caught on camera. correspondents in the heat of battle. >> i remember hearing bing, bing, bing. >> troops recalling the dangers they face every day. >> my first thought was i just lost three soldiers in a vehicle. >> and a classified video that stuns the world. in this hour, troops from the front lines to their front lawns. >> i think he remembers you. >> war, up close.

caught on camera, combat. hello, i'm contessa brewer. welcome to caught on camera. u.s. troops in the wars in iraq and afghanistan have had some of the most high tech fighting gear. but they've also brought something else to the battlefield like never before -- their cameras. the images captured have changed the way people back home see and hear what the troops are going through, thousands of miles away. a terrifying ied attack. >> combat patrolling at that time was hours and hours of boredom punk waited by moments of sheer terror. >> in the wars of iraq and afghanistan, by far the most common and deadly weapon against

u.s. troops has been the improvised explosive device or ied, also known as roadside bombs, ieds have claimed the lives of 65% of all u.s. casualties in both wars. >> the improvised bomb is the signature weapon of both the iraq and afghanistan war. it's the number one killer of soldier, the number one weapon of insurgents. there's also scary as hell. >> sometimes the difference between life and death is just seconds on a trigger. >> you just don't see it coming. you even have that gut feeling all day long, but i don't know where it's coming from. and i don't know who it's going to hit, and i don't know who's going to push the button. >> january 11, 2008, soldiers from the u.s. army's third squadron third cavalry division are on patrol in the city of mow sul, iraq.

>> mose you will was mostly insurgents. they had taken root in mosul and we were trying to take that city back. >> the men are exhausted. >> we'd been out for about 36 hours at this point. and we were making our way back to our combat outpost. >> the battle-worn neighborhood is known as an insurgent hot spot. >> the terrain favored the enemy. the bombed out buildings, it was difficult to see through the win dies, very narrow alleys. >> on this day, the area as main road, a major supply route for both u.s. and iraqi forces looks clear and the squadron decides to take it. >> i got it before every time we got attacked, the pit in my stomach. i knew something bad was going to happen. that's why i took up the camera and started filming, just based

on hunch. >> he is acting as lead scout standing up through the hatch of his bradley fighting vehicle. captain brown is on the radio reporting their position. when an ied detonates. >> my first instinct was i just lost three soldiers in a vehicle. >> brown believes the ied has vaporized the bradley in front of him with his three men inside of him. >> the way it blew up, it happened in slow motion and you couldn't see the bradley any more. the ied was so deeply buried that it kicked up so much concrete and tar, asphalt and dirt, the bradley disappeared. i was already getting ready to call for helicopter support. >> but meiraculously, when the

dust clear, the bradley reappears, and captain brown radios that all the men are safe. >> the radio finally came back on, they radioed back said they were all okay. >> i think i might have been knocked out for a few seconds, realized what happened. checked on my crew everybody was all right. >> the convoy continues quickly back to its combat outpost. after inspecting their vehicles for damage, the men can finally breathe a sigh of relief. they realize the bradley's open hatch is what saved his life. >> for protection i had it straight up, and luckily that hatch was between me and a lot of the debris that blasted through and put a few big dings in my hatch, but i'm very happy it was there and protecting me from large chunks of shrapnel or any debris that could have taken me out. >> captain brown downloads the

video to his laptop, and his soldiers gather around to watch it. >> the first time we watched the video, i think we all said the same exact thing that i said on the video. because even though we had watched the scene unfold in real life, you still don't see it coming. >> it's a lot of, like patting on the back, like glad you made this through. the only reason i think we didn't get blown up was the trigger man was just a little slow or didn't have his timing right. i think maybe we were just moving faster than he anticipated. >> the entire squad spends the next five days scouring the aisha for the insurgents responsible for the attack. although they never find the man who planted the ied they do eventually secure this area of mosul and rebuild the road for safe passage. >> it's one of those things where it's very personal when

you have an attack. i've had ieds blow up at my door and you take it personally. it becomes a miniature battle inside the war between you and that other person who's trying to kill you. and when you come out on top you realize that you're still alive so he failed. you may not have captured him, but he still failed, and that feels good. >> coming up. journalists undersiege in afghanistan. >> we came under attack. >> whether caught on camera, combat, continues. humans. even when we cross our t's and dot our i's, we still run into problems. namely, other humans. which is why at liberty mutual insurance, auto policies come with new car replacement

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. journalists filming in one of the world aels hottest combat zones, caught on camera as they come under fire themselves. war reporting is as old as war itself. >> richard angle heads to afghanistan to report the story of soldiers based at a lonely outpost. >> we didn't know what we were going to find. we went to the valley which at the time was the most dangerous place in afghanistan. so we knew we would see action. we would see combat. >> angle and his crew, producer and cameraman, land right in the middle of the action. the men of viper company are trying to clear the valley of

taliban fighters, and the crew is there to document the action. >> pretty much every day, this outpost came under attack. and pretty much every time the soldiers went out there to do a patrol in the area, that patrol came under attack. >> while living with the then f -- men -- for weeks at a time they witness the harsh environment. >> food was pretty much all out of a plastic bag. so the living conditions were pretty bad. >> every conflict is different. in iraq, your real danger was getting blown up in a humvee. in the corn gall, it's more what you think of as classic warfare, units that are attacked from taliban fighters firing down from the hillsides. they were just in gunfights all

the time. >> during the very first firefight they filmed, the cameraman gets a little too close to the action. >> there were a group of soldiers who were just returning from a trek and suddenly these gunshots rang out. so i went up on top of the actual command post. i wanted to get a full sequence of him firing. the first shot i got was on his right hand side. so i basically got too close to the weapon and was hit by the shell casings. >> that will teach me not to get in the way of that. >> it misses his eye by millimeters but draws blood. >> you're thinking about how you can compile a story together. >> filming outgoing rounds is easy. filming incoming is much more

difficult. >> before too long, angle and his crew find themselves in an extremely difficult situation. they decide to mount an operation designed to draw out the taliban. >> they the broke up into two units. one group took up a post in a safe house in the middle of the village. the other unit openly, overtly walked drove and moved into the village on the other side and set up position in a farmhouse. >> it's a trap to catch the taliban, and things are going just as planned. until a tragic mistake changes everything. >> so i was filming, and suddenly, there's this very loud explosion. >> a u.s. fired mortar lands directly on the safe house where part of the unit waits in ambush. >> it was a really, really awful

moment, because what it meant was that the operation that we thought we were going to do suddenly turned into this very dire situation. >> i remember as soon as we heard that bang, we knew something was wrong. and then we heard the most disturbing thing. we could hear the soldiers crying out for help, crying out in pain. and it was a horrible thing. >> there was nothing we could do other than watch and film. >> the mission changes to a rescue, as apache helicopters are called in to retrieve the wounded. >> everything was incredibly dangerous at that stage because you're trying to extract wounded men. your cover is blown. the troops who were injured had to release red smoke to alert the people who were coming to save them of their exact location. >> the commander also needs to get everyone else out of there, including the nbc news crew. >> there was only one way out.

we had to get back to the vehicles. so as expected, as these soldiers are leaving, they got attacked. >> we rounded the corner, and that's when the first shot rang out. and then it was gunfire everywhere. another soldier and i rushed back to the humvee. >> the bullets are pinging off the side of the humvee. as i'm, you know, between this rock and the humvee and redden is walking backwards. so the two of us are by this humvee, i'm walking forward, and he's walking backwards, filming me, and i'm trying to prevent him from falling and then getting run over by the vehicle or shot. >> my mind is racing, because we need pictures, but you can't have pictures unless you're filming. and in fact richard and i were

having a giggle the other day and i said why didn't we just get in the humvee and hide there and we couldn't remember why we didn't. but had we gotten in the humvee we couldn't have gotten the pictures. >> there's incoming fire right now. >> fortunately, the crew and the soldiers make it back to the command post. but as they return, the men get the news they have been dreading. one member of their company, sergeant john pinach was killed in the attack. >> they were devastated. i knew they were devastated. and i knew what it would mean for the soldiers. i knew the bonds that they hmong the unit and the fact that they'd done this themselves by accident. i'm still in touch with soldiers from the unit. and it still bothers them immensely. they haven't gotten over this and probably never will. >> angle and his crew spend more than a year going back and forth

film ng the men. >> i think the drive for me to go to these places is because nobody else is going or very few people are going. that i have a camera, and that i can record it as well is only a bonus. and therefore, i'm telling my story through these pictures. and that's the great thing about being a cameraman. we have this amazing power with this thing we hold in our hand to record life. >> i don't like war. i don't like seeing war. i don't like going to war, but war happens. and i think it's important to see war up close as a society, to understand about our human nature. war has its own dynamic that is also fascinating, that is also grotesque and also beautiful in some respects, because you see the chivalry that comes out, chivalry that is gone in almost every other aspect of our society and yet the brutality, which is also part of our human

nature comes out. i think if you go to a conflict zone, you will see a dynamic that you will not find anywhere else. coming up, a close call for a team of army engineers who seek out roadside bombs. when caught on camera -- combat -- continues. help the gulf recover and learn from what happened so we could be a better, safer energy company. i can tell you - safety is at the heart of everything we do. we've added cutting-edge technology, like a new deepwater well cap and a state-of-the-art monitoring center, where experts watch over all drilling activity twenty-four-seven. and we're sharing what we've learned, so we can all produce energy more safely. our commitment has never been stronger.

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four ieds already today. we found three of them. >> to clear the roads of iraq and afghanistan of deadly ieds the company relies on companies like this. drawn from the california national guard, these men are truly a band of brothers, and they do a job that is one. most dangerous and terrifying on

the battlefield, this is one of the unit's commanders. >> we go looking for these bombs, looking for indicators that bocmbs are there, that they've been placed there. we use various equipment to dig it up. >> he obsessively videotapes his whole deployment. >> i just have a camera record everything. so i just have the familiar ra on the dash of my vehicle. >> gunner ben winchester also films, mainly with his helmet cam. >> i just wanted to catch something. i wasn't sure what i was going to kachlt i knew i was going to afghanistan, and it's the real deal over there. >> april, 2009, they capture on camera a fightin'ing day when they are hit with multiple ieds.

>> so we're driving down the road, and we get hit in the middle of nowhere. there was no indicators, no markers. there was just an ied in the middle of nowhere. >> no one is hurt in that kpl x explosion takes out the mine roller. the repairs take hours and leave them exposed on the village road. >> i talked to the village leader and he advised us that the taliban uses that road often. >> he passes the information to his commanders, but they order him to continue. the next day just as they set out, their camera captures yet another strike. >> each time, when your friend's blown up, your heart stops, you wait for the dust to come down and the radio to crackback up

and hear something. >> good to go. >> everybody's good to go, nobody's injured. >> so we recovered the vehicle, and then we continue on the road. >> finally, the group makes it safely to its destination, battered and shaken, but alive. phil is also a truck commander in the 235th who has survived numerous ieds. >> for a split second, there's definitely a sense of oh, god, this is it. it's all over. >> well, this is good. >> and then you realize everything's good and start hearing everybody again. you know that everybody's okay and you're like all right. we made it. >> i'll zoom in on it. >> while deployed, the team routinely watches their own videos to assess the attacks and evaluate their reactions. >> the videos were really a time to decompress after a mission. it was something to look forward to, being able to sit down

together. >> ben and van say they videotaped the war to remember and to prove exactly what happened there. >> i think it helps because i think the media in the united states sort of sensors a lot of like real combat footage. >> we're receiving response. >> i think it goes a long way to tell the american people that this war that we're in isn't so black and white. going to war shouldn't be something that it's just taken so lightly, you know. >> during their time in afghanistan, ben, van, and phil each sustain significant significant injuries including ruptured eardrums and broken bones. they earn five purple hearts among them. all of them struggle with memories of the war. but they agree, what got them through is their brotherhood.

>> i would do it all over again, only if i had them. >> as often as we can, we try to get together. and we're trying to make new memories so the old memories aren't the same old stories. whenever we get together with these guys i try to do it, because they're the best guys in the world i know. coming up. a u.s. helicopter assault in iraq sparks controversy. when caught on camera, combat, continues. no, no, no, no. you can't go to school like this, c'mon. don't do it! no! (mom vo) you never know what life's gonna throw at you. if i gotta wear clothes, you gotta wear clothes. (mom vo) that's why i got a subaru. i just pulled up. he did what now? no he's never done that before! oh really? i might have some clothes in the car. (announcer) love. it's what makes a subaru, a subaru.

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i'm melissa rehberger, the world's leaders are calling for an end to the bloodshed in egypt. today some 38 muslim brotherhood members were killed doing what the egyptian military calls a prison break. president obama spends the last day of his vacation on the golf

course. back to caught on camera. welcome back to caught on camera, i'm contessa brewer. one of the most controversial incidents of the iraq war came to light publicly in 2010 when wikileaks released a disturbing military video from three years earlier. the footage shows a deadly aerial assault, among those killed, two journalists from reuters. a warning, the video you're about to see is graphic and may be hard to watch. july 12, 2007. the temperature is more than 100 degrees in central baghdad. this is the most violent period u.s. forces in iraq have seen. the surge, 30,000 u.s. troops are deployed to root out the

insurgensy. more troops on the streets means more danger. and attacks against u.s. forces are increasing daily. >> this is at the apex of iraq going to hell. the surge has just started, and the war went from incredibly violent to over the top violent, especially in baghdad. >> we would get blown up regularly. snipers shooting at us. never tells us who the enemy was. >> soldiers from the u.s. army's bravo company, 216, including ethan mccord are on patrol in a run down neighborhood called new baghdad. early that morning, the battalion comes under mortar fire as it leaves the base. and while the soldiers patrol, they hear sporadic gunfire. >> this area had been a troublesome area, so bravo company was cast out to go out and flesh people out u. >> two apache helicopters are

providing air support. and cameras mounted on their gun sights are recording the action. the audio you hear is the pilot's actual radio chatter. the pilots spot a gruch men they suspect are insurgents carrying weapons. >> have individuals with weapons. he's got a weapon too. there's about 20 of them. >> oh, yeah. >> because the men are all dressed similarly, the pilots don't realize that two of them are journalists. a photographer and his driver. the apache soldiers seem to mistake the camera for a rocket propelled grenade. >> all right. we've got a guy with an rpg.

>> getting ready to fire. we got a guy shooting. now he's behind the building. >> the helicopter crew gets permission from the commanding officer on the ground to fire on the group. >> let me know when you got it. >> come on. fire. >> keep shooting. >> the apache, you know, fires and fires and fires into this group of guys. and it appears that they're all dead right away. >> look at all those dead -- >> a few minutes pass and the reuters employee begins crawling away. >> see that guy crawling right now on the curb. >> yeah. i got him. we'll see. >> the pilots are begging, sort

of themselves and begs the higher power that he'll get up and grab a went so that they can fire again. >> come on, buddy. >> all you got to do is pick up a weapon. >> when you go through the entire thing and listen to the entirety, you get a sense of detachment almost like dare i say a video game. >>? the meantime, a van drives into the scene. >> we have individuals going to the scene, possibly picking up bodies and weapons. >> appears to be an insurgent ambulance that's going to pick them up. >> the pilots want permission to attack again. >> roger, crazy horse one. request permission to engage. >> picking up the wounded? . >> come on, let us shoot. >> engage.

>> one eight, clear. clear. >> there's no sign of any further weapons. there certainly is no sign of any further fighting. these guys are certainly no threat. and yet, the helicopter pilots decide to light up the van and blast it. >> oh, yeah. look at that, right through the windshield. >> just a few minutes later, specialist mccord and the rest of bravo company arrive on the scene. >> i immediately saw a group of men by a wall who had just been completely shredded from these .30 millimeter rounds, and i saw up against the wall the rpg. the rpg did not have a round in it. and on the ground close by was

an ak-47, and i saw the light blue mini van, and i could hear a little girl crying. >> realizing that there is a wounded child inside, mccord and his soldiers run to the van. >> inside the van, when i looked in, was a little girl, about four years old. she had a severe belly wound and glass in her eyes and in her hair and all over. next to her was a boy about seven years old. he had a very severe wound to the right side of his head. next to him in the driver's seat was the father. there was no way that he had survived. immediately, i grabbed the little girl, grabbed a medic and was picking glass out of the little girl's eyes so that she can blink. there were no weapons inside the van. it looked like a father driving his kids. >> the medic rushes the girl to a nearby vehicle as mccord returns to the van to take a

photograph. >> and as i put my camera down, the boy makes a movement like a labored breath. i remember my heart sinking, and i start screaming out at this point, the boy's alive. the boy's alive. so i pull the boy out, and i start running towards the bradley. as i'm running, i tell him, it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay. i have you. don't die. don't die. and he looks up at me. and in the individual yes, you can sigh where i stop running, because he looks up at me for a second and then his eyes roll into the back of his head. >> mccoy hands the wounded boy to the medics in the bradley vehicle. >> at the time this is going on, my kids are in the back of my head. when i put the boy inside the bradley, my platoon leader who's a lieutenant was standing there. what he said to me was mccord, what the f are you doing? quit wasting your time with

these m-f-ing children and go pull security. roger that, sir. >> amazingly, both children survive the attack. coming up. the leaked apache video continues, another attack with even more firepower, when caught on camera, combat, continues. [ male announcer ] at hebrew national, we're so choosy about the cuts of beef that meet our higher kosher standards

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video first shows an attack on a gruch men then on a van trying to help the wounded. >> to me, the most shocking part of the video comes at the end. >> going to come around and get some more distance. >> roger. clear. >> there's some confusion. there's maybe some shots from nearby. and all of a sudden, they zero in on a group of guys entering a building. >> so there's at least six individuals in that building with weapons. >> and we could put a missile in it. >> and they say let's hit it with a hellfire missile. and at the bottom left hand corner of the screen you see a guy just randomly walk into the screen and they don't say no, no. no. stop. they shoot off the missile

anyway. an iraqi citizen looks to be just walking down the road, minding his own business. then one second he's there. one second he's not. as far as i can tell, he was vaporized. i don't think his family probably ever knew what happened to him, because there was nothing left. >> come around, and we'll clear the smoke. we'll fire one more. >> a lot of people don't know this, but the only thing that was found in that building when our teams went in there were a bunch of dead families. three families, to be exact, of children and women. that house could have been cleared very easily by one of our teams. instead, they chose to fire hellfire missiles into this building. >> stand by, engage in weapon hellfire. >> all right.

clear. >> were there some bad people in the area? yeah, there were. there were people there who wanted to hurt us. but it just doesn't make sense to me. because i was there. >> the day after the attack, the u.s. military releases a statement confirming the deaths of quote nine insurgents and two civilians, unquote, mean being the reuters journalists. american troops were conducting a raid nearby when they were hit by small arms firepan rocket propelled grenades. reuters conducts its own investigation and can find no one in the area who saw any clashes that day. one week later the organization demands an investigation.

it also requests access to the apache cameras and communications. all their requests are denied. the government makes no further comment on the incident until three years later when wikileaks which had received a copy of the classified video releases it under the provocative title collateral murder. >> the video is important in a number of ways. one of them is better scrutiny of how pilots behave when they fire on people. >> they released it in a couple different forms, in a long form and a more concise form or the high points if you will. and the effect of that release was devastating. >> the u.s. military is trying to explain a newly released video that shows apache helicopters killing civilians in iraq. >> ethan mccord has just dropped off his children at school when he gets the news.

>> came home, sat down on the couch with my cup of coffee, turned on the news. it's insane, because the very first image i saw was of me rung across the screen carrying a child. i was angry, just by the initial shock of it being on the tv, but also a little relieved. i wanted people to know what was happening in iraq. >> the same day the video hits the air, the u.s. military r releases the report it conduc d conducted. >> the report said we investigated the incident, and our guys behaved appropriately. there was no violation, if you will, of the rules of engagement, which once you sigh the video the conclusions are die metically opposed to that video. >> in the context of combat that this is what is happening. >> after the wikileaks release, many people press the military

to reopen its investigation. >> they. in the end, backed up the army regulation report and said we're not going to do anything to reopen this, which i thought was a very tragic and wrong call. >> the united states military declined to request a comment for this program and instead directed us to the findings in its report. since the release, the video has sparked much debate. >> there were enemy soldiers that had weapons, and they had to get permission to fire. >> i think it's slanderous for them to say their mission is to kill as many iraqis as possible. >> it's harder to find fault with the pilots for their initial actions. what's harder to explain is opening up on the van.

they can follow that van anywhere. from a military point of view, it might have been better to follow the van and see where that led. >> urban combat is the most difficult type of combat any army will ever face. with that said, there are very clear criterions set up. the idea is minimum use of force necessary to counter an adversarial threat. that van should never have been engaged by anybody. that never offered a threat. again, let me be very clear here. the presence of a weapon on the battlefield does not constitute a threat. it constitutes a weapon, and you've got to determine if the weapon is tied to someone who's threatening you. >> everybody's fighting over it, whether or not they had weapons. well, they had weapons. no they didn't. this was murder. no it's not, it's war. in a sense everybody's right, but everybody's wrong at the same time. what you're looking at is a

small, black and white video of a much larger issue. >> following the apache incident, specialist mccord served for eight more months in iraq before he was wounded in this ied explosion. >> i learned how to live without a lot of things in iraq. when i looked in and i saw those children, the one thing i couldn't live without was my own humanity. i couldn't self justify what i was doing in iraq anymore, what we, as a nation, were doing in iraq. i had to refigure out who i was as a human being and what i wanted out of life. and what legacy i was going to leave for my children. i struggle every day, man. every day i struggle. >> this is a situation where we could and should have done a better job of protecting innocent life, because this is not only a war of territory, of physical destruction. this is a whatever hearts and

minds. and clearly, if you're killing citizens in the process of trying to secure a city, you're not winning that battle. coming up. soldiers returning from war sol of the most memorable homecomings we've ever seen. when caught on camera, combat, continues. [ tires screech ] [ beeping ] ♪

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while thousands of miles from home, u.s. troops use all the technology available to them, including video to stay in touch with their families. like this dad, who reads to his daughter on camera, whenever he can. >> mickey waits at dawn, time to work the whole day long. >> yeah. >> the separations can be long and difficult. and they make coming home all

the more sweet. >> daddy! >> homecoming is the day troops and their families dream of. >> oh, my god! oh! >> and more than a few of them are caught on camera. april 2011, senior airman trevor crowder is anxious to return home from his nine month deployment from iraq. >> i wasn't expect ago big homecoming. i nusu just knew was going to be my wife. i wasn't expecting a big parade or anything. >> back home in nebraska, there is more than one family member who misses trevor dearly. emity thunder paws is a three year old great dane, the pride and joy of the family. while trevor is deployed. emmett misses his playmate. >> emmett, he misses rolling and

with trevor. they're best friends. >> on the day her husband returns from home, whitney decides to videotape trevor's homecoming from emmett's point of view. >> do you not recognize me? >> he clearly smelled me coming in through the door. i had no idea his reaction was going to be like that. that's what made it special for us. >> he was just trying to look him in the eyes. >> i think he remembers you. >> it was really fun to see emmett greeting trevor coming back. it was really cute. i'm glad i caught it on camera. >> in buffalo, new york, another soldier is greeted by another emotional pooch. >> i missed you. >> garen fisher is surprised by

her golden retriever, molly. >> i knew she would react, molly would react, but i guess i didn't expect her to react the way that she did in the airport. i think she was just beside herself and, you know, we were just kind of overjoyed. >> master sergeant joe myers knew his return would bring joy to his nine year old daughter hannah. >> when the camera started coming in, they told us that they were going to look at our class, because we were the best fourth grade class, so they said they were just going to come in and look around. and they said to welcome some special guests. >> the most special guest of all, her dad. >> it took all i could do to keep my composure coming through the door of that classroom and

looking for my daughter. >> two years after her father's surprise visit to her classroom, hannah lives in germany with her parents and younger sister. she and her father treasure the memory of that day. >> it was like a blur. i was so excited because i had no clue. and i wasn't supposed to be coming home that day. he was supposed to be coming home a little after, like a few weeks, i think. >> in my 22 year, i've missed four different times. i missed almost ann tire school year for hannah. i didn't now what to expect, whether she'd jump up and down, whether she'd sit there in shock or the reaction that she had. >> their video ends up on yuban becomes a sensation. millions of people continue to revel in their reunion, something that amazes them to this day. sometimes i think about it, and i'm like oh, my gosh, the world saw my cry, but my excuse is that i was only nine.

>> joe myers says the best part of his return was not the attention it got. >> seeing my wife's face and my daughter's is the best part. >> and despite all the people who share it, it is still their private moment. >> i think it gives us kind of just a little common ground that she and i were both there in that moment. and that we have everything that's gone on since then, the video and everything else that's happened, to reflect back on just she and i. hannah, it's true, a lot of people may have seen you cry, but a lot of people also shared in your joy. thanks for giving us something to smile about. i'm contessa brewer. that's all for this edition of caught on camera.

raging fires, deadly flames, a massive explosion rips through a california community. >> oh, my god! >> highways become infernos. >> this is one of the most dangerous areas of interstate 40. >> firefighters face death in the line of duty. >> it's the closest i ever want to come to near death experience. >> and a day of celebration descends into chaos. >> at one point, the fireworks were going 40 to 50 feet up in the air. >> it's not my time to go, that's all i