JELUWAR, AFGHANISTAN – JULY 07: Rounds of .50 caliber ammunition sit in an MRAP vehicle with U.S. Army Task Force Thor Route Clearance Patrol from 23rd Engineering Company, Airborne before a day-long route clearance mission July 7, 2010 in Jeluwar, Afghanistan. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Full photoset – HERE
Looks like it would be a stressful job. It’s probably a bad thing that there would be a lot of down time where nothing happens… it wouldn’t be the type of job to get lazy on.
Note: The red tipped bullets you see every 5th round in the picture are Armor Piercing Incendiary Tracers (M20).
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9 responses to “IED Hunters In Afghanistan”
thats API (armor peircing incendiery) rounds for those of you that don’t know . cool stuff, it’ll shredd pretty much anything.
Thanks arron… When I was reading some info on .50 caliber tracers I just stopped at “red tip” which was a tracer… not realizing that further down the list was “red tip with a ring of silver”
Why are the API’s not at the crimp groove?
hmmm good observation. I have no idea. I don’t know anything about reloading, but I wonder if seating a bullet that high would cause problems? Seems to me at the very least it might be more prone to causing jams in certain weapons.
Actually if you look, the tracer rounds are about the same length outside the casing as the non-tracer rounds. the additional stripe probably has someting to do with the extra machining process to install the reactive chemical for the tracer.
What concerns me more is the round that has slid out of it’s linkages to the left of the Tracer round. That is more likely to cause a jam if they don’t inspect the ammo prior to firing it. Which leads me to the question… why is it out of it’s ammo can?
I wondered the same thing, If i caught any of my joes doing that it’d be a bad day.
Interesting… Yea that type of mistake could be the difference between life and death If the weapon jams I suppose. Pretty scary
Question, I was shooting with a friend several months ago, and his last round which was gray tipped just like in the picture started a huge fire. Are these incindiarys also, or tracers, or some other kind of pyrotechnic?
I am part of the 23rd EN CO and was there when this picture was taken. The rounds that are displayed were the main rounds we used during our mission and are placed into a MK19 ammo can to allow us to have aprox. 400 rounds in the gun instead of just 100 from a normal .50 cal ammo can. This picture was taken on one of our maintenance days where the gunner removed to rounds so he could clean them and inspect the rounds. After the maintenance was done I can assure you the rounds were properly seated in the links for myself and my other battle SFC Bennett inspect all weapon systems, ammo, and vehicles before the day is done.