Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan with Britain’s Elite Bomb Disposal Unit. Sean Rayment

Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s. Every member of 3 Para knew why the British Army was on the streets of Ulster. We understood the politics, the tribal tensions and the history, but it mattered little to any of us. Soldiers do not fight for Queen and Country: they fight for each other. They do not fix bayonets with the government’s foreign policy objectives ringing in their ears: they do so because they are professionals trained to obey orders. It’s the same in Helmand today. Every soldier still wants to win a medal but he also wants to make it home in one piece.

      But with glory comes a terrible price. In Helmand, a front-line soldier stands a one-in-ten chance of being killed or injured; those are not good odds. Looking around the departure lounge at RAF Brize Norton, I wondered which of my fellow passengers would not survive the six-month tour, and I doubt I was the only one with that thought in their mind. The atmosphere was subdued, depressing even. Some soldiers entered the room with eyes reddened by tears, doubtless wondering whether they would ever see their loved ones again. Part of me, sitting here now descending into the Helmand desert, wonders the same.

      There was once a time when I thought that as a journalist I was safe in a war zone. It’s a foolish notion. Why should I be less at risk than anyone else? But I believed it nonetheless. I have worked in several war zones – the Balkans, Iraq, Northern Ireland – and I always thought death and injury were something that happened to others. Mainly soldiers or journalists who forgot to obey the rules or who simply pushed their luck too far.

      That was until one of my best friends, Rupert Hamer, was killed while on assignment in January 2010 after the US armoured vehicle in which he was travelling was destroyed by an IED. He was working as a reporter alongside photographer Phil Coburn, and the pair were both attached to the US Marines Expeditionary Force when he was killed. They were part way through a two-week assignment and were returning from a shura, or meeting of elders, when the tragedy struck. Phil and Rupert were sitting beside each other inside a 30-ton heavily armoured Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle when they hit a huge improvised explosive device.

      The main charge was composed of ammonium nitrate powder and aluminium filings, and when these are mixed together in the right quantities the result is lethal. The explosive was packed into several yellow palm-oil containers buried about 15 cm beneath the ground. The detonator was probably made from a Christmas tree light, or something similar, with the bulb removed. The bomb was one of the largest ever seen in Helmand.

      The MRAP more or less remained intact – the front and rear wheels and axles were blown off – but the shock wave which tore through the vehicle was devastating. Despite wearing helmets and body armour and being strapped into their seats, Rupert, Phil and four US Marines all suffered multiple injuries. Phil and Rupert were sitting side by side, but while Rupert died Phil survived, though the bones in his feet were smashed beyond repair and both feet were amputated. Four US Marines travelling in the vehicle were seriously injured and a fifth was killed.

      Death in Helmand is random – it has killed the best in the British Army, possibly even the best of the best. Every soldier from private to lieutenant colonel – all the ranks in a battlegroup – have been killed in action in the province since 2006. Not since Korea has the British Army been in such a bloody fight, and every indicator suggests it’s going to get worse.

      I last spoke to Rupert less than two weeks before he was killed. It was an unusually warm day in early January. He had called me from Kabul while waiting for a flight to Helmand. I was sitting on a chair in my garden, guffawing with laughter as he relayed in detail all the hilarious events that had befallen both him and Phil in the short time that they had been in Afghanistan.

      Rupert was in good form, joking about the Marines’ lack of organization and saying that by comparison they made him look organized. My last words were, ‘E-mail me when you can, and look after yourself.’ As he set off for Helmand, I went to Austria for a week’s skiing holiday with my family. Rupert was killed on the following Saturday, 10 January.

      The first thing my wife, Clodagh, said to me after I told her Rupert had been killed was, ‘It could have been you.’ At that moment I vowed never to return. Fuck it, I thought to myself. It’s not worth it. Not for a few stories for a newspaper. But even as the words formed I secretly I knew I would return. The problem for me is that I find war zones exciting places. There is a thrill to being under fire, even risking your life, always in the knowledge, of course, that, as an observer, rather than a protagonist, I was somehow invulnerable. Rupert’s death shattered that illusion, but as the shock of his loss gradually lessened I was soon beginning to convince myself of the need to return.

      Rupert always said to me, ‘If you are going to report the war, then you have to see the war,’ and he was right. Just before I left, my 6-year-old son asked me why I was going to Afghanistan. ‘To carry out research for my book and to report on what is happening in the country,’ I told him, hoping that he wouldn’t ask me if I was going to do anything dangerous. ‘Why can’t you just get the information off the internet?’ he responded, looking confused. ‘Because that’s what somebody else has seen and witnessed,’ I replied. ‘I need to see what is going on for myself so that I can write about it.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think I understand.’

      So here I am on a C-130, ten minutes away from landing in Helmand, the centre of a war zone where every day British troops are being killed and injured. So much for never returning. And the news from the front line is not good. In Sangin, a town in the north of Helmand, six soldiers have been killed in the first week of March. Four of the dead were shot by snipers. Taliban shooters are good, and the Army is understandably nervous. Enemy snipers are feared and hated by all armies and run the risk of summary execution if captured. Snipers will go for the easy kill or one designed to shatter morale: the young soldier, the commander, the medic. Morale in Sangin had understandably suffered. Soldiers were being picked off at the rate of one a day. Although the sniper is guaranteed to generate fear, in Helmand the IED, the unseen killer, remains the soldiers’ worst nightmare. A step in the wrong direction, a momentary lapse of concentration, can mean mutilation, the loss of one or more limbs, or death.

      Lose a leg in what is known as a traumatic amputation and you have just four and a half minutes for a medic to staunch the wound before you fatally ‘bleed out’. The time decreases with each additional limb lost, and that is why no quadruple amputee has yet survived.

      IEDs are now being manufactured on an industrial scale – it is no longer a cottage industry. Bomb factories in some parts of Helmand can produce an IED every fifteen minutes. Made from pieces of wood, old batteries and home-made explosive, they are basic and deadly. The Taliban have already produced IEDs with ‘low metal’ or ‘no metal’ content, which are difficult to detect. So, as well as using equipment to detect bombs, troops also need to rely on what they call the ‘Mk 1 eyeball’, hoping to spot ground sign.

      In Helmand the IED is now the Taliban’s weapon of choice and the main killer of British troops. The field hospital in Camp Bastion now expects to treat at least one IED trauma victim every day. Between September 2009 and April 2010 there were almost 2,000 IED incidents.

      The human cost of this war has never been higher. Since 2006 more than 350 soldiers have been killed and more than 4,000 injured. Of these, more than 150 have lost one or more limbs. And those are the statistics for just the British forces. Every country with troops in Helmand – the United States, Estonia and Denmark – has suffered similar losses.

      In one week alone in February 2010 there were 200 IED incidents – that is, bombs being detonated or discovered. Do the maths – that’s over 9,000 a year. Or more than one IED for every British soldier serving in Helmand.

      The job of battling against this threat falls to the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group, part of the Counter IED, or CIED, Task Force. At the tip of the spear are the Ammunition Technical Officers, or ATOs, the soldiers who defuse the Taliban IEDs – the bomb hunters. Also called IED operators, the ATOs work hand in glove with the RESTs. It is a fantastically dangerous task, not because the devices are sophisticated but because of the volume of bombs. The number of IED attacks started to go through the roof in 2008, a development which was entirely unpredicted. Back then there were just two bomb-disposal teams in Helmand because someone,