BAQUBAH, Iraq – The chaplain and the medic noticed it first: a pile of freshly upturned soil at the side of the highway.
The two men were part of a combat engineer patrol searching for roadside bombs, the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Riding inside a “buffalo,” an armor-plated vehicle equipped with a mechanical boom, they stopped to investigate.
A claw on the boom tore into the dirt and unearthed two artillery shells wired to a blast pack and a cell phone, the components of a remote-controlled bomb known as an IED, or improvised explosive device. Soldiers detained two Iraqi men who had hurried away from the site as the patrol pulled up.
It was a moment of triumph Wednesday for the search team, the product of dogged patrolling of an explosive-infested stretch of highway in the so-called Sunni Triangle 20 miles north of Baghdad.
Several times a day, every day, the Apache Bomb Hunters of the 467th Engineer Battalion slowly cruise the dust-streaked blacktops, exposing themselves to bombs, snipers and ambushes as they try to keep the roadways clear.
Other patrols speed up and down local highways, giving bomb triggermen less time to detonate the bombs.
The engineers move deliberately, scanning the roadside for signs of such things as unusual mounds of dirt, garbage, brush or construction materials.
“Dirt, garbage, signs, cars, donkeys, gravel, vegetable carts, dead dogs – you name it and an IED has been found hidden in it,” the battalion’s operations sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Flanagan, said Thursday, minutes after the day’s first patrol returned safely to its base camp.
Hunting roadside bombs is anxious, wearying work. The patrols intersect prosaic scenes of Iraqi urban life: men waiting in gasoline lines, boys playing soccer, butchers slaughtering livestock, girls in dark head scarves walking home from school. But virtually every day in Iraq, the commonplace is transformed by the tremendous explosion of a hidden explosive device.
Even before the first engineer patrol left the concertina wire and blast walls of Forward Operating Base Warhorse on Thursday, a bomb triggered just after dawn killed a machine gunner in a truck from the same brigade a few miles to the northeast in the town of Muqdadiya. An insurgent hiding in a ravine used a cell phone to detonate a “daisy chain” of several bombs made from artillery shells, commanders said.
Later Thursday, a tank driver with the brigade was wounded when a bomb, also fashioned from artillery shells, exploded beneath his Abrams tank near Samarra, about 50 miles northwest of here. An Army explosives expert called in to investigate was killed when a second bomb was detonated by remote control.
The deaths underscored the urgency felt by the engineers as they scanned the roadsides in brilliant sunlight, trying to maintain their focus hour after hour.
The attacks have a certain rhythm, and over time the engineers learn to spot subtle shifts. On Wednesday, for instance, medic Sgt. Leslie Johnson noticed that many shops were closed and that few people were on the roads. Normally, the area is bustling, often with young men throwing rocks at passing patrols.
“After a while, you learn to sense when things just aren’t quite right,” Johnson said as he walked the roadway in helmet and flak vest, his finger beside the trigger of his automatic rifle as he protected fellow engineers who had stopped to inspect a culvert.
The differences had made Johnson suspicious, and so the fresh dirt mound drew his attention. The battalion chaplain, Capt. Daniel Bell, had noticed the mound too, especially because the dirt interrupted the lines of new tire marks on the shoulder.
The chaplain had volunteered for the patrol. He said he believed in ministering to his men at times of greatest peril.
The Apache Bomb Hunters, an Army Reserve battalion from Memphis, Tenn., arrived in Iraq just five weeks ago, attached to the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division.
They took over from an engineer unit that had detected and detonated more than 200 roadside bombs during its year in Iraq, said Flanagan, the operations sergeant.
One of that battalion’s engineers was killed by a roadside bomb, he said.
“They gave us good advice,” Flanagan said.
“They told us: Stay alert, trust your instincts, look closely for anything that seems out of place.”
A driver on Thursday’s patrol, Spc. Daniel Shobe, was scanning both sides of the road as he guided his armored Humvee across the asphalt, his automatic rifle tucked beside his seat.
He drove the vehicle in the middle of the highway in order to keep it as far as possible from the roadsides.
Oncoming traffic swerved to the shoulder. Traffic headed in the same direction pulled over and stopped, giving wide berth to the heavily armed patrol.
Shobe was on just his seventh patrol, but already he had learned to control his anxiety. He concentrates on the mission, he said, blocking out thoughts of explosions.
In the Humvee turret, Spc. Daniel Ragan swung his grenade launcher from side to side. He also kept an M240 machine gun within reach. It was his 20th patrol, and he was still trying to shake the sense of dread that sweeps over him before most missions.
“I was real nervous at first, a lot more than now,” said Ragan, who like the other engineers wears no special protection beyond the helmets and vests worn by other soldiers.
“But I still have that feeling in the back of my mind that something bad could happen any second.”
After almost four hours of searching, the patrol slowly made its way back to base.
The soldiers made a final search of Route Detroit, then swept down Route Danger and Route Taco. They came to a brief stop at the gate of Camp Warhorse. “Ah, home again,” Shobe said.
“Feels so good every single time.”
The men safely inside, the gate swung shut on the rest of Iraq, ordinary and implacable, and full of menace.
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