KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - They are the anonymous ones, soldiers who don't talk about their duties and who have perhaps the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the Canadian Forces.
Members of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit -- EOD in military parlance, the bomb squad in layman's terms -- have more than enough work to keep them busy in Afghanistan.
Over the past year, the Taliban have switched from head-on confrontations with coalition troops to devoting most of their time and energy to build improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
Add to that the fact that Afghanistan has more landmines than any other country in the world from 30 years of civil war and a battle against the Soviets, and the problem gets even worse.
A lot of information about the bomb squad is classified and those doing the jobs are reluctant to discuss it.
But Lieut. C. Mackenzie, a veteran EOD specialist, spoke about what it feels like to be in his profession in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Mackenzie is a navy diver. There are bomb experts from the air force, too, working alongside the army; there is just so much work to do getting rid of explosives in Afghanistan.
While new tools, like the Husky mine detection unit, is capable of finding many of the newly hidden IEDs, ultimately it is often the EOD squad that still gets called out.
Mackenzie shies away from suggestions that his job is the most dangerous one in the military.
"I don't like to use the word dangerous," he said with a chuckle.
"My mother said, 'Is it dangerous what you do?' I would say Mom, what I do is hazardous ... At times it can be significantly hazardous, but if it was really dangerous not only would I not be doing it, nobody here would be doing it."
Mackenzie declined to say how his units deal with IEDs, but he did discuss how it feels to be next to something that could snuff out his life in the blink of an eye.
"There is a feeling in the stomach that you get which probably isn't that different than when you're going up to the prettiest girl in the high school and asking her to dance," he said.
"You know it can go either way. It could go really well and you get to dance with the prettiest girl or she'll say No."
"It's the very same feeling you have when you put on that bomb suit and you zip up and you take the long walk, as we call it," Mackenzie said.
"When you take that long walk it's a feeling like nothing else, and I've got the bravest and most capable soldiers working for me that do that type of stuff on a daily basis."
The EOD unit deals with literally dozens of IEDs each week. These are deadly devices. The seven Canadian soldiers who have perished during the current rotation did not die in heated battles with the Taliban. They were killed when their vehicles drove over an IED.
But Mackenzie said there is no lack of soldiers wanting to join the unit.
"Obviously you don't just walk off the streets of Toronto and walk into a recruiting centre and say: 'Hey, you know what? I think I want to be one of those guys who do that EOD stuff I read about in Afghanistan - those guys with the bomb suits and stuff," Mackenzie said.
It takes years of training to get to the stage that an opportunity might come up to join the squad, and those who get the chance don't take it lightly.
"They want to do it. I wouldn't say the challenges are any greater than for those soldiers going outside the wire that face danger or face threat. But make no mistake, when you're working an IED problem you're really working at solving a trap," said Mackenzie.
"They're traps set to harm our soldiers and they are designed to harm a great many people and vehicles. When you're up close and personal like that you definitely have to take it seriously."
