Humvees No Match for Crude Bombs

This is a graveyard for Humvees, the final resting place for the hulking vehicles felled by insurgents’ roadside bombs.

In a parking lot, the U.S. military’s most common personnel carriers lie flattened with noses down in the mud. Their metal carcasses are barely recognizable. Tires have been splayed to the sides or blown away entirely. Shrapnel has burst holes in unprotected parts of the vehicles, as if they were tinfoil.

The nine mangled Humvees here have been destroyed by what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

“Now this one here, you can see the IED tore the whole back end off the vehicle. It’s just gone,” said Sgt. Patrick Parchment of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which operates south of Baghdad.

“The front is sitting cock-eyed. And that’s steel,” he said, showing a visitor another severed vehicle.

The blasted remains do not inspire optimism about the fate of the Marines who had been riding in them. Sixteen Marines of the 24th have died since arriving here in July; 259 have been wounded. The majority of the casualties were caused by IEDs, as Marines must daily brave a gantlet of roadside bombs on highways and dirt roads that cut through farms.

The Marines and Army have almost 20,000 Humvees in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But a quarter of the vehicles do not have proper armor.

The problem came into focus this week when a Tennessee National Guardsman told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that troops had to forage for scrap metal to weld to their vehicles for protection. The confrontation, at a U.S. base in Kuwait, triggered an uproar and raised questions about whether the Pentagon was doing enough to provide safety equipment for the 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

The visit to the Humvee cemetery here was before Rumsfeld’s meeting with the troops.

Marines here said they were at risk every time they left the base to make supply runs or conduct patrols. Surveying the mangled Humvee frames, they shook their heads as they talked about some of the blasts they had survived.

Humvees fitted with steel plating provide the best protection, the Marines said. But they pointed out that many Humvees on this base were being driven with jury-rigged armor that offered only limited defense against shrapnel.

“For the most part, the armor’s doing its job, saving many lives,” said Parchment, a 24-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., whose unit cannibalizes the disabled Humvees for armor and other parts. The extra weight from the armor means the Humvees seldom flip over after they are hit, he said.

But sometimes, finding gaps in the armor, “the shrapnel goes right through the frame,” Parchment said.

Nor is armor any guarantee of avoiding the smashed bones and severed limbs that roadside bombs often cause. And it offers little protection against the bigger explosives that have been used against the Americans.

Marines and soldiers continue to die almost daily from IEDs, the Iraq war’s contribution to the world’s catalog of effective low-tech weapons. But the term “improvised” is misleading because the explosive is typically a factory-produced 155-millimeter artillery shell that stands taller than knee-high.

The shells are usually propped against a post or hidden under roadside mounds of garbage.

The destructive power of shrapnel detonated in the open air has caused record rates of head and neck wounds among U.S. troops, and the rate of limb amputations is double that of previous wars.

On dangerous roads, such as the main highway leading from Baghdad’s airport to this base 25 miles south, the military has torn down guardrails that served as hiding spots for the shells.

The short posts that supported those guardrails remain. The IEDs are frequently propped against them and detonated either by cellphone or by a hired triggerman who simply touches two wires together when the target passes. The Marines say the going rate for someone to plant and detonate a roadside bomb is about $200.

Many Marines want the posts taken down and other hiding places bulldozed.

“On an open road, it’s usually easier to see, but often you usually don’t recognize the trouble until you go by it and then you say, ‘Hmm, that looks suspicious,’ ” said Lance Cpl. Edward Jay Messer, 23, of Mansfield, Ohio, who drives supply trucks.

This unit of 2,200 Marines alone is hit at a rate of two roadside bombs daily, and an average of four are discovered each day. “IED” has become a verb to the Marines: “Some of us have been IED’d five or six times,” Messer said.

Many are aimed at the 7-ton supply trucks that ply the highways, as the shrapnel-pocked fleet sitting in the parking lot of the 24th MEU shows. The Marines try to avoid putting anyone in the unprotected back of the trucks, pushing everyone into the armored cabs, where “you’re fairly well protected,” Parchment said.

Marines continue to be ferried on patrol or into battle in open-air vehicles with little more than thin steel plating welded to the sides and instructions to keep their heads low.

Messer recently drove into the base here with a damaged Humvee in tow.

Partially armored, the disabled vehicle did not look ready for the graveyard. Its frame was unbent; its wheels rolled cleanly.

The only visible damage was a streak of jagged rips along the driver’s side where shrapnel had strafed it.

The punctures started just above the front tire and rose toward the driver’s seat, slicing between the armored side of the hood and the armored door.

“Look at the dashboard if you want to see what happened,” said Messer, with a toss of his head toward the Humvee. The gauges were covered with large drops of dried blood. The Marines did not know whether the driver had survived.

“At the end of the day you just have to trust the hairs on the back of your neck to drive these roads. That, and say your prayers every morning,” he said with a wry smile.

“And every afternoon,” he continued.

“And every night.”

Wallace was recently on assignment with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq.