NORFOLK, Va. - For the entire year he was in Baghdad analyzing more than 1,000 roadside bomb detonators, Benito Baylosis never took a day off. No one did. And no one complained about it, he said, as they explored the electronic circuits of defused improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. "What we did was that important. You get time off when you go home, or on R & R," he said.Baylosis, 41, a Navy lieutenant commander, came back to his hometown of Norfolk to receive the Bronze Star on Tuesday. The award cited him for personally handling more than 1,000 IEDs, providing "critical countermeasures" and saving "countless coalition forces' lives."
"He developed and monitored over 136 bombmaker profiles," said the Army's citation, which added that "no one in the U.S. armed forces knows more about enemy IED initiators utilized in the Iraqi theater of operations."
Baylosis, who graduated from Old Dominion University with an undergraduate electrical engineering degree, will return soon to his regular duty station in Naples, Italy, where his family resides. In Iraq, he headed a team of American, British and Australian military specialists, mainly engineers. He also worked with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gathering forensic evidence for possible future court cases related to terrorism. The team, operating from Camp Victory near the international airport in Baghdad, examined IEDs, traced their origins and turned over information to help find the manufacturer.
"They are some of the most basic forms, from mechanical to electrical, to remote," he said in an interview. Because of the sensitivity of the work, he could not detail what his team found. Published reports say many devices use garage-door openers or cell phones to activate the explosives. Baylosis is assigned to a detachment of the Norfolk-based Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center in Naples. He was the electronics laboratory manager of the Multi-National Corps-Iraq, Combined Explosive Cell in Iraq.
Baylosis said he normally specializes in shipbuilding and program management in his job in Naples, but his electronics skills seemed a good match for what he was asked to do. "We felt that the job we were doing did save lives and will continue to save lives as long as we get to do it," said the father of three. "I think we are making a difference. Obviously, we want to get ahead of the IED maker. We want to be a step ahead of them and with increased security, I think it will eventually get solved. I just don't know the time line."
According to Michael White, who compiles casualty figures of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the Web site icasualties.org, and Defense Department figures, 904 of the 2,087 American service members killed in action in Iraq have died of injuries from IEDs.