Insurgents bury them under mounds of trash, tuck them inside the rims of discarded tires, stuff them into concrete medians. For months it has been the site of a stream of attacks with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Finally they reach a rubble-strewn intersection of two highways that some US troops call the Death X. They convoy for half an hour, passing slow-moving donkey carts and palm trees wrapped in razor wire. Team Mayhem is joined by three more Humvees carrying a dozen security troops from the Louisiana National Guard. It’s a line from the film A Time to Kill. Across the top of the windshield, above the sun visor, Ferraro has scrawled in black ink: Yes, they deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell - Samuel Jackson. Stickers on the front bumper read Team Mayhem, the nickname this three-man team of bomb chasers gave themselves. Behind him, the other members of his squad - sergeant Chris Sager and specialist Jon Ferraro - fall in, and they all pile into a gray-green Humvee. He steps out of the 717th’s workshop, a corrugated plastic shelter in Camp Victory, part of the sprawling American military headquarters next to the Baghdad airport. "Sure thing," Palmer says, reaching for his body armor.
Palmer’s commander, head of the US Army’s 717th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, asks him to go check it out. But someone has just reported a suspicious package in front of the Abu Ghraib prison, and the bomb disposal unit that the staff sergeant’s team is scheduled to relieve has a stalled Humvee - common in Baghdad’s scorching July heat. Mark Palmer isn’t supposed to start work for another five hours.
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