I was an embedded reporter in Iraq during April and May of 2003. While I was assigned to the U.S. Army's 555th Combat Engineer Group, I spent most of my time with one of its subordinate units, the 14th Combat engineers. It's hard to believe that five years have gone by.

I was back out at Ft. Lewis today, and the 14th engineers are going back to Iraq, for their third tour. But because of the way the military moves people around, and some come as others go, there were no familiar faces. That wasn't the only thing that changed.

In 2003, the unit was prepared for battle against a defined foe - Saddam Hussein's army. One of the things combat engineers deal with is clearing mine fields, and at that point it was believed some 10 million mines had been planted in Iraq, most along the Iranian border.

But while the unit found caches of mines, it also ran up against a new weapon - the IED, or improvised explosive device. And as my brief tour was about to wrap up, the picture that the IED would become the weapon of choice for the enemy was starting to take shape.

Now, the 14th Engineers' primary job is dealing with IEDs. Back in 2003, the unit's only real armored piece of equipment was a bulldozer equipped with a mine plow to dig up mine fields. Today it's the Buffalo, a huge armored truck developed during the war which uses a long arm to pick up and dispose of IEDs before the IEDs can kill U.S. and allied troops.

This is just a slice of the war, and shows just how much this war has changed.


Read about the Fort Lewis battalion's deployement here.

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