Received the opportunity to join Army EOD today and am seriously

>What is EOD school like down in Eglin?
Long. Good living standards though.

>Why does it have such a high failure rate?
1. A lot of people who think they can be around explosives become shaky and unsuitable the second you give them a blasting cap.
2. It's a long school with a lot of tests, get jammed on even a single test and you're done.
3. Some people get clausterphobic, so the bombsuit ruins them.
4. Related to #3, it's more than just being able to physically move in a bombsuit. You have to be able to think clearly and methodically in a bombsuit. It's not like a ruckmarch where you can just zone out your mind to get through it.
4. Some people will flip out under the stress, lose their cool, and go into a death spiral during a practical exercise.

>Apart from studying and not being a goon, how does one do as well as possible in the course to get their crab?

Study good, keep a level head. Having very good cardio makes the environment easier to deal with. Don't argue with instructions, because sometimes phase I and phase II will conflict, just take what they tell you and roll with it. Don't bother trying to learn about ordnance beforehand on google because all it's going to do is fuck you up by putting info that might be wrong into your head.

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>>35195122

>>35195177
Have you been through the course with Officers trying to go EOD? If so, what have you noticed about them and their behavior and how they performed in the course? Thank you so much for the information.

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>>35195196

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>>35195219

>>35195122
Low speed low drag

Pros: maybe some dumb bitch watched hurt locker and thinks you're cool

Cons: also known as reality, someone finds an IED and you show up 6 hours later. We stopped calling EOD and just had our assaultmen blow the shit up. That's all they do, is explode god damn explosives.

>>35195231
I thought that is engineers who blow them up mostly...

>>35195211
Officers go through the same course that everybody else does. When you're in a mixed setting like that where both the officer and enlisted are student and you spend a lot of time together, things will naturally relax within the course setting. Outside the course you are expected to treat them as an enlisted treats an officer. Officers that can't handle dealing with working directly with enlisted sure won't last long.

In general, the officers in the EOD world in my time were very close to the troops. During a time in a unit, we had one fresh out of the course Captain who was a real careerist and tried to play some serious fuck-fuck games including bad mouthing the previous unit Captain to make himself look better. He didn't understand how tight the community is and that the Captain he was badmouthing was well known to the people he was talking to. He made a jackass of himself and due to some other things he got kicked out of EOD. With his attitude, he got no leeway, and was shipped off to be an ammo point officer in about a month.

>>35195241
Why would we call a combat engineer when an 0351 is more qualified? We operate at company and battalion levels. So they'd take as long or longer than EOD.

>>35195241
>>35195231
The "EOD takes too long" is a self fulfilling cycle. People find an IED and call it up, but then the higher level debates calling EOD because "they take too long" and then when they finally put the call in, several hours have already passed. It's a constant headache. Our TOC had gotten calls routed to it after infantry BN sat on it for 6 hours one time.

>They just blow it up

No. There are explosions, but they don't just blow it up unless there is another option. Just blowing shit up where it sits ruins roads and infastructure. It also tells us nothing about how the IED was built. A huge part of the behind the scenes of EOD is tracing together intel on IEDs and patterns, hopefully to establish the identity and location of who is dropping them.

>>35195298
I never said EOD blows it all the time. I said we did. Because that's what they do 90% of the time. So we just did it ourselves instead of waiting. A god damn monkey with a hand grenade can do your job. But then you're -1 monkey.

>>35195339
It's not what gets done 90%. It's done a vast minority of the time. Just because you saw an explosion doesn't mean we just rand over and hucked a chunk of C4 at the IED.

Disarming to allow for protection of roads is important. Often an IED will be disarmed and moved to the nearest place that doesn't cause a problem. Blowing an IED up in the middle of the road compared to a field 50 feet away does make a lot of difference.

Also just blowing up the IED is treating the symptom without getting at the root cause. Without collecting information about the IED, it can't be put together and traced back to do a raid on the guys making or planting them. Doing a raid on a cache house and shutting down IEDs in an area is quite fulfilling.

>>35195122
>What is EOD school like down in Eglin?
hard, I met a commo chick that washed out of EOD. she got recycled twice and said the written tests were never the same when she retested.

>>35195392
It's usually not some big Scooby Doo mystery how they are built and operate. After we had electronic counter measures they mostly used live wire.

We didn't always blow them, you could disarm them effectively and then call EOD. But if we had somewhere to be, and local population or us weren't in jeapordy we did.

It's just you guys take forever. I think you should attach to Infantry and be on standby in areas known to have them. I don't know if you're stretched too thin or what.

>>35195500
>It's usually not some big Scooby Doo mystery how they are built and operate. After we had electronic counter measures they mostly used live wire.

What I am saying is that things are collected leading back to the house of the guy who planted or made the IED. You want to kill that guy right? Otherwise you just keep playing whack'a'mole with his roadside IEDs with no end in sight.

>We didn't always blow them, you could disarm them effectively and then call EOD.
Cutting the command wires? Great, until there is a secondary. You know what else was part of my job? Clearing a potentially hazardous scene after a death and doing a site survey. It's real fun clearing the area around a blown up soldier who thought he could play hero.

>It's just you guys take forever.
See earlier comment, your own BNs and other TOCs will sit on calls before giving them to us.

>I think you should attach to Infantry and be on standby in areas known to have them.
In some cases we are. I spent 6 months attached with an infantry company right along with them as they pushed to make advances into eastern Afghanistan and set up new OPs.

>I don't know if you're stretched too thin or what.
We are also stretched thin. You know that we had a single unit covering two provinces? Keep in mind that a unit is 44 people, including admin and support staff. So, thats 9-10 teams for two provinces, some of who have to be juggled to attach to pre-planned ops, site surveys (yay, getting to do a report on a soldier who accidentally killed himself with a LAW!), and any high priority last minute shit that comes up.

We do often still roll somebody out the wire within 30 minutes of getting a call actually routed to our TOC (you know, when your command decides to finally talk to us). If we are too slow, it's our ass having to talk to our internal higher chain. And so, we've got guys running response after reponse ragged and the thanks we get for showing up is "OMG why do you take so long?????"

>>35195593
In short, we are disarming shit to protect the roads you drive on, so insurgents can't use the blast holes to plant future IEDs. We're collecting evidence and using it to eventually do raids on the guys making the IEDs and stop them from planting more in your path. And then we're having to go through the guts of both your guys and of the enemy to make sure everything is safe to touch.

In short, I'm a fucking low speed monkey and any average infantryman could totally do my job because all I do is toss C4 on IEDs.

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>>35195616
Can you tell some stories on how you operate and what you do your task at a site?

>>35195652
TTPs are basically all kept under wraps for obvious reasons.

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>>35195593
>>35195616
Hey man, I respect what you did over there. I respect every service member no matter what.

Every reason you listed for long delays is the same, chain of command taking forever, and not enough of you guys.

We're you ever in Helmand by any chance? That's when we needed you the most. I guess it's just frustrating because just like you, we had a job to do as Infantry. You had a job to do, clear our path so we could do our job. It's just you weren't at the ready like we would have hoped. We really should focus our hate on the guys who planted them.

I assume you're Army, I was Marine Infantry. We both came home my dude. I was simply telling OP there's a lot of bullshit involved. Thank you for what you did, but I hope you can understand my frustration of it all.

>>35195709
>You had a job to do, clear our path so we could do our job. It's just you weren't at the ready like we would have hoped

Its kinda hard to get to an IED if I haven't been told its there

>>35195709
Never went to Helmand, that's solidly USMC EOD turf. I was central/northeast along AFPAK in the mountains. Occasional trips to central, but only for missions, never stationed.

Long waits make us as frustrated as you. It makes us look bad. Our command probably spent 50% of deployed time yelling at commanders who slow walked calls to us.

When it comes to embedded EOD, the problem is that there are more units who want it than EOD to support it. We embed a lot, but you just might think it doesn't happen because when you're in 1 of 500 units who want embedded EOD, you won't see it much.

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>>35195776
Well that's just jacked. Helmand was IED central. I've had lifts by the Army, but you couldn't cover our AO.

Once again, not blaming you. It's fucking the guys at the top. All it would of taken was a 4 star to realize the situation is FUBAR. Had you guys come in.

Hopefully Mad Dog won't let that happen.