Insurgents have hidden improvised explosive devices throughout a small city in Iraq.

Your task is to locate and disarm the IEDs using a robot.

Oh, and make sure no one, including the robot, gets hurt.

This is a task Staff Sgt. Mark Walker, an EOD robot technician for the 62nd Civil Engineer Squadron's EOD flight, faces on a regular basis.  Though some people might shy away from such a job, Walker thrives in it.

"I became an EOD robot operator because of the ‘wow' factor," said Walker, who attended EOD robot training in 2005. "I have always been involved with extreme sports.  The rush you get when you jump off a cliff is the same rush you get when you put on a bomb suit."

Despite warnings about the job prior to enlisting in the Air Force, Walker gave his boss his two-week notice.  His boss asked him what he would be doing in the Air force, and after Walker told him, his boss said, "You know, you don't have to work on bombs," Walker recalled.

After attending 6 to 9 months of training, Walker learned the skills needed to disarm and destroy IEDs.

He learned about chemical and biological munitions, and he can look at just about any bomb fuse and tell you where it was made and how to diffuse it.

At the end of the training, he spent a week learning how to use the robots. Ranging in size from 30 to 500 pounds, the robots, which run off an antenna or fiber optics, have night vision, carry shotguns, contain microphones and speakers, and are designed to disarm and shoot bombs.

"The robots can carry an explosive charge," he said.  "They can carry detectors that detect radiological or chemical threats that are 100 meters to a half mile."

For Walker, who enlisted in the Air Force at age 25, learning to use the robot was sometimes difficult. Many of the robots were controlled with Playstation 2 controllers, and like his younger peers, he did not play games on the system. It also takes time to get a feel for the robot platform as a whole, he said.

"The robot has several cameras strategically placed," Walker said.  "You have to look beyond the one camera and understand the big picture.  What you see in one camera is not everything going on around the robot."

However, some aspects of robotics came easy for Walker due to his training. During the school, the instructors created an atmosphere of stress, he said.

"It's easy to remove yourself from the situation when you use a robot," he said. "During my first Iraq deployment I never felt too scared.  The jump off the cliff thrill never happened.  The first thing deployed is always the robot.  I know that if something happens the only thing that would be blown up would be the robot, not my team leader or a friend."

At the same time, the job can be tedious and boring.

"You can sit behind a robot for four hours," Walker said. "Sometimes we disarm the bombs, and sometimes they explode.  But it can take time to do it."

Despite the dangers of the job, it is rewarding.  He explained that during his last deployment to Afghanistan, he worked with a Danish team and a British Royal Engineers Search Team.  In a seven-day period, they found and disarmed 29 IEDs, he said.

"The Danish team had lost three men in their Army close to their base prior to our helping them," he said.  "Losing three men was a huge blow when the entire Army is only about 3,500 men.  It was just great that we helped make it safe for them.  It is not about being in an ongoing war, it's about making it safer."