I Lost My Love in Baghdad by Michael Hastings Page B

vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, the car bomb (pronounced Vee-Bid). There was also the SVBIED, the suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or suicide car bomb. (Es-Vee-Bid.) The troop favorite was the DBIED, the donkey-borne improvised explosive device, the Dee-Bid, which was rumored to have been witnessed more than once. The EFP, or explosively formed projectile or penetrator, also known as the shape charge, was a particularly deadly bomb that could rip through the thickest armor. The U.S. military officials claimed the EFPs were being imported from Iran. (The commander of the Desert Rogues showed me a photograph of the damage from an EFP detonation. He kept the photo on his laptop. The metal charge had gone through the driver’s window and killed one of his soldiers. “See the brains on the steering wheel,” he said.)
    The afternoon following the patrol, I spoke to an intel officer named Matt about a recent Es-Vee-Bid experience. Matt was six one, with blue eyes and reddish hair. We’d been talking for a while, sitting under the shade of a makeshift gazebo outside headquarters, when he got around to telling me what was on his mind.
    He’d been out on patrol, one of those getting-to-know-the-neighborhoods, win-hearts-and-minds kind of thing. The soldiers were giving out candy to the kids. One of the soldiers was swarmed by children, jumping, smiling, standing in the middle of the street.
    Matt was walking around the corner to the next street when he heard the loud explosion and ducked. He got a look in his eye as he told the story. His hand shook slightly.
    â€œI ran around the corner,” he said. “I saw things, little body parts, children. Tiny pieces of children.” He looked at me like he needed to apologize for what he was saying. “You know, I know this sounds cheesy,” he said, and then, “Things you’re not ever supposed to see. Arms. Legs. Of children.”
    One American and at least fifteen Iraqi children killed. Matt’s eyes drifted. He told me there’d been a counseling session afterward, set up by the army’s mental health unit to deal with post-traumatic stress after incidents like this. Matt said he attended the meeting, but didn’t think it helped very much. I told him I would email him to follow up and do a story. I was interested in how the army was handling combat stress. He never responded to my emails.
    The Desert Rogues took me in a convoy across the city, from FOB Rustamiyah on the east side of the Tigris to Camp Victory on the west, to drop me off for my next embed. Camp Victory, one of the bases surrounding the Baghdad Airport, was home to an army EOD company. Explosives ordnance disposal. The Baghdad Bomb Squad.
    The bomb squad had a small shack and yard, “the Bomb Garden,” decorated with explosives; rows of grenades and mortar shells (30mm, 60mm, 120mm, that’s a big one), Iranian grenades, Italian grenades, American grenades, Russian-made rockets, mortar tubes, all manner of land mines. Next to the Bomb Garden was the Garden of Shame, where they kept the objects that soldiers had thought were IEDs but turned out to be false alarms. There was a tea kettle, an extension cord, a piece of cable, a brake drum. The bomb squad had responded to these calls, spent hours preparing to defuse them, only to find out that they had wasted their time.
    I arrived and heard I had just missed a big one. Danny, a bomb squad tech from Tennessee, jumped out of a Humvee and rushed up onto the wooden porch of the shack, his face red beneath a do-rag, pumped on adrenaline, carrying a long sliver of metal. He’d just detonated the big IED. Ka-boom.
    â€œTake a look at this shrapnel,” he said. “Big as a lawn mower blade. Touch the edge.”
    I touched the edge; it was sharp.
    â€œImagine that flying through the air. That’s sharp enough to kill you,” he said, then added the shrapnel to the