Listening to Creedence after an IED cracks our windshield

The 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade, Special Troop Battalion, Alpha Co.--"The Annihilators"--let me ride along in their convoy this week as they went hunting for IEDs.

They found two. I was with 'em when they found the first one.

I was in a Buffalo, a heavily armored Hummer-on-steroids that protects soldiers better than most any other rig in Iraq or Afganistan. About 28 tons of protection.

It was just enough.

Sergeant First Class Andrew Hay, Oshkosh, Wis., Staff Sergeant Robert Block of East Hardwick, Vt., and Specialist Thomas Butler of Boise, Idaho, were the noncommissioned officer in charge, the IED equipment operator and the driver of this behemoth. "We've found 48 IEDs," said Hay, a laconic guy you're glad has your back. "I consider that 48 lives saved."

So far in its 10 months of deployment, the unit has lost no soldiers killed, but three have been wounded with concussions and sent back to the U.S. for treatment. [For some reason, some bubblehead in the U.S. military started calling concussions TBIs, "traumatic brain injuries."]

Around 3 p.m. on a dusty macadam farm road caled Macys by the military, maybe an hour's 15-mph drive from the big base at Kirkuk, there came a PING!

The Husky, a one-man vehicle also metaled like a medieval knight, had registered a suspicious object under the road it had just passed over.

The Buffalo was called up to check out the slightly disturbed asphalt about a foot square. Then Sgt. Block unlimbered from the top of the "truck" (as GIs routinely call most everything with wheels and axles)a 25-foot-long claw shovel with fork-like tines a foot long and thick as a hammer handle. The whole vehicle shuddered as the claw dug deftly around the disturbance in the dirt.

"Bang-Bang 1-6, we got rounds, we have a round."

"You wanna poke around and leave the round in the hole?"

"Yeah, roger."

They'd found a "nonstandard cylindrical object 6 inches in diameter, 12 to 15 inches long, lying horizontal and diagonal in the road."

An IED.

The EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) rig next to us then dispatched a Mars Lander-like machine called a Talon, a treaded robot on a wire that "interrogated" the IED further--the verb used by the demolition experts to describe dealing with a device that's killed thousands in Iraq.

Talon confirmed more about the homemeade bomb; then. as Specialist Butler videotaped, the IED was blown up by remote control.

WHOOMPH!

Our huge rig shook, and a second later the windshield spider-webbed with a loud THWACK! We were 75 meters back, and we still juddered like a roller coaster car and got whacked with high-speed debris.

"Rock or metal?" SFC Hay asked, chewing an oatmeal raisin cookie.

"Pro'ly a rock," Sgt. Block drawled.

The homemade bomb turned out to be a fire extinguisher filled with about 30 pounds of UBE--unknown bulk explosive--which could be ammonium nitrate (like the Oklahoma City bomb) or two dozen other lethal ingredients.

After a more detailed report was filed back to the big base for overall intel evaluation, we learned that the EOD truck next to us was "dead in the water." Something wrong with one of its axles or the pneumatic system.

So a new EOD vehicle was sent out from home base, along with a flatbed to retrieve the wounded rig and two Humvees for security.

The Annihilators pressed on with their mission, which wouldn't bring them back to base till afer 10 p.m. I had to link up with another unit at 6:30 next morning, so I hopped in the disabled vehicle for the ride back to base.

Inside were three Air Force guys--hard-core because of their demolitions expertise and all staff sergeants: Daniel Fye, Will Roberts and James Joiner.

As we were towed by the flatbed, Fye muttered a two-word Anglo-Saxon expression and added, over the internal commo link, "Let's hear some Creedence."

So for the hour it took us to get back to base, we listened on our high-speed, low-drag headphones to one of the three best rock groups America has ever produced. In 1969-70, as Bruce Springsteen said at their Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame induction a few years back, "For a couple years there, these guys weren't the hippest band, weren't the coolest in the world. Just the best."

Creedence Clearwater Revival.

That's sure how the soldiers I was with in Vietnam felt about 'em. "They never made a bad record," said my buddy, Specialist Ron Silver of Iowa.

So in 2008, nearly 40 years after listening to CCR's lyrics as the soundtrack of my war, here I was in another war, listening to 'em again. Fye's dad had turned him onto them.

I had a flashback.

A good one.

A day that started with a bang ended the same way.

As we were towed past a boy herding sheep, goats, cattle and a mule, a fortunate son was watching a bad moon risin'....