Esposito Richard - Bomb Squad: a year inside the nations most exclusive police unit

At the end of the day it always comes down to a man in a Kevlar suit... its man versus bomb

L IEUTENANT M ARK T ORRE , C OMMANDING O FFICER ,
NYPD B OMB S QUAD

In my mind its all business; I dont worry about my family, I dont worry about a function that Im doing after work, I just worry about whats at hand. And whats at hand is that package; I dont want that package to hurt me or hurt the public, so I treat that package as being live, or being an explosive device, no matter what it is.

D ETECTIVE F IRST G RADE J OE P UTKOWSKI ,
S ENIOR M AN , NYPD B OMB S QUAD

T hey are a small group of thirty-three pointedly relaxed, decidedly suburban, offhandedly humorous men who are partial to wash-and-wear pastel shirts and pleasant, just-good-enough ties. They are the current members of the New York City Police Department Bomb Squad. The watches they wear tend to be the kind with thick bezels, clear numbers, and easy-to-read sweep hands.

Measured in precious seconds and eternal minutes standing over a bomb, time is surgically important to these men. Of course they also measure it in all the ways that other police officers measure timein hours on duty or in years on the job. But for them time can suddenly come to an end with a blast wave moving at 26,000 feet per secondan incomprehensible, invisible, soundless force. It smacks and compresses with such speed and such violence that it is not until after it is followed milliseconds later by another wave that bystanders can hear the deafening sound and see the shrapnel-filled fury of the killing force. For the man kneeling over the bomb, this is a requiem. Yet each day they must reach inside themselves in the same offhanded manner in which they draw on their blue Bomb Squad windbreakers, and call on a stillness that allows them to face this destructive force with steady hands.

In existence for 101 years, the NYPD Bomb Squad is the oldest bomb squad in the nation. During those 101 years nearly 500,000 police officers have served New York City. From them, 225 were selected to join the Bomb Squad ranks. Beginning with a surge in domestic terrorism in the late 1960s, these bomb technicians have headed out to an average of more than 2500 stress-filled bomb runs a year.

On December 31, 2003, the authors were invited to join the NYPD Bomb Squad as full-time observers. With the gracious permission of the New York City Police Department and the unanimous consent of the squad members, we were given unprecedented access to the life of their squad room. It was a chance to observe day to day, for three hundred and sixty-five days, an elite unit in action. It was an opportunity to explore what made these ordinary men so willing to take on such extraordinary risks.

This book is a result of that year on the Bomb Squad. It is not a book about the grander themes of a war on terror, or a book about the mechanics of building or taking apart bombs. It is simply a book about bomb technicians.

In the course of a year, the squad thought we should attend the same courses they did, try on the heavy protective suits that they wore, and read the files of past cases that they kept in their basement. To allow us to get a better feel for the rigors of the craft, the United States Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation invited us to audit the basic training course at the Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama. The FBI also allowed us to participate in a Large Vehicle Post Blast forensic course that the Bureau conducts for law enforcement officers and members of the military. The International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators invited us to their conventions and to listen to the technical briefings they offered their members. We drove robots, hid behind bunkers as bombs were detonated, and stood behind our hosts so that we managed to return home with all of our fingers. But this book it is by no means our personal accountthese were simply the tools the squad gave us to enable us to tell their stories. That is what we have tried to do.

At a time when Improvised Explosive Device is a phrase heard on television nightly, it might come as a surprise to discover that those devices are nothing but bombs, the kind of bombs that bomb technicians across the United States take apart every day. It certainly was a surprise to us. Also surprising was the discovery that there are a lot of bombs planted and defused each year in the United States and that this has been going on for a very long time. In one year, now forgotten but just over twenty-five years ago, extremists planted 384 bombs in New York City. A handful of bomb technicians went out to defuse them.

This book is about those individual bomb techniciansthe ones who work in the squad today and the ones who took apart those bombs in the past. As such, it is part oral history. Many living retired members of the Bomb Squad provided us with their memories and their personal files.

The culture of the bomb technician, we came to learn, is not to be found in the five-inch-thick NYPD rule bookthe Patrol Guideor in the regulations of any other police department. Nor is it explained in the volumes of explosives training material. It is a culture that has evolved over the ten decades of trial and error on the part of police officers who donned protective gear, knelt down, said a prayer, and attempted to cut the correct wire, sever a circuit, remove a blasting cap, and defuse a bomb.

The public rarely sees a bomb technician up close. And that is what this book attempts to offera close-up.

Normally, it isnt until a package has been identified as suspicious and an area several hundred to a thousand feet square completely cleared of civilians that a bomb technician will step from behind a big blue and white response truck and into his silent arena. What the public sees is a hooded man behind a ballistic faceplate inside a bulky ninety-pound khaki green Kevlar suit. He lumbers slowly toward danger. The suit cuts off most outside noise so the technician is accompanied only by the sound of his pumping blood. The suit is so hot that he can lose three pounds on a twelve-minute walk to a suspicious package and back. As he walks, he empties his mind of extraneous thought, of useless bravery, and of as much fear as he can. His fingers appear from beneath the cuffs of his armor. Free of any armor themselves, their unimpaired nimbleness is valued more greatly than their potential loss.

The bomb technician plays chess with an opponent who conceals his moves from view inside a fried chicken box, a thermos, a lead pipe, a briefcase, or a backpack. The bomb tech prefers to play the game with no spectators because each disclosed move is removed from his arsenal and added to the opponents. The bomb technicians accepted our word that we would not expose important elements of their craft. Even if certain solutions or tools or bomb-building methods can be found in texts or online, we made our own decision not to add to the propagation of this information.

Something that you might not think a big risk is the willingness of the bomb technicians to allow us to put their names in a book at all. In countries outside of the United States, bomb technicians themselves have been the target of terrorism. The logic behind that is as chilling as it is simple: If the person who can defuse the bomb is eliminated, then the bomber has a greater chance of success. The trust the NYPD Bomb Squad placed in our word was an important part of what made the access they granted us to their lives so special. We hope we have lived up to it.

Richard Esposito and Ted Gerstein
New York, 2006

T IMES S QUARE , N EW Y ORK
D ECEMBER 31, 2003, 4:31 P.M.