What Is It Like To Get Hit By An IED?

A U.S. soldier with the 2nd Platoon Charlie Troop, 3rd Squadron of 61st Cavalry Regiment takes cover during the controlled detonation of an IED (Improvised Explosive Device). Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Newsweek: Quora Question: What Is It Like to Get Hit by an IED?

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnership here.

Answer from Tymon Kapelski, four years Combat Arms, four years Intel.

I did convoy security as a .50 gunner for about a year in Iraq in '05-'06. My convoy was hit with many IEDs, but close calls were few and far between. There are three events that really stand out in my mind that I'm willing to talk about, one where I was hit, one where another gun truck was hit, and one where another convoy (directly next to me) was hit. They all feel wildly different. First, some background. I deployed as a battery element, this is not the norm. We were 142 people that convoyed together, at minimum one mission a day/night. We slept in/on our trucks for days on occasion, and we were an extremely tight knit group. We only had about six or seven gunners though, and that wasn't a job everyone wanted because you were exposed all the time, so we never got nights off and we were fiercely protective of everyone.

WNU Editor: A good article on how much the IED has changed the U.S. military is the following .... How the IED changed the U.S. military (USA Today).