Foot on Bomb, Marine Defies a Taliban Trap

[Robb]

Foot on Bomb, Marine Defies a Taliban Trap

(NYT piece, click this Google search link then the first News result for the story)

...He watched the two Marines in the disposal team working on the hill. They were busy, and moving cautiously. Lance Corporal Mathison had not wanted to accept that it was a bomb. He was beginning to shift his point of view.

“If this really was an I.E.D, then you ain’t drinking with me,” he said. “Because I’m done drinking. I’m going back to the way I was before I joined the Corps.”

An improvised bomb is a simple thing — a few batteries, a few wires, a blasting cap or two inserted into a stable explosive charge. A pressure plate serves as a switch. When depressed, the circuit is closed, the current from the batteries flows to the blasting cap, igniting the cap and setting off the full blast.

Ordnance specialists have a label for devices designed this way: victim-operated....

[Statistical]

1. "a veteran Marine reluctantly assumed for a morning one of the infantry’s most coveted roles:..."

"that of the charmed man."