RC TOYS VS. IEDs

How do you han­dle a road­side bomb, when there’s no robot nearby? Simple: you use one of those remote-​​controlled cars that kids have been play­ing with for decades.
“Yesterday, I was ‘out­side the wire,’ patrolling with the 2nd Platoon. We came upon a pos­si­ble IED [impro­vised explo­sive device] in the mid­dle of the road, and stopped all traf­fic to check it out,” writes Sgt. Greg Papadatos, of the 69th Infantry Regiment, in a Military​.com diary.

A young pri­vate [named “E.S.”] in that pla­toon has one of those radio-​​controlled toy cars. When they find uniden­ti­fi­able debris in the road, E.S. sends out his lit­tle RC car and rams it. If it’s light enough to be moved or knocked over, it’s too light to be a bomb, so we can approach it and get rid of it. If it’s heavy, we call EOD [explo­sive ord­nance dis­posal — the military’s bomb squad]. At night, they duct tape a flash­light to the car.
The mil­i­tary actu­ally has robots that it uses for such things, but they are larger, slower, higher-​​tech, and fright­fully expen­sive. Only EOD units have them, and you could wait for hours and hours before they show up with their robot. If 200 units read about this idea, and 50 units actu­ally buy a toy RC car, and it saves just one sin­gle life, it would all be worth it.
I’ve sug­gested to E.S. that he put some fancy paint and a cou­ple of LED lights on his toy car, demon­strate it to some Army brass at the Pentagon, and sell it to them for $80,000. He won’t actu­ally try that, but it’s fun to imag­ine. In the mean­time, I’ve also sug­gested to some of his chain of com­mand that they put him in for a com­men­da­tion or a medal for his inge­nu­ity. If he ever finds a real bomb with that toy car, they prob­a­bly will. (via the Huffington Post)

May 17th, 2005 | Bomb Squad | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.