Destructable objects

I am looking for a way to make destructable objects in my missions. The way I was thinking of doing it was to implement some sort of "health" for the object (so different objects would take different amounts of abuse before they broke). I'm almost positive I'm going to wind up modeling this in Milkshape, which is no problem. From what I understand, it would be just an animated model. When the health of the object reaches zero, then the destroyed animation would play. All I need to know here is how to code this and make it work that way. Can anyone help me here? Thanks in advance.

-Travis