IN MY SHOES: What It’s LikeTo Get Blown Up By An IED
All Staff Sgt. Marcus Jimenez, a group of Jordanian and U.S. soldiers and an interpreter wanted to do was to hand out soccer balls to kids and inspect four mosques in the eastern Afghanistan town o Pakhab-e’Shana to see if they were in need of repair. Inexplicably, the group met with hostility – the kids pelted them with rocks “hurled artillery-style over mud walls” and “[a]n an hour later, Jimenez would be dragged, barely conscious and badly hurt, from the twisted wreckage of an armored truck blown up by an improvised explosive device” in yet another demonstration of the bankruptcy of COIN, the counterinsurgency strategy meant to win hearts and minds.
Wired writer David Axe, who was riding in the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle along with Jimenez and several others reports on what it’s like to get blown up:
I had just polished off a small bag of nacho chips when there was a very loud clanging sound and, in an instant, the whole world shrank into a space roughly the size of a utility closet, went white, and angled rightward with an awful, heavy momentum. I knew, even then, that the pallor was from the dust shocked out of a hundred nooks and crannies by the force of a massive IED. The world’s weird angle was from the vehicle’s roughly 15-ton armored body being hurled forward and sideways by the blast.
I hung there in dusty space for what felt like forever, but was probably only two seconds. It was more than enough time to decide I was dead, marvel at the strangeness of being dead, then realize I was still alive - and fear I might not be when this metal sarcophagus stopped flying.
We struck the ground: seven men and their equipment crunched into an unforgiving heap. The gunner, a kid named Glenroy Martin, was lying on top of me, screaming and cussing. The interpreter cried out in accented English, squinting against the blood streaming down his face. …
My glasses were gone. I would find them later, broken in half and wedged under a radio. My cameras, strapped to my chest, seemed OK. I grabbed them - first my still camera, then my video camera, and began documenting the worst thing that had ever happened to me. …
I was bleeding from several cuts on my arm and face, but I felt no pain. That would come that night and the next day. As I write this, 24 hours after the attack, I feel worse than at any point during the incident itself.
My knees feel hollow. Every muscle aches. When I’m not using them, my hands shake. But on the ground after the explosion, I was as focused on my job as the soldiers were on theirs.
I took photos until my poor, abused digital camera gave up the ghost. I switched to video-only. …
I read over these words I’ve written, and I worry that I’ve focused too much on my own fragmentary experiences, my own frenetic feelings. But then I assure myself there’s no other way to write about getting blown the hell up.
Editorial Note: Trying to baby his previously fractured tailbone, Axe was sitting in the relatively more comfortable seat at the very back of the MRAP that had been occupied by the interpreter, which turned out to be the farthest from the explosion. When he last saw the interpreter, the man was “crushed in metal and streaked in blood” and Axe worried that “I will dream about him.”
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