I guess you could say that I witnessed an unsuccessful bomb deactivation. I used to be a combat engineer in the Army, and while we were not EOD, we often pulled security for EOD when they did UXO (un-exploded ordnance) missions, because apparently, infantry grunts can't be trusted at UXO sites to not pick up UXOs and try to make keychains and shit out of them.
So anyway, we were at this apartment complex somewhere on the outskirts of Baghdad in either April or May 2003. The complex was made up of three buildings that all faced inwards toward a courtyard, and out past the open side of the courtyard was a four-lane divided highway. It was just wasteland on the other side of the highway, because we were out near the edge of the city.
There was a un-exploded cluster bomblet in some bushes near the narrower face of one of the two side buildings that faced out toward the road, and I was sitting not far away -- just on the edge of the road -- as I manned the .50 cal on my M113 Armored Personnel Carrier and pulled security.
The EOD techs had brought their bomb truck with them in the convoy, but since there was plenty of open room on the edge of the city, we were going to blow the unexploded ordnance at the site without transporting it.
They still had to remove the bomblet from the bush and get it away from the buildings, though. Now, in my experience, deactivating explosive devices is usually done in a very low-tech, ad-hoc way. You blow it in place if you can (which engineers can simply do on their own), and if you can't blow it in place, then you call EOD, and they usually simply move it as short of a distance as possible while staying as far away from it as possible until it's isolated enough that they can blow it up. If they don't need to transport it, they don't. Easy.
So, to get the bomblet out of the bushes and away from the building, one of the senior techs tied one end of a 25+ meter piece of white textile tape (commonly called 'engineer tape') to the bomblet and thus tried to dislodge it from the bush from a safe distance. I was no farther away from the bomblet than he was, and situated higher up, but I was by the side of the road and he was more or less in the courtyard.
Anyway, the bomblet exploded just as it got loose from the bush, and everyone just turned their heads and looked over at this EOD tech, who was just standing there and still holding the running end of the engineer tape. Nobody seemed to be hurt, so he just shrugged his shoulders like a slapstick comedy character, and we all laughed. What else can you do?