DEMO |

DEMO
Name: Teflon Don
Posting date: 8/11/08
Returned from: Iraq
Milblog: Acute Politics

It’s Day #2 of Annual Training -- that two week part of the “Just one weekend a month, two weeks a year!” that the US Army Reserve Component promises new recruits with dreams of playing soldier. Never minding, of course, those few odd years when there’s a war on.

Tomorrow is the first day of “real training” -- today and yesterday have been administrative, heavy with settling into living quarters and sorting out the rush of confusion that accompanies shipping hundreds of men and tons of equipment to a base hundreds of miles away from home.

Tomorrow is Demolition Day, the best day of the training cycle by far, and the main reason I became a Combat Engineer. I asked the recruiter what Army jobs dealt with explosives; she answered Combat Engineer and Explosives Ordnance Disposal. My nascent impression of the distinction was that Engineers blew stuff up, while EOD neutralized bombs that tried to blow them up. Since I didn’t want to go looking for trouble and get blown up in the process, I decided to join as an engineer. I’ll leave the irony to the reader.

Combat Engineers live for demo. There’s a sense of raw power when dealing with blocks of C4 and loops of detonating cord. There’s a downside, too -- most of us can’t watch modern action movies without comment. Grenades don’t explode into fireballs, and a small satchel charge of plastic explosive won’t bring down a large building no matter how well placed.

On the other hand, we learn how much C4 it takes to cut through how much steel; how much Composition H it takes to blast impassable craters into roads; and how detonating cord explodes at 25,000 feet per second -- fast enough to race in a straight line from Los Angeles to New York in minutes.

On a night like tonight, we talk about intangibles and wishlists, too. How cool would it be to blow up the old tank that’s sitting out on the range? Better yet, how about we take our blocks of C4 and spools of detonator caps and fuse and teach a class on “field-expedient” demo -- the way simple cross-sections of steel with plastic explosive on the back can become simple shaped charges with many times the destructive power of the explosive alone?

I’ve heard older soldiers, experienced with more supplies and less oversight, talk about the way a military shaped charge, when tipped on its side, will send a superheated ball of metal plasma skipping across the desert. If that’s true, could we have shaped charge races? First plasma ball to the end of the valley wins?

Of course, we won’t try it. There’re too many high ranking officers and NCOs around who would take an extraordinarily dim view of the proceedings. Still, there’s a lot of improvised demo that is okay, because the Army Field Manual on such makes it so. I know of at least nine different ways to open a locked door with nothing more than detonating cord, tape, and hard rubber or spare intravenous solution bags. Some are so gentle they remove little more than a doorknob -- others will tear a steel fire door off its hinges and send it into the back wall of the building. I can stand within a few meters of them all.

Really, when you think about it, it’s little wonder that former combat engineers are on the short list of people for the FBI to talk to when something explodes.

P.S. About that demo...A few days after writing the above we accidentally sent a shaped charge skipping in similar fashion to what I described. Seriously, we didn't mean to. We had set up two shots of three shaped charges each, and one of the six charges misfired. Normally, a shaped charge is set up on a metal tripod, pointing downwards to punch a hole into the ground that will be filled with another charge for cratering. The standoff from the ground is required in order for the shaped explosion to fully form. When the one shaped charge misfired, the tripod was blasted away by the concussion from the other five charges, and the misfired charge was left lying on the ground. When we cleared the charge, we simply detonated it where it lay on the ground, for safety.

The blast sent a plasma ball skipping across a tinder-dry grassy meadow and up a ridgeline into a stand of trees and high brush, leaving a line of small but quickly growing fires in its wake. The base wildfire unit put out the fire on the ridge, and we just waited for the fires on the valley floor to die down before continuing to blast California sky-high.

Comments

[Earl]

Seriously, I have been trying to convince people that shooting firearms is lame beside the satisfaction of making the Earth move with Demo! I will just have to try harder. Loved fishing with C4.

[Miss Em]

Accidental skipping shape charge. . .had you guys high-fiven and enjoying the show. A Demo-legend comes to life.

Say sorry to the CO's and the NCO's but you really don't need to with us.

One civilian who likes to watch our guys make thing go boom and truly. . .
WISHED I COULD HAVE BEEN THERE to have seen it in real time and not in my imagination.

[JH]

Words cannot express the mixture of jealousy and awe I feel while reading this. That must have been unbelievably amazing.