EOD is extremely dangerous work...
and Afghanistan has untold tons of explosives all over the place that must be disposed of. Many of those explosives are old and probably unstable. Those guys who do EOD have to have nerves of steel and balls of iron. Like a British EOD guy said during the Falklands War back in the 1980s, "One twitch and you're dead." Sadly, he must've twitched because he was killed trying to defure an unexploded Argentine bomb on a British ship. And to think some people complain about the stress of their office jobs, what with office politics and all.