12 July New York Times - A Platoon’s Mission: Seeking and Destroying Explosives in Disguise by Michael Gordon.

When American soldiers take to the road they pray they avoid the roadside bombs that seem to explode every day in Iraq. Sgt. First Class Timothy Faust has a very different goal: he hopes to find them.

Sergeant Faust’s Demon Platoon has the “route clearing” mission for Company A, Task Force 1-36. That is the somewhat understated description of an operation that involves driving into a veritable no man’s land in hostile Anbar Province to uncover mines, buried artillery shells and all manner of explosive devices, often under sniper fire.

The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars on technology to counter the bombs, which the insurgents have continued to install at a furious rate. But as a recent trip with Demon Platoon showed, detecting the bombs — improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, as the soldiers call them — is often a matter of memorizing the location of trash heaps, bomb craters, dirt mounds and construction sites in Hit, a garbage-strewn city of 40,000...