Senior Chief Brian Krohe lives two separate lives: one as owner of H&S Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning in Seward, and another as an expert on explosives.
“I love both of them,” he said during a recent presentation to the Seward Rotary Club.
Krohe has spent the past 20 years in the U.S. Navy. He currently serves as the Leading Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Reserve Explosive Ordnance Disposal Expeditionary Exploitation Unit One.
That’s a big way of saying he and his team find and blow up undetonated explosives in war zones.
Originally from Virginia, Illinois, Krohe joined the Navy in January 2002 at age 30.
He was self-employed working in a refrigeration business with his dad when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened.
“I joined the military and totally went a different route,” he said.
After boot camp and Gunner’s Mate “A” School in Great Lakes, Illinois, he served as Work Center Supervisor for the Armory aboard the USS Stethem, a ship named for Robert Stethem, a Navy Seabee diver tortured and killed by terrorists during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985.
“He (Stethem) gave his life for us. It was neat to serve on that ship and meet his family,” Krohe said.
Since his initial days on the Stethem, Krohe has advanced in rank several times, earning the Chief Petty Officer designation and gaining his Master Explosive Warfare Specialist and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Exploitation Specialist designations.
He has traveled a lot, seen a lot and done a lot in the military.
“I’ve made five deployments. I’ve lost friends in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Krohe said, tearing up as he explained the symbolism behind the Navy EOD badge:
• a wreath, symbolic of achievements in minimizing accident potentials through ingenuity and devotion to duty in memory of those who gave their lives in EOD duties;
• a bomb depicted from World War II, representing the historic nature of the EOD attack – the unexploded bomb – with three fins representing nuclear, conventional and chemical/biological weapons;
• lightning bolts symbolizing the destructive power of bombs and the courage and professionalism of EOD personnel; and
• a shield, representing the EOD mission to prevent a detonation and protect the surrounding area.
“When I say we earn it, we do,” Krohe said.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal ranges to all sorts of bombs, from improvised explosive devices on the side of the road to bombs dropped from airplanes.
“When Germany would raid Great Britain, we had what they called ‘duds,’” Krohe said. “They dropped them, they didn’t explode. How do you get rid of them? It was trial and error. They’d try something and it would work, or it unfortunately wouldn’t.”
That’s where the EOD motto came from: “Initial success or total failure.”
Krohe’s “bomb squad” training was a 60-week endeavor – much more in-depth than that of traditional bomb squads that train for just eight weeks.
His crew can tackle anything from a hoax to a pipe bomb in a mailbox in more civilian situations.
“We do a lot of work for the Secret Service and all the people that get protection,” Krohe said.
When former presidential nominee Barack Obama spoke at the Mile High Stadium in Denver in 2008, the Navy EOD team swept the entire stadium from top to bottom for potential explosives.
The team uses robots to locate and eliminate explosives when possible.
“We always try to protect life first,” Krohe said.
He goes as deep as 300 feet underwater to stabilize influence and contact mines.
During one mission, Krohe passed out because of the conditions in the water.
“It’s cold. You’re not splashing around in the water,” otherwise one could disrupt the magnetic field around the mine and cause it to explode.
“I started shivering, and then I quit. I knew something was wrong,” Krohe said.
A buddy pulled him out of the water, and he recovered.
“That’s one of the things that sets us apart from the Army, the Marines and the Air Force: we do everything in the water,” Krohe said.
They also do a lot in the air, parachuting from 40,000 feet to land on ships or in the water.
Krohe remembers his jump school training in San Diego, California.
He had been there two weeks and was ready to graduate when his first daughter was born.
He traveled back to be with his wife, Allyson (Volzke) and their newborn in the hospital.
“I hadn’t slept. I was exhausted, but they called me up in the morning and said, ‘Hey, if you want to graduate, you need to get your butt back here,’” Krohe said.
So, with no sleep, he went back to San Diego, jumped out of the plane to graduate, and had a malfunction.
“My chute didn’t come out when it was supposed to,” he said. “I was completely awake after that.”
He pulled the rope harder, and it eventually worked, making for a safe landing.
Jumping from planes is one of Krohe’s favorite parts of the job.
“I love my feet hanging out when you’re flying several hundred feet off the surface of the water,” he said. “There’s absolutely nothing like it.”
His job as an EOD technician has evolved over the past 20 years.
His team was always the first on scene in the Iraq and Afghan wars to look at the wreckage of an explosive device, secure the area and pick up the pieces.
Working with the FBI, they figured out that the pieces and parts can tell a story.
“We can put them back together, figure out how it worked and develop something to use against it,” Krohe said. “We became crime scene investigators.”
Now, they work toward the collection and preservation of materials and evidence instead of just cleaning up.
They are able to trace the “fingerprints,” both literal and figurative, on explosives to figure out exactly what country they came from and what was inside.
His division even works with tracking DNA, deleted files from electronics and other records to solve crimes.
“There’s a fingerprint to everything,” Krohe said. “If you just know how to find it, it’s out there.”
