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Soldiers assessed the safest way to cross a field in Arab Jabour on Saturday, the day an anti-mine vehicle was destroyed nearby.

ARAB JABOUR, Iraq — From the blast and the high, thin plume of white smoke above the tree line, it looked and sounded like any other attack. The bare details were, sadly, routine enough: a gunner was killed and three crew members were wounded Saturday when their vehicle rolled over a homemade bomb buried beneath a road southeast of Baghdad.

Yet, it was anything but routine. Over a crackling field radio came reports of injuries and then, sometime later, official confirmation of the first fatality inflicted by a roadside bomb on an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.

The military has been careful to point out that the new vehicle is not impervious to attack, and that a sufficiently powerful bomb can destroy any vehicle. Still, a forensic team was flown in immediately to inspect the charred wreckage, from which wires and tangled metal protruded, to determine whether the bombing had revealed a design flaw.

“It’s a great vehicle, but there is no perfect vehicle,” said Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie, commander of the battalion that lost the soldier.

Three of the four people aboard suffered only broken feet and lacerations. Pending the results of an investigation, it is unclear yet whether the gunner was killed by the blast or by the vehicle rolling over.

But officers on the scene noted that he was the member of the crew most exposed, and that the vehicle’s secure inner compartment was not compromised and appeared to have done its job by protecting the three other crew members inside. “The crew compartment is intact,” said Capt. Michael Fritz. He said the blast would have been large enough “to take out” a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Roadside bombs have been the single deadliest weapon insurgents have directed against American forces in Iraq, and have grown increasingly sophisticated and powerful over the years. As a result, reducing the carnage from the bombs became a strong military and political imperative for the Bush administration.

So important is the mine-resistant vehicle to the United States military that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates singled it out in his holiday-season message in December, saying, “To ensure that troops have the best protection available on the battlefield, MRAPs became the military’s highest acquisition priority, and thousands of these vehicles are in production and en route to theater.”

On Friday, Mr. Gates toured an assembly facility for the vehicles in Charleston, S.C., where he described them as “a proven lifesaver on the battlefield.” He cited Army reports that there had been 12 attacks on the vehicles with homemade bombs since a push began last summer to send more of them into combat zones, mostly in Iraq. No soldiers died in those attacks, he said.

The vehicles have distinctive, armored V-shaped hulls that are designed to deflect the force of the explosion from roadside bombs out and away from the vehicle, sparing the occupants in the compartment.

The underbody sits about 36 inches off the ground, higher than the Humvees that have proved susceptible to roadside bombs despite the additional armor added to many of them in combat zones.

The vehicles are much bigger than Humvees, standing 12 feet high, weighing up to 18 tons, and carrying 6 to 10 soldiers, depending on the model. There are more than 1,500 of them in Iraq now, and the military plans to purchase more than 15,000 of them at a cost of $22.4 billion.

Saturday’s deadly attack came on the first day of an operation to clear insurgents from southern Arab Jabour, a rural, overwhelmingly Sunni area less than 10 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The primary target is Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.

The bomb went off at 4:45 p.m., as engineers were driving beside an irrigation ditch to support soldiers of the First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, who had been clearing farmhouses and villages since a dawn air assault. The blast threw the vehicle into the air and spun it 180 degrees, with its shattered nose coming to rest beside the ditch.

Pvt. Matthew Hall, 19, saw the bombing while standing on the roof of a nearby farmhouse. “I heard a loud boom,” he said Sunday. “I looked over and I saw pieces of vehicle and smoke. I saw a tire flying into the field.”

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