A growing number of the Navy’s explosive ordnance disposal
experts are being detailed to Army and Marine units in Iraq to help
neutralize the improvised bombs and other unexploded ordnance that
litter the landscape.
Traditionally,
Navy EOD technicians specialize in clearing explosive hazards at
sea, in ports and along coastal areas. Recently, however, many of
them have deployed deep inside Iraq, where U.S. military forces
now must contend with about 30 roadside bombs a week, double the
number of a year ago.
“The Army and Marines just don’t have enough [explosive-disposal]
teams,” explained Lt. Steve Gilbert, officer in charge of
the Navy’s EOD Mobile Unit 2, Det. 20. “So they sent
out a request for forces, and the Navy had the personnel to support
them.”
As a result, Navy teams are being detailed to Army units in Iraq.
For example, Gilbert’s detachment, based at Little Creek Naval
Amphibious Base, Va., recently returned from a six-month deployment
to Baghdad.
“We were assigned to the 63rd Ordnance Battalion,”
Gilbert told National Defense.
The 63rd is part of the 52nd Ordnance Group (EOD), which provides
explosive-disposal teams for the entire Army. The detachment worked
with units of the 1st Cavalry Division in and around Baghdad.
Members of the detachment agreed to talk about their deployment
in general, but were careful not to discuss operational details.
“We can’t get too much into specifics,” warned
Gunner’s Mate 1st Class Scott Mielock.
“We dealt with everything from VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised
explosive devices, or car bombs) to hand grenades—everything
you could think of,” said Chief Petty Officer Randolph Lawson,
the detachment’s senior enlisted man.
During the deployment, the unit—which is made up of EOD eight
technicians—responded to 567 calls for assistance, including
60 or so post-blast incidents, Lawson said. If the device already
has exploded, EOD specialists conduct an investigation.
“We try to figure out how the device was made and sized,”
he said. “We gather fragments. Based on experience, we often
can tell a lot about the device.”
Military intelligence specialists are keen to know where the bombs
originated. “Most of the ordnance is foreign,” Lawson
said. “It’s not only Russian. It’s Bulgarian,
Chinese, Yugoslavian, Egyptian, Iranian—from basically anybody
who makes ordnance.”
There is plenty of it needing attention, Gilbert noted. “A
lot of munitions—like mortar rounds or RPGs (rocket-propelled
grenades)—are just lying around on the ground.”
EOD teams frequently are called in to investigate. U.S. commanders
would like to see the teams respond more quickly. “The challenge
that we have is not so much the number of EOD personnel, but the
coordination and ... the speed with which we can get them out to
the locations,” said Army Maj. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, head
of Multinational Force Northwest, in a video news conference from
Iraq.
“It takes us approximately 30 to 40 minutes to respond,”
he said. Rodriguez would like to see that response time shortened
to 10 to 20 minutes, he said.
When the teams arrive on the scene, they often find that the bomb
reports are hoaxes, Gilbert said. During Detachment 20’s deployment,
it investigated 198 reports of IEDs. Only 111 turned out to be real,
he said.
When U.S. troops find a possible explosive, “they secure
the site, and we make it safe,” Gilbert explained. “Sometimes
we dismantle [the devices]; sometimes we blow them up. It depends
on the circumstances.
“If [the device] is something that we’ve seen before
and we know we don’t have to call in military intelligence,
we use C-4 and blow it up.” C-4 is a plastic explosive that
is highly malleable and relatively safe to handle. “It’s
our most used tool,” Gilbert said.
Using a bomb to destroy a bomb is the preferred method of disposal,
because it is less risky than dismantling a device, he explained.
“If it’s nothing new, why would you put somebody in
danger trying to dismantle it?”
Another alternative in dealing with explosives is to use a robot
to investigate them. Detachment 20 uses the Talon IIIB, made by
Foster-Miller, of Waltham, Mass. It comes equipped with a variety
of sensors and tools that enable it to investigate suspected bombs
and disrupt or disable them. It can be mounted with an M16 5.56
mm or Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, or with an M240 or M249
machine gun, all of which can be used to disable IEDs from a distance.
The Talon is an all-terrain, all-weather tracked vehicle, with
a top speed of 4 mph. “It’s a fast robot,” Gilbert
said. “That’s why we like it. The less time we’re
out there, the less time somebody has to take a shot at you.”
In all, there are 200 Talons in Iraq, Foster-Miller General Manager
Robert E. Quinn told National Defense. Since 2002, the company has
received approximately $70 million in contracts to produce Talons
for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The firm has established a facility
at Camp Victory in Iraq to repair the robots.
The Talon, however, is not the only anti-explosive robot employed
in Iraq. In March of this year, the Navy awarded an $18 million
deal for iRobot Corp. for rapid deployment of more than 150 copies
of the PackBot EOD robot to Iraq and Afghanistan. The PackBot is
small enough to be carried by a single person. It is equipped with
a lightweight, ruggedized OmniReach Manipulator System that can
reach two meters in any direction to assess and disrupt IEDs, military
ordnance, land mines and other incendiary devices, explained Joe
Dyer, iRobot’s executive vice president.
EOD technicians sometimes employ Army snipers to disable bombs,
but it is rare. “About the only time we use them is to shoot
out the windows of a car bomb,” Gilbert said. “That
helps us see more clearly what’s inside the car without the
sun’s glare on the window.”
Sometimes, the technicians allow their Army security detail to
shoot suspected IEDs. “It gives them something to do,”
said Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Tempi Devers. “They
like that.”
Devers is the only woman in Detachment 20 and one of 11 female
EOD technicians in the entire Navy. In all, the Navy has 858 enlisted
EOD technicians, male and female, and 269 EOD officers, including
seven women.
When an EOD technician is required to inspect a suspected explosive
up close, he or she can wear an EOD 8 Bomb Suit, made by Med-Eng
Systems Inc., of Ottawa, Ontario. The EOD 8 is designed to protect
against fragmentation, overpressure, impact and heat. It includes
a jacket, trousers, groin protector and full-face helmet, with a
floating visor system to aid visibility.
“It’s like something from Star Wars,” Gilbert
said. But, he added, the EOD 8 does have its limitations. For one
thing, at 70 pounds, it’s heavy.
Still, he said, “it does provide limited protection against
fragmentation—not a lot—but it’s better than nothing.”
When not wearing the bomb suit, the Navy technicians are equipped
much like the ground troops with whom they are deployed, with the
same helmets, body armor and M16 rifles. They even wear the same
battle dress uniforms.
“We don’t want to make it any easier for the bad buys
to tell us apart from the soldiers,” Lawson said. “The
difference between us and them is that when those guys are loading
up with bullets, we’re loading up with zip ties, electric
tape, pliers and screwdrivers.”
Despite technicians’ efforts to blend in with the soldiers,
insurgent snipers often targeted them. “We came under fire
several times,” Gilbert said. “It happened enough so
that you almost got used to it. It got to the point that we could
do our job without worrying about it.”
Despite all of the shooting, nobody in the detachment was wounded.
Others were not so lucky, Gilbert said.
“One of our security personnel was hit by the tail of an
RPG,” he said. “It punctured one of his lungs. We got
back him to base in about eight minutes. They flew him to Germany,
and he’s fine now.”
Even less lucky was an Iraqi police EOD technician who picked up
a device just as the U.S. team was arriving on the scene. The device
“exploded in his hand,” Gilbert said. “There was
nothing left of him.”
The Iraqi team “learned as lesson that we already knew: If
you have a robot, use it,” he noted. “They had one,
and now they’ve started using it.”
U.S. EOD specialists, across the services, have suffered significant
casualties in the current fighting. In May, technicians from the
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines gathered at the EOD Memorial at
Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., site of the joint services bomb-disposal
school, to honor two Marine and three Army specialists who died
in the line of duty this year.
Such losses are hard to replace. At the moment, the Navy’s
EOD ranks are only about 85 percent filled.
The Navy is trying hard to fill those vacancies, but standards
are high. In addition to coping with explosives, Navy EOD technicians
frequently deploy with special operations units, and they have to
be able to keep up, Gilbert said.
EOD specialists must complete 51 weeks of rigorous training, with
instruction in diving, ordnance demolition, helicopter-rope suspension,
parachuting, small arms and handling marine mammals. Fitness standards
also are stiff. Candidates must be able to:
• Swim 500 meters within 14 minutes.
• Perform 42 pushups, 50 sit-ups and six pull-ups.
• Run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, 45 seconds.
Those who can meet such requirements and are willing to accept
the risks of EOD work can get extra monthly compensation for their
skills, including $225 for diving, $150 for hazardous duty and $150
for parachuting, in addition to their regular pay. To retain experienced
personnel, the navy offers reenlistment bonuses up to $45,000 for
EOD technicians with at least six years of service.
The hard training and risks give Navy EOD teams an esprit de corps
and camaraderie that set them apart from other military units, technicians
said.
“We’re real tight, real close,” Mielock said.
“I’d say laid back. When we’re trying to work,
we work, and when we relax, we relax.” By contrast, Army units
with whom Detachment 20 served “ran a tight ship,” he
said.
As a result, relations between the two were sometimes a little
tense. The situation was made worse by the fact that the two services
have different standard operating procedures for EOD work. “They
wanted us to follow Army rules, not ours,” Gilbert said. “Some
issues never got resolved.”
For example, he said: “The Navy respects expertise and experience.
The Army respects rank.”