Watched Hurt Locker over the weekend. With due allowance for the bloopers logged by Jonathan Foreman (some of which were spotted by my son, a 14-year-old military-matters geek), I thought it was pretty good on effects and suspense, though a bit feeble on psychology. Like so many other movies. Is this a gadget-y age, or what?
I was only once anywhere near bomb-disposal guys. As the British Army downscaled in the 1960s, there were a lot of empty barracks lying around. We weekend warriors, and some regulars too, used to get sent to these dismal, disintegrating places for short training courses in this or that. Circa 1969 I was at a range course in the north of England, with three or four small, unrelated regular units doing other things in the same barracks, and all messing together with us. One of them was a bomb-disposal squad. If there was anything personality-wise to distinguish them from the other regulars, it escaped me; but I did notice that, rank for rank, they were treated with great respect.
The appeal of bomb-disposal work isn’t hard to figure. For some common personality types, including mine, instantaneous annihilation — the usual fate of an unlucky or incompetent EOD tech — is far preferable to being blinded, paralyzed, or otherwise maimed. I’d guess this attitude is quite widespread among soldiers in combat, though my usual go-to reference on points like this, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, doesn’t really tell us. And then there’s the techy-geeky thing, tracing wires and figuring connections, that kept so many young guys out in their driveways fixing their cars all day Saturday . . . before video games came up . . .