The “soldier” in this case was a 42-pound robot called a PackBot. At least, he wrote, “when a robot dies, you don’t have to write a letter to its mother.' But he also expressed his thanks and talked up the silver lining he took away from the loss. He apologized for his inability to change what had happened. In his condolences, the chief noted the soldier’s bravery and sacrifice. Yet the other soldiers in the unit had never once heard a complaint. The soldier had always taken the most dangerous roles, willing to go first to scout for IEDs and ambushes. More important, they had lost a valued member of the team, a soldier who had saved the others’ lives many times over. They had lost their most fearless and technically savvy soldier. The effect of this explosion had been particularly tough on his unit. That night, the team’s commander, a Navy chief petty officer, did his sad duty and wrote home about the incident. Hearts in their throats, they loaded the remains onto a helicopter, which took them back to the team’s base camp near Baghdad International Airport. They found little left of their teammate. As the flames and debris cleared, the rest of the team advanced. This soldier, though, had been right on top of the bomb. Even if a person is not hit, the pressure from the blast by itself can break bones. The IED erupted in a wave of flame.ĭepending on how much explosive has been packed into an IED, a soldier must be as far as 50 yards away to escape death and as far as a half-mile away to escape injury from bomb fragments.

There was no time to defuse the bomb or to escape. By the time the soldier was close enough to see the telltale wires protruding from the bomb, it was too late. Unfortunately, this particular IED call would not end well. Perhaps the most telling sign of how critical the teams’ work was to the American war effort is that insurgents began offering a rumored $50,000 bounty for killing an EOD soldier. In a typical tour in Iraq, each EOD team would go on more than 600 calls, defusing or safely exploding about two devices a day. By 2006, about 2,500 of these attacks were occurring a month, and they were the leading cause of casualties among U.S. The unit hunting for the bomb was an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team, the sharp end of the spear in the effort to suppress roadside bombings. American soldiers call these jury-rigged bombs IEDs, official shorthand for improvised explosive devices. Hidden along the side of the road, the bomb looked like any other piece of trash. The Iraqi insurgent had laid his ambush with great cunning. There was little to warn of the danger ahead.

Real war robots