Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid sounded uncharacteristically strained as his tearful words crackled over the telephone line from Afghanistan. Exhausted after another gruelling four-day operation defusing bombs in one of Helmand’s most dangerous districts, he told his wife, Christina: “I’m hanging out, hun. Can you come and get me, babe?”
The next day he was dead, blown up as he tried to render harmless yet another improvised explosive device (IED) planted by the Taliban. He was due home this weekend on leave. Instead, wearing his medals, Christina stood among a reverent crowd in Wootton Bassett on Thursday to greet his body.
“Oz” Schmid was an unusual soldier, not just because of the lonely and terribly dangerous job he did but also because of his outlook on soldiering itself. A former army cook, he volunteered to learn bomb disposal skills — “no different from cooking, really” — and set about protecting people rather than killing them.
Christina said he hated conflict, “any of the gung-ho stuff”. She saw him as a warrior, part of an ancient code vital to the strength of society. Oz himself had told me modestly: “I suppose, thinking about it, I’ve been given a skill or been taught a skill and — well, I don’t know, I’m going to sound a bit chav really — at the end of the day it saves lives, it’s not killing.
“I go home, and people go, ‘How many f****** Taliban have you killed?’ Well, it’s not really about that. It’s more about how many lives I’ve saved, I think.”
The 30-year-old from Truro in Cornwall operated in territory unimaginable to the armchair warriors at home. Called the “green zone” — an ironic dig at the ultra-secure green zone in Baghdad — the fertile Helmand River valley is a labyrinth of sodden fields, irrigation ditches and small mud-walled hamlets. It is crisscrossed by lethal footpaths and narrow alleyways where many of the 230 British dead in the Afghan war have been blown up by IEDs. The Taliban have perfected the art of channelling soldiers towards an IED by blocking side alleys with debris or using a “scout” to draw them on. Oz’s task was to go into the killing zones and defuse the explosives waiting there.
I first met him during the Taliban’s brutally successful bombing campaign over the past summer. My photographer, David Gill, and I were sitting at a wooden table on the bank of the canal that runs through the British Army’s forward operating base Jackson in Sangin. An easy-going, fast-talking soldier with a mop of blond hair and an infectious smile casually plonked himself down next to us.
He wanted to know what we did. We said we were freelances. He thought we were bold yet foolish coming to Helmand without a salary. Then we found out he defused bombs for a living.
“I once looked into getting life insurance,” he said with a wry smile. “It would have cost me £350,000.” We laughed and told him we couldn’t afford any either. For the next two weeks we’d bump into him in the mess tent and he’d sit and share a joke over another staple meal of gravy-covered noodles. We talked again whenever we met, most recently two weeks before his death.
I asked him why he’d nicknamed the team he commanded Rainbow. “It’s because we’re the only all-gay counter-IED team in Helmand,” he joked, a grin spreading across his face. “We named ourselves after Zippy, Bungle and George. It was good for morale. When we’re out on a job people always ask us why we’re called Team Rainbow. We could joke about it. Our team mascot is a duck. We call him Corporal Quackers.”
Oz became interested in bomb disposal when he was a chef, cooking for an infantry battalion in Northern Ireland 10 years ago. “I saw the bomb team at work and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do that’,” he said.
After working as an ammunition technician, he qualified for the role of high-threat counter-IED operator, becoming one of only a handful of bomb disposal experts in the army trained to such a high level.
On counter-IED training exercises the instructors would stand behind him with a brown paper bag, ready to burst it with a bang if he cut the wrong wire on the imitation bomb.
“You do the same with a training bomb as with a live IED. If you do the wrong response or cut, then you are f*****. It doesn’t matter that they are not real when you train. You know when you have screwed up,” he said.
The skills he built up over the 10 years of intense training made him a vital asset to counterterrorist operations in the UK. Attached to 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regiment of the Royal Logistic Corps, he was often involved in missions conducted by British special forces. He was commando-trained and had done the notoriously tough P Company course, earning him his parachute wings.
“What’s it like doing my job? It’s like when I used to cook. You could always get burnt. It’s like any other job. It’s the same as stacking shelves in Tesco. You could slip on milk and break your leg,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he spoke.
“I don’t count the jobs I do. How many devices have I defused throughout the whole tour? I’m three months in and I’m between 50 and 70. I’m not counting. You’re probably the first people I’ve said that to.”
I asked him how he coped knowing that he risked losing his life every time he went out to defuse a bomb.
“I treat it as a job — I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it before. Some guys deal with it in their own little way. Some lads dance around and shout how many jobs they’ve done or what they are.”
In July, another of the army’s top bomb disposal experts, Captain Daniel Shepherd, 28, was killed defusing a roadside bomb in Nad-e ’Ali district in Helmand.
“The device was . . . well we don’t know what it was,” said Oz, staring into the distance, caught up in memories of a fallen member of this small and tightly knit community who do one of the most dangerous jobs the army has to offer.
“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.”
He said that uppermost in his mind were the patrol who had found the device — and the unseen Taliban watching them. “Nine times out of 10, in fact 99.99% of the time, I’m down there and I’m doing it as quick as I can, ’cos 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.”
In July, Oz was sent to an area of Helmand known as Babaji to take part in the largest British assault of the summer, Operation Panther’s Claw, which was supposed to make the area safe for the ill-fated presidential election.
After the initial surge into the area, the Light Dragoons and the 2nd Battalion the Mercians became bogged down in fierce close-quarter firefights with the enemy, who littered the valley floor with IEDs as they retreated in the face of superior British firepower.
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