Practice makes perfect

After a tiresome week and a half of classroom lectures - there's an awful amount of information we have to digest - we went on a field trip to the Army Mine School. Topic of the day: mine and improvised explosive device(IED) awareness. Apart from road traffic landmines are one of the greatest hazards in out of area operations. Sudan has an estimated 500.000 - 2 million landmines buried in the soil. Unfortunately most of these are deposited in our Area of Responsibility (AoR). At the mine school we are taught how to best cope with this threat. Rule of Thumb is to not stray off the (cleared) roads or paths. In the unfortunate event that we should get caught in a mine field we practiced clearing a path through the area by "poking" a rod or other pointed object. Justt to make it more realistic they used dummy mines with small charges. The drawback of this method is that it's very time consuming and should only be used as a last resort.

(Ric and I gentlypoking for mines, you may also notice the tripwires)

A favorite spot for IED's are guardrails. This is the reason the were removed from the highways in Irak. Below the effect of just 2KG of explosives on a passing Jeep.


A day like this is extremely useful for us folk accustomed to moving around in a safe environment.