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

by Brian Castner

  Thoughts drift further, as the dust and palm groves and empty desert landscape crawl by outside the thick windows of the armored truck. Does the thin line go back further? How far? What blood runs in my veins? Am I from a Line of Old? What may rise in me, unbidden and unknown, to meet this oldest of challenges? How many battlefields has my blood made wet, in empires made and gone, on bare green islands and cold forested mountains of myth, in lands whose names have changed countless times? How many arrows have I dodged? How many rifles have hung from my shoulder? How many bandages have I wrapped? How many helmets have I worn? In the line of my people, all the way back to the beginning.

  What resides hidden within me, lying in wait to be revealed, once the cycle continues and renews?

  In the darkness of my bedroom, at night, when I try to fall asleep, the top of my head comes off. My chest fills and floats, the ceiling crushes down, and my head cracks open. In a clear line, from temple to temple, around the back of my skull, it lifts free. I can feel it release and open. The spider crawls off the back of my head and runs to the ceiling. I feel every leg detach, as the body forms from the rear cranial knob, and the massive gray hairy spider runs across space and walls and over the foot sitting in a box in a corner.

  Living with the Crazy feeling is intolerable. When I awake in the morning, I open my eyes and try not to move. It is the only time all day that the Crazy feeling is not overwhelming and all powerful. It hasn’t had time to build throughout the day, and for a brief second, it lies still. I wish my whole day could be that first split second.

  Instead, my first thought is always the same. Will I be Crazy today?

  And the answer is always “yes” before my feet hit the floor, children screaming, wife rushing to dress for work, my day an agonizing marathon of eye twitches, rib aches, heart gurgles, and chest fullness until I can struggle back to oblivion again, in that bed, eighteen hours later.

  When I make breakfast for the children, I feel Crazy.

  When I drive them to school, I feel Crazy.

  When I sit in front of the computer, fixing PowerPoint slides, I feel Crazy.

  When I wait for dinner to finish cooking, I feel Crazy.

  When I get on a plane, I feel Crazy.

  When the foot sits in the box, I feel Crazy.

  When I read my children a book before bed, I feel Crazy.

  When I lie next to my wife at night, I feel Crazy.

  And then I fall asleep and do it all over again. Why?

  The Crazy feeling distracts from every action, poisons every moment of the day. It demands full attention. It bubbles, and boils, and rattles, and fills my chest with an overwhelming unknown swelling. My misery compounds.

  I wake every morning hoping not to be Crazy. Every morning I am. I grind through. Month follows month.

  This is my new life. And it’s intolerable.

  I can’t do this.

  I hated going out at night. Our security hated going out at night too. Yes, we had all the fancy NVGs, our night-vision goggles, and other gear so we could “rule the night,” as the grunts liked to say. But we didn’t use them because we had to drive in downtown traffic, and we’d hit every civilian vehicle between us and the IED if we didn’t turn on our headlights. So instead, in the worst possible combination of circumstances, the bad guys got to hide in dark houses, and we had to drive with two bright white targets on the front of our Humvee, and two red ones on the back.

  A call came in from Cougar 13, a regular infantry patrol, for a bomb on the big bridge spanning the Khasa River, just a tiny stream at that time of year that trickled through the center of Kirkuk from north to south. The big bridge, a glowing target visible from miles around, above the dark gash of rabbit warrens and wadis.

  At least it was a respectable hour, not long after full dark. This night the patrols got out earlier and found the IEDs quicker, so my teams and I were still awake. Which meant the city and Haji were still awake. A city of a million Arabs and Kurds and Turks, ancestral homelands for each, depending on which century you consulted. The Kurds were the best organized, controlled the levers of official political, law-enforcement, and military power, and had a plan for restoring Kurdistan: outbreed their neighbors. Arabs who had relocated to Kirkuk during Saddam’s rule did not take kindly to bullying eviction, and sympathized with the terrorist networks that retaliated. The city’s gory present conspired to spoil the city’s hopeful future, so prodigious the blood soaking into the ground that it contaminated the oil reserves hidden beneath the rocky desert.

  Four armored Humvees pulled into the parking and staging area in our compound, right in front of the HAS. After donning our helmets, sandy Kevlar hiding Castleman’s sandy blond hair, we walked up and met the security lead, Bayonet 23. Bayonet didn’t normally take us out. It was usually Psycho, the mortar platoon. But Psycho was on a personal-security-detail mission with the brigade commander, and Bayonet was stuck with us. Or we with them.

  We shook hands, bullshitted, and looked at the map to figure out where we were going. It was our job to clear the IED upon arrival, and Bayonet’s to get us there and keep us alive while we worked. We had done it many times before, but this time there was one wrinkle—we had a passenger. The Colonel, my boss, was nervous about our overall mission. He couldn’t figure out what we did. He didn’t understand why Air Force guys were driving around on the ground with the Army, where they could get hurt. He didn’t understand that EOD technicians from all four services were nearly interchangeable, received virtually the same training from the first day of school. He didn’t understand that the stenciled “U.S. Air Force” name tapes on our uniforms signified little to us. He didn’t understand that we were now more comfortable with the Army, had more in common with the grunts who went outside the wire every day than the wrench-turners and computer junkies who stayed on their safe air base. He wanted to come see for himself, and I couldn’t tell him no, so he had waited all day to get a call himself. This was his chance. He stood an attentive distance away from our powwow and didn’t ask any questions. When we broke and mounted up, I put him in the back right seat, where he was less likely to get killed.

  Our convoy of five armored trucks drove off from the compound to the FOB gate, popped on the jammer, locked and loaded our weapons, and thundered out the serpentine, out of the wire, and immediately to the right, joining Kirkuk’s unceasing traffic midstream. South down Route Cherry, then left at the auto dealership, where we had investigated a car bomb a couple of days prior. We drove in the middle of the road, as fast as the Humvees would go, local cars pulling to the side to avoid being overrun. Stopping is dangerous and so to be avoided, but to evade collisions, all civilian traffic must pull aside when you need to change course. The front gunner carried a dazzling green laser and would flash it in the eyes of oncoming motorists when we had to make left-hand turns against traffic. Everyone stops driving when they can’t see. Thus did our armored convoy barrel toward the western base of the bridge, parting a sea of jammed, congested humanity. The Colonel just sat, his tall frame wedged uncomfortably between his armored window and our robot control station, gripping his too-clean rifle unfamiliarly, staring at the city going by. He had never been off the FOB before.

  Cougar 13 and several of their Humvees were already waiting for us in an empty lot at the base of the bridge when we arrived. We eased our armored truck up to the inner command vehicle, parked, and Castleman dismounted to query the sergeant in charge of the cordon.

  No, this wasn’t their normal sector, they were just returning from a patrol. Yes, they had blocked off all traffic, both this side of the bridge and the other. No, they didn’t mark the IED. Yes, it was definitely on the bridge, though it was dark when they found it, and they weren’t sure where. What did it look like? A pile of trash. Good, that should help. There wasn’t too much trash littering the side of every road in every town of this godforsaken country. Fuck me.

  I got out and peered down the road, out over the bridge that reached into t
he darkness. Gunfire popped in the distance and occasionally tinged and zipped off the truck or nearby abandoned buildings that were more rubble than intact. The harsh headlights of the Humvees glared in our face, so the remaining deep black night beyond swallowed the bridge whole. I put my hand out, blocked the worst of the direct beams, and drank in the twinkle and shimmer of the city on the other side of the wadi. White and yellow streetlights, with the occasional reddish-white muzzle flash of small-arms fire, followed by a ping or two nearby. Flame jumped from a snub-nosed automatic machine gun above me and to my left, as a Cougar turret gunner tracked the flashes from the incoming, and soon it paused again.

  Castleman wanted to drop the robot here and send it up into the inky blackness of the bridge to search for the IED with its small cameras and lights. I didn’t disagree. It was my team leader’s job to run the mission. It was my job to run everything else.

  Turning to go back to the Humvee to build an explosive charge for the robot, I bumped into the Colonel instead.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Please get back in the truck, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re getting shot at.”

  The Colonel looked shocked and confused, but complied, turned around and crawled back in. After putting a mandatory cigarette in my mouth, I dug in the back of our truck, found an old plastic Gatorade bottle filled with water and explosives, set it up to detonate, and handed it to the robot.

  We employed a variety of robots, each fitting a specific mission need. PackBots were small but maneuverable, light enough to be carried short distances by one man, with a four-jointed arm and multiple camera systems. The Talon was rugged and durable, bigger and heavier but stronger too. Our largest robot was the F6A, nearly four hundred pounds but also practically indestructible, strong enough to lift a hundred-pound tank round, with excellent lights and cameras. Everyone had their favorites. In the dark, with an unknown IED, Castleman picked the F6A.

  The stainless-steel robotic gripper latched on tightly to the explosive charge I offered it, our robot driver Mengershausen deftly snatching it via the control station in the Humvee. Each robot was paired with its own flip-open control unit, an LCD television screen, and dashboard of joysticks, dials, toggle switches, and remote-firing systems that allowed a human driver, protected in an armored Humvee, to guide the robot’s movements and see what the robot sees using a variety of cameras. It was a disorienting experience, no depth perception at all and spatial awareness at a premium, unless you practiced regularly and honed your skills. Thus each team had one dedicated robot driver, who thought of little else. Quiet, soft-spoken, watch-cap-clad Mengershausen was this team’s operator.

  I waved into the robot’s tall mast camera, indicating he was clear to send the mechanism downrange. The F6A rumbled down the road and over the bridge, searching for our mysterious pile of trash.

  Seconds turned into minutes. Minutes piled up. Plenty of trash, but none hiding a bomb. The robot had dug through its eighth pile of innocuous dirt when Castleman started to get frustrated and called Cougar 13 on the radio.

  “Where’s the fucking IED?” he politely asked.

  “You mean you can’t find it?”

  “No, we can’t find it.”

  “Well.…” There was a pause on the radio from Cougar 13.

  “Maybe it’s closer to the other end of the bridge,” Cougar 13 finally replied.

  The bridge over the Khasa was half a mile long. Our robot’s range was much less than that. We couldn’t get to the bomb from where we were. Our security had driven us to the wrong side of the bridge.

  The sweltering darkness of the desert night was starting to press in as the sweat dripped down my face, to the end of my nose, and then onto my rifle, hanging down the center of my chest. There was a restlessness to the air, an agitation vibrating through the city. The gunfire was increasing from the other side of the wadi. The honking of horns in the traffic backup created by our security blockade was increasingly agitated. Shouts and gunshots would occasionally startle from behind, or to the side, and then stop suddenly. A crowd had begun to form at the edge of the security cordon, onlookers that talked on cell phones, yelled after their children, barely flinching at the sound of the gunfire. At times, Kirkuk can be a peaceful town, high and dry in the north Iraqi uplands. But at night, the city sometimes transformed, turned, became a thing alive. The tension in the air was rising, a tingle on the scalp. You could feel it grow angry, violent, uncontrolled, edging to a riot. It’s exhilarating and terrifying to be the focus of a city’s tentacled hate. This whole town was about to go bat-shit crazy, and we were on the wrong side of the bridge.

  “What do you want to do now?” I asked Castleman.

  “We need to get on the other side of the bridge, and it’ll take too long to drive around,” he responded.

  He was right—the detour to the other side of the river was several miles, and almost an hour’s drive in nearly unmoving traffic.

  “So you want to drive across the bridge?” Was I actually asking this?

  “That’s right.”

  “Past the IED we can’t find and through the small-arms fire?”

  “Got a better idea?” Castleman’s tone was final.

  In point of fact, I did not.

  Several minutes later we remounted to drive across the bridge, our robot re-stowed and explosives tossed in the back of the Humvee. The rest of the Cougar 13 element was already waiting for us, having spent the last hour holding up traffic on the eastern end of the span. The Colonel, who had been waiting patiently inside the truck with Mengershausen, looked at me and gave an “Are we really driving over that?” look. I nodded. And with a quick extinguishing of our headlights, we plunged into the deep surreal.

  We crept forward, the bridge decking rising steadily ahead of us, a slightly lighter gray against the impenetrable night sky. The gunfire on the opposing bank was constant, but no longer directed at us, as we took the long drive alone and unlit. The occasional ricochet pinged off the top of the truck, an annoying buzzing insect just out of reach. Keener looked forward as he drove. Castleman and Mengershausen scanned the front and sides of the road for our suspicious pile of dirt and trash. I stared at the jammer.

  All IEDs fall into one of three basic categories: victim-operated, timed, and command. This one probably wasn’t set to go off when someone stepped on it or drove past, or else it would have been tripped when Cougar 13 found it. It also probably wasn’t time initiated, a tactic normally reserved for attacks on large infrastructure. A device this small wasn’t going to bring down the bridge, and how did the bomber know when we’d drive by? That left command, meaning that the bomb was waiting for a signal to detonate. A power dump via a long copper wire. Or a call from a cell phone. Or a code transmitted on a walkie-talkie. Even Iraqi security would have noticed a guy stringing a half mile of lamp cord along the bridge railing, so command wire was probably out. That left radio transmission as the most likely scenario. We had one defense against this threat, and I was monitoring it now.

  The green LED display continuously flickered through its cycle as we slowly inched up the bridge, the jammer scanning and monitoring and broadcasting its drowning tone thousands of times a second. The tiny readout, a sick joke by the designing engineers, provided precious little information. Just a string of numbers to be dissected and fretted over.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

  12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

  Each number a channel, each channel hit in sequence, each digit a different threat frequency momentarily squashed. The numbers flicked by so quickly I could barely discern them.

  7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13

  2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2 6 7 8 2 9 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2

  “I think we’re getting closer,” I called up to Castleman.

  6 7 8 9 2 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 2 5 6 2 7 8 2 9 2 10


  2 11 2 12 2 13 2 14 2 1 2 3 2 4 2 5 2 6 2 7 2 8 2 9 2 10 2

  “We’re almost on top of it.”

  Two little metal boxes in our truck, two innocuous antennas mounted on the exterior hardened skin, matching wits with someone hidden trying to kill us as we drove. Could he hear our truck? Could he see us? A glint off our reflective headlights providing a lethal clue?

  Soon we came upon, and nearly hit, some abandoned cars left in the roadway. When Cougar 13 evacuated the area, not everyone took their ramshackle Vauxhalls with them. Slowly we swerved around these cars and trash, threading a needle of potential car bombs, nearing the top of the span, looking for the bomb that must be close, when our driver stopped short.

  “Dude, why are you stopping?” I yelled up to Keener.

  “There’s a guy pointing a gun at me!”

  “What?!” Castleman and I dismounted into mayhem. A crowd of Iraqi Police were milling about on the top of the bridge, their American partners nowhere to be found. Light blue police uniform shirts untucked, clutching their dirty AK-47s, the IP looked lost and confused. I don’t speak Arabic, and our terp was safely back with the Bayonet 23 security detail at the base of the bridge. Castleman leaned his blond head back into the truck and picked up the radio, screaming and incredulous that an IP patrol would be stranded on the bridge next to an IED and inside of a supposedly sealed cordon. The police had obviously independently discovered the bomb and had been guarding it, waiting for us to respond. Now they were lost in the middle of a firefight with no radio communication, stuck on a bridge between two American security teams that would shoot them if they approached. I would have laughed if I wasn’t stuck on the bridge with them.

  I waved at the IP to follow me as I took cover behind an abandoned car, putting the beat-up sedan between me and the threat: an unfound IED to my front and gunfire on the far right bank. Several IP approached hesitantly, more nervous about me than the chance of getting shot out in the open on the top of the bridge. Insha’Allah.