They surrounded their buildings with giant dirt-filled wire mesh containers called Hescos and posted lookouts on the roofs.

Collapsible wire mesh containers with heavy-duty plastic liners filled with sand protect the troops who call the small combat outpost home.

It is made of a collapsible wire mesh container and heavy duty fabric liner, and used as a temporary to semi-permanent levee or blast wall against explosions or small-arms.

The wire mesh containers — lined with fabric and filled with sand — can be deployed in a fraction of the time it takes to stack sandbags or build an earthen berm.

Massive, dirt-filled wire mesh containers stamped HESCO (sold by the Dubai-based conglomerate Hercules Engineering Solutions Consortium) comprised our frontline berms.

These include the Bremer wall concrete barriers used in Iraq and Afghanistan by US Armed Forces, and the HESCO bastions, wire mesh containers filled with sand or soil, which are used by British Armed Forces.