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

by Brian Castner

  The leader looks up from his laptop, charade put aside for the moment, and faintly nods in my direction. I nod back. Their rifles materialize at their feet, a desert mirage, propped among their backpacks and gear, pistols tucked in drop holsters on their legs. I can feel the familiar grip of my rifle in my hand. The comforting grooves on the bolt-release paddle on my left thumb, the heavy satisfying thunk as the spring is released, the bolt moves forward, and the round slides into the chamber. A deep breath. I wonder if they need a fourth man on the team. What’s the job? Personal security detail? Door kickers? Every stack needs a bomb technician.

  I think about going back every day. Back to the job. Back to the clarity of thought, the singleness of purpose, the mundane details of the world falling away and only the essential remaining. No bills. No to-do lists. No children asking for attention. No tear-filled marital counseling with my wife. No broken lawnmower and early-morning soccer practice and dentist appointments to schedule. No clutter.

  For a moment, I do more than just consider going back. The helo inserts, rifle slung and feet dangling out the side, legs kicking in the breeze. The cordon-and-search assaults, knocking on a door in the middle of the night, lighting a valley on fire with thousands of pounds of explosives. The Crazy purrs its approval.

  The safe and familiar and comfortable beckon. Why not go back? To where life makes sense, and I’m good at what I do.

  Maybe someday, but not today. My flight will be leaving soon. I need to get back to my gate. The man in khaki catches my eye, nods one more time, and then looks away down the concourse. I follow his gaze that has perked up, and the Spidey sense tingles again.

  First a stare, from a businessman standing outside the gate. Then a watchful eye from a couple in a lounge across the way. I catch a glance. They look away. An awareness floods me, surges from my groin and drowns my brain.

  I’m in danger. I’m alone, isolated, surrounded and suffocated by the crowd. I need to egress, violently if necessary. Avoid a static direct firefight. Shoot, move, and communicate. Live behind your weapon. Do whatever is required to go home.

  I grasp my rifle, which has been waiting for me at my shoulder. I need to leave this airport terminal right now. I need to get out.

  The closest emergency exit is two gates down, on the left. I know because I’ve scouted the area before, part of my regular contingency planning. I should be able to get there in less than a minute. As my right hand settles into its familiar position on my carbine’s pistol grip, elbow bent, wrist fully turned, index finger above and outside of the trigger guard, I choose my targets. The main transit security force is in the next concourse, and I don’t see a roaming cop between me and the door. The female airline staff personnel manning the gate will duck and run. The crowd of sheep blocking me from the exit are helpless, except for a few.

  The man in the suit thirty meters ahead spends a lot of time in the gym. He is taller and stronger than I am. He is the biggest threat, and is in my way. He should be first. I grip my rifle tighter, and pick up my pace.

  Next is the teenager, just past him, with the navy high-school football T-shirt. His slight father next to him will cower, but he won’t. I’ll have to kill him too.

  I count the rounds in my rifle magazine. I visualize the first two into the chest of the man in the suit, the frightened reaction of the crowd, the next two through the football player. I visualize stepping over them to the exit. The foot sits in the box on the counter at the next gate. My breath is coming faster now, as I begin to make my move. My blood is pounding in my ears, my heart strong, quick and regular, the typical gurgling and skipping corrected and overcome. I prepare to drop the first target. I need to get out of this terminal.

  I quicken my pace. Ten meters to the first mark, twenty-five to the emergency exit.

  I put my finger on the trigger. I am going to make it home.

  The man in the suit catches me staring at him. Square in the eye.

  Goddamn it.

  I stop, self-consciously pause, then turn away. I know the look I have on my face.

  What the fuck am I doing?

  It’s happening again. I thought it would have gone away by now.

  Ashamed, I awkwardly shuffle out of the main concourse thoroughfare, mumbling apologies, head down, looking away. I place my back to the wall, between the Nuts on Clark stand and the woman trying to get me to fill out a credit-card application. My heart is pounding out of my chest, and the Crazy is in my throat. Desperate, I reach for my cell phone, and dial my wife as quickly as I can.

  “I’m doing it again.” I skip even saying hello.

  “What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be on a layover?” she says.

  “I’m picking people to kill.” Tears come unbidden.

  There is a pause at the other end of the line.

  “It’s your anniversary, you know,” my wife says.

  I had forgotten, but I know which one she is referring to. I got home two years ago today.

  “You’re always worse on an anniversary,” she says.

  She’s right. I wish I knew why.

  “I don’t like being like this. Normal people don’t do this. Planning to kill random strangers.”

  “Just go to your plane, and you’ll be fine. We’ll talk when you get home. Are you okay now?” she asks.

  No.

  “Sure,” I say instead. She hangs up.

  Breathe, Brian. Breathe.

  I pick my head up, and re-see a harmless crowd, the anonymous normalcy, the unthreatening busyness.

  The young dark-haired woman from the credit-card kiosk walks up to me. “You could earn twenty-five thousand miles by applying for a new platinum card today,” she coos.

  I put my rifle down and head to Gate C23.

  I looked for Ricky on my run today, but he wasn’t there to meet me. He didn’t say he was coming, but I expected him. We run together most days now. It’s nice to have a brother on the run, to help me through the uphill sections, encourage me when I need to dig in, dig deeper.

  But Ricky wasn’t there, so I ran alone. Overcast sky, blustery headwind, a struggle from beginning to end. The Crazy boiled the whole way, barely waning at the height of my exertion. I returned troubled, alone.

  It is now evening, darkness coming quickly in the early winter, and I sit on the mattress in my bedroom at home, eyes closed, my wife and children downstairs. I breathe like my New Shrink has been trying to teach me. Mindful of my breath. Mindful of my presence. Being present, simply in the breath.

  My mind re-creates the yoga forms. Then they too blur, a stillness comes over me, and my mind is blank.

  Silence in the room, the clatter from the house shut out. With each breath, I feel the Crazy deflate, compact, coalesce, first into my gut, and then lower, further compressing, passing down and out. I sense an incredible emptiness in my chest, a blessed smallness.

  My Crazy is still. For the first time in over half a year, my Crazy is extinguished. Not smothered with pain, or burned to evaporation, but gone. It returns a minute later, a bubbling rise, but for a moment, there was nothing.

  I can beat this.

  Maybe outside of my head there is an objective reality. At peace.

  X | Ricky

  WE HAD NO front line in our war. A front line only exists when two standing armies look over a field at one another. Our army didn’t do much standing, and we were fighting the ever-changing sea we swam in. But we didn’t swim continuously. We stepped into and out of that sea; the front gate of the FOB was the shore, and there I turned the switch on and off.

  Out in the city, on the highway, in the helicopter, danger lurked everywhere. No smiling locals, no pile of trash, no abandoned parked car could be trusted. Your brain was always on, your back never turned, your rifle always ready, finger on the trigger.

  But once we got back to the FOB, back to the HAS, a two-foot-thick concrete dome sheltered your righteous head from that crashing sea. The vest came off, the rifle was set down,
the breath came easier. A take-out dinner from the chow hall and a cigarette and a laugh around the fire pit outside with your brothers. Back inside the gate, you were safe again.

  And so every day the pendulum swung. Danger to safety. Safety to danger. As the missions piled up, getting back to the HAS took on new urgency. It was bad luck to die at all, but getting schwacked with three weeks left, two weeks left, one week, would be the height of tragedy. Eventually the end of the deployment was in sight, and we counted the days until there were no more missions, no more trips off the FOB, no more forays into danger. The goal was to go home, because if the HAS was safe, home was Safe.

  He drove the robot down to the hidden device, camouflaged with trash and debris, on the side of the windblown highway on the south end of Kirkuk. The worst of the summer heat had broken, but that only reduced the temperature from broil to bake, and the sun still oppressed. While Mengershausen stared at the robot screen, I kept one eye on the crowd gathered to watch and one eye on our security.

  “Hey, watch your sector, not us!” I shouted over to the gunner atop the nearest Humvee.

  Our security was new, green, fresh off the plane. They couldn’t run logistics convoys without getting shot, they couldn’t go on patrol without getting blown up, and if they did accidentally stumble across an undetonated IED in a stroke of luck, they couldn’t tell us where it was so we could clear it. It took an hour of searching to find this one; we eventually had to call in helos to scout the road ahead. They discovered it hundreds of meters away from the initially reported spot. Clocks ticking as they ran out of fuel, the mini Kiowa helicopters eventually flew right up next to the thing and dropped smoke grenades on it. Ten feet off the deck, tipped on their side, the pilot popped and tossed the purple canister out the window, rotor wash churning up the surrounding desert, each blade tip inches from the road.

  The infantry brigade in place when we arrived—which had shown us the ropes, driven and flown us everywhere, and protected our teams on every mission—had reached the end of their tour, packed up, and gone home. The new brigade was just that, and this kid manning the turret gun looked like he had only been in the Army since breakfast. We served as the overlap, the continuity, and were suddenly the old veterans and voice of wisdom. Not that it mattered much; the new brigade seemed determined to relearn every lesson the hard way. Casualties were way up, and my morale was just as far down. I didn’t have the time or patience to teach a whole brigade how to survive their tour. I certainly didn’t have the faith or goodwill to let them figure it out by experimenting with me. Let the helo drivers pick up their slack, we weren’t going to echo it. Home was too close to start fucking around with newbie security teams now.

  “I’ll let you know before we blow anything up, don’t worry,” I yelled up again. “You look for bad guys and let us worry about the IED!”

  I almost felt bad for the new brigade. We were leaving too. They’d unknowingly pay for our mistakes, and those of the brigade they replaced—for every cordon and search of the wrong house, farmer’s burned field, flex-cuffed innocent, and pockmarked road. But we had paid for the unknowable actions of those that came before us as well. EFP and car-bomb retaliations as revenge for assaults and firefights forgotten. We paid our due, but not for what we had done. When I left Iraq, the U.S. military had occupied it for five years. But we didn’t collectively have five years of experience; we had one year of experience five times. And through it all, the Iraqis endured, and remembered, and resented, and hated the fresh, young, pimple-faced kid sitting on the Humvee near me, though he was in middle school when the first cruise missiles fell on Baghdad.

  “Hey, Mengershausen, did you ID the main charge on the end of that command wire yet?”

  “Yeah, it’s another improvised claymore.”

  “Rusty cylinder sleeve with nuts and bolts for frag?”

  “Yup. Same ones we’ve been seeing the last month.”

  “How many is that now since we hit the EFP factory?”

  “Sir, I can’t even keep up trying to count.”

  “Did we used to have improvised claymores before we did that botched EFP factory job?”

  “Not like this.”

  “We’re pushing our luck. We’re too short to get blown up again. Just whack this motherfucker and let’s get out of here.”

  I don’t remember which mission was my last. It all gets fuzzy at the end. But one day our replacements arrived, and it was our turn to pick them up in Hiluxes and drive them back to their new home in the HAS. Their arrival portended the certainty that the war would continue without us. And just like that, it’s not your job to leave the FOB anymore, not until you get on the airplane bound for home. Your war doesn’t end with a climactic battle or a crescendo of missions. It ends with silence; one day the phone just stops ringing. That call you went on yesterday? Turns out that was your final run outside the wire. When the phone rings again, someone else will answer it. Your war is over.

  I thought about two things on the flight home: sex and alcohol. The latter was surer than the former; I had to endure my wife’s anger at my absence for a long time before we had our homecoming.

  The alcohol, on the other hand, flowed freely from the moment we hit non-Muslim soil. Back at the FOB the Special Forces guys always had beer smuggled in via C-130, and they were more than happy to share after missions. But we were always discreet, and it was saved for special occasions. We wanted a proper celebration, a survival celebration: kegs and cigars and naked bodies in the hot tub. It started when the plane landed in Germany. It continued in the wee hours during a quick refueling stop in Iceland. The homecoming party at Luke’s house happened two days later, once safely back at Nellis in Las Vegas.

  Ricky met me at the door with a giant bear hug. We were on opposite deployment schedules, and so were always around to put each other on the plane and welcome each other back. I had gotten the beer cold for his return eight months prior. Now he was returning the favor.

  “It’s good to have you back, sir,” Ricky said. His skinny arms squeezed with surprising strength.

  “It’s good to be back, bro,” I yelled over the music.

  Ricky’s wife had already joined a flock of giggling girlfriends in the hot tub, and a game of Strip Jenga was in session at the kitchen table. Q handed me a beer, Grish a cigarette, and we talked and joked and smoked and drank and lied and told war stories and savored life and marveled that the indulgent pleasures of this existence endured. Your brothers saw you off. Your brothers welcomed you back. Your brothers ensured your survival in between.

  I made it home. So did everyone else I took to Kirkuk on that trip. We did what we had to do to make sure of it. Our mission was to come home in one piece. That the best way to accomplish this mission was to not go on the call, to never leave in the first place, only occurred to me much later.

  I never had to go back to Iraq. And I haven’t.

  The Army insisted on holding a graduation ceremony, to celebrate the end of our predeployment training at Fort Sill, the last requirement before my trip to Kirkuk. Phillips had to give a speech, as he was the highest ranking officer among us. We were all captains, but he bested me by a couple of months.

  Phillips was not excited to give a speech, and I was just as happy the duty didn’t fall to me. Still, I thought of what I would say should it come to it. What would I say to my men, this day before we boarded the plane for Iraq? A first trip for some, return trip for most, second trip for me, my chance to redeem myself, to make right my failure my first time around.

  I wrote a speech in my head, and never gave it. I wrote it down later that day and saved it, saved the burning need to deploy, saved the drive, saved the choice to live my dream, saved the idealism and the ego, saved the optimism and the duty, for when I would need it later.

  “Fellow EOD operators,” I wrote. “We are riding the front crest of history. In the sixty years of Air Force EOD, we have never been as busy. We are making history every day.

&nbs
p; “Lexington. Concord. Saratoga. Tripoli. Baltimore and New Orleans. Shiloh. Gettysburg. Vicksburg. San Juan Hill. The Ardennes and the Marne. Omaha Beach. Anzio. Pearl Harbor and Midway. Inchon and the Yalu River. Khe Sanh. Da Nang and the Mekong Delta. Panama and Kuwait City.

  “These names are written in blood upon the heart of every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine. These names are burned into our souls. In fifty or one hundred years, when historians write of our current war, new names will be added to that list. Bagram and Kandahar. Baghdad and Baqubah. Kirkuk. Fallujah. And then we will count ourselves lucky to be among those privileged few who can say they played a small part in the continuing honor and legacy of the Armed Forces of the United States. I am humbled to be among the few who can speak to their children and grandchildren about what history will write of us. Cherish this opportunity.

  “The bond among EOD brothers and sisters is our greatest strength. That bond will bring us home.”

  I came home, but then what follows? I never considered. But I chose it all the same.

  I haven’t seen him since high school, probably graduation night itself. The years have not been kind; more around the middle, less on top, and now a flaccidity to his grip. A droopiness to his face and speech.

  “Thank you for coming,” he says.

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I respond. “It was good to see you again. I’m glad there was a great turnout.” A turnout to his fundraiser, paying for his medical bills.