BOMB HUNTERS by Sean
Rayment (2011).
There are two kinds of solders
who fight the war. One who fight it in their desks in air-conditioned war room
thousand miles away from the actual warfare, talking about national security
and all the good stuff. And the other who fight the dirty, dangerous and
scarily as hell war in the bullet-ridden front line.
Not like the first who fight for
ideology, TV spot light and kickback, the latter fight for each other and for
the ultimate goal of every foot soldiers- SURVIVAL!! (honestly, nothing else
matter to them.)
This
book is all about this. SURVIVAL. At
it’s best/worst.
This book can actually depress
you profoundly. Trust me. It happened to me, too… Sigh
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layers. – First of all, none of the
soldiers, except very few crazy guys, wanted to be in Afghanistan-the most dangerous
country in the world right now. They are all there because they just don’t have
any choices. For poor young guys who come from poor neighbors and nothing to
lose, the only and fast way to get an education and get their life back into
the track is enlist to the army. This is the only job available and coming home
alive is the only way to win the war for them. Nothing else matter.
Crazy journalist SEAN RAYMENT,
crazy because he went to war with his own will, leaving behind a young
boy and wife in spite of sudden EXPLOSIVE death
of his two friends just few weeks before his departure to Afghan, returned to
the war and captured the exact sense of what actually is going on inside the
real, desperate war, and again, as a reader I MIGHTLY thank him for his courage
and work!! What a marvelous writer he is!!
Let me just quote some facts for
your better understanding, ok?
Normally, there were about 200
IED incidents in every week in 2010. (IED stands for Improvised Explosive
Device – land mine, SILENT KILLER - what soldiers called). If you
do the math, that’s about 9000 explosion a year, 28 per a day. Make
matter worse, recently some geniuses in Taliban came up with the new kind
of IED with low or no metal content making them really hard to be detected with
metal detector or even with bare eyes.
This is a job where one simple
mistake means death or amputation.
As a professionally trained soldiers,
whose routine deportation period is 6 months for the British army, they have to
survive half a year with this fantastically dangerous job.
It seems like a lot of young
soldiers opened up their hearts to the writer/journalist and talked about
almost everything. What this war meant to them, how much they missed their
family and why the fellow soldier’s death affected them so much, etc. I’ve got
the impression that talking to someone neutral who never directly involved in
warfare might calm their mind down.
Their job is similar to those of
forensic scientist. As a bomb hunter you always have to try to disarm the bomb
without triggering the explosion, because operators want to the device intact
so that later they can analyze them and extract all the vital info out of it
which help identify the device/enemy. Therefore, saving tons of lives later.
By the way, do you know how easy
it is to make a IED?
Most of them are nothing
more than simple, hand-made wooden shoebox with little bit of rusty metal part
for the trigger. For a deadly device which blew away so many human lives/parts,
it is just ridiculously simple to make one. Anyone can make it in their kitchen
in maybe 25 mins? And since the most area of Afghan have been in the war almost
forever, they can find pretty much any material for the explosive-part of the
bomb in side street. They are just lying there waiting. I am telling you, it is
stunning!!
Also, killing bomb-disposal team
is regarded as highest honor for Taliban, it become the deadly chess matching
games in which both sides always tried to come up with new tactics to out-match
each others.
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lace. – What
makes their job even harder is the surrounding nature. The temp is over 40
degree, almost 50 for at least 9 months a year. With their equipment
weight around 40 kg, and armor which somehow raise the temp for 10 more degree,
the bomb hunters essentially are forced to work only with their equipment( no
armor) and finish the job quickly before the heat knock them down.
Also, because virtually it is
impossible to find any good local police or arm force to assist the British
army, they have to protect themselves and the locals from Talibans who attack
both with guns and IEDs.
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erdict. – A lot of first-hand details of
war, army bases and lives within them. Most of stories are quite festinating
because they are so different from that of ours- civilians.
Politicians all talk about
sacrifice/duty but sacrifice is easy to talk about when you are not the one
doing it. This book is full of professional soldiers who choose the jobs which
require the sacrifice for various reasons.
So-called, authentic
voices of the soldiers are so realistic and convincing this book is actually
fantastic reading experience but the same time quite depressing too.
My heart goes to all the soldiers
and their families.
*make sure you check all the
photo-inserts in the middle section of the book before you start reading. They
all looked happy and beautiful.
