WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GET BLOWN UP

It’s hard to know what to think about the attack on Iran. Getting blown up in Afghanistan has helped me make sense of such things…

I was riding in a Humvee with American troops in Afghanistan in 2008 when we were blown up by a homemade pressure cooker bomb dug into the soft dirt at a crook in the road. I was in the second truck of an American convoy that was snaking its way into the infamous Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, and I had been instructed that we’d probably get hit on the way in and that I’d probably have to pass ammo up to the gunner. The company commander was in the forward passenger seat, and he was just saying to the driver, “We’re going to pull around that corner –“ when the whole world turned orange. If he’d been able to get to the next word, we might have died; the man who blew us up touched his wires to the battery a moment too soon. The explosion tore up the front of the Humvee but left the crew compartment intact.

The image, above, is a frame from the video I was shooting when the bomb went off. It shows the exact moment of the explosion. My memory is that I seemed to know it was about to happen a fraction of a second before it did, as if the world had just inhaled sharply. A lot of dirt rapped down on the windshield, which made everything dark, and there was heavy shooting around us. I felt so calm that I was worried I was in shock from a wound and ran my hands down my shins to make sure my feet were still there. The Humvee was burning and we were breathing toxic smoke, so the captain gave the order to bail out, and we threw the doors open and ran. I went behind the next Humvee in the column, which was pumping 40 mm rounds into the hillside, and then joined the men who were moving up the draw to clear it of enemy. The bomber was long gone, but we found the electric wires and double-A battery that he’d used to blow us up.