2 Rifles in Helmand photo's by Michael Yon

[bobdina]

Full story here http://www.apacheclips.com/boards/showthread.php?p=12903#post12903



1-Captain Henry Coltart on Pharmacy Road

2-A sniper team quietly sat beside a dog and its handler.

3-A soldier checks his night-vision monocular.

4-Flipping up the night-vision monocular puts it on standby.

5-The mission will be very dangerous and the soldiers, who mostly could not see me taking photos unless they were using night-vision gear, seemed lost in thought.





photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

6-The friendly attack dog. A dog handler recently told me he was urinating when an Afghan soldier tried to grab his willy. The handler said the dog bit the Afghan soldier who needed a few stitches.

7-We set off down the market road. Some folks believe such reports are "security violations," as if the thousands of people living here do not know exactly where the bases are, or do not know exactly where we came from and went to. Operations take place here every day. Civilians are everywhere.

8-We made it to FOB Tangiers with no dramas. Some Afghan soldiers were on guard while others seemed comatose.

9-The commander of 2 Rifles is Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thomson (right), who this morning was constantly studying maps

10-An A-10 was transmitting downlink but we were getting interference, maybe from the building or other radios.

[bobdina]

wf yon11-The A-10s were gone and so Axle headed to sleep but Corporal Henry Sanday keeps working while all his men are zonked out.

11-Body armor for a pillow. Many soldiers buy those bracelets because they say the profits go to support wounded warriors. Next time I'm in Camp Bastion, I'll buy a couple.

12-"Axle" Foley, who was on that horrible mission with Sanday, went to sleep until more aircraft were scheduled to show up

13-The British call guard towers "sangers" (a word the Brits picked up during a previous Afghan war). At the bottom of the ladder, I announced my presence to the ANA soldier and he waved me up.

14-on tower


photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

15-That's when his buddy showed up with the dog. In Afghanistan mostly only villagers keep dogs, but the ANA are copying the British and adopted their own guard dog.

16-Mud walls meet cinderblocks. Locals fill the cinderblocks with mud. If the people spent as much time building roads as they do building walls, this place would have more roads than California.

17-Sangin from the Sanger. The town of Sangin is not exactly Jurassic Park like most of Afghanistan

18-That man is walking on Pharmacy Road. Most of the the walls are roughly fifteen feet tall, though the walls behind him are shorter. There is no commanding ground -- this is about as good as it gets -- and the snipers cannot get long shots or observe far.

19-Scrap in front of PB Tangiers.


photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

20-The mercury rose with the sun. LtCol Rob Thomson gathered up some men and wanted to go see the EOD soldiers as they were clearing some of the most dangerous ground.

21-The EOD soldiers said this dog missed a big pressure-activated bomb and led his handler right over it. Luckily the team didn't step on the device. The dog is better at finding shade than bombs, apparently. Probably should be a drug dog. I'm no expert on search dogs, but it is true that glaring sun can bake away scent. I had the feeling that the soldier felt like he let people down, but nobody said any such thing. Everybody knows it's tough out here and sometimes you simply miss the bomb.

22-We came into a compound that had been "cleared." Without EOD, our losses would be far higher in Afghanistan. The EOD soldiers get special respect and earn every ounce of it.

23-LtCol Thomson checks progress.

24-The imagery from November 2004 does not show the power lines in the photo below.


photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

25a-The EOD team is rigging this wall to blow part of it down. On the other side of the wall are the two blown-up vehicles; one of the vehicles is British and the other is the trailer from a "jingo truck." The area surrounding the trucks is booby-trapped with explosives, and the vehicles also are booby-trapped. So the goal is to blow down the wall and drag the vehicles off the road and into this compound.

25-These EOD soldiers wear a Rainbow patch and call themselves Team Rainbow, which of course seemed quite curious.

26-The wall is so thick and strong that Team Rainbow put about 200 pounds of plastic explosive in all the right places, then rolled out the wire. The reader might be surprised to see what 200 pounds of high explosives does to the wall.

27-Team Rainbow and LtCol Thomson stayed up close, but I got behind the farthest vehicle because I have no pride in my courage. Some people think this is crazy work, but I'm actually a safety fanatic.

28-And so that's all that 200lbs of high explosives, in perfect contact with the target, placed by experts, could do to this wall. When soldiers come back from Afghanistan and say that the compounds are like fortresses, this is what they mean. The electrical wires, which cannot be seen in the Google Earth imagery of 2004, got blown down


photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

29-He drove the scooper machine to the front and opened the wall to let a bigger truck inside. The Engineers hooked webbing around the electrical wires, and using the winch on the big truck, pulled the wires up and draped them over the notch the scooper had cut. EOD was back in business clearing Pharmacy Road. In fact, the soldier who is driving the scooper is the same driver who got blown up on Pharmacy Road, and his blown up vehicle is one that they were about to drag into the compound.

30-Preparing plastic explosives in slivers of shade. Iraqis thought our body armor was air conditioners, and thought we have "cold pills" to chill us out. The soldiers carry far more weight than I do, and they work three times harder.

31-SSgt Schmid of the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal (JFOD). Dealing with hidden bombs made by pernicious enemies requires special people. I asked Ssgt Schmid which wire he cuts when dealing with booby-traps -- red wire, or the green? -- SSgt Schmid just laughed and kept working.

32-The blown-up vehicles were dragged through the blown-up wall under the blown-down wires.

33-As the midday sun pounded down, the EOD soldiers continued to work in the heat. LtCol Rob Thomson stayed out in the boiling sun with the men. I retreated with some others to a cooler place that was halfway underground. Most of us soon fell asleep as the EOD soldiers kept blasting, blasting, blasting.


photo's Michael Yon

[bobdina]

34-some ANA were preparing for a mission.

35-During the clearance, this soldier fell off a ladder. He was all the way at the top, about fifteen feet high. Luckily he was wearing his helmet because he said he also cracked his head. His spirits were good but he seemed a little embarrassed for falling off, but accidents like this happen a lot. Even when nobody is shooting, there are plentiful ways to get hurt out here.

36-RPGs are simple but enormously effective.


photo's Michael Yon

[nastyleg]

34-some ANA were preparing for a mission.

35-During the clearance, this soldier fell off a ladder. He was all the way at the top, about fifteen feet high. Luckily he was wearing his helmet because he said he also cracked his head. His spirits were good but he seemed a little embarrassed for falling off, but accidents like this happen a lot. Even when nobody is shooting, there are plentiful ways to get hurt out here.

36-RPGs are simple but enormously effective.


photo's Michael Yon

RPG's are effetive but the HESCO did its job and is more effective....large hescos can stop a vbied going 50MPH