News

Reservist's explosive performance earns Bronze Star

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Paul Haley
  • 446th Airlift Wing
MCCHORD AIR FORCE BASE, Wash. --  No member of his assigned unit in Iraq was killed on his watch. The award of the Bronze Star Medal to Tech. Sgt. David Ewbank is a testament to his role in establishing that fact.
 
Almost 17 years ago, Air Force Reservist Sergeant Ewbank got his first taste of demolitions when he temporarily assisted a Marine explosive ordnance disposal unit during operation Desert Shield. 

That brief exposure led him in July 1998 to become an Air Force Reserve EOD operator with the 446th Civil Engineer Squadron, which then led to earning a Bronze Star Medal. 

Sergeant Ewbank received his Bronze Star for his performance while deployed to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division from May through October 2006. During his deployment, no member of the unit was killed in action. 

Army Lt. Col. Brian Coppersmith, the commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, said he attributed their complete lack of deaths, in part, to the involvement of the Air Force explosive ordnance disposal team. 

At the end of the deployment, the commander of the 101st AD recognized the entire EOD shop by awarding them unit coins during a formation. 

During Sergeant Ewbank's stay in the Middle East, however, it wasn't all awards and congratulations. His experiences ran the gamut from mundane to insane. 

"It was predictable: every (American) national holiday they (the insurgents) launched rockets over the fence, so some time between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. we had to gear up and go out looking for holes in the runway," said Sergeant Ewbank in his characteristically husky voice. 

The insurgents seemed to put great significance on the timing of their attacks. They attacked on holidays, or days they believed their enemies considered holy. They frequently attacked on Sunday mornings for the same reason: because the terrorist factions related it to Christians going to church. 

One Sunday morning there were eight suicide car bomb attacks. Sergeant Ewbank was called to clear one such site after the detonation. Just as he was starting, a Kurdish police officer approached him and said they had killed a suicide car bomber before the car detonated. 

The bomber tried to attack a Kurdish police station, and a police officer shot him in the head before he reached the station. The car continued rolling until it hit the station, but it didn't blow up. 

The police officer asked Sergeant Ewbank to come disarm the bomb. 

To have a live bomb not blow up is a rarity and something EOD operators look forward to experiencing. 

"It isn't every day you get a chance like that," Sergeant Ewbank said. 

Explosive ordnance disposal specialists have ways of taking bombs apart while keeping themselves and others in one piece. They use robots to cut wires and blow pieces of the bombs apart, or deliberately set the bomb off when it is safe to do so.
Using the camera on the robot, Sergeant Ewbank could see the terrorist had the trigger in his hand. His fingers were curled around the housing and his thumb was just over the button. 

Sergeant Ewbank used a remote disruption technique to cut the wires to the trigger he could see. Before anyone could approach the car, though, it had to be personally cleared by him to ensure everything was safe. 

While checking the car, Sergeant Ewbank found a second trigger beside the driver's seat. It looked like the driver could have leaned on it to detonate the explosive, in case he couldn't use the hand trigger. Luckily, the bomber didn't hit it when the police officer killed him. 

"I couldn't see the secondary trigger from the camera, so when I cleared the car, I found it and had to disable it myself," he said. "It was in a neighborhood, so we couldn't detonate it in place." 

Sgt. Ewbank kept a great deal of intelligence intact by disarming the bomb, where it would normally be destroyed by the blast. 

"The intel guys were thrilled with everything they got from the bomber," said Sergeant Ewbank. 

One of the lowest experiences of his deployment was responding to an attack in which an American truck was hit by an explosive-formed projectile. 

An explosive-formed projectile, or EFP, is a bomb that uses its explosion to create a hot, concentrated jet of metal to pierce armor. 

After a vehicle or area is hit by an explosive, EOD must clear the vehicle or area before anyone can approach it. No one can disturb anything in the vehicle except to get injured people out. 

"Something I never, ever, read in my job description was: you'll have to move body parts out of the way to clear a vehicle. After this EFP hit a Humvee, we went in to check for unexploded parts of the projectile and for any ordnance they may have been carrying that was now in an unsafe state," Sergeant Ewbank explained. "When we opened the door, there was a hole in the door at about thigh-level, and there was a leg inside the truck. I mean, it was a leg in an Army uniform with the boot still on." 

The leg belonged to an American soldier riding in the vehicle when the projectile hit it. The soldier survived, but the soldier' s comrades, rushing to evacuate the injured troop to safety, left the appendage behind. The EOD team suspended their work long enough to hustle the leg to its owner in the hope doctors could reattach it. 

Sergeant Ewbank is still modest about his performance while deployed, in spite of receiving a medal as significant as the Bronze Star. 

"I just put on my body armor, loaded my guns, and did my job," he said. "My real motivation to get up at 3 a.m., and get geared up was to send Army guys home with both legs."