Being British, there is much mention of the weather. The sun beats down on Camp Bastion but the talk is of how it’s a cool start to the week: a balmy 40°C out in the desert. Recently, soldiers say, the mercury climbed as high as 50, so this is respite of a sort. For the uninitiated, however, it feels too hot to think – let alone fight.
Bastion, the largest British military base in Afghanistan, provides a sprawling home from home for the army in Helmand province. It has grown to encompass three British bases, the last of which is under construction, and the US Army’s Leatherneck camps 1 and 2, adjoining it. There is also an Afghan National Army training facility, Shorobak, nearby.
The footprint of Camp Bastion is larger than Aldershot barracks, the home of the British Army in the UK. Officers from 1 Close Support (CS) Battalion of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) have been at the camp with their soldiers since March. In theatre, the battalion has been absorbed into a wider equipment support group (ES Group), which contains 553 REME soldier-tradesmen and 25 officers.
They are there to ensure, in the words of the regimental motto, that the punch is kept in the army’s fist. Fixing and maintaining the diverse array of equipment used in theatre, from armoured personnel carriers to tanks to the metal detectors used to hunt for improvised explosive devices (IEDs), is all part of the remit.
The commanding officer of the ES Group, Lt Col Adam Fraser-Hitchen, says his troops have not been resting on their laurels. “This is the busiest tour I’ve experienced. The environment is harsh. If you combine the harsh environment with the heavy usage of vehicles and weapons and sighting systems, that takes its toll.
“We need to be able to repair and maintain that equipment and get it back into the hands of the user as quickly as we can.”
The area of Helmand the troops are operating in is large, from Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, up the Helmand River to Sangin in the north-east, taking in Nad-e Ali and Nahr-e Saraj on the way. The army maintains a number of forward-operating and patrol bases around Helmand, which act as staging posts for operations. REME troops either carry out maintenance and repairs at Bastion, which has a number of workshops, or are called forward into the field to carry out work in situ. The preference is to carry out work forward because that allows vehicles and equipment to be returned swiftly to their units. It takes considerable time to bring damaged vehicles back to base. Of the total REME soldiers in theatre, an average of 60% are deployed forward at any one time. The rest work seven-day weeks at the camp.
Men and women from the ES Group may fly by helicopter to the forward bases, where life can be considerably more austere and challenging than at Bastion, or go into the field as part of large combat logistics patrols, where REME recovery crews are used to bring in badly damaged vehicles. Increasingly, such patrols and the support vehicle recovery (SVR) trucks used by REME are being targeted by insurgents with both IEDs and small arms fire to disrupt the supply of vehicles. Lt Pete McIver, who commands more than 30 soldiers including recovery mechanics and vehicle mechanics, says: “We are seeing incidents where the SVRs are being targeted.”
One of the men under his command, Sgt Pat Tinker, a Territorial Army serviceman, says: “A lot of the lads have faced danger. I was on a convoy and a remote-controlled IED went off behind my vehicle. The intention was to disable one of the vehicles and stop us in our tracks.”
McIver describes his troops as “battle-hardened”. “They are a resilient bunch,” he adds.
In addition to the dangers of deploying forward, life on the convoys is physically and mentally demanding. Recovery and maintenance crews live on rations and sleep when they get a chance on journeys that might last for five days. The SVRs have a crew of three, with a gunner on top, a commander and a driver. They recover bogged-down or broken-down vehicles. Craftsman Lee Hawkins says: “The combat logistics patrols can be quite tough mentally. You work hard and are tired physically. And sleep deprivation becomes a factor.”
In the field, snipers are a threat. Recently the Taliban have started targeting the helicopters that fly the repair teams out. Says Capt David Tawlkes of the ES Group: “The insurgents will take sporadic shots at helicopters. It’s opportunistic: they don’t lie in wait for the helicopters but if they see one coming they will take a pot shot. They are high-value targets.”
Technicians are often called up to work on the army’s crucial Information, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (Istar) equipment while under fire. Istar is used to detect the movements of the Taliban and counter the threat of the IEDs they plant. The Istar systems, which offer 360° surveillance at high definition and over long ranges, are prone to overheating. Going out to fix one is no picnic: an Istar technician might carry 70kg of kit in soaring temperatures to carry out a repair. Because the equipment is relatively new and only used in theatre, there is a sharp on-the-job learning curve.
Maj Clare Phillips, an ES Group company commander, says her mechanics are increasingly carrying out complex repairs forward of Bastion to vehicles such as the Mastiff that have been hit by IEDs.
“It’s a significant technical achievement to carry out that level of repair in the field,” she says. “The time it would otherwise have taken to extract vehicles from, say, Sangin to Bastion would be phenomenal. It could be three months to get the vehicle back on the road.
“There are relatively few combat logistics patrols that go forward to Sangin and therefore there is a huge demand on them to move essential food, spares and water. It is quite difficult to get non-essential items on to the convoys.
“Although the Mastiffs are hugely important vehicles, we would struggle to get the priority to get them all back here.”
The 26-tonne Mastiffs have V-shaped hulls to deflect the force of a blast away from the crew. No one has died inside a Mastiff hit by an IED but the explosion still causes a lot of damage. Civilian contractors from Force Protection, the American firm that makes the Mastiff, are on hand at Bastion to assist with repairs. They are the only workers authorised to weld directly on to the Mastiff’s hull.
Safety at work
Operational health and safety – the reduction of avoidable accidents in theatre – is the responsibility of officers from the Royal Navy who have been working with REME on issues such as vehicle safety.
The work follows incidents such as the deaths of five soldiers when their armoured vehicles overturned in a canal. Lt Cmdr Mike Thompson of the navy, who worked until recently as operational safety adviser on the tour, says: “We’re sending people home injured from avoidable accidents. We have to stop these accidents happening, identify lessons from accidents that have happened, and incorporate those lessons as quickly as possible.”
Lieutenant Commander Pauline Aird, also of the Royal Navy, who has just taken over from Thompson as safety adviser, says: “The last thing we want to do is lose people to unnecessary accidents.”
The officers have been working with REME soldiers on developing improved illumination for points of egress from armoured vehicles so that an exit can be made more easily if they have overturned in water. They have also been studying the possibilities of adding hydraulic assistance to open heavy doors and the positioning of seatbelt cutters.
One area where safety can be improved is in wearing of seatbelts in vehicles such as armoured personnel carriers. According to Aird, a myth has developed that not wearing a seatbelt can increase the chances of surviving an IED strike. “We need to encourage troops to wear seatbelts at all times, unless the commander determines that the risk of contact is so imminent that soldiers may need to get out of the vehicle very quickly,” she says.
Thompson adds: “Unfortunately some guys have this fallacy that if you’re not wearing a seatbelt you may be blown free of the vehicle or able to escape if it is hit by an IED. In actual fact, seatbelts offer protection.”
At Bastion, there are metalsmiths, armourers, technicians, vehicle mechanics and workshops dedicated to the care of certain weapons and vehicles, such as the Warrior armoured personnel carrier and newer equipment like the Husky troop carrier. Power packs for the Warrior – combined engines and gearboxes – can be replaced, maintained and tested at Bastion. “Infrastructure at Bastion is clearly a lot better than it is in some of the forward locations. But time is a constraint,” says Maj Tim Gillies, second in command, ES Group. There is a shortage of metalsmiths in theatre, meaning that REME troops are kept busy. Repairing bar armour on vehicles is one of their major tasks. “We do more man hours on bar armour than anything else in theatre,” says Staff Sgt John Reeves.
Some vehicles have also had to be modified considerably in theatre before they are ready for service such as the Husky, essentially an armoured pod bolted on to the bed of a civilian truck.
According to Artificer Sgt Maj Charlie Watters, who runs ES Group’s engineering operations HQ, which coordinates and prioritises all the engineering work the group carries out in theatre, it has processed more than 4,000 work requests since the start of the tour. This does not indicate the number of actual jobs completed: a single request – to repair weaponry, for example – may contain many separate items within it.
Gillies estimates that the ES Group has undertaken more than 58,000 hours of repairs since April. The aim is always to repair equipment and get it back into service, but in extreme cases it may be “denied” – destroyed in the field to prevent it being captured by the Taliban.
All REME tradesmen and women have dual roles: to fulfil general soldiering duties and carry out repairs and maintenance. Capt Dougie Wilson says: “If there’s a compound to be cleared, and my guys are out in the field, they will be drafted in.”
He estimates that half the troops under his command have been deployed forward of Bastion during the tour. Many end up carrying out infantry duties such as patrols once repairs have been made.
Some REME soldiers are as far forward as possible within Helmand, working at the head of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force. Gillies says: “It’s quite important to note that our guys are all capable soldiers as well as engineers. If required, when they are under contact they react as all infantry soldiers do. They can fight their way through insurgent positions.”
Phillips says that some of her soldiers “can be too self-deprecating”. “They say – ‘I just fix trucks’. But I tell them: ‘You can be called to go on patrol, to clear IEDs, or work with the infantry. And you fix trucks’.”
Brig Rob Nitsch, responsible for all the enabling operations that support British forces in Helmand, including the ES Group, acknowledges that the last year has been difficult. But he says: “In terms of trying to help the government of Afghanistan beat the insurgency, we’re making progress. Governance is improving and the security situation is improving. Against those measures, there’s good progress in this mission. Clearly there’s a loss of life associated with this as well, which we deeply regret.”
Lt Col Fraser-Hitchen says: “A lot of the guys have had some pretty hard experiences that many people at home will never see in a lifetime. But the difficulty brings with it a closeness for the battalion, which comes together as an organisation far better than in the UK or even training on the prairie in Canada.
“It’s not until life becomes genuinely dangerous, and people understand that they’ve helped each other through difficult situations, that you really bond. I don’t think that bond is ever broken.”
Most soldiers from 1 Close Support Battalion REME, previously keen to get on with the job, are now eager to get home. Their tour ends next month. Some will stay with the battalion; some will move on to new postings. Then the cycle will start again: there will be an influx of new recruits, and training in Catterick, Wiltshire and Canada, culminating in another tour of Afghanistan in 2012.
What the situation will be like on the ground then is a matter for speculation, but it is likely that the REME troops will still be needed in Helmand.
- This is the fourth and final piece in a series of articles on 1CS Battalion REME