the bomb-disposal world – he was known to everyone and loved by most. He was a huge personality, cocky and scruffy, but he was also an excellent bomb hunter. He had spent several years serving with 3 Commando Brigade and proudly wore his Para wings and famous Green Beret and revelled in his status as an Army Commando.
    Oz was irrepressible. His favourite saying when morale would take a bit of a dip was ‘Let’s man-up and get on with it.’ Every morning without fail those who walked past his bed in his tent in whatever part of Helmand he was working would be greeted with one of two phrases: ‘Suck us off’ or ‘Two sugars with mine.’ He once attended a memorial service in Sangin for a fellow soldier killed in the area a few days earlier but fainted through exhaustion. When he came round, a padre was standing over him, asking if he was OK. Oz opened his eyes and responded with, ‘Get off my fucking hair.’
    It was as a chef that Oz originally joined the Army in 1996, but while serving with an infantry unit in Northern Ireland he saw a bomb-disposal team at work and felt he had suddenly found his calling. Oz arrived in Helmand in July 2009 on Operation Herrick 10 and immediately took part in Operation Panchai Palang, or Panther’s Claw, a multi-national operation designed to push the Taliban out of central Helmand before Afghanistan’s ill-fated presidential elections. Oz, known as ‘Bossman’ by his team, was one of Badger’s closest friends. The two had known each other for around eight years and were on the same High Threat course before being deployed to Helmand.
    ‘Oz filled the room, absolutely filled the room,’ Badger said, a broad smile lighting up his face. ‘He was a fantastic bloke, a great laugh. He was the loudest man I knew, he was brilliant. Before you go on any course in the Army, you get a set of joining instructions and at the back of that is a course list. I would always flip to the back and look at the list and if Oz’s name was on it you knew it was going to be a good one. It would be two weeks of hard work but two weeks of hard drinking. Oz worked hard and played hard, that was his way.’
    In August 2009 Oz was attached to the 2nd