Noah Shachtman in Iraq 0705

Looking through the robot's eyes.

The robot finds an IED -- a wired-up artillery shell, wrapped in white plastic.

Members of the "Joint IED Defeat Task Force," looking rather defeated. They wandered this highway for hours, picking up bombs remnants by hand. Other soldiers took bets on whether they would survive their tour of duty.

There might have been a bomb squad working a few yards away. But this woman had crops to tend.

Lots of vehicles in Iraq look suspicious. But few more than this one.

Dust storms reduced visibility to almost zero.

The spindly-clawed Buffalo armored vehicle digs through Baghdad's rubble piles, looking for improvised bombs.

Rigging up a makeshift x-ray machine, to see what's inside a suspicious package.

The streets of Baghdad are lined with rubble and trash. A bomb could be hidden anywhere.

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CPT Greg Hirschey, head of the 717th EOD Company, drinking his beloved Gatorade slushie.

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SSG Mark Palmer bags a bomb trigger, so forensic analysts in Baghdad and at FBI headquarters in Virginia can examine it.

A pair of aerostats watch over Camp Victory, the American military headuqarters in Iraq.

Noah is strapped in to an 80-pound "bomb suit."

Just to make it into EOD school, soldiers have to carry a 90-pound shell like this around for a half-hour. Five minutes was about all I could take.

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On the shore of a man-made lake near Baghdad's airport, in a once-abandoned warehouse and a cargo container across the street, the Army has its central robot repair and resupply facility. the hub for the largest deployment of robots to a battle zone in history.

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