GRAFTON — A Grafton man who was in an U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team during the Gulf War was thrilled that “The Hurt Locker” won Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards.

Now everyone can see the film about one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army, said Dave Jezewski, an Elyria native and 1990 graduate of Elyria High School.

“I was rooting for it — I thought it was really well done,” Jezewski said.

“I’m sure ‘Avatar’ is a great movie, but this (Army EOD teams) are real life — these people do this stuff every day and they volunteer to do it,” he said.

Many technical aspects were spot on, said Jezewski, who served with the 71st Ordnance Group from 1990 to 1994.

For example, the film showed how a detonating bomb can kill you even if you aren’t struck by any of the debris, he said.

When a plastics explosive called C-4 explodes, the explosion can kill because the gases expand at 24,000 feet per second, he said.

“If you’re too close, that overpressure will jumble you up inside because of the pressure,” he said.

Since he was in the Army, things have changed a bit — the advanced bomb suits now have intercoms so soldiers can talk to each other as well as video cameras so someone away from the danger zone can provide advice, he said.

But the uniforms are still bulky — and heavy. Completely outfitted, his bomb suit weighed about 100 pounds, he said.

Like any fictional account, the movie took some dramatic license, he said. In Kuwait, it would be a busy day if soldiers worked on one or two bombs, and in the movie it looked like they handled 10 a day, he said.

And Jezewski, 37, had to laugh during several portions of the movie, including a segment where one of the stars of the movie used a large knife to rip up the seats of a vehicle containing a bomb in the trunk in hopes of finding the detonation device.

“If I saw a wire going out of the trunk, I would investigate before I started hacking at the seats,” he said. “There were parts of it that were extremely realistic and parts of it that were really over the top.”

One thing that was fairly realistic is how soldiers in the film let off steam by drinking and roughhousing after dangerous duty, he said.

“It might not make sense to a lot of people, but it made sense to me,” he said.

It takes a lot of book work and technical training to become an EOD tech, Jezewski said.

“You have to know how the terrorists build it to know how to disarm it,” he said.

With some bombs, you can’t just snip the wire from the detonating device, Jezewski said. Instead, the EOD techs have a toolset with “all kinds of fancy things to disarm it,” he said.

“One of the EOD mottos is ‘Initial Success or Complete Failure,’ ” said Jezewski, owner of Spray-on-Specialties in Grafton.

Jezewski said he couldn’t even find a theater showing “The Hurt Locker” when it was released over the summer.
“My wife wanted to see it because she knew I had done that in the Army,” he said.

They bought the DVD, but the big Oscar win means that the movie will gain wider attention, Jezewski said.

His wife, Sherri, said they even let her husband’s stepson Nick, 9, and stepdaughter Alexis, 14, watch the movie.

“It was an awesome movie,” Sherri Jezewski said. “Realizing that’s what he did was kind of shocking.”

To this day, she said her husband isn’t one to jump into a task without thinking about it very, very carefully.

While the Jezewski family was cheering on the film in Grafton, some in Oberlin were celebrating, too.

The film’s screenplay was written by Mark Boal, a 1995 graduate of Oberlin College and a freelance writer who was embedded as a journalist with a bomb squad. After the win, Boal made stops at NBC’s “Today” show and was interviewed by other media.

The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win for best director.

Contact Cindy Leise at 329-7245 or cleise@chroniclet.com.

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