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

by Brian Castner

  “You need to get off the bridge,” I yelled over the drone of our Humvee’s diesel engine.

  I received blank stares in return. I tried again with a mixture of sign language and basic English.

  “Big Boom!” I said, and pointed further ahead. They started arguing among themselves, pointing at either end of the bridge. This wasn’t working.

  I then noticed one policeman, quieter and standing to one side, who looked out of place. A bandanna on his head, and a face a little too clean shaven. A navy blue shirt, too dark. No moustache, and a paler face. Not Arab. Not Kurdish. Turk? American spook?

  I went with my gut.

  “You need to get these guys off the fucking bridge right now. That way.” I pointed behind me.

  “Mista, Mista!” he responded back, shaking his head and putting up his hands in a sign of incomprehension. But the “mista”s didn’t sound right either. I looked at him, and he back. A blink. And then he was off, yelling at the IP to follow, down the bridge behind us. The spook vanished.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Keener asked.

  “They’re lost.” So are we. “Let’s go.”

  Again we remounted, and resumed slowly crawling forward, peering at the fuzzy grays and blacks of the dark roadway, the green flicker of the jammer lighting up the inside of the truck. Castleman was radioing to Cougar 13 on the other side of the bridge, coordinating and clearing our approach, when Keener suddenly veered to the right, off the center stripe of the road where we had been driving, and buried the gas pedal, tearing toward the brightening headlights of the awaiting soldiers. I guess we found it.

  I quickly looked out my window and down. There it was. A pile of garbage just a little different than every other pile of garbage. A wire looped out of the trash. A rounded metal curve in the otherwise random jumble. A pile of refuse like all the others on every street in this city … except this one contained enough explosives to kill me where I sat. Inches from my door, from my feet and legs and heart. The other piles of trash in this city could contain an IED. This one actually did. The sure proximity was unnerving no matter how many times I endured it. The bomb lay right there, next to me, out my window, waiting.

  Keener flipped a U-turn at the end of the bridge and buried us amid the welcoming blanket of the far-side security. I redeployed the robot, grabbed another explosive water bottle, and soon it was working its way toward the pile of trash we had spotted. This side of the bridge was freer of small-arms fire but just as rowdy, a crowd of honking horns and headlights and empty bombed-out apartments looming over us. A dark single-family home with an open mouth lay to our right. I peered into the open door, saw movement, blinked my eyes and shook my head, and it was gone. We needed to clear this IED and be done.

  Castleman called out that the robot camera had found our prize. I turned back to the Humvee, and watched through the controller screen as the robotic claw closed on a small two-way radio and started to pull. Motorola 5320? 8530? I’d have to check later, when we wrote the report. Normal setup for the radio bomber who worked in this area was a crude mechanical timer as a safety backup, a nine-volt battery, and a single electric blasting cap. The robot arm lifted and extended, revealing just that: radio connected to battery connected to cap connected to a heavy gray 120-millimeter mortar shell. The Colonel was leaning forward, transfixed, staring at the flat screen, its eerie light iridescent in the deep night. Now to place our explosives, blow everything apart, and get out of here. None too soon.

  I went to the back of the truck to prepare our charge for detonation, and instead saw our security trucks, which had been blocking traffic, starting to line up in a convoy formation. To leave. They can’t leave—we’re not done yet.

  “Why is our security leaving?” I called to the front of the truck, yelling to make myself heard over the constant diesel din.

  Castleman grabbed the radio and had too short of a conversation.

  “Cougar 13 says they’ve been fragged to investigate a car bombing in the Kurdish market on the north end of the city,” Castleman yelled back.

  “Why are they leaving without us? We’re the ones that do the investigation!”

  Castleman laughed.

  “Tell them to stop. We’re not done here!”

  There was another short pause, and then Castleman started swearing and hitting the radio handset against the side of the Humvee in frustration. My turn, to see if an officer talking sense had more effect.

  “Cougar 13 …” I needed a call sign. What number do Army commanders take? “Cougar 13, this is EOD 6. Where are you going?”

  “EOD 6, Cougar 13. FOB Warrior TOC has fragged us to Mike Echo 4473 2681. VBIED detonation, over.”

  “You are our outer security. You aren’t leaving.”

  “EOD 6, Cougar 13. Bayonet 23 is going to handle your security.”

  VBIEDs—Vehicle-Borne IEDs, pronounced Vee-Beds—always got the command post excited, thus the urgent change of plans. And Cougar 13’s point made sense; Bayonet 23 came with us, after all. Their swap might even have worked under normal circumstances. Tonight, though, there was a bridge, gunfire, and a still-live IED between us and Bayonet 23. If Cougar 13 left, there would be no one holding off the mobs pressing against the security line on this east end of the bridge. We couldn’t disarm bombs and be riot police at the same time.

  “Cougar 13, EOD 6. Negative. You are staying put until we’re done with this one. Then you can take us to the VBIED blast site.”

  The radio went quiet for a moment. Follow the TOC’s direction? Or disobey their ops center to follow my order from the field? Tension filled the line.

  “I’ll call the FOB Warrior Battle Captain myself on my cell phone and let him know what’s happening,” I added.

  That obviously made Cougar 13 feel better.

  “Roger that, EOD 6,” came the belated reply.

  Being a captain had occasional advantages, and Castleman had not wasted the time I bought him. While I kept us from being abandoned, our robot had placed an explosive-and-water mix near the wires connecting the battery to the blasting cap, and was reloaded back in our truck.

  “Fire in the Hole!” Booom! The device came apart and scattered across the bridge, alerting half of Kirkuk to our presence.

  The small-arms fire exchanges increased between Bayonet 23 and the gunmen on the near bank as we made the lonely drive back up the bridge to investigate the dismembered device. Quickly pieces and parts were loaded in our truck: a possible fingerprint here, a telltale wire knot there. I grabbed the mortar shell, a massive turkey leg, five pounds of explosives encased in thirty-five pounds of steel, and dumped it unceremoniously in the back of the truck for future disposal. Castleman called on the radio to Bayonet 23, who could now finally cross the bridge, as we quickly lined up and left the angry crowds behind. The Colonel stared out the window.

  Off we drove, our little five-truck convoy, through the twitching city, to a smoldering car, a burning market, a pile of bodies, screaming children, and a long, long night.

  I read in my hometown newspaper that a local art gallery, the big one at the college, has a new exhibit. It’s an antiwar piece, a mix of media that demonstrates how terrible conflict is. The paper says it’s earnest and powerful and contains Truth. I decide to go.

  The room is small. A video plays on the far wall, continuously scrolling a list of names. Names of our dead. Black bags hang on strings from the ceiling, like giant popcorn necklaces, filling half the room. Each bag is supposed to hold the name of a soldier. More names of our dead. There are a lot of bags.

  The artist has a narrative posted on the wall, an explanation of the piece. It talks about the moral choice of being a soldier in war. It says soldiers, when confronted with the horrors of war, have to make a choice: To fight or not. To participate or not. Suicide, it says, is the only moral choice.

  The Crazy feeling explodes in my chest and makes my head spin. I start to shake.

  Maybe it’s right. Maybe I’ve made t
he wrong choice all along. I know what I did. I know what I wanted to do.

  And now it’s caught up with me. I can’t live like this.

  Not my whole life. Not the rest of my life like this. With the Crazy.

  Something has to change.

  It has to end.

  V | The Day of Six VBIEDs

  I DON’T REMEMBER when we realized there were six. Perhaps we should have expected it, after hitting the EFP Factory That Wasn’t the day before. But I was tired, so tired, gorging on coffee from my enormous desert-camouflaged travel mug simply to stay awake, and when the first call came in, I sent off a team like it was any other event, any other bag or suspicious pile of trash along any highway in Iraq.

  But it wasn’t. Five minutes later there was another call. And then another. We stepped outside of the HAS, and saw three pillars of black smoke rising from the center of the city. A fourth pillar appeared before we ran inside to answer the phone again. Within fifteen minutes there were six. Six car bombs, attacking locations throughout the city. Later we called it the Day of Six VBIEDs.

  Castleman took the first team to the local Patriotic Union of Kurdistan office, the site of the first attack, while I left with the second team five minutes later. Together we leapfrogged from blast site to blast site, from smoke cloud to smoke cloud. Count the bodies, collect the evidence, clear the scene, destroy leftover hazards. Mostly count the bodies.

  Ewbank, Mitchell, Crisp, and I headed to the second call, to the Kurdish day care for crippled children. That sounds fake, right? Like I just made that up? Like I picked the stereotype of the most horrific possible target of a suicide car bomb? If only. Just before nine o’clock in the morning, a purple Opel detonated in the outdoor play area after ramming through the mud courtyard wall. We arrived to comb through the aftermath.

  There was little to see at the day care. A smoking and charred black skeleton of a car, an engine block thrown through a crumbling home. The screaming crowds that would accompany us the rest of the day were thinning quickly, having already carried off the biggest portions of the victims. Two mangy feral dogs chewed on the little that was left. Four more car bombs to get to. We quickly pressed on.

  Jimbo and I are running along the secluded creek-side path, past heaps of winter flotsam, tree-trunk strainers and rocky curves, a gray chilly winter day in eastern Washington. Jimbo and I are civilian trainers together, always on the road, EOD unit to EOD unit, a blur of travel and teaching. I’m running down the Crazy, and Jimbo obliges me as a running partner. But today my knee is screaming, and my lungs are ragged, and I can’t keep up a pace that tamps the Crazy down. So Jimbo runs on ahead, but Ricky is on the trip too, and he hangs back and keeps me moving, even if it’s at a slower gait.

  “How far you wanna run today?” Ricky asks.

  “I want to go my full six miles. Do a 10K. Can you do it?” I respond, huffing and wincing. My knee won’t stop protesting, but at least the pain fully occupies my mind.

  “I’d like to finish the whole thing. I hope we have time,” Ricky answers.

  Ricky and I press on, around brown rolling hills and under old abandoned railroads, following the river swollen with the spring thaw. But I’ve developed a limp that is throwing off my stride, no matter how I ignore the pain in the ligament on the outside of my knee. Soon my pace slows again, and Ricky is checking his watch.

  “If we’re going to get back in time, before it gets dark, we need to turn around,” Ricky says.

  I protest, but he’s right, and reluctantly we turn back toward the hotel. Jimbo catches us on the way back, and we all finish the last leg together as the sunset turns deep purple, the streetlights coming on in bunches. Jimbo ran the full 10K we had mapped out before, and tells us of a waterfall he saw around a bend we never made it to, another mile past where we had to turn around. It sounds great, but Ricky and I never do make it all the way to see it ourselves.

  They had already started screaming before we arrived. It continued the entire time we worked. It probably continued after we left.

  More than a scream. A high-pitched shriek, and sob, and vomit, and a scream again.

  Men usually formed the bulk of the crowds that gathered spontaneously at bombings and attacks, huddled in dress clothes and leather loafers, faces full of concern and suspicion. This crowd was different from the moment we arrived. There was a small group of women across the narrow street from the crater formed by the second car bomb; in their screams they created a din that rivaled any shouts and chants from any male throng I had ever heard. And because there were women, they brought their children, crying an echo of their mothers’ wail. Small children, barefoot in the sewage and blood. And one boy, barely a teenager, who stared at our armored truck as we arrived with overtly hot contempt and hatred. The crowds of men never looked you in the eye, even if you spoke to them. But this boy’s direct gaze burned through the armored glass between us. His eyes never left me, never wavered, never stopped boring through Kevlar and steel and flesh to see what, if anything, lay beneath.

  Even the meager trees were blackened by the enormous blast that felled half a city block. Somehow the target, a police colonel and Kurdish commander of the city’s SWAT team, managed to survive. He was still inside his home when the suicide bomber drove the explosive-laden car into his driveway. His bodyguards, who had come that morning to pick him up and take him to work, were standing in the driveway next to the official police vehicle. I never did find much of it. We found the entrails of the bodyguards on the roof of a home a quarter mile away.

  The foot didn’t sit in the box. Not yet.

  The Iraqi Police who arrived before us made no pretense of holding back the crowds, swelled and frantic, pouring over the scene, collecting pieces of loved ones and already mourning the dead. What evidence could we possibly find in the chaos? My frustration grew as the shell of the suicide bomber’s car was loaded on a tow-truck bed before we had a chance to examine it. Iraqi policemen brought us arms and hands, gesturing and talking hysterically, but with no terp around we understood little. The colonel himself had already left for the main police station to plan a reprisal against the Arab faction that produced the suicide bombers. And through it all, the women never stopped screaming, never stopped chanting, never stopped their piercing clamor.

  Why are we even here, I thought, if hundreds have already tromped through, swept up, recovered, snatched, or spirited away whatever tiny shreds of evidence may have been available? Why do I care who the bomber was? Why do I care what explosives he used? What trigger? What car, and where it was stolen from? If they don’t care, why should I?

  The boy continued to stare, and the women continued to shriek, and my anger grew with the volume of their grief. Did they think I liked wading knee-deep through their former cousins, sons, brothers, children? Did they not see that I was trying to help? But every move the crowd made set me back another half step, an accumulation of a thousand ingratitudes. The removal of a speck of explosive residue here, the grabbing of the bomber’s license plate there. The mob swarmed like ants anywhere we had to work. Why did they have to make an awful job next to impossible?

  And will no one shut these women up! The screams never abated, seared through my earplugs, and branded my brain.

  I noted my rifle again, heavy in my hand. I can shut these women up. If no one else will do it, if the Iraqi Police won’t move them on, get them home, then I can stop the screaming.

  I put my right thumb on the safety, and my finger on the trigger.

  I could do it. There are only, what, five or six? I could kill five or six women to stop the shrieking. It would be worth it, to stop this migraine tearing my skull apart, to stop the mindless wailing and gnashing.

  I fantasized about it. My finger got twitchy in anticipation as the adrenaline began to flow. I couldn’t take my eyes off them now, heads modestly veiled, hands covering their wrinkled faces stained with tears. Still the screaming did not stop.

  The teenage boy stared through m
e, and saw nothing inside. I stared back at the women, and flipped my rifle off Safe. I could do this. I am capable of it. I can end this insolent screaming now.

  “Come on, Captain, let’s go,” said Ewbank. “There ain’t shit here to find. And anyway, we got another call. They found a car bomb that didn’t go off. Let’s di di mau.”

  There are two of me now. The logical one watches the Crazy one.

  The Crazy one is living the life. The Crazy one wakes up, and wonders if today I will be Crazy. And the answer is always yes.

  The Crazy one dresses the kids, packs lunches, drives them to school. The Crazy one showers, eats, cleans. The Crazy one flies to work, trains soldiers, flies home. The Crazy one sleeps next to my wife, goes to hockey practice, checks math homework. The Crazy one runs and runs and runs. The Crazy one is always Crazy.

  But the logical one can step back and observe. The logical one watches, waits, comments. The logical one knows there is another way. Knows that this life is not a life. Knows I used to enjoy things, even some of the things I’m doing now. Knows that there must be a cure for the Crazy. Knows that the Crazy must not always be, simply because it is right now, at this moment. There was a time before the Crazy. The logical one knows there must be a time after.

  But the logical one is powerless, trapped, a shade looking over the shoulder of the Crazy one frantically whirling. It can only watch, as my chest fills, and my stomach boils, and my head comes off, and I simply endure from minute to minute.

  It took the Kurds just a few minutes to figure out what was going on. But once they did, they started fighting back as ruthlessly as they had for thousands of years. The Kurds and Arabs hate each other more than most can fathom, and the retaliations began before the car-bomb attack had even ended. On the Day of Six VBIEDs, five car bombs went off. One did not. The Kurds shot the sixth driver in the temple as he approached the final target. That failed bomber sat now in the gray Japanese car a hundred yards in front of me, slumped but upright, blood splattered across the interior driver’s window, an intact device under the hatchback ready to blow. A bomb for us to clear, a building and family that would not be destroyed today. It was the only VBIED on the entire tour that we would safe before it detonated.