Today was a very exciting day. I got a new mission! I am going to work with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team! The EOD team has a very important job. They specialize in dealing with things that explode! Some of them work with UXOs, or UneXploded Ordnance. These are things like bombs and artillery shells that are just lying around. There are a lot of those in Iraq! Iraq fought a war with Iran for eight years, and then fought two wars with the US, UK, and their allies. So there are lots of bombs and shells left over that are just lying around, and the EOD teams help get rid of those so the Iraqis can safely walk around and farm the land again. They'll gather up a big pile of these bombs and shells, and then set them all off at once. That makes a very big BOOM!

Another important, and very dangerous, job that the EOD teams do is defusing IEDs. IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, are things that the bad guys use to try to blow us up when we walk or drive by. When a soldier sees one, he calls up an EOD team to come and clear it so that he can continue his mission. As you might guess from reading the news, the EOD teams are very busy with this kind of work! This is part of the reason that I was asked to help them.

Here are a couple of pictures of me training to be an EOD technician:

Don't worry, everybody - that's a fake IED I'm practicing on.

The EOD technicians explained to me that actually, walking up to a bomb or IED and cutting wires is something they almost never do. They have much more sophisticated and less dangerous techniques for disarming these things. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what all of those techniques are! The bad guys want to know everything about our EOD teams so that they can build IEDs that are harder to disarm. We don't want to give them too much information.

The EOD technicians said that until I can get more training, they will have me provide security for them. That's fine with me - I don't want to start messing with bombs until I've learned more, and I'm good at providing security!