Photo: Tom Schierlitz; IED models: Based on actual bombs constructed by Prop House Weapons Specialists Ltd.

There was a time he [Schoenfeld] would get to know soldiers only to have them sign off from a video chat and never return.

“It was very sad,” he says. “The output of these devices was devastating.” These days, things are different.

He shows me an 8-inch-thick block of military-grade steel — “rolled homogeneous armor,” he calls it — with a 2-inch-wide hole blasted all the way through by shrapnel from a test IED charge.

New armored vehicles can take damage like this, Schoenfeld says, and the occupants can tell him about it on video afterward.

“I get people standing in front of holes like these, smiling,” he tells me. “They say, ‘Yeah: I got back out and shot the guy that did this.’”

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