Inside the "Baghdad Bomb Squad"

Xeni Jardin 6:06 pm Tue Nov 1, 2005

My fellow Wired contributor Noah Shachtman blogs,

After months of preparation, and three weeks in a warzone, my entire trip to Iraq has been boiled down to 29 hours. But that day-and-a-smidge shift with "Team Mayhem," a U.S. Army bomb squad, winds up being pretty damn action-packed.

Booby traps, smoking mortars, rooftop gunfire, suspected truck bombs, roadside explosives, and an idiosyncratic little robot named "Rainman"
all figure prominently in the story, which appears in this month's Wired magazine. But mostly, the article is about the battle of wits that's being fought between high-tech U.S. military squads and low-tech insurgent bombers. Improvised explosives have become the deadliest threat to soldiers and civilians alike in Iraq. So the winner of this fight largely determines the fate of the counterinsurgency.

But getting a clear picture of this tangle has been tough; military bomb squads, or "explosive ordnance disposal" units, are ordinarily shrouded in secrecy, operating in shadows. This is one of the first times they've allowed a reporter in for an extended stay.

Link to Noah's article, "The Baghdad Bomb Squad," and 140 pictures he shot during the trip, including the detail shot of spent IED components, above (full-size link). This particular image reminds me of Dalí's melting clocks.

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