It s not quite an Oscar-winning performance but Johnny Five gets the job done, scrambling down a rocky Afghan slope to plant explosives around a propane tank wired to blow.
The little robot – technically known as a TALON but nicknamed Johnny Five after the 1986 US film Short Circuit – slowly makes its way back up to a hulking armored vehicle where bomb disposal experts prepare to detonate.
Twenty seconds! a soldier shouts, as a US army commander frantically gestures to Afghan police and farmers to take cover in the dusty fields around Yosef Khel village in eastern Paktika province.
Soldiers and civilians crouch behind a mud wall with fingers in their ears before a moderate bang sends a cloud of smoke into the air. The troops then head back to base, their four-hour mission to defuse the bomb safely completed.
The Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker, about a bomb disposal unit working the hazardous streets of Iraq, propelled the dangerous work of military explosives specialists into the public eye.
In the film, which won Kathryn Bigelow the Best Director Oscar, a three-man team led by battle-hardened maverick Staff Sergeant William James embark on one frantic mission after another.
Something always goes wrong, explosions fill the screen and James risks lives by disobeying the rules in an adrenaline-fuelled film, high on drama but – actual bomb disposal experts say – low on realism.
If I had a team member that operated that way, I would not go outside the wire (off the base) with him, said one member of the US military s explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) unit based in eastern Afghanistan.
He is not professional, not safe, taking too many unnecessary risks. Out here, we re not looking for that shit. I m doing this to save lives.
The EOD team is a brotherhood of select individuals who have worked together as safely as possible since World War II, he said.
The Hurt Locker did not portray that and you will be hard pressed to find any EOD technicians who enjoyed that movie for what it was, he told AFP.
The expert asked not to be named as the EOD has ordered its personnel not to discuss the film in detail, wary that any revelations about their operations might help insurgents counter their techniques and build deadlier bombs.
The Hurt Locker may be set in Iraq but it is the war in Afghanistan – now in a ninth year – where home-made bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are taking the heaviest toll on foreign soldiers and Afghans.
The ingenious devices use mobile phones, batteries, fertilizer, pressure plates and springs and are the most deadly weapon in the militants armory.
IEDs hamper both military and development work in Afghanistan and are blamed for most of the deaths of foreign soldiers.
These (EOD) guys are the bee s knees, they save lives and they enable us to do our job, said Major Mark Leslie, operations officer for 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment based in western Paktika.
Captain Julie Klimach, company commander for the EOD team at NATO s Forward Operating Base Salerno in neighboring Khost province, is hardly the type of macho bomb disposal expert portrayed in The Hurt Locker.
Slight and bookish with glasses and shoulder-length hair, the biology and chemistry graduate was attracted to the bomb disposal unit by the technical aspects of what she describes as not your average job.
Klimach has been working in bomb disposal for more than three years and says it is not a great deal more dangerous than many other military jobs but has not told her family exactly what she does.
They know a little bit but they don t know much about it. I don t want to worry them, she said.
The Salerno EOD team leader Staff Sergeant Charles Johnson has also avoided telling his parents about his work, which he says attracts a certain type of person.
You have to have a certain mindset, just being comfortable with working with explosives or around things that are possibly fatal if you mishandle them, he said.
The father-of-two called The Hurt Locker, which he has avoided seeing, unrealistic and said moviegoers inspired to join their ranks after watching the film will be disappointed.
If they want to come to the EOD strictly for watching the film, they live in a pipe dream, he said.
