EFL,much more about the hand off at the link. This lead in is about the Army of Steve.
As the insurgency in the Sunni Triangle was heating up last fall, Lt. Col. Steve Russell was dealing with a new wave of attacks in which bombers were using the transmitters from radio-controlled toy cars: They would take the electronic guts of the cars, wrap them in C-4 plastic explosive and attach a blasting cap, then detonate them by remote control. So Russell, who commands an infantry battalion in deposed president Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit, mounted one of the toy-car controllers on the dashboard of his Humvee and taped down the levers. Because all the toy cars operated on the same frequency, this would detonate any similar bomb about 100 yards before his Humvee got to the spot. This "poor man’s anti-explosive device" was "risky perhaps," Russell writes in a 58-page summary of his unit’s time in Iraq but better than leaving the detonation to the bombers.
Suspicions confirmed
As one of the biggest troop rotations in U.S. history gets underway in Iraq, with almost 250,000 soldiers coming or going, the seasoned units that are leaving are doing their best to pass on such hard-won knowledge to their successors, in e-mails, in essays, in PowerPoint presentations and rambling memoirs posted on Web sites or sent to rear detachments. And in the process, these veterans of Iraq have provided an alternate history of the Army’s experience there over the past nine months -- one that is far more personal than the images offered by the media and often grimmer than the official accounts of steady progress. |