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IEDs
One of the things we have to worry about on the road are IEDs. That's a fancy acronym for Improvised Exlposive Device, what the media calls a road side bomb.
The Insurgents like to hide them in dead animals, hide them in watermelons (funny but true), attach them to guard rails, hang them from overpasses, put them in abandoned cars, place them on the road in garbage or a pile of dirt, or in this case, bury them in the road. It's almost impossible to see them before they go off.
This is SSG Tellier standing next to the crater an IED constructed with a 155MM artillery shell created when it exploded. It was detonated under one of our HUMMWVs when he drove over it. No one got hurt, and the truck only suffered minor damage. Our trucks are heavily armored, and IEDs don't usually do much damage to us. The tracker trailers we escort are an entirely different story.
The Insurgents usually target the convoy vehicles, rather than us, but this time they took a chance. The bad guy who set this off got away, the almost always do. This IED was detonated by wire control, some are timed, some use car alarm detonators, radio or cell phone detonators, or sometimes they pull the pin on a grenade, or throw a gas can full of naplam. IEDs are daily part of my life here.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
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