Thirteen years later

Published Oct. 14, 2014
By Airman 1st Class Sean D. Smith
Minot Air Force Base Public Affairs

MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. -- Thirteen years, 19,000 missions in Afghanistan, 36,000 in Iraq - and now the last of the Air Force explosive ordnance disposal units are finally home.

Among the returnees was three-time bronze star recipient, Master Sgt. John McCoy, 5th Bomb Wing EOD flight chief. Through his eyes, McCoy explains his experiences and hardships of being deployed.

McCoy is a member of the last six Air Force EOD flights to come back, but he wasn't just over there to see the curtain fall. McCoy helped pack it all up and turn off the lights, but he was also there from the very beginning to watch the EOD mission in Afghanistan take shape.

"In 2001 you were in a sleeping bag in a hangar with a pallet of MREs and water," he said, reflecting on how the mission has developed over time. "Now it's flat screens and air conditioning."

With the last units finally out, this is the end of an era. McCoy described what it was like to break down and send back everything that had been built up over years of EOD operations.

"You can kind of see the generations of equipment. We started pulling stuff out, and it was like 'Yeah - I remember when they sent these over,'" he said.

McCoy made it clear that, while the withdrawal might have brought with it a sense of relief, it's been a long road, and not a safe or relaxing one.

McCoy has no shortage of stories that illustrate the perilous nature of the EOD mission. "I looked down, and it was a Yugoslavian landmine. It was fused, and it had a tripwire - I looked at the tripwire, and it went to another landmine, and that had a tripwire, so I was in the middle of basically a field of tripwires and live landmines. I was about sixty or seventy yards into the minefield," he related, making the incident out to be nothing more than another day at the office, a simple example of how quickly circumstances can turn from tedious to potentially deadly.

He believes the most dangerous element is the unknown, and that discipline and a focus on safety are vital.

"A lot of times we'll get a call like, 'suspicious item alongside the road, wires protruding.' And that's it," McCoy said. "That's all we have to go on, disturbed earth and some wires. That could be anything. There's a lot of inherent hazard, but we try to keep it as safe as possible."

Thirteen years of EOD operations have come with a steep price. Twenty EOD Airman have been killed in theater since Sept. 11, and more than 115 EOD Airmen have been wounded.

"There is such a thing as doing all the right steps and still getting hurt. You can still get in trouble even if you're doing the right thing, because a lot of what we deal with is not standard, it's improvised," McCoy said.

McCoy explained that though the cost has been high, the EOD mission is crucial to ground operations.

"Every time we go out and reduce a hazard, it potentially saves lives, saves equipment. It prevents a chain of other things from happening, because we're dealing with the incident in the safest way possible," McCoy said. "Every time you deal with an IED, you think that could have been someone's leg, or that was two guys that didn't get blown up."

Though this mission is complete, McCoy knows that there will always be more for EOD to do. Dealing with improvised explosive devices and repurposed ordnance was the focus in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's only a small portion of EOD's overall mission. Every device that's successfully disposed of is a potential tragedy averted, and EOD Airmen put their lives on the line to prevent those tragedies.

Each device carries risk, but according to McCoy, also reward. "Each one is someone who's not going to have to get slung out of here in a helicopter, or even die."