inspired

Man, Bomb, and Holy Spirit
Snr. Lt. Marko Haukkamäki is one of Finland's most adept bomb disposal experts and a devout Pentecostalist. Jesus helps him in his dangerous work.


By Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen

Senior Lieutenant Marko Haukkamäki puts a Yugoslav hand-grenade on the table. The grenade, which fitss in an open hand, is heavy for its size.
Fortunately this is just a harmless teaching aid and not a live round. Haukkamäki shows off the grenade at his workplace, a classroom at the Engineer Regiment's training facilities in Keuruu, in Central Finland.

Haukkamäki came upon a booby-trap utilising one of these devices three years ago while serving in Kosovo.
It was in the doorway of a department store in Pristina. He walked up to the grenade in his bulky "bombsuit" or blast suit, took a good long look at it, decuded correctly that it was a dud, and picked it up.
Haukkamäki, 38, is one of Finland's leading bomb disposal experts, and he leads the mine clearance course at the Engineers' School.
He has rendered safe a hundred or so explosive devices and items of UXO - unexploded ordnance - and has received training at the National Defence College in Lappeenranta and in Denmark, Great Britain, and Ireland.

His profession is to train army personnel (not conscripts) in the mysteries of explosives.
And if the driver of an excavator or back-hoe on a construction site happens to stumble across an unexploded bomb dropped in the war, then Haukkamäki is the one who gets the call to arms.
A competent junior officer, without a doubt.
But that is not quite all.
As his help in times of trouble, Haukkamäki has one extremely powerful friend: Jesus Christ.

A week ago, the film The Hurt Locker opened in Finnish cinemas.
Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty as members of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq, the independent movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow has won widespread acclaim and picked up several awards.
As a subject, bomb disposal has been little covered in mainstream cinema, for all that it is highly topical in the world of improvised explosive devices and roadside bombs that we read of daily in the news from Iraq and Afghanistan.

What sort of person winds up in this sort of business?
Haukkamäki has himself seen the film.
The lead character, an American sergeant, is portrayed as a reckless hothead with a constant need to get his adrenaline fix, who rips bombs away from their wiring and clips cables with pliers.
"Not someone like him", says the Lieutenant.
"All movies give the wrong impression of explosives clearance work. The bit where you are snipping wires with a pair of pliers is the very last and the lowliest resort in our arsenal of methods."

In real life dismantling situations, one tries as far as possible not to handle the explosive device at all.
An important tool is the remote-controlled robot - admittedly something that does also feature in movies.
This device, a remote controlled vehicle or RCV, sometimes called a "Wheelbarrow", comes equipped with video cameras to provide a close-up image of the bomb or UXO, and a mechanical arm for handling.
Bombs can be made harmless for instance by glueing, welding, or burning them. Or by blowing them up in a controlled manner, just as the booby-trap grenade in Kosovo was blown up.

And as for the bomb disposal expert himself, he has to be C-A-L-M with a capital C.
Unlike Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner's character) in The Hurt Locker.
Marko Haukkamäki says he feels a sense of "supernatural peace" descending on him when he walks towards a bomb with his blast suit on.
The calm comes from Jesus and the Holy Spirit, which Haukkamäki took into his life last winter.

He speaks openly and proudly of his religious convictions.
Before he found his faith, he says his life was in a knot. He drank too much, got stressed out at work, watched porn films, and above all made a complete pig's ear of his human relationships.
"I wound up in the sort of situation where I could not see any way out but to cry out Jesus's name", says Haukkamäki in the sappers' classroom.
And Jesus answered.
The whisky was poured down the sink, Metallica changed to gospel music.
The former member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church found a new spititual home with the Pentecostalists.

The reason for the change of church was that the Pentecostal rites are "more intensive, more joyful, and have more feeling to them" than the state church.
And the Pentecostalist teachings lay emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit, important to Haukkamäki personally.
The Holy Spirit entered into Haukkamäki two weeks after he found Jesus.
"it was a very powerful experience. Tears and laughter all flooding out at the same time. A complete release; a quite incredible sensation."

Haukkamäki now believes that God led him to this kind of vocation. He first became interested in explosives technology in the Finnish Defence Forces in 1990.
When he steps towards the unknown of an unexploded bomb, Haukkamäki feels no fear inside his suit, because Jesus is watching over him.
"All my thoughts are focused on the job in hand. If you feel fear, then the fear comes before or afterwards. I believe that is how the body works - when the need arises, the entire system comes into sharp focus on the most important things", he says.
Sometimes, Haukkamäki says, during a dismantling mission, he can speak in tongues inside his bombproof helmet.

The Senior Lieterenant looks at the grenade on the table in front of him.
In The Hurt Locker, the EOD sergeant gets hooked on the adrenaline high that rendering a bomb safe brings him.
He eventually returns to Iraq for another tour of duty.
Does Haukkamäki hanker after a return to Kosovo? "I'm not in any hurry. The Lord will tell me when I need to go there."

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.12.2009



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MIKKO-PEKKA HEIKKINEN / Helsingin Sanomat