BAQUBAH, Iraq - The chaplain and the medic noticed it first: a pile of freshly upturned soil at the side of the highway.
The two men were part of a combat engineer patrol searching for roadside bombs, the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Riding inside a "Buffalo," an armor-plated vehicle with a mechanical boom, they stopped to investigate.
A claw on the boom tore into the dirt and unearthed two artillery shells wired to a blast pack and a cell phone, the components of a remote-controlled bomb known as an IED, or improvised explosive device. Soldiers detained two Iraqi men who had hurried away from the site as the patrol pulled up.
It was a moment of triumph Wednesday for the search team, the product of dogged patrolling of an IED-infested stretch of highway in the Sunni Triangle 20 miles north of Baghdad.
Several times a day, every day, the "Apache Bomb Hunters" of the 467th Engineer Battalion slowly cruise the dust-streaked blacktops, exposing themselves to bombs, snipers and ambushes as they try to keep the roadways clear.
Other patrols speed up and down local highways, giving IED triggermen less time to detonate the bombs.
The engineers move deliberately, scanning the roadside for signs of such things as unusual mounds of dirt, garbage, brush or construction materials.
The patrols intersect prosaic scenes of Iraqi urban life: men waiting in gas lines, boys playing soccer, butchers slaughtering livestock. But virtually every day in Iraq, the commonplace is transformed by the tremendous explosion of a hidden IED.
Even before the first engineer patrol left the concertina wire and blast walls of Forward Operating Base Warhorse on Thursday, an IED triggered after dawn killed a machine-gunner in a truck from the same brigade a few miles to the northeast in the town of Muqdadiya. An insurgent hiding in a ravine used a cell phone to detonate a chain of several bombs made from artillery shells, commanders said.
Later Thursday, a tank driver with the brigade was wounded when a bomb, also fashioned from artillery shells, exploded beneath his Abrams tank near Samarra. An Army explosives expert called in to investigate was killed when a second bomb was set off by remote control. The deaths underscored the urgency felt by the engineers as they scanned the roadsides in brilliant sunlight, trying to maintain their focus for hours.
