On Sunday I wrote a piece about “racing turtles,” trying to convey the image of mine warfare. You move slowly and calmly because the mine and mechanical booby trap have much more patience than you do. They will sit there, immobile, quiet, with neither breath of inhalation nor buzz-click of timer, waiting for you to find them.

Mines and booby traps come in different styles and types. After four years of Mr Bu$h’s ego-war many Americans know abut them to the extent that they are called IEDs, or VBIEDs (vehicle borne) which is also the term for “very big” IEDS, unless they’re called “big m-f’s.” Some Americans are also familiar with the effects of these bombs – the shattered, missing limbs, destroyed eyes and brains – a trail of wreckage that will haunt our nation for 50 or 60 years in some cases.

Michael Gordon describes bomb-hunting in this morning’s NY Times and to his credit he only mis-describes the insurgents as “al Qaeda” once.

[T]here were a few early indications that the bomb threat in the area might be more challenging than the Americans had expected. The street the soldiers had raced across was strewn with slender copper wires, which the insurgents used to set off buried bombs powerful enough to upend armored vehicles.

As the platoon watched from its new foothold south of the road, a Buffalo vehicle, a heavily armored truck with a V-shaped body to dissipate bomb blasts and a giant mechanical claw, began to scour the nearby roads for bombs. It found three, which were exploded by American combat engineers.

“Controlled dets,” a soldier called out, referring to a deliberate detonation of a discovered bomb. The good news was that the buried bombs had been found and neutralized. But some had been deeply buried on the road the platoon had just crossed.

In discussing the “Lebanese flypaper” I tried to give a quick sense of some of the difficulty encountered by infantry and armor in the steep hills of Southern Lebanon, because that is what the troops in Baquba are facing. Buildings are hills; streets are valleys. When the streets are mined, you either risk getting killed to pass through, or you sit and wait. The third method, climbing on top of the buildings, doesn’t work, as the unit Gordon was with found out.

To blast a path through the next bomb-ridden stretch of road, combat engineers brought in a mine-clearing device. A bright fireball appeared over the street and a cloud of gritty dust engulfed the platoon’s house as the soldiers huddled in the back and plugged their ears.

Afterward, as Sgt. Philip Ness-Hunkin, 24, walked to the house next door, he saw copper wires leading to the home. The gate was unlocked and the front door was invitingly open.

“Right in the front door there was a pressure plate under a piece of wood,” he said, referring to a mine that is set to blow when it is stepped on. “Over in that neighborhood there were wires going all over the place.”

“H-BIED,” a soldier called out, using the military’s acronym for a house-borne improvised explosive device.

The last place the platoon wanted to be was next door to a house bomb and a series of structures that had not been cleared. If the soldiers got into a firefight and had to dart in and out of the houses along the road, they might be diving into a series of deadly booby traps, explained First Lt. Charles Morton, 25, the platoon leader.

The explosive-rigged house needed to be destroyed by an airstrike or artillery fire. So the soldiers were instructed to move back across the road they had just crossed.

Once there, the troops clambered into a two-story house. When Sergeant Mennitto got to the second floor, however, he spotted antiaircraft ammunition and a detonation cord next to two propane tanks. The platoon had escaped from one house bomb, only to encounter another.

So this platoon’s advance was held up for a day while they waited for artillery or an airstrike to clear the houses for them. The next day, finally, an M1 tank appeared and blew the houses with its main gun.

The insurgents/Sunnis/Mahdi Army death squads/resistance/ militants/Ba’athist dead enders are going to make the Americans destroy as much of Baquba as they can.

Nothing makes a people more loyal to a resistance than having their homes destroyed by a foreign occupier. It’s funny; I learned this back in the Viet Nam era. I don’t think many of our military leaders were around, then.