I WENT ON PATROL. I drove with a convoy of Scimitar tanks from FOB Edinburgh through Musa Qala, and beyond. The road took us down
through a wadi, in which we soon came upon an IED. The first one I’d encountered.
It was my job to call in the bomb experts. One hour later the Chinook arrived. I found it a secure location for landing, threw a smoke grenade to indicate the best spot, and to show which way the wind was blowing.
A team quickly hopped out, approached the IED. Slow, painstaking work. It took them forever. Meanwhile, we were all totally exposed. We expected Taliban contact any second; around us we heard whizzing motorbikes. Taliban scouts, no doubt. Clocking our location. When the motorbikes got too close, we fired flare guns, warning them off.
In the distance were poppy fields. I looked off, thought of the famous poem. In Flanders fields the poppies blow…In Britain the poppy was a symbol of remembrance, but here it was just the coin of the realm. All those poppies would soon be processed into heroin, sales of which would pay for the Taliban bullets fired at us, and the IEDs left for us under roads and wadis.
Like this one.
At last the bomb experts blew up the IED. A mushroom cloud shot into the air, which was so dust-saturated you didn’t think there could be room for any more.
Then they packed up and left, and we continued north, deeper and deeper into the desert.
