The men and women of Seitz’s battalion, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 2, based out of Little Creek, Va., probably don’t need that reminder. They’ve lived and worked seven days a week for months on end to rid northern Iraq of the weapon that is the biggest threat to U.S. troops. Several members of their battalion (officers won’t say exactly how many) have died doing this job—deaths that hit especially hard in the small, tightly knit EOD group. “You chew the same dirt—you celebrate birthdays, you celebrate holidays. You do everything as a group,” says Terrence I. Molidor, the command master chief of a mobile EOD battalion based in central Iraq. He was one of several EOD members who flew to Forward Operating Base Speicher to attend the July 25 memorial service for technicians Jeffery L. Chaney and Patrick L. Wade, killed while clearing a road in Samarra on July 17. “It’s the one thing that I’ve dreaded since I came into this country: going to a memorial for someone you know,” Molidor told NEWSWEEK. “When you know the individual’s family—his wife, his kids—that has a tendency to make your job that much harder.”
EOD members are part of an elite group that numbers fewer than 4,000 in the Army and Navy combined. Navy EOD technicians must complete around 15 months of training, and qualify as Navy divers and parachutists. Candidates for the EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida must have the same aptitude scores as candidates for the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, and the EOD school’s attrition rate is high, given the demands. EOD technicians are quick to remind people that they do far more than just look for IEDs and bristle at being compared to a “bomb squad.” And definitely don’t mention the Navy SEALs. The EOD folks say they undergo similar training, but that they prefer to keep a lower profile than the storied naval unit. “We could be SEALs,” one technician told me while we waited for a helicopter out of FOB Speicher one night. “We don’t want to be.”
That’s an understatement. EOD is very media shy. I was told that I was the first journalist allowed to embed with Mobile Unit 2 since they deployed to Iraq around 11 months ago. They were excellent hosts, even as they endlessly asked what I was writing about them. That made it even harder to witness what happened in the tactical operations center on July 24. A few hours after I spoke to Chief Seitz about the pending memorial service, more bad news came in. Another technician, this one an Army staff sergeant, had just been killed by an IED blast in Diyala province. The news was like a body blow: faces winced, heads dropped, doors slammed. But the operations center continued chugging along, as supervisors ordered a communications blackout until next of kin were notified, and issued instructions to subordinates. A while later, Lt. John Ismay, the battallion’s public-affairs officer, came into the conference room and asked if I understood what had happened. I told him I did; he nodded, shook his head and walked out and back to work. “They understand the risk,” Navy Cmdr. John Coffey, the commander of the battalion, told me later. “On one hand you pay tribute to your fallen brothers, but on the other hand you realize there’s a fight out there and there’s a weapon that is killing our troops.”
Currently, there are more IEDs in Mobile Unit 2’s territory than anywhere else in Iraq. The battalion, based at Speicher in Salah ad Din province, supports the Army’s 25th Infantry Division in northern Iraq, covering an area the size of Pennsylvania. In the past 10 months, the battalion ran more than 10,000 EOD missions, about 75 percent of which were related to finding and clearing IEDs and related weapons caches. The bombs are believed to be planted by Sunni insurgents. For security reasons, U.S. military officials here declined to discuss specific tactics by insurgents who plant IEDS, or how the Coalition troops counter them. But they did say that insurgents in northern Iraq are much better at hiding the bombs than in the past—on the roadside, under roads, in culverts and under bridges. Sometimes, the insurgents will only partially camouflage IEDs, set them out in the open, or even plant dummies so they can study how the EOD clearance teams respond. This also enables the insurgents to lure them into ambushes. The IEDs left in plain view “makes the hair on the back of our necks tingle,” says Command Master Chief Pat McLean, of Minnesota, the battalion’s senior enlisted man. “And we go out on plenty of hoax IED [calls] because we suspect they’re watching us.”
Indeed, the EOD’s daily road-clearance missions tend to be either mundane or terrifying. They count on the heavily armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, known as MRAP, which has a V-shaped chassis designed to protect the soldiers by deflecting IED blasts outward. The vehicles are armed with air blowers to expose potential IEDs under sand or debris, and a long claw that can dig up bombs. The teams also have remote-control robots with cameras that can do reconnaissance and, if needed, also disable IEDs. Aside from putting the robots into action, the EOD teams remain inside the vehicles because they’re potential targets for snipers. Soldiers carry empty Gatorade bottles to urinate in, as the missions can last up to half a day.
The MRAPs have a driver, vehicle commander and two spotters who look for exposed wires, suspicious lumps in the sand, displaced dirt or anything else that could indicate the presence of a bomb. There’s no special equipment that can detect buried explosives, so the spotters instead must use binoculars, and more often the naked eye. The technicians in the vehicles, driving as slow as 15 to 20 miles per hour, trade jokes over the radio system and blast rock music on their iPod-equipped stereos to pass the time. There’s also a bit of gallows humor among the group, like their I BRAKE FOR IEDS bumper sticker I saw hanging on an office wall—and a penchant for practical jokes. NEWSWEEK photographer Danfung Dennis was the victim of one such prank when he went on an emergency response with an EOD team to check out some unexploded ordnance outside the base. One of the technicians started screaming, “Death rocket! Death Rocket! Get your gas masks on! Get inside!” As the unit scrambled for cover, a startled and concerned Dennis turned to them and asked—deadpan—if they had an extra gas mask. That was when everyone started laughing. I was told he also found it funny. Eventually.
Humor can only help in this very difficult job in this very difficult place. The men and women of the unit risk their lives to save those of their fellow soldiers, as well as civilians. That mission makes things like the memorial service on July 25 that much harder. The soldiers spoke bravely about Chief Petty Officer Wade and Petty Officer Chaney during the eulogies, and then came the hardest part. Following military tradition, roll call was preformed. Three times Wade and Chaney’s names were shouted out and three times there was no response. The silence across the compound, surrounded by dust and sand, said it all.
