LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — With a deadly bomb possibly lying just inches under their feet, any sane person would — oh, I don’t know — run away. But these uniformed madmen have a job to do. They run toward a potential explosive, with nothing but steady hands and body armor to protect them.

It might seem nuts, but the calculated insanity practiced by teams of U.S. Army engineers may be slowly turning the tide against Afghanistan’s insurgent bombers.

On Friday afternoon in Logar Province, just south of Kabul in eastern Afghanistan, Spc. Justin Torres and Pvt. Wendell Burley, both from the U.S. Army’s 541st Engineer Company, are patrolling a dirt road with their handheld metal detectors when they pinpoint a suspicious, buried object.

It could be nothing: garbage or decades-old scrap. Or it could be one of the roughly 1,300 bombs a month that the Taliban and other armed groups use to attack NATO forces. There’s just one way to be truly certain. Torres and Burley step aside; Sgt. Leslie Pittman and another NCO unsheathe their bayonets, leap on the spot Torres and Burley indicate, and begin digging.

The two veteran engineers have scraped several inches below the road’s surface when there’s a ding sound. One of them has struck metal. I’m standing nearby with a video camera rolling. And although I’m a veteran of several bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan — or maybe because I am — I suck in my breath and hold it.

What happens next defines the days of Torres, Burley, Pittman and the other members of Logar’s “Route-Clearance Patrol,” a team whose purpose is to stumble across roadside bombs before other soldiers do.

The original route patrols, formed during the height of Iraq’s bloody homemade-bomb fight, mostly stayed inside their high-tech, blast-resistant vehicles. In Afghanistan, a country that lacks Iraq’s relatively well-developed infrastructure — or even paved roads — the route patrols increasingly move on foot, reviving the brute simple, metal-detector-and-bayonet tactics that were common as far back as World War II.

“There’s more risk putting boots on the ground,” says Capt. Brandon Drobenak, the 541st’s young commander. “But it works.”

The official stats corroborate Drobenak’s claim. Between August and February, NATO’s route patrols, bomb squads and other anti-improvised explosive device (IED) units have reduced the number of troops killed and wounded by explosives by more than a third, to just 200 or so per month. And the percentage of effective bombs concocted by the Taliban is dropping, even as the bombs cranked out by the Taliban stays north of 1,300 a month.

All the same, coalition IED casualties remain high: there were nearly 8,000 last year. With warm weather fast approaching in Afghanistan and the ground thawing, the 541st’s engineers say they expect the number of bombs, and bomb casualties, to increase somewhat compared to this winter — though hopefully the levels won’t exceed 2010’s.

The IED-fighters have reason to be optimistic. More than a decade into the Afghanistan war, they might have finally figured out the right approach to the conflict’s bomb problem. It’s a major departure from the strategy that worked in Iraq. And it stands a good chance of continuing to work even after NATO has handed off combat operations to the still-developing Afghan army.

In both conflicts, coalition forces learned to aim “left of boom.” That is, to use CSI-style forensics to identify bomb-makers and bomb-placers and to kill or capture them before they can target coalition troops.

The difference is on the front line, where route patrols must deal with the bombs that leak through the left-of-boom operations. In Iraq, the route patrols cruised up and down the highways in their tricked-out armored vehicles, essentially absorbing the bomb blasts so that other forces wouldn’t have to. I accompanied one route patrol in north-central Iraq in 2005 — and trust me, it was nerve-wracking.

Compared to Iraq’s paved highways, Afghanistan’s mostly dirt roads really suck. The poor quality of the roads forced the route-clearers and other forces to get out of their vehicles and walk.

The route patrols turned that liability into a strength. Rather than breezing down a road at cruising speed, like they might in Iraq, in Afghanistan the route-patrol units move at a walking pace. And where the scanners on a fast-moving vehicle might miss carefully hidden bombs, a foot patrol examining and probing every square inch is unlikely to miss anything.

“We’re slow and methodical,” Drobenak explains.

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