That Would Have Been Nice to Know Before I Got on the Helicopter….
Life in the digital age is great. There are so many ways to communicate information from just about any location on the planet. You’ve got cell phones, satellite phones, and radios. Even in the middle of a war I can set up my Swiftlink Satellite System and send emails from somewhere in the Afghan wilderness. It’s great. Now we just need to learn HOW to communicate and everything will be alright. Example: a few days ago I responded to an IED on Afghan Route 614 NNE of Kandahar. Now, when the call came in it was “we need EOD to respond to a roadside IED at these coordinates”. Great, no problem sounds like a standard IED next to, or perhaps buried just under the surface of an unimproved road (most of the roads in Afghanistan). So I grab my team and we grab our gear and fly out to the site on a Blackhawk helicopter. As we approached the site we’re able to see the U.S. forces that had called the item in…sitting on an asphalt road. Hmmm…OK, not a problem, the shoulder is dirt, could be buried there. The helo dropped us off without incident and I found the guy in charge, and asked him to describe the situation so I could figure out the best course of action. Well, of course the first words out of his mouth were “It’s buried about three feet in from the edge of the asphalt.” Under the asphalt. Of course. A key bit of information that would have allowed me to include a 15lbs. shaped charge, designed to penetrate things like concrete and asphalt in a hurry. Of course nobody mentioned anything in the mission brief so, instead of an operation taking maybe 20 minutes and involving a single detonation we ended up with a two hour ordeal involving three detonations, almost 40lbs. of explosive and resulting in a four foot wide by three foot deep crater in the road, and that was just to get down to the main charge of the IED (the 15lbs. shaped charge could have blasted a hole in the road significantly smaller and also detonated the IED all in one go). Fortunately the story has a happy ending, despite the best efforts of Murphy I was able to detonate the IED safely and reopen the road to traffic and nobody was injured. Well, I guess it’s happy for everybody but the guy that has to fill in that pot hole, kinda sucks for him. Sorry guy, I blame the lack of communications in the digital age.
June 14th, 2005 at 2:59 pm
I know you probably can’t answer this, but just in case, how did they get the IED under a paved road? Tunnel in from the side? Also, how were our troops able to detect it there?
June 15th, 2005 at 6:32 am
Actually, that one I can answer since it won’t require any specific info. The really amusing part is that the IED was there before the road was paved…it was found later by some locals who happened to notice wires comming out of the road embankment and reported it to U.S. forces. The U.S. forces pinpointed it with some mine detection equipment.
June 15th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
That’s interesting. Who paved the road? Nice of the locals to clue you in. Do you interact with the locals a lot? How would you gauge the general feeling toward our forces?
June 15th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
The road was probably paved by one of the various reconstruction teams in the area. We do interact on a fairly steady basis with the locals who are usually quite welcoming and helpful. Except for the guys trying to kill us of course. They’re not very nice.
June 15th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
Good thing that some steam roller didn’t go cartwheeling through the air in a spray of hot asphalt. Although, I guess from the “wires comming out” it was intended for manual triggering.
June 15th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
Was wondering whether you named and/or “nose arted” your robots?
June 15th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Ah yes, “educating the customer”. They obviously hadn’t a clue what info you needed to do the job correctly. Sounds like the non-EOD folks need a list of “helpful hints” to provide when calling these things in. Think they’d read it? I would, if it were my backside on the line, but that’s just me.
June 16th, 2005 at 5:03 am
Bill: Nameing the robots is actually pretty common. One of the ANDROS robots here is named Kenny (after the South Park character), I’m fairly certain it’s because it was blown up a couple of times in the past. When I was stationed at McGuire in New Jersey we had 4 ANDROS robots, two large and two small, the large ones were Sylvester and Coyote and the small ones were Tweety and Road Runner. As for “nose art”, I haven’t seen any, altough I hear a couple of the ‘bots up a Manas, Kyrgyzstan has been decorated with Autobot and Decepticon symbols from “Transformers”. No word on how they get along.
Maureen: Yeah, we teach a class called Explosive Ordnance Recon every month or so. We could just as easily entitle it “How Not to Get Blown Up”, it is designed to give personnel in the AOR a basic skill set which will allow them to identify and report hazardous ordnance and IEDs as safely and efficiently as possible. One of the things we stress is to be as specific/detailed as possible in the initial report of the item and its surroundings. As you can see it doesn’t always take!