There sits Staff Sergeant William James, the bomb technician at the centre of The Hurt Locker, lighting a cigarette and bragging about his credentials. "I saw a little bit in Afghanistan, too," he says on his first Hummer ride with his new team.
Heading into Sunday's Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker is a favourite, as it has been with critics and at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards last month. With nine Oscar nominations, it's heralded for its documentary style, based on a script by a reporter who embedded with a bomb team, and billed by the LA Times as "overflowing with crackling verisimilitude."
But the film's admirers don't include those who actually do the job - defusing or destroying makeshift bombs. Canadian explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) soldiers in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan's most volatile and bomb-laden provinces, say their life is no Hurt Locker.
"First reaction was, 'This is pretty Hollywood,' " says EOD soldier Lieutenant Caroline Pollock. "All of us were laughing at the movie, at parts in the movie where no one else would laugh. Like, this is ridiculous."
The Canadians, for example, think Guy Pearce's character - killed early on while wearing the heavy bomb suit and running from an explosion - shouldn't actually have died.
"The guy was 100 metres away and running when it exploded? I was surprised he died," said Leading Seaman Doug Woodrow, a 13-year Forces veteran who has donned the suit himself.
In one scene, the boys get into a sniper fight alongside some mercenaries. Sniper and EOD skills are not typically offered as a joint course, nor are bomb experts expected to clear massive industrial buildings on their own, as Sgt. James and his team do.
"I was like, 'Who the hell does this? Can I have their job?' " Lt. Pollock says, laughing. "It was a good movie, but I didn't think it was that great ... I don't think it was accurate of what EOD operators do."
In a scene used on the movie poster, Staff Sgt. James picks up a "daisy chain" of wires and pulls about eight shells from the ground. The Canadian bomb techs say he'd have to have been The Hulk to do so, as each weighs at least 60 pounds.
"That's pretty damn heavy," said Troy Chiasson, a Canadian EOD team member.
And Sgt. James, played by Jeremy Renner in an Oscar-nominated turn, is a little too reckless.
"This guy's obviously sick. He craves the thrill," LS Woodrow says, acknowledging, however, that it is somewhat reflective of the testosterone-laden field.
"There's definitely A-type, Alpha personalities in the group," Lt. Pollock says. "We try to suppress any cowboy tendencies. Doing the cowboy stuff, it can be pretty unsafe, not just for the operator but for the whole team."
The Canadian experience does overlap a bit with the movie, which is based on Americans in the Iraq war. The bomb suit is the same, the job just as nerve-wracking, and when a soldier needs to go to the device, it's always just one who does "the long walk."
The Canadians also use a bomb robot - though it's bigger than the one in The Hurt Locker. "Our robot could kick their robot's ass," says LS Woodrow, who enjoyed the movie despite its inaccuracies.
"There's a lot of guys who are part of my EOD team who would say that it's not realistic. Like any movie, it requires the suspension of disbelief. It's absolutely no different than every time CSI airs, you're going to have forensic pathologists rolling their eyes ... I thought it was really well done."
Improvised explosive devices play a significant role in the Afghan war. Most of the Canadian soldiers killed here died in IED blasts, and as the war progresses troops are coming across more complex devices.
"We are seeing things that we never thought we would see," Lt. Pollock says. "There is huge variety in ordnance you can use, the switch you can use. And they're smart."
As such, the average bomb can take several hours to defuse. A complex car bomb - such as the one Sgt. James defuses in minutes, finding the "dead man" switch - can take over 12 hours to defuse, EOD soldiers say. It's just one of the reasons why the film is up for Academy Awards, not a documentary prize.
"It's entertainment," LS Woodrow says with a shrug. "In terms of the actual nuts and bolts of it, it's not real."