To clarify my last post, no no one was hurt too bad. Many of you have contacted me with concerns for their well being. From the size of it I assume they had to be knocked around fairly bad, but at the same time they were not med-evaced. It their injuries had been in any way life threatening, or even close to life threatening it would not have even been a question, they would have been evacuated. I do not know those Marines. They are from a different unit. Their only task is to clear future routs of bombs, where as ours is to provide general security for any operation outside the wire. We really don't work with them that often, so I can't comment on how they are doing.
Really, with these new vehicles I think that IEDs are passe. The trucks can take a ton of abuse and have all the passengers walk away. Also, with the caliber of training Marines are getting when it comes to detecting IEDs, both using the naked eye and thermal cameras, we are spotting most of them before they go off. It really gets me excited when we find a bomb with multiple hundreds of pounds and destroy it before it has a chance to go off. How pissed that bomb maker must be that weeks of work did nothing but delay us by twenty minutes.
