Like an alarm, the phone rang in our detachment’s tactical operations center. Having operated in Iraq for two months with more than a hundred missions in the rearview mirror, one might think that we’d become desensitized to the rush of adrenaline. That would be wrong. I still felt it every time the phone rang.
On this particular day, it was an urgent 911 call, delivered in the standard nine-line format. According to line four, there had been a car bomb, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED). The suicide bomber had driven onto the grounds of an Iraqi police headquarters and recruiting station. My explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teammates, Richie and Adam, looked over at me with the loyal resolve born of countless hours of working together under incredible pressure. I knew I could trust them with my life.
We double-checked our gear and then checked it again. I donned my body armor, hefting the familiar weight onto my shoulders, glancing down at my chest to quickly survey the ceramic bullet-stopping material secured within the chest pouch of the vest. This part of my routine was so familiar, it almost felt like a cadence as I opened and closed the Velcro strips around the super-hardened ceramic plates. Patting the vest twice with confidence, I looked up to see my teammates standing ready. We mounted up in the Humvee, yanking the heavy armored doors shut and immediately conducting standard communications checks. Part of me felt invincible; the other part shut off for a while, because whatever that part was, it wouldn’t be useful for the mission at hand. I focused my thoughts, playing through scenarios in my mind, running mental simulations in preparation for the moment of action that was quickly approaching.
We linked up with our security element and headed off the base, “outside the wire.” The whine of the Humvee’s engines was piercing as we accelerated, driving in a tight convoy. Local civilian drivers were familiar with the sight of our military formation flying down highways en route to various objectives. They pulled off to the side of the road just as we would if we heard an ambulance approaching back home.
The Iraqi police station was four kilometers away. As we navigated the streets we’d previously cleared of improvised explosive devices, I cautiously scanned the road for anything suspicious. We listened attentively for the periodic beep cuing us into the lead vehicle’s tactical updates. We were thinking about the threat ahead, but also imagining the very real possibility of an unseen IED along the way.
We arrived on the scene unscathed and immediately saw the Iraqi police buzzing with activity. A crowd of twenty to thirty men had gathered as casual spectators. We had no idea who among them might be friendly and who might be hostile. A handful of the police spread out to stabilize the area. A white police truck was parked in front of what looked like a high-ranking police officer’s office. Next to the building, twenty meters away, was a dilapidated, white sedan. I kept asking myself, “What could kill me right now? How do I take control of this scene?”
I directed our Army security element to set up a perimeter on opposite sides of the suspect vehicle. As they spread out to arrange for our protection, several of the Iraqi police approached my vehicle, obviously agitated and panicked. One of them explained through my interpreter that he was the chief of police and a newly assigned “bomb expert.” I asked him where the device was located, and he replied that the suspected VBIED was the same white sedan I had observed no more than twenty meters from the group of spectators. We had no way to safely detonate the explosive device without endangering the civilians. “BIPing it,” or “blow-in-place,” was not an option. As the leader on the scene, it was my responsibility to somehow disperse the crowd, set a proper perimeter, and deal with the device.
Experience had eroded my trust in the generally corrupt Iraqi police. Nevertheless, I had to get people out of the way and somehow go to work on this deadly weapon. Thoughts of what might happen if the bomb detonated near the crowd were too tragic to consider in this moment. I cordoned the thought off in a part of my mind for later consideration. I had a mission to complete. The language barrier exacerbated the stress level exponentially as I attempted to maintain a clear and calm line of communication through the interpreter. As I spoke with the so-called bomb expert representing the Iraqi police, something didn’t feel quite right. Sweat was pouring off his brow in the 115-degree July heat, but it seemed to be the cold sweat of nervousness. He also seemed to have a stutter in his voice. The translator conveyed to me, with a measure of concern all his own, the message, “I took it apart . . . I took it apart.”
Richie prepared the iRobot PackBot to investigate the sedan, and Adam built up a bootbanger water disruption charge for our option of last resort—a remote disruption attempt and the possible high-order detonation of the device (and vehicle). Part of me wanted to go straight to plan B and blow the car sky high. I didn’t trust the police “chief.’ The tension kept building. An Iraqi army-police recruiting station was an attractive target for the insurgency. How could I know whether this “bomb tech” had put the VBIED there to target potential new recruits and my team?
Suddenly Adam’s voice piped in on comms, “Lieutenant, I’ve got at least a half-dozen one-five-five projos daisy chained with det cord in the trunk. The det cord doesn’t have an initiator that I can see, but I’ve got separate wires going into the backseat.” In the vernacular, he said that in the back of the car there were at least six 155 mm projectiles, each carrying a heavy metal fragmenting shell with approximately twenty-five pounds of explosives, connected with explosive cord. He was viewing the device via the camera on the PackBot. He maneuvered it to view the backseat but couldn’t trace the wires with 100 percent certainty. Meanwhile, I continued to question the Iraqi police chief, who conceded that the vehicle hadn’t been searched from bumper to bumper, only in the trunk. I sensed his embarrassment of contradicting his earlier statement as I stared him down with disdain and continued to stay vigilant for signs of deception.
My team and I concluded that the potential for a high-order detonation would not be feasible, and 100 percent clearance could only be achieved by sending an operator downrange. I directed Richie to take charge uprange, and we talked through the emergency procedures. This would be the first time that I would wear the bomb suit on a live IED.
The forest green EOD VIII Med-Eng bomb suit went on piece by piece. My feet slid into the toe cups, and the flexible front armor wrapped around my legs, as Richie and Adam zipped up the trousers on the backside of my calves. The trouser suspenders slid over my shoulders like a bulky but comfortable pair of overalls. The additional armor groin-pad “diaper” Velcroed into place and the turtle shell-type spine armor completed my lower half of protection. The heavily padded and armored top half was donned from the front, arms in first. With armor, seams create a point of failure, and the EOD bomb suit was designed to absorb a forward facing blast. All the closures attached in the rear. The bulky neck dam flowed around the underside of my chin, designed to deflect a blast wave up and away from my vital grey matter upstairs. Last came the helmet and visor, completing my security cocoon.
I had a clear understanding of the objective and even had a sense of peace as I donned each article of the bomb suit. Richie and Adam double-checked me. The scene was certainly similar to several in the movie The Hurt Locker, yet it was also unique. I wasn’t about to rush recklessly downrange to cut the blue wire, like some character in a movie. Everything had a process, and the process would work, as my training had led me to believe. My heart raced, but I refused to think of anything but complete success. Adam attached my facemask, and the world went quiet. I could hear myself breathing and that was all.
A pull line trailed me as I approached the vehicle on foot. My teammates would use the pull line to yank me back if an explosion occurred. The line unwound from a wheel, slowly spinning as I closed in on the car. I saw the robot camera turn to look at me. I knew that my boys were behind its eyes, keeping watch on every move I made. If I made a mistake, they would quickly take my place to complete the mission. “Initial Success or Total Failure,” the EOD motto, was branded in my mind, and I trusted my team to complete what we’d started, no matter the cost.
Twenty feet out. Ten feet away. On target. Doing my best to search the interior of the vehicle, I felt a bit like a little kid dressed by mom in a bulky snowsuit . . . in the middle of a 115-degree desert. The trunk was filled with ordnance, just as Adam had indicated. I determined that it was safe to continue and did a systematic assessment of the threat while trying to assume the perspective of the bomb maker. I found the wires Adam had mentioned and traced them under the backseats to more projectiles. With every moment I spent there and with every action I took, I felt like the IED got a little more pissed off. In our line of work, an EOD tech tends to personify the IED as he faces it one on one. The more one has to manipulate the device, the more one thinks it will defy one. After a quick snip and the tie of a “bowline” knot, however, I was ready to return to the boys uprange. I backed away carefully and felt as though I were dropping a two-ton elephant off my back. I had deactivated the bomb, and the stress was streaming out of my pores.
Adam and Richie welcomed me back to the world and greeted me with a bottle of water. My chest was pounding as they helped strip off the bomb suit, piece by piece. We shared a quick laugh as we moved to the final steps of rendering the device safe and tying up the operation. It was another one of the many events that cemented my love for those guys.
We were able to extract more than two hundred pounds of explosives from the sedan along with a lot of forensic evidence. From the rearview mirror, we were able to recover latent fingerprints that later led to an important intelligence development, a targeting package, and the capture of an insurgent bomb-making cell in the area. We found additional electrical components that helped us identify new bomb-making trends in the region. The icing on the cake was taking the ordnance to a remote location to make it disappear in the loudest and most violent way possible.
Our unit, EOD Mobile Unit 6, Detachment 12, accomplished 426 missions supporting the U.S. and Iraqi armies in and around Baghdad from January through July 2007, during the height of the troop surge. Our tasks were to identify, neutralize, and render safe any explosive hazards and make the battle-field accessible to our troops while also protecting the local populace. When I returned home, some of this mission further crystallized as the locked corners of my mind opened and began examining it. There were feelings there that I’d locked away, such as fearful “what-ifs,” and bottled-up tensions. In truth, adjusting to normal life was difficult after living and conducting operations in a culture of war. I worked at accepting that life goes on and summoned the courage to continue serving in my old environment with a forever-changed perspective.
I have learned so much from the men on my team, from the Iraqi people, from every breath counted in the brief silence of a moment downrange. I have learned that my alma mater’s ideals—duty, honor, and loyalty—are more than worth fighting for. For this knowledge, those values, and the wonderful gift of freedom, I feel truly blessed by the grace of God.
Eric Jewell, front row, far left, with his EOD team in Baghdad. (Courtesy Eric Jewell)