EOD is explosive ordinance disposal. That means that we take explosives and we dispose of them. That’s our primary job. The EOD program is one of the most challenging and most difficult schools in the Department of Defense. So once you finish basic training, you’re going to come here to Shepherd Air Force Base, to the Air Force EOD preliminary course. It’s about five weeks long. As soon as you get here, you hit the ground running. Every single day. We do between two and 4 hours a day of physical training. You’re going to feel what it’s like to be hungry, to be tired, to be stressed out all the time.
There’s always going to be heavy robots. There’s going to be heavy equipment that you’re going to have to carry. You have to be fast. You have to be strong. They train for that here.
The rest of the day is going to be filled with academics. You’re going to learn the history of EOD. You’re going to learn all the missions of EOD, and then you’re actually going to be handling the tools. You’re going to be assembling, placing, and firing the tools. And once you’re ready, and we’ve determined that you’re ready, we will take you out to a live demolition range, and you will use live c, four live blasting caps and make it go boom. Once you’ve mastered all the academics, once you’ve mastered the tools, once you’ve mastered demolition, then you’re going to graduate here and move on to the joint service school in Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
The first thing you do once you get here is get your hands on explosives. You’re taught the basic fundamental principles of explosives, different types of explosives, explosive properties, the science behind explosives. We started to introduce you into some of our tools, some of our methods that we use. Your ability to look at an ordinance item and identify it, a little bit of creativity, ingenuity. There’s no two problems that are exactly the same. And then from there, carries on to ground ordinance division, where they’re going to be introduced to grenades, rockets, projectiles, and landmines. A major focus for the Air force specifically is going to be the Air Ordinance division. They’re going to start seeing dispensers and payloads and then aircraft and all aircraft explosive hazards. Next is improvised explosive device division. This is where they’re going to start wearing the bomb suit.
The first time you put that bombsuit on, you close the helmet and realize that there was nothing to be scared of. That was the most rewarding thing I’ve had so far in this training, we.
Are responsible for unexploded ornaments, recovery operations. The test ranges, the bombing ranges get littered with bombs. So we’re responsible to going out there and clearing those bombs. You introduce the robots and it’s really cool because they start using some of the same console controllers, the gaming console controllers that students grow up with.
They say that EOD has nerves of steel, and you don’t come into EOD with nerves of steel, but when you graduate the training pipeline, you most definitely will have those nerves of steel. Never give up, never quit. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be stressful, but it will be worth it in the end.