Posts Tagged ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’

Lieutenant-Colonel Dan Drew has seen any number of soldiers blown up by IEDs (improvised explosive devices). He was one of roughly 200 Canadians embedded with an Afghan brigade of 3,000 in Kandahar province for seven months in 2008, a time when “there were a lot of bad guys and not a lot of us.” IEDs were the Taliban’s weapon of choice. Fighters used them to blow up soldiers on foot patrol. They used them to blow up vehicles. They planted them in roads, in fields, along paths and in stone walls.

The feeling has been described by survivors as falling. Also as soaring. There’s a flash and a shrieking darkness and then the weightless moments of maximum kinetic terror when the detonation blasts you beyond gravity. After the boom there is just distorted wreckage, and dust and pain and shouting, for the survivors at least. All the armour in the world and it just doesn’t really matter. The vehicles get tougher but the blasts get bigger. There is simply no good way to keep Canadian soldiers safe once they get caught in the boom of the roadside bombs, the suicide bombs, the [...]