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

by Brian Castner

  Mitchell drove the robot down to the car bomb and verified what the Kurds had told us. A dead bomber in the front seat, a suicide switch wrapped around the automatic transmission lever next to the emergency brake, electrical wires running to the car battery, a pile of propane tanks filled with homemade bang, primed with wads of gooey plastic explosives and held together with black electrical tape in the rear cargo compartment.

  Crisp and I went to the back of the Humvee to get an explosive tool for the robot to drag down and place under the car. I lit another cigarette; smoking was the least dangerous thing I did all day.

  “Which one do you think Ewbank wants?” asked Crisp.

  “I guarantee it’ll be the Boot Banger,” I answered.

  Sidney Alford, eccentric British inventor and demolitions man, developed the Boot Banger in the mid 1980s to take apart IRA car bombs in Northern Ireland. A boxy briefcase-sized mix of explosives and water, Boot Bangers remove everything from the trunk of a car, usually by turning the vehicle inside out. To the uninitiated a harmless-looking black plastic box, like an overgrown piece of toy luggage, the Boot Banger sandwiched layers of water and explosive to great effect. We had meticulously prepped the tool back at the HAS, carefully slicing the quarter-inch-thick sheets of explosive to fit. All we needed to do was add water and cap in.

  The crowd around us predictably began to grow, but this time, instead of a pressing mob or wailing women, our company was AK-47-armed Kurdish peshmerga, tribal militia determined to secure their homes and exact revenge. The radio crackled with a report of multiple black vans of masked gunmen, sporting rocket-propelled grenades, on their way to our location. Our terp had a hurried conversation with the pesh commander, gesturing to the west and north. Soon the gunmen began shouting and running off together toward the heart of the city. Gunfire erupted in the distance, and I never saw a black van.

  The robot ripped the suicide switch off the gear shift and then slid the Boot Banger in flat beneath the hatch, on the ground between the pavement and undercarriage. Ewbank popped the initiator, the tool exploded, and propane tanks and detonating cord flew into the air, ripped free by the expelling force of the water jet. In minutes it was safe enough to head down to the car, dismantle the rest of the bomb by hand, and inspect the Kurdish handiwork.

  I leaned in the passenger side, collecting pieces of evidence, and examined the body seated behind the steering wheel, still perfectly intact, so focused is the Boot Banger’s effect. The thwarted suicide bomber’s head leaned to the side, covered in a fine layer of dust kicked up from our explosive clearing charge. His eyelashes were dirty; that’s how I knew he was dead. If he were alive, that layer of dust would tickle, and he would have brushed off his eyelids and nose. But the dust had settled and did not irritate. Nothing would spur this fleshbag to move again, even the flies now coming in.

  I stared at the hole in his skull. It was dark, empty. His brain had been pushed in, leaked out the exit wound on the other side, and I couldn’t see it from this angle. A black hole in his skull, just above the temple, the diameter of my index finger.

  I wanted to put my finger inside of it.

  I am alone in my full bed. Alone with the Crazy, in the bed where the spiders crawl out of my head and the ceiling presses down to crush me. Always bubbling, always boiling, always intolerable, the Crazy feeling swells me to bursting again. I’m crawling out of my skin. It’s been three and a half months now. The Crazy hasn’t let up yet.

  My wife rolls over and pretends to be asleep. We have gone to bed without speaking. Again. She is wearing a yellow T-shirt as a nightgown, the words “Kirkuk, Iraq” emblazoned across the front in bold black letters. You get a T-shirt for everything now. Running a race. Opening a bank account. Giving blood. Elbowing your neighbor to catch a shot from a pop-gun at a minor-league baseball game. I even have one for fighting the Battle Creek forest fire in South Dakota. A T-shirt for a forest fire. Why not one for fighting a war?

  My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.

  “How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked.

  “He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.”

  My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me?

  My wife wasn’t prepared to sit and wait for my collapse. She considered it a gift, grace from above, that I got fired and sent home early from Balad. No way I could tempt fate twice and emerge unscathed. Better to consider me dead the day I got on the plane for Kirkuk. Her mental preparation was validated; as far as she could tell, I came home Crazy. She tells me that I didn’t laugh, not once, for an entire year after I got back. Crazy was like dead for her.

  I know she’s strong enough to handle it. The girl I met our senior year, straight A’s, future emergency-room nurse, college swim team, was strong enough. Strong enough to deal with my deployments and time away. Strong enough to wait for the knock on the door while watching the carnage on the evening news. Strong enough to deal with a Crazy husband. Strong enough to raise our sons by herself. Strong enough, if called upon, to open the letter I wrote before I left, to be read to our boys if I came home in a bag, explaining why their father went away to die in some city they can’t find on a map. To this day that letter sits in a small safe, inches away from where I now sit and type. It sits in that safe unopened and undiscarded because I don’t remember what I wrote and I can’t bear to look now to find out. But my wife could have done it. She’s strong enough. She’s not scared of the soft sand.

  So if she needs to cry herself to sleep next to me in bed, then she just needs to cry. If she needs to not speak, then she will stay silent. If she needs to replan her life to support four sons and a couch-ridden Crazy husband, then she will do what she needs to do. She can hack it. She’s just going to have to. What can I do about it now, lying here in bed alone? I’m Crazy.

  Our Marriage Counselor, fat and sweaty, fingers intertwined and resting on the shelf of his enormous stomach, diagnosed the situation.

  “Why is the war still in your house?” he huffed. “Get it out of your bed.”

  Too late. We are in a bed full of rifles and helicopters and twitching eyes and Kermit’s blue skin and the foot in the box. My wife sleeps next to the shade of a dead man every night.

  I sleep alone, with the Crazy. And its gray spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart from the inside out every night as I stare at the ceiling in my solitary bed.

  “We should ID this motherfucker. Where are the weapons intel guys?” asked Ewbank.

  We had cleared out the last of the physical evidence from the car bomb and were prepping the homemade explosive-filled propane tanks for demolition. Incoming bullets zipped and pinged off our trucks, snicker-snack off the crumbling concrete houses. The dead bomber with the hole in his head still sat in the front seat.

  “They’re on another car bomb now with Castleman’s team,” I replied. “Should I call them to get them over here?”

  “Nah, we don’t have time. Do we have a fingerprint kit in the truck?” asked Ewbank.

  “I don’t think so. Weapons intel has them all.”

  “Did we check his wallet at least?”

  “Didn’t have one. I bet the Kurds grabbed it before we got here.”

  “Well, we need something for this asshole,” said Ewbank, and thought a minute, finger to his lips.

  “You guys could cut off his fingers and take them with you,” suggested a voice from above. It was the turret gunner from a nearby security Humvee, obviously eaves
dropping on our conversation. The barrel of his short belt-fed machine gun was visibly warm from returning the sporadic incoming fire that had harassed us all afternoon, a faint whisper of smoke slipping from the bore. The kid smiled and looked proud of himself for having such a good idea. Thinking outside of the box.

  I considered.

  “Probably not a good idea. We don’t have a good way to keep them from rotting on the way to central processing in Baghdad.”

  “Yeah, good point. Well, one more unidentified suicide bomber in this world won’t hurt much. Let’s pack up and go,” said Ewbank.

  We blew the propane tanks in a nearby field where they wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything. The Kurds must have dragged off the body. I don’t know. We left it and the car where they lay.

  Two months later we had a Day of Five VBIEDs. But by that time I was numb, my brain atingle, and I have no memory of it at all.

  Terrorism and modern war are only possible in their current form because of the scientific application of high explosives. Poor pale cousins of these dark riders appeared before, but the true potential for human cruelty was only discovered on a grand scale once man could kill tens or hundreds or thousands in one act, rather than take single lives with a spear or a club.

  Explosives being the key ingredient in the conflict, it would seem logical that those that neutralize said explosives would play a pivotal role. Such logic, however, is wrong. Most state-employed weapons are designed to detonate immediately at their target, and it is only an unintended consequence that unexploded munitions would be present on the battlefield. Civil War cannonballs, Great War artillery shells and mortars, World War II rockets and flak, Vietnam War anti-aircraft missiles and hand grenades were all meant to kill immediately. It is only when terrorism and modern war are mixed, one side choosing to integrate fear into its strategic plan, that the neutralizer comes to prominence. Because then the bomb technician is not so much a disposer of waste as a bringer of calm, a foil to the fundamental method by which your enemy wishes to wage war.

  Twice in modern war has the bomb technician found himself a historic fulcrum. Our first chance we won. The second, we failed before we started.

  Nazi Germany swept up the Poles, Belgians, Dutch, and French in a tidal wave that crashed on the high white cliffs of the British Isles. To put another notch in Hitler’s belt, the Luftwaffe needed to defeat two foes: the pesky insects buzzing around the ears of their expansive bomber formations, and the stout hearts of the British people. The first they attacked with Messerschmitts. The second they attacked with fire bombs and V rockets in the Blitz.

  Germany knew the factories of Britain, Canada, and the United States would have been able to perpetually provide sufficient airplanes and pilots. Thus the first foe would only fall if the second failed first. The real battle lay with the will of the British people to endure, contingent in large measure on the efforts of the Unexploded Bomb (UXB) brigades.

  Not every bomb dropped is going to detonate. Some will malfunction, no matter the precision of the engineering or mechanical specifications. So when German bombs dropped on London neighborhoods but did not detonate, someone had to go clear them. The UXB squads combed through craters and crushed buildings.

  Unfortunately, German ingenuity foresaw this eventuality and spotted an opportunity. If a bomb could be dropped with a timer, so that it would hit the ground and not detonate, and by all accounts appear to be a dud, then someone would come to dispose of it. But if the bomb fuze timer was set properly, it could detonate later, surrounded then by men clearing it by hand. The Germans developed such timers in the 1930s, and sold them to Franco’s Spain, where they worked to great effect and delight. This strategy worked the first time in Britain. And probably the second. But soon, the British awoke to the danger, and the bomb technician was born.

  Thus a game of cat and mouse developed, each side now fully engaged in the deadly contest before them. British UXB squads learned the inner workings of German timing systems, and disarmed them prior to detonation. German fuze builders then incorporated antitamper features, anti-withdrawal snares, to spoil the new safing methods. The British developed their tactics on the fly, on the battlefield, sending one technician to the bomb with hand tools—hammers, screwdrivers, and hand-crank drills—while the rest of the team stayed back and made meticulous notes. They performed one step at a time, loosened one screw at a time, and detailed each success and failure. If drilling to the left of the fuze caused it to detonate yesterday, then they drilled to the right today, writing a book of procedures to thwart each German re-engineer.

  UXB teams cleared the bombs. The fire brigades stopped the inferno. The British people did not yield. The bomb technician gave his full measure, and ultimately shifted the strategic direction of the war.

  In Iraq, however, our second opportunity, we saw the challenge before us, and declined to meet it.

  As American and British divisions raced over the Kuwaiti border, entering Basra, Kut, and Najaf on the way to Baghdad and beyond, soldiers discovered unguarded and open ammunition bunkers, huge complexes of high-explosive artillery rounds, aircraft bombs, mines, and guided missiles. Instead of securing and destroying those depots, we left them as we found them, moving on to richer targets and swift regime change. In some locations we tested for biological and chemical weapons, finding little other than old rusting hulks, cracked bombs, and hollow rocket warheads. In others, we nabbed the few pieces with technical intelligence value and shipped them back to the United States. Most we left to rot in the open, exposed, vulnerable, not forgotten but simply dismissed as unimportant.

  By the end of the year, those ammunition bunkers were empty, stripped clean by Iraqi militants and redistributed for us to dispose of one by one, hidden by the side of the road.

  “Let me tell ya something,” the old Chief said to the young officers.

  “Are ya ready,” the Chief asked, “because I’m going to blow your fuckin’ minds.”

  The Chief had been in EOD longer than I had been alive. I was ready for any insight, any bits of wisdom, as I sat in the nighttime darkness by the man-made lake outside of the Task Force headquarters. A couple of my fellow EOD commanders and I were meeting at the sprawling base west of Baghdad for a little redirection from higher. The Chief was the informal portion of that.

  We waited. The Chief considered his dark cigar, held gently in his dark hand.

  “IEDs are dope,” the Chief said. “They’re nuthin’ but fuckin’ dope. You think you’re saving the day clearing out that IED? You’re just snatchin’ the user. You think you’re getting ahead taking down the weapons caches? Those are just the sellers. We could wax guys for smokin’ and sellin’ dope for the next thirty years, and there would always be more dope. We could catch ’em bringing it across the border, and there will always be more dope. There is so much dope all over this country, we’ll never find it all. And even if we do, if they still want it, they’ll grow it themselves. That’s the thing about dope. There’s always more.”

  We sat in dejected silence for a moment. The Chief took another puff on his cigar, cherry-red tip bright in the desert night.

  “Well, then, what do we do?” I asked, for the group.

  “You can only do two things,” said the Chief. “The first is to try to get them to not want dope anymore. The problem is, as long as we’re here, everybody wants dope, and they always will.”

  “So what’s the second thing, then, if the first won’t work?” I asked.

  “Get everybody’s ass home in one motherfuckin’ piece,” the Chief replied, deadly serious. “You gotta take care of everyone and get them home to Mamma. It takes five things to live through Iraq. Luck, training, luck, equipment, and luck. Say your prayers every night before you go to bed, kiss that fuckin’ rosary you got, and maybe we’ll all get home to drink some beer at the fuckin’ strip club before all this shit’s over.”

  The first time I met Albietz he was covered in blood. Not his own, but I didn’t know th
at yet.

  Albietz and Meadows and Roy were stuck at Bernstein, a lonely outpost south of Kirkuk. Spartan Bernstein existed to watch over the town of Tuz, a sleepy ville that vacillated between bouts of subsurface tension and extreme violence. As the EOD team there fought boredom and sleep loss in uncertain quantities, I had them come back to the main base every so often for a good meal, a hot shower, and an explosives resupply.

  The attack occurred on one such trip. A heavily armed convoy of Humvees doesn’t snake north on the deserted highway from Tuz very often. There is only one wide, main route through the sprawling city of Kirkuk when approaching from the south. There is no way to prevent a solitary spotter down in Tuz from calling his cousin in an IED cell operating up in the city. It is too simple to predict when and where the convoy will pass a certain street corner, chosen for its hidden infiltration and escape routes. It is too easy to cut through our armor with an array of EFPs.

  The detonation hit the Humvee directly in front of Albietz, Roy, and Meadows. The front concave plate of each EFP melted into a hot comet of molten copper, a heavy center mass trailing burning globs, morphed by the force of the densely packed explosive propelling it. One dirty slug entered the rear passenger door, cut through three legs, and then splattered and ricocheted inside the compartment of the armored truck.

  The EOD team responded first, being the first to see the attack and quickest to the scene. Roy swept for secondary devices that might be lying in wait to kill soldiers providing first aid. Albietz waded into a red wet hell and began to apply tourniquets around thighs, above where knees used to be. The soldier closest to the door lost two legs, the gunner lost one. The femoral artery that runs down the interior of each meaty leg can pump a fire hose of blood when there is a healthy heart of a vibrant twenty-year-old involved. Albietz bathed in it as he worked.