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Explosions and rubble all in a day’s work

Dec- 2-2007 » Filed Under: 2nd SCR

Be sure to click through to see the photos as well.

By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes

BAGHDAD — Trash, dead animals, concrete blocks and street rubble appear to fascinate soldiers from the 84th Engineer Company, 2nd Cavalry (Stryker) Regiment.

On daily route-clearance missions, the engineers roll out of Camp Liberty, part of a sprawling complex of bases connected to Baghdad International Airport, and drive for hours paying close attention to what they find by the side of the road.

“Was that Coke bottle there yesterday? How about that plastic bag? Is that a piece of wire running out of that hole in the ground? That’s really strange … weird. Let’s grid-reference that lump of concrete. Let’s take a closer look at that piece of half-buried metal,” the soldiers say as they make their way through traffic-clogged urban streets or along dirt back roads in search of roadside bombs.

Their missions are one of several measures the Army takes to defeat roadside bombs, which have killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq over the past four years.

On Thursday morning, the 84th’s 3rd Platoon, the War Pigs, cleared about 40 kilometers of roads connecting Camp Liberty to Combat Outpost Aztec, a smaller 2nd Cav base surrounded by semi- rural land on Baghdad’s southern fringe.

One of the platoon soldiers, Staff Sgt. Chester Wall, 34, of Rapid City, S.D., did this work when the unit was last in Iraq, in Mosul in 2005.

Back then, the engineers would mount combat patrols and drive 35 to 40 mph searching for roadside bombs. Now, Wall said, route-clearance missions travel at 5 to 10 mph and rely on a mix of Strykers with plows, a Husky observation platform and the Buffalo — a heavily armored vehicle with a robotic arm used to “interrogate” suspected bombs.

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