much luck and wishes for great success! You are training to do an amazingly beneficial humanitarian job, and my hat’s off to you.
Emplacing the stuff is the easy part; removing it safely takes much more planning and finesse.
study hard and enjoy the training. Remember: “when in doubt, demo it in place” is the easy answer, not always the right one.
Congratulations, Tripler! I’m glad you get a shot at doing something you really want to do.
Just be CAREFUL, ok?? Those things can hurt you. :eek:
Sweet, man. What a coincidence, I was out throwing grenades and blasting claymores for the fuck of it today. Helps a bit with the boredom. Got some decent video of it too.
Be safe. Count your fingers often to make sure they’re still there.
errrr… and by “for the fuck of it” I mean “for training and proficiency” of course. 
How much does a claymore cost?
Glad to see my tax dollars at work.
“All right, Bud, you have to cut the ground wire, not the lead wire. It’s the blue wire with the white stripe…Not—I repeat–not the black wire with the yellow stripe.” – The Abyss
To the o.p., I’m glad someone wants to do this, but I’d personally rather be far, far away when things explode than right up close trying to disarm. (With rockets we spend a lot of time making sure the ordnance absolutely can’t detonate until you need them to go.) Good luck, and regardless of what you’ve seen in documentaries, climbing under a moving bus is not a good way to disarm a bomb.
Stranger
I would also be very curious to know about the safety prospects of this job compared to other jobs within the armed forces as well as civilian positions.
Is there a comprehensive safety tracking organization similar to the NTSB for aircraft crashes that thoroughly investigates injuries among people that do EOD? Is it, like flying aircraft, a position that is thought to be something that you can accomplish very safely, or is the attitude that there will always be something that will just blow up and hopefully you won’t be the one holding the wire-clippers when it happens?
Finally, is there ever actually any situation where you’re wondering which wire to cut, or once you have a given device you know with 99.99% certainty how to disable it and it’s just a question of properly executing that plan?
Tripler,
If I see you running, I’m dropping and rolling!
Congratulations! When you finish, let us know so I can buy you a shirt that says:
IF YOU SEE ME RUNNING, TRY TO KEEP UP!
Yo, Eglin AFB baby checking in . . . Congratulations Tripler! My dad was in EOD for 22.5 years (nukes and conventional); I hope your career is as long and uneventful - relatively speaking - as his was.
I’m glad to hear you have family support in this too; you never know when you may need someone to whip up some sandbags for you after hours!
I used to work with a lot of retired/ex EOD guys when I worked at an explosives testing range in college. They’re a fun bunch, that’s for sure. The thing that always amazed me the most is how they knew so much about Russian and other foreign warheads. Every once in awhile, on the range, we’d stumble onto something that had been part of a test and had somehow gone unaccounted for. We’d call up the EOD guys, and even the new ones would give us a brief history of the weapon and what he planned on doing with it (which was often times just picking it up and tossing it in the back of his truck :smack: )
They have special devices which encapsulate the package and blast them with a water jet. The jet’s pressure is chosen to be strong enough to disrupt the energetic material while being tame enough to not set off any of the primary (detonator) explosives in the package. There’s one such device described here. As krisolov says, this isn’t always the best answer; but if you’re dealing with a relatively small package, it’s often employed. I wonder how often it’s done, but it seems like they announce a suspicious package on the intercom once a week. It’s usually claimed, but there have been stories of laptops, etc. completely destroyed because some moron didn’t use a bag tag.
Don’t worry, I think we get a bulk discount. 
When any one thinks of EOD they think of IED’s and terrorist bombs like those in Iraqi and other places. That is when they don’t conjure up images from Hollywood. But it seemed to me (during my brief stint in the Army Artillery) that most State Side EOD spent their days looking at and defusing: ordinance that fell out side the impact area, old ordinance unearthed in former impact areas that were no longer live fire ranges, dealing with poorly stored explosive ammo or old ammo that had gone bad and ordinance that just failed to go off.
Are those jobs the first tier in EOD work or just all those guys had to do in 1988?
Oh, that’s cool. Congratulations, and have a lot of fun!
I remember watching Danger: UXB (Unexbloded Bomb) on Masterpiece Theatre when I was a kid. It was about a group of WWII bomb squad folks in England, defusing lots of German “duds” that weren’t so duddy.
StG
Thank you. Velly intellesting. I was hoping for an x-ray vision machine or something equally James Bond-y.
Fire Dept? No, I called the Bomb Squad.
Hmm, I didn’t know you could just call up the Bomb Squad. Usually the Bomb Squad is part of the HazMat team, which is part of the fire department. In my experience, at least.
Thanks for the wellwishes!
I signed into the school today. . . and I have to admit, there’s a bunch of damn kids here! Most of the students I passed today were E-1 to E-4s (like, in their teens or early twenties), but man alive, I feel like an old geezer at 31.
So, class officially starts on the 27th. I don’t know the full curriculum yet, but I’m sure I’ll discuss as I go through things. One of the biggest things a few folks stressed is that you will fail a test at some point, but not to let that bother you too much–everyone fails something. When you fail, you get rolled back to reaccomplish the task or test you didn’t do well. Other than that, it’s gonna make for some long days. 0700 - 2100ish, which includes all of the study halls. I’m used to this already: I was an Exec for a Brigadier General and was taking two night courses on top of that just to finish up my Master’s degree. Bring it on.
And I owe some responses:
Santo Rugger pretty much hit the nail on the head. I’ve seen EOD flights send the robot downrange with the water cannon to dismantle things. Also, there are handheld X-ray machines that can give technicians an idea of what’s inside something. And Kalhoun, most robots have a camera on them AFAIK. But for suspect packages, I can’t answer specifically, just because I haven’t gotten into that classwork yet. But I think it’s safe to say you’d send a robot to investigate and then go from there.
A few weeks back, my wife and I were watching a program with an experimental charge one could place underneath the trunk of a car (for a VBIED). Had a charge underneath it which would focus a layer of water above it into a shape, which would literally cleave the trunk in half. Worked like the water gun on the robot already mentioned, but on a larger scale–useful for destroying what’s in the trunk of a suspect vehicle. But, it was in the experimental stage.
Quartz, you raise an interesting point: from what I’d seen in the past, the Bomb Squad was attached to the Police Departments, not the Fire Dept. That’s not to say they have each other all on speed dial at the dispatch centers, but I had assumed you’d called the F.D.
Tripler
I’m chompin’ at the bit to get started.
IME, in Florida the local bomb squads are attached to the various sheriff’s offices, rather than the FD.
You are now on my “awesomest careers of people I know” chart, right after a couple of bird strike testers at Lockheed. (Yes, the chicken cannon people, but I don’t think they use chickens anymore).
I thank you, but I have to caution you. . . I’m set to begin training, I ain’t completed it yet.
Tripler
I can’t count my eggs before hey hatch. Mmmm. Eggs.