Photo By Chris Bush | Sgt. Applewhite and Pfc. Mikhail Missick gather information and digital photographs on...... read more read more
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ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. – As the two soldiers carefully make their way across the room they methodically photograph and examine the materials strewn about the tables and floor, while making mental notes to themselves. The evidence is clear and alarming: this house is definitely a homemade explosives laboratory.
As the sergeant readies himself to leave the building, he reaches for some papers lying on the floor and as he picks the materials up, he triggers the detonator on a hidden explosive.
Luckily this time the only consequence of his actions is the loud alarm ringing out in the makeshift classroom here on Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Edgewood Area; time to stop the training exercise and discuss the mistake.
Justin Anderson, a retired Air Force explosive ordnance technician and currently an instructor at the Joint Centers of Excellence, suggests to Sgt. Lucas Applewhite and Pfc. Mikhail Missick, both explosive ordnance disposal soldiers from the 22nd Chemical Battalion (Technical Escort), ways they can avoid instances like this during the week-long Homemade Explosives Course held here Oct. 11-14.
Applewhite and Missick quickly move on from their mistake to inventorying and investigating the rest of the lab while Anderson offers up suggestions and ticks off a mental checklist of their progress.
“These guys really worked well together as a team. They asked good questions and made sure they didn’t miss anything. Pretty sharp,” Anderson said.
This course has proven to be an invaluable asset to many of the service members who have attended it, according to Anderson.
“We’re on the road all the time giving this training. We’re a mobile training team and we offer the 40-hour course about 24 times a year,” Anderson said. “This is the second year for the HME course. We used to have a smaller portion included in our asymmetric course mixed in with chem and bio. We found out quickly that the primary explosive being used in Afghanistan is homemade explosives.”
The chances that EOD service members will encounter homemade explosives during a deployment to Afghanistan are nearly 100 percent, Anderson explained.
Experiences on the battlefield drove a change in the dynamics of the course, according to Anderson.
“The chances of finding a [homemade explosives] lab are pretty high, so they refocused and they basically decided that instead of having a day on HME, it would be better to have a full 40-hour college credit course,” Anderson said.
In developing the course, the Joint Centers of Excellence and Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization utilized input from some of the world’s experts in homemade explosives, Anderson said.
The course covered a wide-variety of areas related to countering the threats presented by homemade explosives. The soldiers learned various detailed insights about the mixing processes explosive makers go through to concoct their devices. Course attendees also learned what to look for when entering an explosives lab.
“It’s a great course. I actually wish that when I first came into the military and into EOD that I had gotten the same sort of training,” Anderson said.
Anderson also said he sometimes gets some helpful feedback from some of the more experiences students who attend his training.
“There is not a day that I don’t learn something. Sometimes I’ll get to see – from another perspective – how someone operates and I hadn’t thought about attacking a problem that way, and if I see something like that I will just further pass it on,” he said.
Approximately 30 soldiers from both the 22nd Chem. Bn. and the 20th Support Command attended the course.
The course proved to be an eye-opener for Applewhite, a 26-year-old Arizona native who spent the first years of his Army career as a cavalry scout.
“This was exactly the kind of stuff they need to have for EOD courses,” Applewhite explained. “This course was instructive because we learned a lot about the stuff that we will actually be dealing with.”
The technical knowledge of the instructors was extremely helpful to the newer members of the EOD community, Applewhite said.
Maj. Ezell Tornes, 20th Spt. EOD current operations officer, said the training was crucial in the development of soldiers within the EOD community.
“The course was very beneficial for EOD technicians, because it provided us with an understanding of how to recognize HME, how to safely interrogate labs, and the HME,” Tornes said. “My favorite portion of the training was the reference materials provided.”
Applewhite said one of the highlights of the course was seeing what it takes to have a functioning homemade explosives lab.
“Learning about what percentages of materials it takes and where to find them was extremely important,” he explained.
“It was much more than I expected,” Applewhite said. “In this job field, you really need to have training like this so we can see the colors and the smells. It was extremely important stuff.”
| Date Taken: | 10.18.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 11.08.2011 14:56 |
| Story ID: | 79728 |
| Location: | ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, MD, US |
| Web Views: | 221 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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