722nd Ordnance Company trio named Army's top EOD team

A trio of technicians from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, took top honors in the annual EOD Team of the Year competition, besting five other teams in a series of mental and physical obstacles at Virginia's Fort A.P. Hill.

Staff Sgt. Jason Fedak led 722nd Ordnance Company members Lauren Caldwell and Blake White, both specialists, through four day's worth of events that wrapped up Sept. 16 -- and weren't all focused on explosive ordnance disposal.

The soldiers assembled and disassembled weapons, took a fitness test, and were tested on soldering skills such as land navigation and casualty treatment. To up the difficulty, some of the skills tests took place during a ruck march, bringing endurance to bear along with know-how.

And that was just one of the four days. The others presented teams -- most of which had won qualifying contests at the battalion and group level to earn their spots -- with a slew of EOD-related puzzles.

"You never know what you're going to see and run up against," Fedak said. "We run various mission sets ... so anything and everything can be thrown at us. You take each day as it comes, each problem as it comes."

The teams weren't given much choice: Scores weren't posted daily, so they had no idea what the competition was up to. Even after the final gun, an Army spokesman would not release the results, saying they were a "close hold."

While he'd never competed in the event, Fedak's not short on experience -- formerly a sailor, the nine-year service member has made multiple deployments to Iraq and Africa. The team's junior members each have less than five years of service under their belt, but it wasn't as if they could pull from an old test booklet or obstacle course. 

"They're really good about making each toy a little bit different, every year," White, 27, said. 

"We got to see several problems we had not seen before," Fedak, 35, said, adding that the toughest challenge came from an improvised device at a home-made explosives, or HME, lab with a detonation system that had the team briefly stymied.

"We'd never seen that switch before," White said. "Whoever made it was really smart."

Despite the obstacles, the inexperience and the scoring mystery, Fedak never lost faith.

"There wasn't a doubt in my mind about how hard we trained and how far my command team prepped us to go," he said. "I had no second-guesses about the team that I had."