I was invited to give the opening remarks for the 2019 Army EOD Team of the Year competition. They made a Facebook video of the ceremony, and it includes some of my thoughts on EOD culture, risk management and how they intersect. I’m going to post the link here to make it easy to find. I think there are some good thoughts in here. In the future I’ll expand on some of my thoughts and provide the references so you can do your own research.
https://www.facebook.com/USACASCOM/videos/2528646630508508
Give it a listen and tell me what you think in the comments.
Sir,
I feel our culture stems from our ability to problem solve. We develop critical thinking skills learned from solving EOD problems, no two EOD incidents are the same. All most all other jobs in the Army are executed by drills and repetition to get the drill right, make it muscle memory if you will. EOD Techs from the beginning are taught to be different. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it sometimes can be misinterpreted as such. Like your example with the CBRN officer, they have a pretty lock step way of doing their job. When an outsider who unintentionally points out “other ways” of doing business that may be better, it tosses a monkey wrench in their way of thinking and goes against the “muscle memory”. This problem solving ability, when learned, can’t be turned off and becomes how we approach all problems to include non-EOD problems.
Dean, I agree completely. In future posts I’ll talk about the way we are trained, and how that permanently influences our assumptions about the world. Our assumptions about the world are a little different than others’, but they are a deliberate artifact of our training and are designed to keep us alive in a dangerous environment.