PECH RIVER VALLEY, Afghanistan — Many American soldiers have survived roadside bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Army Lt. Brian Farrell is among the few to relive the experience on videotape.

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Farrell, a 2004 graduate of Drexel University who grew up near Princeton in Monroe Township, N.J., was driving up the Pech River Road on April 1 when the six-ton armored humvee he was riding in was hit by an IED - an improvised explosive devise.

“I was in the trail vehicle in a convoy, an IED detonated under the front of my truck, basically blew off the front end of the truck … and flipping the truck over completely,” said Farrell, 24, a combat engineer in the First Battalion, 32d Infantry Regiment, part of the 10th Mountain Division.

All five occupants of the humvee survived. The turret gunner shot out of the roof of the vehicle like a jack-in-the-box and landed about 35 feet away. Farrell suffered some shrapnel wounds in the face.

“I think we all walked out of there with a concussion,” he said. Two months later, a video turned up on the Internet credited to As-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s media wing. The terrain looked familiar. Farrell’s superiors asked him whether he was comfortable taking a look.

“Well, I relive it every night anyway, so I might as well take a look at the video,” he said. “Sure enough, it was a video of my vehicle. They had videotaped the entire explosion.”

It is dramatic footage, first showing the bomb-maker wrapping the 40-pound bomb, and then showing the explosion lift the vehicle off the road. It appears to have been shot from the hillside where the insurgents had triggered the bomb with a radio device.

“Of course they did some editing to it,” Farrell said. “They chopped out the parts where we crawled out of the vehicle. They chopped up the parts where we shot up the ridge line that they were standing on.” The video also include some shots of the medevac helicopter “taking away the dead,” as the Arabic caption read.

“Apparently, according to the As Sahab network and the al-Qaeda organization, I’m already dead and I shouldn’t be here right now,” Farrell said.

-- Andy Maykuth