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

by Brian Castner

  The upgraded shooting regimen was interspersed with words of combat wisdom from our instructor, aphoristic hadith pearls from the master, blessings on the student. We sat at his feet, loaded yet more magazines with row upon row of ammunition, and absorbed the enlightenment. Simple concepts that inspired confidence in ourselves and our ability to return alive.

  You must be willing to commit more violence than your enemy. A firefight is a test of wills to kill.

  You must mentally prepare to be shot. To absorb the impact, to brace your chest against it, and then continue to return fire.

  Live behind your weapon. Take cover behind your weapon. If you are shooting at your enemy, he will put his head down and not shoot back. If he is not shooting at you, you cannot get shot.

  Your rifle, your pistol, your vest, your head, and your heart are a five-man team on your side. They will save you. Stay alive no matter what. You don’t quit until you are dead.

  Always be alert, be present, be ready to kill. When the moment comes, your training and muscle memory will save you.

  The last day of training, the final exam, the last shooting sequence, was a combination of all previous exercises. We moved down the grassy field on patrol, soggy scrub trees transformed into dusty crumbling walls of an Iraqi village in my mind’s eye. Suddenly, our instructor calls contact front! Twelve of us came on line, and a thousand rounds are fired in the first minute, overwhelming violence perpetrated upon our imaginary foe.

  I needed to change mags, and yelled, “Reloading!” over the roar to my right and left. My partner next to me called, “Covering,” and killed my targets and his during my five-second change-out. In one rote motion I dropped the old mag with my right index finger, reached for the replacement with my left hand, and keeping my eye on the target and never looking down, inserted the new mag and brought the bolt forward and home. “Up,” I shouted, and the fire continued.

  A command from the instructor. To my right, DJ called for a peel. One by one, the shooter on the right end of the line called, retreated, turned, and began firing again, into the enemy and past the line in front of him. Yard by yard we retreated down the cobbled Iraqi street.

  Then, to my left, Brown fell. Hit. Wounded by a phantom bullet, a shoulder tap from our merciless instructor. He had to be recovered and brought to safety.

  “Man down!” I called, and stepped back over Brown’s prone body.

  “Covering,” came the immediate reply, as Olguin and DJ filled my spot, and placed their squared bodies between Brown and the ghostly incoming fire.

  I flicked my rifle to Safe and moved to grab Brown from behind, around the chest in a massive bear hug. Hot shell casings, discarded from the relentless protective fire above us, fell in a rain, onto exposed necks and wrists, into armor gaps and down under my shirt. I sat Brown up, reached around, locked my hands, squeezed, and lifted. Five hundred pounds of man, armor, helmet, tactical vest, rifle, and ammunition lurched backward in one heave. We fell in a pile, inches from where we started.

  Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

  I yelled to DJ to help, and Olguin shifted fire to cover his targets. DJ and I each grabbed one of Brown’s shoulder straps, and after a quick count to three, surged forward. My left arm nearly dislocated as we fell again.

  Our Marine instructor loomed over me and barked in my ear, harassed and mocked, screamed obscenities, questioned my love for my wounded brother at my feet. Would I leave him to die on the battlefield? Alone? Olguin called for a reload and our team’s collective fire waned. We had spent five minutes and four thousand rounds retreating a hundred meters down this exposed Iraqi street. Brown was wounded. I was exhausted. Ammo was running low.

  DJ found his second wind, and with a cry and a massive pull, got Brown’s deadweight moving again to our rear. I latched on, dug my boots into the mud, and tugged as my rifle flopped against my chest. Our firing line retreated again, back to our rally point, to safety.

  I fell again, next to Brown as he checked his bruised body, roughed up from the drag. I panted in exhaustion, and DJ came up to pat me on the head.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “We’re all coming home together.”

  It is at this time, away from family, away from distractions, away from anyone except those with which you will deploy, that the envelopment of the mind occurs. EOD school taught me to want nothing but the life of a bomb technician. Cloistered combat drills taught me to think of nothing but staying alive. I was whisked away into this sublime psychological deployment current, a profound fatalistic insight that further binds you to your EOD brothers and sisters. A collective yielding to luck, to fortune, to Providence, a resignation of self to a timeless continuum of soldiers gone before.

  I met Jessie Spencer senior year of college, on the dance floor of a crowded bar. She was wearing tight jeans and drinking cheap tequila and her smile brightened my soul. It was a hot courtship, a quick engagement, marriage only a year later. I needed Jessie down deep in my gut. And yet. So intoxicating was the seduction of my new mistress—drunk as I was on a cocktail of two parts adrenaline, three parts philia, one part noble purpose—that I didn’t realize I had chosen a new lover until years later. The smell of my wife’s auburn hair, the longing of her blue-gray eyes, the heartbeat of my infant son pressed against my breast, all faded into forgotten memory. The daily drumbeat of training for war, planning for war, celebrating and dreaming and devising for war, was incomparably lovely. It consumed all thought and creativity. It engrossed my being. I wouldn’t leave it for as long as I wore the uniform, home or away.

  My world became narrow and small—the thirty-five other EOD technicians I would deploy with, a base in Iraq, IEDs, the enemy. Who and what you are leaving behind fades nearly unnoticed. Your time horizon begins when you step onto Iraqi soil and ends when you leave. There are no considerations beyond the handful of brothers in the room with you and the next nine months. There is no thought to the consequences of your decisions past that abbreviated timeline, no imagining of what might follow you home. Home is a lifetime away. Your immediate present, your whole world, is the war. That is where you are going, like countless others before you over the centuries, a line of young men from American small towns and European peasant farms, from great Roman cities and Japanese pagodas on terraced mountainsides. Don the armor, mount the horse, and join your brothers in battle.

  But before you leave, on a ship, on the jet, marching out of your village in a column down muddy medieval tracts like previous faceless hordes, you celebrate life even as death stalks in your shadow. The strip club filled to capacity every evening, a long day of training on the range giving way to an overtime of partying. Previous nonsmokers bought cartons of cigarettes. The beer and liquor flowed generously. Even the most button-downed spent money they didn’t have on stripper after stripper until closing time. And why shouldn’t they? They were going to war.

  “Are you a soldier, shugah?” cooed the mostly naked girl on my lap.

  “Close enough,” I replied. She had dark hair, and relied on hard work rather than God-given good looks for repeat business. I liked that.

  “Are you all together? There sure are a lot of you,” she asked again, making small talk in between songs. I had thrown another couple of twenties down, so she knew she would be with me for a while.

  “We are. We’re all bomb technicians, and we leave for Iraq in a couple days.”

  “Well, this place sure was boring till you got here,” she lied in a whisper, her lips brushing my ear, soft breath inducing shivers up my spine. She ran her fingers down the back of my head and neck, along my shoulders and torso, and placing both hands on my hips, lifted herself into a straddle across me.

  She leaned in, and I could feel the warmth of her breasts through my shirt.

  “You guys deserve to have some fun before you go,” she breathed.

  The bird touched down at Balad just after the New Year. I was fired less than a month later.

  My first C-130 ride
ever was my flight from Qatar into Iraq. The deployment was still an indistinct dream in my mind until the main lights turned off in the back of the cargo plane. Stark reality suddenly emerged in the form of a dim red glow that barely illuminated the thirty of us packed onto the cloth bench seats. We had crossed over into Iraqi airspace. Safety and comfort and three-a-day beers at Al Udeid were left behind. I half expected surface-to-air missiles to continuously shoot at us the rest of the way in.

  The EOD compound at Balad, a sprawling air base an hour’s drive north of Baghdad, was everything my romanticized brain had hoped for. Hard against the flight line and taxiway were rows of armored trucks and dingy tents, dry-rotting in the desert heat. A trapezoidal bunker squatted in the center of our camp, a shelter during incoming rocket attacks and a vault for a collection of seized small arms and ammunition. Plywood-decked floors in the tents concealed the lairs of constantly chattering mice, squeaking all day and night. The sticky traps littering every nook and cranny were all that stopped a full infestation, though the screams of caught mice, tearing themselves apart to be free of the snare, kept me up much of the night. My sleeping area was just large enough for a single cot, barely secluded as it was by several sheets hung to provide a modicum of privacy; a spanktuary to jerk off in and not much else. My first morning in country I awoke to the vibration of a mortar detonation on the runway half a football field away, a daylight attack from hills to the northwest. It was so close that the thud of the detonation’s compressed-air shock wave, rather than the actual sound of the explosion, startled me awake.

  The food was bad. The terrain was desolate. The threat was real—Sunni insurgents outside of the gate were really trying to kill us.

  Everything about Iraq sucked. I loved it.

  The environment met expectations, but being in command did not. My carefully crafted vision of life as a deployed EOD operator met the practical limits of the Air Force bureaucracy almost immediately. For two solid years I had dreamed of bombs and explosives with a childlike simplicity. Now I was finally here, in the box, living in a rat’s nest, mortars coming down, ready to do the job. But instead of working, we waited.

  We waited for approval to store our explosives. We waited for permission to dispose of munitions near the busiest airfield in Iraq. We waited for the General to personally approve every off-base mission we were tasked by the Army to complete. If an IED was on the side of the road, and we were called to clear it, we couldn’t go unless we asked the General first. I spent my first two weeks of combat on the phone and writing request letters to the General’s administrative assistant.

  It didn’t take me long to stop waiting for or paying attention to the answers. We were EOD technicians. We had a job to do, and I knew better.

  The end came when two of our robots broke. We had a large shelter filled with robots, of every make and model, some experimental, some left over from wars past. But very few of the robots were functional, or fit adequately on the specially prepared ramps mounted to the back of our armored trucks. The robots manually disassembled IEDs so we didn’t have to; they kept us alive. They were also in constant need of repair, but the hub maintenance shop was in Baghdad. Getting there required off-base transport—we needed to ask permission for that.

  A week before a scheduled convoy, I drafted an approval letter and sent it to the General’s aide. No reply.

  Six days before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office to follow up on the letter. I was told to resubmit the form.

  Five days before the scheduled convoy, I e-mailed the request again. No reply.

  Four days before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office again.

  “Please provide justification for not utilizing C-130 air transit to move the robots,” said the General’s executive officer.

  “Those birds only fly once a day, and get canceled half the time,” I replied. “If we drive down, we can turn right around after picking up the new robots. My guys will be back the same day. I need the robots and teams back—I can’t afford to have them stuck in Baghdad for three days waiting on a flight.”

  “Please provide written justification for not using C-130 assets,” the General’s exec said again.

  Three days before the scheduled convoy, I resubmitted the form, with the required justification.

  Two days before the scheduled convoy, a third robot broke.

  One day before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office, seeking verbal approval.

  “We’re currently considering your request,” the administrative assistant answered.

  “The convoy is tomorrow. We need to know!” I was not patient.

  “Please check your e-mail for approval,” I was reminded.

  The day of the scheduled convoy came. No e-mail. No approval. Three broken robots.

  “Are we running down to Baghdad or not?” Hallenbeck asked. Hallenbeck was one of my team leaders short a robot; his was sitting in pieces on the imminent convoy.

  “They’re leaving in twenty minutes,” Hallenbeck reminded me.

  I checked my e-mail again, and looked at the phone. I didn’t want to know what the answer was going to be from the General. We needed the robots.

  “Yeah, go get in the convoy. Hurry up so you don’t miss it.”

  The e-mail from the General’s office disapproving the mission arrived an hour after the convoy left. Thirty minutes later, I drove to my boss’s office to hear my rights read to me. When the convoy returned later that day, bearing three new fresh robots, I was not at the compound to greet them.

  On a clear midwinter day, morning frost yielding to a warming desert sun, the line of townsfolk waiting to vote in their first election stretched down the muddy track bisecting the tiny village. Despite threats and attacks they waited for hours, robes and coverings clutched tight against the chill, to shuffle through decaying schools and crumbling halls, emerging triumphant with a single finger inked blue. On that day, the Balad EOD unit ran calls for twenty hours straight: bombs discovered at early-morning ballot openings, investigations of suicide attacks on lines of expectant hopefuls. On that day, the pinnacle operation of the tour, the EOD teams ran to exhaustion. On that day, I sat in an office and read a book, waiting for my punishment.

  We had been preparing for the election from the moment I arrived in Balad. Initially, polling places had been the target of threats and hoaxes to scare the local populace into staying home. When plans for the election still went forward, the real bombs started showing up. Daisy-chained explosives outside of government buildings along the path where voters would wait their turn. Drive-by shootings and sandbags filled with radio-triggered mortar shells tossed from car windows into the queuing crowds. Car bombs left overnight and timed for poll workers the next morning. All of those and more, the Balad EOD team disarmed, safed, investigated, and prevented. Without me.

  On Election Day, I did not lead my men into battle.

  Instead of fighting my war, I just sat, alone, quarantined from my brothers, awaiting my fate, an impotent, mute, broken failure.

  I sit on the couch at home, dark night filling the picture window behind me, Crazy sloshing in my chest. I stare at the bottles in front of me. Twitch. The left eye has been bad today. My relief is spread across the tabletop.

  I start drinking as early as I can now, as early as I can justify it. Not every day, but more and more. On the days when the left eye is twitching at its worst, it consumes all thoughts beyond the boiling Crazy. And today is the worst yet. Fluttering and jerking, a pounding pulse under the eyebrow and swish of the lower lid. I’m an animal driven mad by relentless distraction, not of buzzing insects but of my own body betraying me. Uncontrollable. Intolerable. Just like the Crazy feeling.

  A couple after lunch. Two bottles of beer before dinner. Twitching through my spaghetti.

  Two more during dishes. I start to help with the children’s baths, then give up as my eye distracts me from differentiating between the soap and the shampoo. T
witch. Another bottle before the hockey game. Twitch. To the couch and more beer. Twitch. Twitch.

  I don’t notice that my wife has already gone to bed. I sit now, alone, and open another. The number of empty beer bottles on the coffee table is growing.

  Twitch.

  Twitch.

  Please let it stop.

  Twitch.

  I quickly finish and stumble slightly as I put the glass down. The spinning room slows my eye and pounding heart both.

  Twitch. Crazy. Twitch.

  The last beer in the carton. How pathetic would I look to my brothers now? How would I explain it? Drinking to keep my eye from vibrating out of my skull. Alone in the dark. And scared.

  Twitch.

  Stillness. A fall.

  And then nothing.

  The scene was no more horrific than normal. Most gas stations in Kirkuk consisted of a man on the side of the road with a jug of piss-yellow liquid and a hand pump. This gas station, however, for police and government officials, had actual inground storage tanks, poured concrete islands to pull your car up to, and 1950s-era American rotary-dial mechanical pumps. An inviting target for a suicide bomber. Or two.

  This time they got past the fences and guards using fake Iraqi Police uniforms and identification cards. Or they were real Iraqi Police, with real uniforms and badges. It was always hard to tell.

  One bomber approached the aging pumps, idling cars, and quasi-important politicians and detonated his ball-bearing-laced suicide belt in the thickest portion of the mid-afternoon crowd. Fortunately for the assembled, though, he was also near a concrete light pole and pump that absorbed most of the explosive energy. The first blast caused confusion, hysteria, and a flood of police and nearby citizens drawn to the scene.