Back then it was used to test half-ton ordnance now it serves to study controlled explosives used by soldiers to blast holes through walls and doors in combat areas-standard practice in modern warfare. The mystery of what that thump does had brought me to a World War II bombing range some 40 miles southeast of Denver. “I’ve been in blast events where we’re actually hundreds or even thousands of feet away, and I still feel that thump.”
“You feel the thump,” one team member told me. There was a countdown from five, a low “pow,” and a dull thump in the center of my chest. Outside, shot number 52, trailing a 20-foot length of yellow-and-green-striped detonating cord, was securely taped to the wall of a one-room plywood building with a steel fire door.
Inside the protective bunker I waited with the explosives team, fingers wedged firmly in my ears. Burness Britt waits to be medevaced out of Afghanistan following an IED strike in June 2011.
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