By spring 2005, my fellow soldiers and I, who had been in Afghanistan for almost a year, had grown accustomed to our deployment. We’d had many missions helping establish schools for Afghan children, stopping highway robbers, and providing security for Afghanistan’s presidential election. A newly arrived soldier who hadn’t been outside the wire much might freak out upon seeing an Afghan with an AK-47, but most of us were big 2nd Amendment supporters and felt our Afghan friends also had a right to bear arms. Nothing much shocked us.
One day, driving our Humvees across the open Afghan desert with a few hours until we reached our base, I spotted the impossible. Out in the empty wasteland, about 50 yards away, was a bomb.
This was no cellphone-detonated improvised explosive device. It was a proper bomb — a gray cylinder, perhaps 1 1/2 feet long and 10 inches in diameter, sticking out of the earth at a slight angle, tapered a little at the end, with four tail fins. By that point in my deployment, I’d seen plenty of explosives and ammunition, but I’d never encountered anything like this.
“Hey, guys.” I felt stupid. The very idea of such a thing was ridiculous. “Is that a bomb?”
The convoy halted. Everybody but the gunners in each of our two Humvees dismounted to form a security perimeter.
Our squad’s two team leaders, Sgts. Matthew Peterson and Marlin Beckmann, called me to their position at the side of the dirt-track road.
“What do you think, Cpl. Reedy?” Peterson asked.
This kind of thing had happened before. Because I was a combat engineer, I was often asked about explosives. “Well, believe it or not, sergeant, but my two weeks of explosives training at Fort Leonard Wood didn’t cover what to do with bombs left over from Wile E. Coyote’s latest attempt destroy the Road Runner. But look at that thing. It doesn’t get any more bomb-shaped than that.”
“Maybe the Soviets dropped a dud back in the ’80s?” Peterson ventured.
I would have asked why the Soviets would have bombed this middle-of-nowhere location, but they’d left their war junk all over Afghanistan, even in the most seemingly unlikely places.
“If it’s an IED, they didn’t hide it very well,” I said. “And it’s nowhere near the road.” Even if it exploded, we’d probably be safely out of range.
“Should we call it in?” Peterson asked.
“If we do that, we have to stay here and guard this thing until Explosive Ordnance Disposal can get here,” said Beckmann. “And they’re months behind.”
Peterson turned his face away from the gritty wind blowing through the emptiness around us. “It’s pretty nice here, but I’m not sure I want to stay that long.”
“Why don’t we just shoot the thing?” I asked.
“Good idea.” Sgt. Beckmann pulled a 40 mm grenade round from his pouch and loaded it into the launcher mounted underneath the barrel of his rifle. He adjusted the sights and fired. A moment later, the grenade exploded a few yards from the target.
“Let me try.” Peterson loaded and fired. The grenade nailed the bomb with its regular small burst. “Bingo!”
But the bomb didn’t blow up. “My expert explosives opinion, as a combat engineer never trained for anything like this, is that thing is either ridiculously stable or it is not a bomb,” I said.
The three of us approached the cylinder, which was freshly scarred by Peterson’s grenade round.
“There’s an old combat engineer trick to check if this thing is safe.” I kicked the bomb. It rang hollow. Stepping closer, I could see through its tail down inside it. Empty. “This is the most bomb-looking nonbomb in history.” What was it? Why was it out there? Like a lot of things we encountered in Afghanistan, it made no sense. We mounted up and drove on, no longer surprised by the surprises.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Some names in this story may have been changed due to security or privacy concerns.
