The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows

by Brian Castner

  EOD school doesn’t just teach the technical aspects of bomb disposal. More important, it instills the culture of the profession.

  There is no choice but to work hard. But hard work is not enough. You won’t survive EOD school if you can’t work with a team, and can’t relax when the job is done.

  Fortunately, my class naturally banded together, and the beaches and bars of northwest Florida provided ample opportunity to blow off steam. “Cooperate to graduate” is a common mantra, as students test each other and work together to cross each hurdle. Every Friday night of EOD school was a blur of bars, clubs, beer, and few clothes. Many EOD guys prefer to drink with their pants off. Or as a hat on their head. I can’t explain why.

  It is impossible to overemphasize how important beer is to the EOD profession. Beer at the end of a long week of school, to ease the stress of tests and retests. Beer to quench your thirst from a full day of clearing the bombing range in the relentless desert sun. Beer to dull the pain of a lost brother on the battlefield, near or far, known or unknown. Beer to bond, and celebrate, and mourn, and remember, and forget.

  As weekend planner and surrogate older brother for every member of our class, Jeff organized elaborate marathons of fun. Every night ended with holes in your memory, requiring careful reconstruction with the class the next day. Only a few nights ended in a fight with the locals, or being tossed from a bar, wrecking it on the way out. Most nights ended with breakfast, a tasteless plate of grits and waffles, and a ripe hangover to endure on your one day off. Jeff was tireless, relentlessly upbeat, and more than once dragged my exhausted body onto his boat the next day to swim my headache away with the dolphins in the full sun of the Gulf. A quick nap on his couch, and I was ready to party again, this time dancing at the club late into the night.

  Jeff was as lucky with women as he was with the rest of his life. Not only did I have to endure fantastic tales of his past exploits, we all had to watch him and his wife together, dancing and partying, at the bar, at the club, on the stage reserved for the most attractive women and guarded by granite blocks of men. Jeff’s wife was a vision: sultry, playful, sweet as cantaloupe on a summer day, and hotter than a firecracker. Jeff’s lack of inhibitions included public dancing, and his wife had the ability to draw the attention of the entire club to her swaying and dipping form, especially when she was invited onstage.

  “Are you looking at my wife?” Jeff would yell at the club, to no one in particular.

  Jeff’s grin was ear to ear, and his wife gave a devilish smile from above.

  “You better not be looking at her,” Jeff continued. “She’s coming home with me tonight!”

  I learned many things from Jeff during EOD school. I learned the best way to bury a keg in beach sand to keep it cool all day long, despite the hot sun. I learned to put skin moisturizer on a new tattoo, but not a kind with aloe, because it might react with the ink. I learned that after twelve hours of drinking, it’s possible to fall asleep sitting up, on the toilet, still eating a fast-food hamburger. I learned how to discipline a young enlisted kid without breaking his spirit or breeding resentment. I learned that a certain inlet off Okaloosa Island is a great place to park your boat and watch drunk topless girls frolic in the warm, waist-deep water. I learned to study hard after partying hard. I learned to never give up.

  Jeff would lead our class’s physical-training sessions a couple of mornings a week before instruction started. I endorsed and needed the workouts; to keep my brain lubricated and spinning, I drank gallons of coffee and ate high-sugar foods all day long. The calories kept my exhausted brain functioning, but they also added to my midsection. Jeff’s workouts of flutter-kicks, push-ups, and pull-ups kept the worst of my diet at bay.

  The Navy guys had to attend dive school before EOD training, to ensure they could endure the rigors of working underwater. It’s difficult to render safe an underwater mine or torpedo if you can’t swim in a mask, fins, and rebreather. But dive school is less about learning to use new equipment and more about getting an old-fashioned ass-kicking. The Navy is not going to send you to EOD school unless they are sure you have the endurance, the will, the gumption to handle a certain amount of physical punishment. When I played soccer in high school, if the coach was mad at our performance we would run for hours and never see a ball. In dive school, you swim until you can’t move and drift to the bottom of the training pool.

  So despite a bit of flab from years of drinking, Jeff could run most of his fellow non-Navy students into the ground. His job leading PT was to bring the rest of us up to speed.

  Jeff’s favorite morning workout, after an excruciating set of crunches and flutter kicks, was running the Hill of Woe. Outside of the eastern gate at Eglin Air Force Base are a set of power lines that run up a hill, into the forest, and back through a neighborhood adjoining the base. The three-mile loop up that incline would have been bad, but not epic; no simple slope deserves the name Hill of Woe. But this was Florida—the run was torture because the hill was made of sand. A mile and a half of soft sand uphill.

  Up we went, in a line, in step and on pace, singing songs to take the mind off burning calves and thighs. We had done one loop already, but when half of us turned for home like horses that had spotted the barn, Jeff dug us back in and we turned up the hill again for a second round. A third loop for good measure was on its way, but fortunately I did not know that yet.

  Up the Hill of Woe, single file in the soft sand. Every step forward brought a half step back as the sand gave way under the weight of our shoes. Ahead of me Shipstead stumbled, put a hand on the ground to steady himself, and then was back up slipping through the viscous silt. My knees aching, my legs on fire, I looked over at the grass on the edge of our running path. We ran up the soft sand path, but paralleling us the whole way, out of the main traffic area, the ground was firmer from plant roots and bits of dirt stabilizing the slope. Would anyone notice? If I ran to the side, just a bit?

  I stepped off the soft path and my feet found solid purchase. My backache eased, I stood straighter, and I tore up the hill.

  “Whatcha doin’ there, LT?” yelled out Chaney.

  “I’m coming, Boats,” was my sheepish reply.

  “Come on, LT. Don’t be scared of the soft sand,” Jeff called. He was friendly, but firm.

  Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

  My next footfall was back on the path, but it slipped immediately half a foot down the hill. My hips felt the change with a twinge, and my thighs burned anew.

  Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

  Up and down, forward and back, I labored up the hill, in the soft sand, on this lap, and the next.

  By the end of school, you have learned the ways of the Brotherhood. When you get the Crab placed on your chest, you have thousands of new brothers and a few sisters. They are unknown but loved. You will travel all over the world together, work together, drink together, laugh and cry and bleed and fight together. You have a new family. They are all that will sustain you.

  Jeff died outside of Tikrit the summer after I got back from Kirkuk.

  His team got a call that a security unit found an IED on one of the main routes into the city. The security had backed off and set up a cordon a safe distance away. As soon as his armored convoy appeared, as soon as he arrived on scene, there was a massive detonation under his vehicle. It was triggered by a wire concealed in the ground, so his electronic radio jammer couldn’t stop it. The unit he was coming to assist never saw the wire or the explosives. Jeff was driving the newest blast-resistant vehicle, with an underbody hull specifically designed to deflect large explosions. But this bomb was almost two thousand pounds of explosives and buried in the road. Nothing can withstand that. His twenty-six-ton assault truck was decimated. The bomber had waited until the EOD team arrived on the scene, had waited while the other security unit unknowingly sat on top of their own deaths, and only triggered his device once the EOD truck pulled up to the exact spot. Jeff never had a chance. I don
’t know how much there was left to bury.

  I have a new job now. Out of the Air Force, out of the military, I’m two weeks into my new civilian life and at my new job, sitting in a bland conference room in a faceless hotel in a blur of a town. I don’t know it yet, but there will be a string of identical hotel rooms, a squadron of stuffy airlines, and piles of free continental breakfasts in my future, traveling the country providing last-minute training to EOD guys before they deploy. A parade of faces, a two-week helping of explosives and robots and running drills until they have their tactics just right. Then up and gone, love ’em and leave ’em, to the next half-month stand, another unit, another bundle of hopes and fears. Faces meld and join, till the memory of each brother and sister is just a smear, a lingering haze, a nagging impression. All the faces return. Most alive. Some dead. The list of EOD technicians killed in battle is now largely a list of my former students.

  But this is my first job, and sitting in that conference room, fresh and green and ready to teach my first course, that future is still an unknown. I meet my fellow instructors for the first time: John, JB, Jimbo, Vic. Chris and Matt will join the team soon. All former EOD guys, from all four services, done with the military but not done with the Brotherhood; we can’t bear that thought so we perpetuate. Everyone has a common acquaintance. War stories start, jokes and outrageous deeds. I know Jimbo from my last tour in Iraq; it is not coincidence, it is a law of averages. So few brothers, there are few degrees of separation.

  And then the news arrives at the conference room. Before I lose a single student, I lose a former classmate. Jeff has died, and so has his teammate Pat. In a truck, on a stretch of deserted highway south of Tikrit. Command wire. Two thousand pounds. Buried in the road.

  The Crazy stirs in its sleep. I check my rifle. The foot sits in a box.

  I know Jeff. Jimbo knows Jeff and Pat. JB and Vic know Pat. So now I know Pat too, and JB and Vic know Jeff, as the beer flows, and Vic and Jimbo and JB and I remember long into the night.

  My wife said she could never imagine Jeff growing old. Now she won’t have to.

  III | Failure

  WHAT DO YOU do when your rights are being read? Your legal rights, out loud, to you directly and right in your face, not on television on some crime drama. Do you remain silent? Do you ask for an attorney? Do you yell and scream? Shrink? Run?

  I did none of those things. My words failed and my shoulders slumped. The shock made my heart race and my mind spin and my hands shake all the way up to my elbows. I was expecting an ass-chewing, an uncomfortable correction, a warning to never make that mistake again. I was not expecting to be charged with a crime.

  When I arrived at my boss’s office, a marble-and-plywood box in a captured Iraqi Air Force administration building, I was told to close the door. The First Sergeant and the Chief—witnesses—were standing next to the Colonel’s desk, behind and to the side, eyes looking down. That didn’t happen during typical ass-chewings. I was asked to hand over my sidearm. I removed my 9-millimeter pistol from the holster strapped to my right leg, released the magazine, popped the round from the chamber, and put it on my Colonel’s desk in front of him. That did not typically happen either. The Colonel then looked down, lifted a sheet of paper, and reading word for word in a steady voice, informed me I had been relieved of my command, I had the right to remain silent and any statement I uttered from then on could be used against me in my court-martial proceeding.

  The astonishment hit first, but the stoop in my frame did not last. Pride found my spine, confidence my shoulders. As he continued to read, I stood back up, square, at attention, and listened as I was charged with disobeying the direct order of a general during wartime. A crime, if my adrenaline-addled brain could recall correctly, that could send me to Leavenworth.

  When he was finished, I ignored my first right.

  “Sir, I am very confused. What’s going on here?”

  The Colonel looked at me with sad eyes. He sighed.

  “You need to call the defense lawyer in Germany,” he responded.

  When I arrived at Cannon Air Force Base immediately following EOD school, I thought of nothing but deploying. Afghanistan was winding down, and the EOD guys there were bored, looking for work. But Iraq was still exciting—the initial push into Baghdad had gone well, and there was a palpable sense that we needed to deploy soon, before all the fun was gone. I saw pictures e-mailed back from guys at the Baghdad Airport of guided missiles, submunitions from the First Gulf War, and piles of artillery rounds being destroyed daily. All the things I had only seen in school were there, spread around the country like trash in a giant landfill. I needed to go before it was all destroyed. It had only taken a year for the good times to end in Afghanistan, and we were afraid we’d miss it twice.

  I had only been in my job commanding a unit of about twenty EOD technicians on the flat, windswept prairie of eastern New Mexico a week before I started calling headquarters, asking when I could deploy next. The gray-haired Chief who endured my begging took my enthusiasm in stride; in less than a year, I was in the training pipeline, the conveyor belt, the cattle chute that leads to the C-130 ride into the box.

  I was only beginning to learn about EOD and leadership when my number came, and I had a lot of catching up to do. For all of my self-assured ego and confidence, EOD school really only put tools in my metaphorical toolbox, but hadn’t taught me how to use them. Plus, the specific ordnance and devices I encountered in school were quickly becoming obsolete in the war that was developing. The roadside bomb did not fully exist as a weapon in the imagination of the Iraqi insurgent when I completed the IED section of Explosive Ordnance Disposal school. As a student I studied pipe bombs, the Unabomber, and 1980s Eastern European terrorist designs. We investigated the fake training devices using X-rays and a heavy metal disrupter designed during World War II. The robots were old and kept out of the way where the students couldn’t break them, and we saw none of the other new technology that was available only months later in Iraq itself. I was learning to be in command, I was learning to shoot, I was learning new equipment, and I was learning a new way of war with everyone else.

  EOD had an updated mission. Clear roads, cities, buildings, of IEDs for the grunts and convoys. Find and blow the weapons caches squirreled away throughout the country. Collect evidence from blast scenes to track down and kill the bomb makers. Do all of this while fighting your way through a country on the edge of anarchy. Prepare yourself for the worst. If your security is overrun, and every soldier meant to guard you instead lies rent in pieces, a wet mess strewn about their smoking armored Humvees, be prepared to extricate your EOD team by shooting your way home. No matter what, your brothers come home alive.

  Three months before my first real combat tour we began serious deployment workups, leaving home to conduct training we couldn’t do at our small base. A week of trauma medicine—IVs, intubations, and tourniquets. Driving our Humvees in a convoy at high speed through mock villages and ambushes. Advanced electronics, to analyze circuits soldered together in dirt-floored caves thousands of miles away. Clearing and rendering safe IEDs with the newest equipment—electronic jammers, British water-and-explosive-mix disruption charges, and sleek robots half the size and weight of the clunkers we had at home—most of which we had never seen before. A combat shooting course, put on by civilian contractors, where we moved and fired our weapons in ways that never would have been allowed by the safety-soaked and risk-averse larger Air Force.

  The muddy and ramshackle shooting range looked more like the forgotten corner of an old farmer’s property than the scene of advanced tactical marksmanship training. Two picnic tables, a temporary shelter, rows of railroad ties that demarked shooting lanes, a pile of dirt on one side of the long gallery to catch our lead. Located at the end of a winding track off our maps, the contractor’s firing range was isolated in the low, thick central Texas woods, wet with November rain.

  But initial looks could be deceiving. Piled on those pic
nic tables, in unmarked separate cardboard boxes, were a hundred thousand rounds of 5.56- and 9-millimeter ammunition. Rifles, pistols, magazines, optical sights, scopes, infrared lasers, drop holsters, cross-draw and multi-mag vests, body armor, helmets, slings, armored gloves, and cool-guy sunglasses littered the surrounding grass, fell out of the back of pickup trucks, and stood ready for use. And at one end, against the dirt berm, were rows of heavy steel targets, some with paper coverings depicting Middle-Eastern-looking men, some blank and naked.

  My right thumb was raw from loading magazines by lunch on the first day. To the firing line, for warm-up shots with the rifle and then pistol. Back to the picnic tables for remotivation and magazine reloading. At the firing line again, for transition drills between rifle and pistol. More lectures and magazine loading. To the line again. Three shots with the rifle to the chest, switch magazines, then three more. Professionals do the simple things well: accurate and sustained fire, counting rounds so you are never dry, reloads under fire, immediate actions to fix a broken weapon, transitions from rifle to pistol and back, squaring your body to the threat so your vest absorbs the shock of impact if you are shot, moving and communicating and working as a team while under duress. The plink of lead on steel was a soothing song of success.

  All the while, our contracted instructor, an ex–Marine Recon trigger-puller, barked, cajoled, mocked, ridiculed, and motivated. A command to the line, to prepare to fire. A call to shift fire, as a new threat emerged. A distracting whisper in your ear while you slowly squeezed the trigger. Grunts and yells and shouts to communicate over the din of twelve talking assault rifles.

  The worst of all sins: not hitting the target. “Whatever you do, Captain, don’t miss!” came the regular admonishment from behind me.

  By the third day, simply killing steel was not enough. We graduated to battle drills—recovering and tending to a fallen comrade, dismounting a vehicle under fire, entering and clearing a building, moving and evading hostile fire through an organized violent retreat. Peels from the left, peels from the right, Australian in-line peels, shoulder taps and foot pressure to move through a room. Timing reloads to ensure a constant hail of bullets on the head of the enemy.