SPC Moshe Robbins (USA 2011-2018)
Interviewed by Chaplain Dovid Grossman
I joined the Army in 2011, serving with an EOD unit. In 2013, we were deployed to Afghanistan. I brought Tefillin with me because my wife insisted that I put on tefillin every day. She told me, “If it’s going to protect you, I want you to put it on every day.” Me, being the good husband that I am, listened to my wife. Before Afghanistan, none of my military friends had ever seen Tefillin before, let alone seen me putting them on. But once they saw it, they would call the Tefillin my “Jew straps.” One friend in particular, Babcock, used to remind me to put them on every day. He was a joking and crass kind of guy. On one hand, this was a fun way for him to mess with me, but also, he did remind me to get it done!
While I was there, I had two team leaders. The first one was the type that every time we had an IED (improvised explosive device), he would get on one knee and pray before walking down on it. I say all the power to him—but to be honest, the two of us didn’t get along great. He had a different mindset on how to do things. Babcock, on the other hand, had a completely different attitude. He was smart, he was good at what he did, but he didn’t mess around with a lot of the stuff that most of us agreed was nonsense. And he definitely didn’t drop on one knee and pray before every time we went down on an IED.
One day, we went out on a call, with the Polish forces as our security. We were called to an Afghani police station where they had found an IED. We got to the police station, and I dropped off the robot. The suspected explosive device was in a culvert, and I drove the robot in. Sure enough, there’s an IED there. I could see it—it had a remote control device on it. I went in with the robot and was able to successfully rip the remote off the IED. Now there was just the yellow jug there with the explosives. So I picked it up using the robot’s arm and drove it out into the adjacent field. The whole thing was done without anyone having to walk down there. We were feeling good; the mission was just about accomplished. We were happy, and ready to go.
But once that’s all said and done, we still have to clear the scene. Babcock, as the team leader, walked up to the other side while we crossed the culvert. As he walked back, I kept an eye on him from the back of the vehicle. At the same time, I was also prepping up a charge to detonate the rest of the IED that we found, because we still had to blow it up and get rid of it, while keeping the radio for evidence. Behind me, the Afghani cops were talking to me while I was wrapping my charge, and keeping an eye on Babcock. He walked back along the road until he got to the side that the IED was on. He then peeked over the side of the culvert to clear the scene.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous blast—a second explosive was buried underneath the first IED, and it detonated right there, with Babcock right above it!
The blast went outward, and Babcock’s body hit the dirt. My other team members were a little bit further back from him, and they all dropped down like ninepins. Immediately, I dropped what I was doing, and turned backward; but the Afghanis behind me just disappeared, poof; I have no idea where they went.
In those hectic few seconds, I started screaming at the Polish forces behind me to get medical, while I started running up towards Babcock, fearing the absolute worst. He lay prone on the ground, motionless. As I’m running up (and this is the part of the story where I always make fun of him for being fat), to my absolute surprise, he hops up, and his large girth just starts wobbling as he starts hustling in double time to get back to the safety of the truck. He’s fine; his bell is obviously rung and he’s shaken up—after all, he was only a few feet away from the detonation, and he should not have been able to just hop back up. I think that the wave of the blast happened to go outward instead of going up, saving his life.
But to my shock, when he reached the truck, I saw that he had this goofy smile on his face, and he called me. “Robbins!” Before saying anything else, he yells out, “Your JEW STRAPS! Your Jew straps did this!”
Originally published in the Shavous/Three Weeks 5784 issue of The Jewish American Warrior.
