“At first it wasn’t really a big deal,” Dawson said. “But as time went on, my arm was starting to inflame — it was starting to swell up. It would get real hot, so I was like, ‘These things are a real issue. They need to come out.’” The surgical procedure took a total of 15 minutes, he said.

Even when Dawson faced a potentially fatal injury after being shot in July, military leaders seemed to give him little thought. After being stabilized in Germany, Dawson was evacuated to Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Md. The only person from his entire chain of command who was there to greet him was the operations officer from the 28th Ordnance Company, according to Dawson. A spokesman for 20th CBRNE Command, under which the 28th falls, said that senior representatives visited Dawson during the period he was hospitalized at Walter Reed.

When Dawson was shot, he said he was supposed to be in a different part of Afghanistan, but because one of his soldiers had a baby coming, Dawson volunteered to temporarily take that person’s place on the C.I.A. team. Members of the unit say Dawson never should have been in Afghanistan in the first place, given how many deployments he had already completed. Yet the Army’s failure to recruit and train more soldiers into the unit meant there were only so many soldiers qualified for the job, they told The Times.

Because of a shortage of trained and qualified technicians, more experienced members of the unit say they often feel obligated to volunteer for extra deployments — meaning they spend as much time deployed as they do at home, year after year. “The only reason the unit doesn’t fail,” a former member of the 28th said, “is that it has a core of noncommissioned officers there who refuse to let it fail.”

“There’s no incentive ever to join the 28th,” Dawson said. “I brought it up for years.”

Rep. Rick Crawford, a Republican member of the House from Arkansas and a former Army bomb-disposal soldier, has been trying to push Pentagon leadership to better support these soldiers. But after years of intransigence from senior Army generals, he turned to forcing change through legislation. Crawford inserted provisions into defense budgets in 2017 and 2018 to make a separate corps for bomb-disposal soldiers that would put them on par with their counterparts in engineering and the infantry. The Army is studying the issue and is expected to submit its recommendations to Congress in 2023.

“You’re not going to eliminate the need for E.O.D. techs,” Crawford said, noting the prevalence of improvised explosive devices on today’s battlefields. Between January 2007 and February 2018, I.E.D.s caused 23,000 casualties among American service members, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. “So what are you going to do in the long term? You can train Special Ops to be E.O.D., which is a lot more expensive. Or you can train E.O.D. to operate with Special Ops.”