To many of us, a job involving blowing things up on a regular basis sounds like a dream or wishful thinking. Or sheer fantasy.
For U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground Munitions and Weapons Test Director Esteban Hernandez, however, it is his working life.
Yet working at the Army’s premier test and evaluation facility was not something the Yuma native expected would happen.
“Growing up in Yuma, I never really heard of Yuma Proving Ground because my family doesn’t have a military background. When I was like 10 years old we stopped to see the tanks on display outside the Visitor’s Center when we were going to Martinez Lake, but I didn’t really pay attention to it.”
While working toward his Systems Engineering degree at the University of Arizona’s Yuma extension site, dinner with a family friend who worked at the proving ground piqued his interest.
“When I was going to college, I knew I wanted to be an engineer but I didn’t know what engineering career I wanted to pursue. A friend introduced me to YPG and explained what he did for the Combat Automotive Division and that was interesting to me.”
He started working at YPG in 2020.
“A year before I graduated, I applied for an internship they offered at YPG. I started in May after we finished our spring classes and stayed here for a year until I graduated.”
As the post coped with the COVID pandemic, it was also hard at work preparing for Project Convergence 2020, the capstone exercise in a campaign of learning that had the attention of the most senior leaders in the Army. The breadth of equipment and knowledge demonstrated was astonishing and unprecedented, from autonomous vehicles to air launched effects, and took the combined efforts of hundreds of personnel over the course of eight months of preparation. Leaders with a historical mindset likened the significance of Project Convergence with the Louisiana Maneuvers, which prepared American Soldiers of the early 1940s for eventual participation in World War II.
The following year’s iteration of Project Convergence was even bigger, the largest capabilities demonstration in the Army of the preceding 15 years. By that time, Hernandez had graduated from college and supported the leader-follower autonomous vehicle program during the demonstration. His ordinary duties, though, were as a test officer in the Mines-Countermines branch of the Munitions and Weapons Division, testing systems like the Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC), a series of block C-4 explosive wrapped around a 350 foot-long nylon rope encased in a nylon sleeve deployed by a rocket to clear safe passage paths through minefields.
Hernandez enjoys the job, and plans to stay at YPG for the foreseeable future.
“YPG is very interesting: there is something new every day. What other job in Yuma lets you see explosions on your day-to-day job?”
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