An IED or Improvised Explosive Device is......well......a bomb. Its not TNT or Plastique, though either may be used as a detonator. When the Coalition Forces steam rolled the Iraqi conventional forces many or the well trained Republican Guard soldiers as well as Special Forces went into hiding. Munitions were cached all over the country but there were no howitzers to fire the artillery rounds.

Enter a reasonably smart guy with a background in explosives and a willingness to take chances. The nose cone of an artillery shell has the fuse or detonator. It can be set for impact or air detonation but....it had to be fired. Our smart guy removes the fuse and replaces it with some C4 and a blasting cap with wiring. Initially they were crude......single strand stereo speaker wire would run from the detonation assembly to a hiding spot where the whole thing would be set off with a 9 volt battery. As time went on and smarter guys came along they started using programmable walkie talkies, garage door openers and cell phones as initiators which allowed the Insurgent to be increasingly farther from the area....finally needing nothing more than eyes on to time the blast right.

Now....most of the stuff I saw was 152mm shells. They make one hell of a boom and have a fairly substantial kill/wound radius. They might be daisy chained (I was at a site that had 15 of these), stacked, buried individually or placed inside roadside trash or road kill. Bottom line is they were always concealed and if you weren't careful, you could be standing on top of one.

Near the end of my time there the bad guys got a hold of some engineering cratering charges. These are a shaped charge that make one hell of a big hole in roads, bridges, landing strips and the like. However, if you lay it on its side....with the cone facing the roadway, it will make one hell of a hole in whatever is in front of it when it goes off. These were harder to conceal but they would take out anything....including a Tank.

Now....why did I write this? Because some of the stories that follow will talk about these little gems and I guess I wanted anyone reading this to have a better understanding of what Troops run into over there.