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

by Brian Castner

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

  Brian Castner

  Doubleday (2012)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Non-Fiction, War, Biography

  In the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming.

  Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  But The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivor’s guilt that he terms The Crazy. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within—the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as “normal”? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.

  From the Hardcover edition.

  Amazon.com Review

  Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2012: To those trained in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the last-resort tactic for defusing bombs is known as the Long Walk: a soldier dealing with the device up close, alone, with no margin for error. The Long Walk is Brian Castner's tale of two wars. He fought the first in Iraq, serving two tours dismantling roadside bombs before they exploded, or wading through the grisly carnage of unchecked detonations. The second battle began when he returned home, his life exploding as he stepped from a curb into what he calls the Crazy: a consuming froth of panic and undiagnosed pain that alienated him from his family and compelled him to rig his minivan with ammunition clips for faster reloads while driving through suburbia. With its tense and claustrophobic portraits of the violent streets of Kirkuk, Castner's account is a dead-on description of modern warfare in an unfamiliar land. But it also offers sober insight into the stresses of war on the human body and mind (the effects of blast waves on soft tissues--especially in the brain--are chilling), destruction wrought on those left behind, and the long, lonely walk home. --Jon Foro

  Review

  Advance praise for The Long Walk:

  “ ‘The first thing you should know about me is that I’m Crazy.’ So begins this affecting tale of a modern war and its home-front consequences.... Scarifying stuff...[that is] absolutely worth reading.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “The Long Walk is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner’s memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. ”

  —Jon Krakauer, author of *Where Men Win Glory*

  “Castner has written a powerful book about the long cost of combat and the brotherhood of men at arms. Remarkably, he has made the world of the EOD entertaining, occasionally hilarious, and always harrowing. His honesty is refreshing and the book is written with such candor and openness that one can't help but root for him. And did I mention that it is entertaining? There were scenes at work with the bomb disposal unit where I found myself holding my breath.”

  —Anthony Swofford, author of *Jarhead*

  “Do you want to know a little something about our war in Iraq? Begin with The Long Walk, Brian Castner’s elegant, superbly written story about the bomb-disposal guys. As you read think of Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Castner gives us that steady rhythm of one foot in front of the other. Think of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Here is the reality of the exhausted mind, and of profound thought wandering all Creation: this is what I saw, this is what I did, this is what I have become. It’s the story of the long walk out, as they say, from the Humvee to the bomb in the street, and the long look back.”

  —Larry Heinemann, author of the National Book Award-winning Paco’s Story and Close Quarters

  “Damn, this is a very human book. If you have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan, or know someone who has, you need to read The Long Walk.”

  — Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble

  Copyright © 2012 by Brian Castner

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design by Ben Wiseman

  Jacket photograph © Andy Crawford/ Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Castner, Brian.

  The long walk : a story of war and the life that follows / Brian

  Castner. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Castner, Brian. 2. Iraq War, 2003—Personal narratives, American. 3. Ordnance disposal units—Iraq. 4. Ordnance disposal units—United States. 5. Iraq War, 2003—Veterans—United States—Biography. 6. United States. Air Force—Officers—Biography.

  I. Title.

  DS79.766.C37A3 2013

  956.7044′3—dc23 2011052419

  [B]

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53621-9

  v3.1

  To Jessie, who loves me in spite of all this.

  “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying: Who should I send? Who will go for Us? I said: Here I am. Send me. Then I said: Until when, Lord? And He replied: Until cities lie in ruins without inhabitants, houses are without people, the land is ruined and desolate.”

  —Isaiah 6:8, 11

  “[Providence] became a personality and a dominant force in a world of our own … ‘Luck’—there was no such thing, for luck comes to man whose foresight and planning can ensure perfection to the highest degree possible, and after that, what cannot be planned or foreseen is in the hands of [Providence]. This was Shackleton’s creed.”

  —Journal entry of Dr. Eric Stewart Marshall, polar explorer, traveling with Ernest Shackleton to the South Pole in 1908

  “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  I Whirl Is King

  II The Soft Sand

  III Failure

  IV The Daily Grind

  V The Day of Six VBIEDs

  VI Kermit<
br />
  VII GUU-5/P

  VIII The Science and the Chakras

  IX The Foot in the Box

  X Ricky

  XI The Mountain

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  I served as an officer in the United States Air Force from December 1999 to September 2007. I deployed to Saudi Arabia in August 2001, to Balad in central Iraq in January 2005, and to Kirkuk in northern Iraq in May 2006. This is the story of those events, and the times that came after.

  Everything in this book feels true. It’s as correct as a story can be from someone with blast-induced memory lapses. Nothing was changed to create a moral or to ease discomfort. It’s as real as I can make it, though reality and objectivity sometimes have little to do with one another.

  I | Whirl Is King

  THE FIRST THING you should know about me is that I’m Crazy.

  I haven’t always been. Until that one day, the day I went Crazy, I was fine. Or I thought I was. Not anymore.

  My Crazy is a feeling. It’s the worst, most intolerable feeling I’ve ever had. And it never goes away.

  When you’re Crazy, you make a list of people you have told, the people you have come out to. My list is small. One best friend but not another. Jimbo and John and Greg, but not the other guys on the team. Your wife but not your mother. Those that you think will get it, will understand.

  And now I’m telling you. That I’m Crazy, and I don’t know why.

  The second thing you should know about me is that I don’t know how to fix it. Or control it. Or endure from one moment to the next. The Crazy is winning.

  So I run.

  I run every day, twice a day sometimes, out the front door of my peaceful suburban home, past sticky blast scenes of sewage, and motor oil, and bloody swamps of trash and debris, ankle deep, filling the road, sidewalks, shop and house doorsteps. I run through dust clouds, blown in off the desert or kicked up by the helo rotor wash. I run past the screaming women that never shut up, don’t shut up now. I should have made them stop when I had a chance. I run as fast as I can, as long as I can, my feet hitting the pavement in a furious rhythm, along the river near my home.

  I run in the hottest part of the day, the full afternoon blaze, the heat of the black asphalt, baking in the summer sun, rising through my shoes and into my feet. I speed up, but the Crazy feeling is still winning. It overwhelms. Sweat pours down my flushed face, in my eyes. Albietz is chalk white skin and brown dried blood from head to toe. Kermit’s skin was blue, after they finally found him and put him in his box. Did Jeff have any skin left to show his mother?

  I run every day, on the road and along the river stretching to my left, occasionally veiled by low trees swaying in the sunshine and the light breeze off the water. My left knee started aching five miles ago. My teeth are rotting out of my head. My throat closes. My left eye twitches. The detonation rains concrete chunks on my head, splits my ears, dismantles our robot, and peppers the armored truck with molten steel. I reach for my rifle.

  I run down the road outside my home, to the drone of Humvee diesel engines and in the purple sunrise over a flat desert. The Crazy in my chest is full to bursting, but the protest of my overworked lungs and heart tamps it down. The Crazy feeling never leaves, but the run makes the rest of the body scream louder, one din to cover another.

  The foot sits in the box. Because why not? Where else would you put it? The foot sat in the box.

  I run and don’t want to stop. The adrenaline has been building all day, and it finally has a release. The boil overflows. Fidgety legs and shaking arms pump and swing. When I stop, the Crazy feeling refloods my swollen heart, lungs, ribs. My eye twitches. I speed up again.

  My head swims and swirls. Helicopters and dust fade. I put my rifle down, shrug off my vest. Sweat wipes clean Albietz’s hands, and Ricky’s head, and Jeff and Kermit, and … and? My knee is screaming louder than the women. My ragged breath shakes my chest. I run, and run, and run, and in the Is try to pound out of my head what once Was.

  The C-130 landed in Kirkuk just before dark. A couple of Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, driven by our tired predecessors, were there to meet us at the end of a long and exhausting day. Truth is, they would gladly have met us at any time, in the middle of the night even, because our arrival meant they could leave. Leave to go home, to wives and children and sex and alcohol and sleeping in and not getting shot at. The place we had just come from.

  You can drive the little stick-shift Hiluxes on the FOB—our walled Forward Operating Base—because no one is trying to kill you there. It’s a foreign reminder of home, a normal thing to do every day. Get in a regular truck and drive, on the right side of the road, at a normal speed, with no one trying to shoot you. Simple pleasure.

  Bags of gear piled high in the truck beds, we pulled up to the converted hardened aircraft shelter on the west side of the runway, our home base for the rest of our tour. The French-made blast doors of the HAS were cracked open, and the two-foot-thick rounded concrete roof arched three stories overhead. Inside were the aluminum bunk trailers, the plywood offices and ops desk, a tent or two housing dusty equipment. Our whole operation, under the protective concrete canopy.

  As I lay in bed that night, in my new cell—bed, table, trunk, shelf—I stared at the ceiling. I closed my eyes, and I was in my old room in Balad. I opened them in Kirkuk. Closed, and I smelled the diesel fuel off the droning generator, the dead mice caught in our traps, the rotting tent flaps of my fabric-partitioned room in Balad. Open them and it’s just the sheet-metal ceiling of my box in Kirkuk.

  I’m back. I’m still here. I never left.

  It was less than a year and I was back in Iraq. It was less than a minute and I was back in Iraq.

  I needed to be back. I would do better this time.

  I lie in bed blown up like a balloon, my chest distended and full. The Crazy feeling has filled me to the brim in the darkness of my bedroom, alone next to my sleeping wife. My left arm has gone numb again, left eye twitching as I attempt to close it. The gurgling in my back is growing, first low, then on my upper left side. My heart beats loud, hard, sporadic. I miss a beat. Speed up, catch up. Miss two. A catch-up again. The more I miss the more the Crazy feeling grows. High, full, boiling sea.

  I sit up, turn my feet over the side of the bed, and just try to breathe. My lips tingle and my head spins. My wife has found me on the floor before, face to the pine, a divot on my forehead where I hit the dresser corner on the way down. I lie back down to avoid a repeat.

  My heart bumps, skips, and gurgles. My jaw aches and I check again for loose teeth. My eye twitches. And again. The Crazy feeling builds and builds. It never stops, it never ends, there is no relief.

  My helium chest is light as a feather. The weight of the ceiling is a granite block pushing my chest into the bed.

  What the fuck is happening to me?

  The streets got narrower and narrower as we entered the town of Hawija. The broad highway gave way to two-lane main arteries, then narrower neighborhood roads, then one-lane funnels between high courtyard walls. Over a curb and through one tiny gap, and our driving mirrors on each side snapped off clean, our door handles scraping away rock and concrete in the pinch point. Flanks scoured clean, our armored truck now matched the security vehicles to the front and rear.

  No one drives through the heart of Hawija unless forced; so much hate packed into such a small space. But with the ring roads blocked by route-clearance teams and security cordons, we plunged into the center, as fast as the Humvees allowed.

  Dodging old blast craters, dead dogs, and mountainous garbage piles, we snaked through fortified neighborhoods before hitting the marketplace at the town’s center. In the busy market, the number of civilians suddenly swelled, and our convoy started to get bogged down, weaving but stymied by foot and vehicle traffic. Soon the mass of humanity started to press in, and we slowed further.

  “Why are we slowing down?” I yelled
up to Ackeret, who was behind the wheel.

  “There are people in the way, and they won’t fucking move!” came the reply.

  Slowing is okay. Stopping is not.

  I turned in my seat, faced out. I checked my rifle mag, pistol, stretched in my body armor and readjusted it. Right hand went to the rifle, left hand to the truck door handle. We slowed further.

  I searched the crowd. Booths and stalls, selling fruit and electronics, lined the sidewalks. The crowds walked and pushed closer and closer the slower our Humvees went. Kids pointed at us through our armored glass windows, yelling then scurrying back down alleyways that emerged every half block. I scanned for threats, but the tent covers of the shop booths, stretched taut to shade the harsh summer sun, blocked my view of rooftops. Shots from higher ground? An RKG-3 antitank grenade, tossed from the opening crowd? The Iraqi Army and local police were nowhere to be seen. I readjusted my rifle again, and popped open the dust covers on my optical sight.

  But we had not stopped. Not yet.

  Men with flat faces of unreadable sternness, walking alongside, began to look into the Humvee windows. Kids moved up, tapped on the door, and then ran off, disappearing into the rabbit warrens. If the attack comes, it will be quick. The crowd, like a school of fish, will suddenly all turn and move away. The sea parts, the attacker rushes in, grenade already in the air. A detonation, a lance through the flimsy armor, a flash through arm, leg, chest, and then the flock closes again, attacker absorbed, and scatters.