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  Once, toward the end of the month in An Najaf, Sarver and Williams were dismantling IEDs under heavy fire, and Williams began to shake, disoriented from the heat. Sarver sent him back to the Humvee for water. When Sarver himself returned to the truck, he found Williams prone in the back.

  “Williams, where’s the firing device?” Sarver asked.

  “I left it back at the IEDs,” Williams replied.

  “Did you cut the wires?”

  Williams stammered.

  “Did you cut them? Did you cut them, Williams?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you segregate them?”

  “Yeah. But the mortars are getting really close.”

  “Did you put a charge on them?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you put a charge on them?” Sarver yelled. Williams’s health hardly mattered anymore. “Now we have to go back and blow them up.”

  As hair-raising as the incident was, Sarver never held it against Williams. Indeed, as they drove back to Baghdad, Sarver told the younger man there was no one he’d rather have at his back.

  • • •

  All army EOD techs get training in a school at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The Army looks for volunteers who are confident, forthright, comfortable under extreme pressure and emotionally stable. To get into the training program, a tech first needs a high score on the mechanical-aptitude portion of the armed-forces exam. One in four soldiers fail to graduate.

  “We have not yet cracked the code on what makes a great EOD tech,” says Sgt. Major Matthew Hughs, a senior officer at Eglin’s bomb school. “The only way to find out if a man has the right qualities is to put him in the field, in the situation, and see how he does.”

  Right away, Sarver showed an intuitive grasp of engineering, even in training sessions. With a glance he could suss out any bomb’s architecture. Later, when building practice bombs, he kept pace with his fellow techs, moving from shoe boxes with basic triggers to mock IEDs that incorporated motion detectors and multiple triggers linked by collapsible circuits.

  To Sarver, EOD offered an infinite number of challenges—man-versus-materials moments when he would go down on a bomb and everything else fell away. He came to appreciate the fascinating and dangerous allure of each bomb, the beauty of a well-constructed killing machine. At times, he felt bomb work was better—far better—than hunting. In fact, there was only one problem with the job: There weren’t that many bombs to disarm.

  • • •

  By September, Sarver’s team was in Baghdad—6 million people spread over 81 square miles. It’s a major urban center by any standard, with office towers and mosques, highways and traffic circles, middle-class neighborhoods like Mansur, and slums whose markets draw pedestrians by the thousands at midday. For the insurgents, the city is rife with platforms for killing Americans. Snipers wait for passing patrols atop tall buildings. Car bombers need merely pull up to a Humvee and wave hello before setting off a charge. In the slums, people bury IEDs in dirt roads amid garbage, in highway medians, even in the bodies of road kill.

  The bombs come from a vast trove of explosives left behind by a dictatorship that spent wildly on weaponry. After one war with Iran, two with the United States and multiple Kurdish uprisings, Iraq’s soil has become home to every imaginable weapons system, including an estimated 10 million land mines. Meanwhile, there are only about 150 trained Army EOD techs in Iraq. The Army plans to add up to 1,400 more in the next four years. One enticement: an extra $150 a month in “demolition pay.”

  In Baghdad, Sarver and Williams worked 48-hour shifts. The days blurred. Either it was morning or night; either you were driving out from the base or coming home; either the bomb was in a pile of garbage or in the carcass of a dead dog or on the side of the road; and either you disarmed it or you didn’t and there were bodies or brains on the backseat of a truck.

  It was hard to know how many bomb makers were in Baghdad. One expert said, “The skill set was spreading.” Sarver read the intelligence reports he received closely, and tried to help by passing along bomb circuitry he collected on his missions. After coming back to base from a day in the field, he’d sort the bits of wiring he’d picked up on the Baghdad streets and place them in neatly labeled plastic bags. Later, they’d go to the FBI for analysis.

  Like all EOD techs in Iraq, Sarver could trace the insurgency’s history in devices he’s disarmed. When he first landed, the bombs were rudimentary: a blasting cap, shell and command wire. Now they were more lethal, with wireless designs that incorporated modified car alarms, pagers and cell phones for remote detonation. Soon, he predicts, the insurgents will begin to use more advanced technology—which will push the death toll higher.

  After every shift, Sarver returned to the base and painted a little bomb stencil on the door of his Humvee. One day, Staff Sgt. Kelsey Hendrickson, a tall, bald, strapping 26-year-old tech, watched as Sarver added another.

  “How many you got now?” Hendrickson asked.

  Sarver told him 120 IEDs and four vehicle-borne IEDs—car bombs.

  Hendrickson lit a cigarette. “Who cares, anyway?” he said. “It’s not like you get a special prize for disarming X number of IEDs.”

  “But I’ll know,” Sarver said.

  • • •

  By October 2004 Sarver and Williams have disarmed 160 IEDs. One day they are called out twice, but one IED goes off before they reach it, killing an Iraqi family driving by in a pickup truck.

  Later, Sarver goes back to the trailer he shares with Williams. He’s divided it with a wall of lockers. The only thing hanging on his wall: a map of Baghdad marked up to show places where bombs have been found, as well as areas where there’s a good chance he’ll encounter hostility if he’s out on a call. He keeps pictures of his son, Jared, on his computer.

  In December, with only a month left in their tour, the stress mounts for the bomb techs. Even under the best of conditions, EOD is a deadly job. Sarver knows it firsthand: A close friend, Staff Sgt. Michael Sutter, was killed by an IED the day after Christmas 2003, making him one of ten Army bomb techs to die in the field as of November 2005. And the chances of dying seem to surge in the last month of a tour, when fatigue, distraction and homesickness can dull a soldier’s instincts. “You zig when the bomber zags,” is how Sarver describes the kind of mental mistake that can prove fatal.

  • • •

  In the second week of December, in a rare instance when a colonel is in the field, Sarver’s team travels to downtown Baghdad. They try to disarm the IED with a robot, but can’t. Sarver must take the long walk by himself. Sgt. Chris Millward seals him into the bomb suit. Only Sarver’s face, slightly distorted by his clear visor, is visible. If you look closely you can see him smile as he walks away. Beyond the smile, the rest of his face—the wide nose, small soft chin, and large blue-green eyes—is tight with terror.

  As he approaches the bomb his mind goes blank: “Everything shuts down except for you and the device. I can hear myself breathing.” His heart beats so loudly that it’s audible in his helmet. Because the suit’s radio receiver is turned off (to avoid sending stray radio waves that could set off the IED), Sarver walks toward the bomb totally cut off from his team.

  “When you’re 10 feet away from it,” he says, “you get comfortable because you’re at the point of no return.” This particular bomb—a rusty metal cone—pokes out from beneath a pile of rotting garbage. Sarver puts his hands on the device, an artillery shell holding 18 pounds of explosives with a blasting cap cemented in the nose. A pink wire in the cap leads to a battery connected to a cell phone. A call to the phone opens a circuit that will send an electric charge to the blasting cap, which will detonate the entire contraption.

  Sarver must separate the blasting cap from the main charge, but it won’t come out of the cement. He grabs his knife and starts digging around the wire. He’s careful not to upset the cap. It could blow from even a hard jolt. From 300 meters away, he seems to be moving
at hyperspeed, but inside the bomb helmet the moments stretch out. It’s like he’s moving in super-slow motion. Finally, the wire gives. The bomb separates, and Sarver stands up.

  After he finishes, the colonel, whose convoy the IED nearly destroyed, approaches. “Are you the wild man in the bomb suit?” the colonel asks.

  “Yes, sir,” Sarver says. “That was me.”

  “Look at that hero. America’s finest,” the colonel says, shaking Sarver’s hand. “I want a picture with this man.”

  • • •

  On Christmas Eve, with six days left in his field duties and 190 bombs painted on his truck, Sarver goes out to assess the damage caused by an oil-tanker-truck bomb that’s gone off near the Moroccan embassy. When he arrives, the only light is from a fire smoldering in the top of a palm tree. The air, thick with debris, smells of sulfur, burned fuel and human blood.

  Examining the site, Sarver shines his flashlight into the crater—9 feet long by 6 feet wide by 3 feet deep—left by the blast. He steps through the crunching glass and bits of metal to the truck’s engine block and looks for traces of explosives. Army forensics experts and another EOD tech team are also on the scene. Among the questions to be answered: Was the bomb detonated remotely or the work of a suicide bomber?

  Walking away from the center of the blast, Sarver follows the path of the destruction. At 40 paces, he walks through a completely blackened expanse, which gives way in another 5 paces to a few visible shapes—a bit of concrete, part of a wall. Then come recognizable things, charred but not consumed, and finally just singed—the blistered paint on a gate. Beyond that, weird-looking chickens peck at the dirt, their feathers burned off. Sarver aims his light up into the branches of a tree and finds an orange, perfect and ripe.

  “This is where it ended,” he says, then walks back to the center. He notices two well-dressed men standing in the doorway of their home.

  “I’m sorry this had to happen to you,” he says.

  “I’m sorry too,” says one of the men, a Kuwaiti.

  “Was anybody hurt?”

  “My brother, next door. The glass fell on him. But he’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry. If you see anything hazardous, give us a call and we will come and take it away for you.”

  Back at base, the bomb techs tear into packages of Froot Loops, adding the bitter reconstituted Iraqi milk. They talk about cartoons and movie characters with funny-sounding names. Millward does impressions of Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck. Williams laughs so hard that milk dribbles down his cheek. Sarver, ashen, leans against a wall. “The chickens are what got me,” he says finally. “It was horrible the way they had their feathers burnt.”

  Before leaving Iraq, Sarver does a final tally of the bombs he’s defused: 208. How many lives has he spared? Dozens, maybe, or hundreds. In his After Action Report, the commander of the 788th Ordnance Company, Capt. Christopher Wilson, notes that Sarver’s team “rendered safe the largest number of IEDs that were disarmed by any one team since operations began in Iraq.” As he sits on the military plane that will take him home, the Bronze Star he’s been awarded is stowed away with the rest of his gear. Jeffrey Sarver is officially a hero.

  • • •

  At home in Wisconsin, Sarver returns to his modest rental. It’s just as he left it. None of his 100 rifles, shotguns and handguns have been moved from their cabinets. The living room also looks fine, still crowded with animal mounts—a turkey, a fox, a beaver, a raccoon, a coyote and a deer. They’re all positioned on the walls in such a way that he can admire their lush fur and feathers while sitting on his couch.

  After a brief hunting trip, he’s back to active duty. Except this is what his life is like now: filling out forms, answering to civilians, killing time. There’s little need to put on the bomb suit—only once a month, maybe, to respond to a suspicious package. Then there’s the occasional call from a family that’s found a World War II pineapple grenade in their dead grandfather’s trunk.

  When a day off arrives, Sarver decides to visit his family. He drives to Ohio to spend several days with his father. Next, he travels to Michigan to visit his son, Jared, who lives with his mother, Sarver’s ex-girlfriend. When the three of them meet at the hotel where Sarver is staying, there are hugs all around. The talk turns to Jared’s upcoming birthday (he’ll be eight), and Sarver agrees to take the boy shopping for an early birthday present: a go-cart. In the calm Michigan evening, there are no IEDs to defuse, no bombs to harm his son. Staff Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver is at home in the nation he has sworn to protect—and a long way from the loneliest spot on earth.

  Mark Boal is an American journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture for The Hurt Locker. His screenplay for Zero Dark Thirty was also nominated for an Academy Award.

  The Men He Left Behind

  BY BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT

  While his men patrolled the farmland of southern Afghanistan, Sgt. First Class Carlos Santos-Silva came home to his wife, who had bought a new blue sundress embroidered with pink flowers to greet him at the airport. They’d planned to celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary in Washington, D.C., during his two weeks of leave from the war zone. They would tour the capital and visit some of Santos’s men recovering from injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Instead, Kristen wore her new dress to Dover Air Force Base and watched six soldiers carry Santos off a plane in an aluminum box draped in the American flag. “We’re here together,” she told me the night before the funeral and their anniversary, April 12. “This just isn’t how I thought it would be.”

  Outside the funeral home in Arlington, Virginia, she gathered with friends and family, and handed out balloons, 12 blue and 12 white, for each of their 12 years together. At the signal, the others released their balloons on cue, but Kristen wouldn’t let go. She gazed skyward and her lips trembled. After a long moment, she opened her hand, and watched the balloons rise. “I love you, Carlos, forever and ever and ever,” she said, then covered her face with her hands, and shook with sobs. Cameron, their 11-year-old son, stood next to her and pressed his face to her hip.

  The next day, under a cloudless sky, she buried Santos, 32 years old, in Arlington National Cemetery. A horse-drawn caisson carried his casket down a road lined with tall shade trees to Section 60, where the headstones chart the histories of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Sgt. First Class Raul Davila stepped to the casket. He and I had both known Santos for years, having served two deployments with him in Iraq. Santos had gone on to become a drill sergeant, training new soldiers, and then a platoon sergeant with Charlie Company, 2-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, leading 40 men in the Arghandab River Valley, a violent swath of southern Afghanistan. Davila spoke about how Santos loved being a husband and a father and a leader of soldiers. “I will forever be honored to call him my friend,” Sergeant Davila said, his voice steady and solemn. “Rest easy, Brother.”

  Gunshots cracked the warm morning air, a bugler played Taps, and in crisp movements practiced thousands of times, the burial detail pulled the flag tight and folded it into a neat triangle of stars on a field of blue. A general knelt beside Kristen and handed her the flag. I looked at the crowd, at those who had known Santos at so many points during his life. But what about those who weren’t there, those who knew him best over the past seven months, those with him the day his truck rolled over a massive bomb buried in a dirt road snaking through farmers’ fields? Santos’s men were still working, in a lush, dangerous corridor of orchards and grape furrows outside Kandahar City. As has happened thousands of times during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when soldiers are killed and their bodies sent home, their friends stay behind, to mourn and remember and fight. I wanted to meet the men Santos had lived with and led. And for that, I’d have to go to them, to a place they called the Devil’s Playground.

  • • •

  Flying into Afghanistan, I peered out the window at the vast stretches
of brown, interrupted by jagged mountains, scored by rivers and dotted with villages. Down there, somewhere, Santos had been killed. At this height, such an explosion wouldn’t even be visible. But staring at the land where he died and where his men were still fighting, his death seemed more real than it had at the funeral.

  I would be staying with Santos’s platoon at Combat Outpost (COP) Tynes along the edge of the Arghandab River Valley, northwest of Kandahar City, named for another lost soldier, Pfc. Marcus Tynes, who was killed November 22, 2009. To get there, I rode in the last truck of a five-vehicle convoy. We’d soon be passing over the very spot where Santos was killed, just beside a small bridge on a road where several bombs had exploded in the past six months. Looking through the windshield from the backseat, I watched a giant fountain of dirt shoot into the air 200 yards ahead. The concussion rattled my chest. “I.E.D.! I.E.D.! I.E.D.!” crackled over the radio, the same call made when Santos’s truck was hit. An improvised explosive device planted in the same spot near the bridge had just exploded. But this time the insurgents were too hasty, the bomb went off too early, and the target truck rolled on, its crew uninjured.

  • • •

  After Santos’s death, the region became even more dangerous. His men patrolled pomegranate orchards and vineyards where gunmen shot at them from the cover of dense foliage. The roads and trails were laced with buried bombs, making every step a life-or-death gamble, and the heat—100 degrees and humid—left them parched and exhausted. They had been ordered to begin “pacifying” a small stretch of the valley, so the Taliban couldn’t use it to transport and store weapons and stage attacks on nearby Kandahar City. Their progress was hard to measure. For every bomb found, or fighter captured or killed, there were many more hiding in the valley. But the soldiers kept their fears in check and patrolled the orchards, doing it with a proficiency that would have made Santos proud.