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

by Brian Castner

  I knew none of this when Meadows, Roy, and Albietz arrived at the HAS, our compound on the FOB. Albietz came in first; silent, pallid, bald head splotchy and brown. I was in the ops center, writing another report, reviewing another report, drinking another cup of coffee to compensate for the late mission the night before. I offhandedly greeted the presence I felt, a brown-and-gray-camouflaged haze in my peripheral vision, without looking up.

  Albietz said nothing. He stumbled a bit at the front of the desk.

  Griffin noticed something was wrong first. He jumped up from the ops center where he was working, waiting for a call, and grabbed Albietz as he started to sway. I finally looked up to see Albietz reaching for the wall to steady himself, still girded in his body armor, leaning on his rifle. He was not camouflaged in brown and gray. He was camouflaged in gray but drenched in blood now dried brown, splattered across his vest, arms, face. Only deep white patches around his eyes were spared, where his sunglasses had caught the spray instead.

  I went with another crew to check out the Humvee that had been hit. It had been towed to the FOB motor pool, and was awaiting our inspection. Blood still pooled in the foot well of the backseat; it hadn’t yet evaporated in the desert heat. The telltale copper of the EFP slug plated the mouth of the Humvee’s entrance wound and was flecked around the interior of the cab, embedded in the back wall, around the gunner’s harness and port. The mortuary team hadn’t made it to the Humvee yet; there was still a boot containing its proper appendage tossed in one corner. I closed the door and left after only a moment or two. There was nothing else to learn here, and I couldn’t take the smell.

  I didn’t know Albietz before that day, before I met him for the first time covered in blood that wasn’t his. I hugged him and put him in the shower, unable to do anything more.

  The naïve excitement of combat lasted little longer than a month. Every day I tried to appreciate living my dream, and every day I failed. The exhaustion set in, and I walked through the war in a haze.

  Up too early in the morning, after a restless night of fever dreams, phone calls, and rockets impacting the base. Cold cereal at my plywood desk, in front of my computer, catching up on intelligence reports that came in overnight. And then the wait for a call: a mission, an assault, a car-bomb detonation in the city, the news that someone died. The mission comes, you go and return, and then the waiting resumes.

  The lunches melded into dinners that all tasted the same. The days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. They became a blur of cigarettes and explosions, situation-report deadlines and bloody pieces of children, bone-weary exhaustion and black, black coffee.

  And in relief, shoehorned awkwardly in between, phone calls once a week home to my wife to chat, about a son’s failed math test, a child’s anxiety at day care. Her voice was clipped and short. Because she was sick of being lonely, sick of my being gone? Or because she had finally given up and found someone else to warm her bed?

  Don’t be scared of the soft sand! This is where I want to be. This is where I need to be. I chose this. Love it! Appreciate it! You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

  How do you appreciate dismantled children?

  The war didn’t pause for an answer.

  “Can you believe they pay us to drive around this country and blow things up? It’s like the whole place is one giant demolitions range!” gushed Hodge, newly arrived and fresh off the plane, at the chow hall one afternoon, over a lunch of ash and ice cream. His buzz hadn’t worn off yet.

  “Yes, I can,” answered Keener. He lost his buzz the first time he stepped in something human, and couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Let’s go before the afternoon VBIEDs,” I mumbled. We picked up our trays, dropped them with the dishwashers, and, walking outside, watched smoke rise from downtown in the distance. The call would come in before we got back to our compound.

  I am sitting in my Old Counselor’s tiny office at the VA hospital in Buffalo. She looks sad. And concerned. She always looks concerned.

  I’ve just related how the Crazy feeling expands when I stand in line at McDonald’s. And in airports. Definitely alone in airports. In an unknown crowd, the need to move away.…

  The Crazy feeling hasn’t stopped since that day, the day I went Crazy. It’s been four months now. It never gets better; it never goes away. But it does get worse.

  My Old Counselor is scribbling on her pad as I am telling the story of trying to get some lunch while out on the road on a job in Texas. “Triggers,” she writes on the off-green top-bound spiral legal pad. What does “triggers” mean? I doubt she is talking about the one on the rifle I have strapped to my chest, snugged up tight to my right shoulder.

  “I wasn’t sure before,” she says, “but I am now.”

  “What are you sure of?” I ask. I fidget with my flip-flops. I have a bad feeling I know the answer.

  “You have PTSD,” she says.

  Fuck. I am Crazy.

  VI | Kermit

  KERMIT DIED IN December, the December after I got back from Kirkuk, the December I didn’t laugh, several Decembers before I went Crazy. Looking back on it now, how our paths bent together, met, and then diverged again, each following the other’s trail in a tragic mirror, I see that there were too many coincidences for Fate to have allowed our relationship to turn out well.

  Captain Kermit O. Evans was from the little town of Hollandale in western Mississippi. I never made it to that town for the memorial service, though now I wish I had. I was already going to four funerals and memorial services for Kermit, so I skipped the fifth. I didn’t want to endure a fifth. I was too tired to go. How silly that sounds now.

  I met Kermit while he was training to become an EOD technician in Florida and I was rotting away for a month at a useless professional development course for officers, a knife-and-fork school in Montgomery, Alabama. We had dinner at a bad chain restaurant, sat in the bar, and spent the entirety of our mealtime discussion on his new world as a bomb technician. I, the old experienced veteran, passing on wisdom to the new guy.

  Kermit and I met because he was taking over command of my EOD unit in New Mexico. Despite my recent firing in Balad, I was being reassigned to Nellis, a bigger unit at a bigger base, in Las Vegas. Kermit was headed to Cannon after finishing up his EOD training, but had come from an engineering job at Nellis previously. We were swapping bases. The officer who saw past my checkered history and pulled the strings to get me the Nellis job also put in a good word to get Kermit a slot at EOD school. Chance and a couple of phone calls brought us to the same town at the same time. He told me places to buy a house in Vegas. I told him when his new unit was headed back to Iraq. Kermit was very earnest and excited. He was always earnest and excited, often to the delight of those around him. I do not delight easily; I saw a naïve black kid who was taking over my job and who had no idea what he was getting himself into.

  We ate, I drank a beer, we wished each other well, and our paths, briefly together, diverged once again. But Fate was not done. Fate would lead us back together and tie us in knots, but not on this side of Heaven; that dinner was the first and only time I saw Kermit alive.

  I get the call from my boss, the commander of my squadron. It’s on my home phone. Odd, since my commander usually calls on the smart phone given to me for that exact purpose. And it’s late on a Sunday, after dinner. Also odd.

  “Do you know a Kermit Evans?” my boss asks.

  “Sure. He took over for me at Cannon. He’s in Iraq now, I think, doing that weapons intel job.”

  “He’s missing,” my boss says.

  “Missing how?” I ask.

  “Missing as in his helicopter went down over the Haditha Dam and they can’t find his body. Do you know Perneatha, his wife?”

  “No, we’ve never met.”

  “Perneatha moved back home to Las Vegas while Kermit went to Iraq,” my boss says. “They live a couple blocks from you. You’re the Family Liaison Officer now—have your blues on and meet me in th
e morning. We’re going to tell her.”

  My boss hangs up. I keep holding the phone.

  My wife comes up and asks what’s wrong. “Kermit’s dead, and I’m the FLO,” I say. I’ve never done that before. I have no idea what to expect.

  “This may be the most important thing I ever do in the military,” I tell her, and I mean it. I go into the bedroom and iron my uniform. Shoes polished, pants crisp. The story of my last eight years, told in little scraps of colored silk, endlessly straightened until perfect. I shine and shine and shine my Crab.

  The next morning I meet my boss, who is also in blues, and we go get the Chaplain. Much discussion takes place about when to go to Perneatha’s house. What time is best to tell a wife her husband is missing? It should not be too early in the morning, or one may rudely wake the wife, or catch her before she has gotten ready for the day. At the same time it can’t be too late in the day. If you wait until noon, the wife will ask what took you so long, especially if it becomes clear her husband has been missing for some time. We go mid-morning. We don’t know what else to do. This feeling pervades.

  My boss says he will go in alone, and the Chaplain and I should wait. He doesn’t want to overwhelm Perneatha. This is his job, the notification—we have other jobs later. We park in one of the ubiquitous Las Vegas cul-de-sacs. My boss approaches the door and does the unthinkable. The Chaplain and I wait in the car. The Chaplain makes small talk. He does death all the time. I’m the newbie to this version.

  Later the door opens and we go in. Perneatha is sitting on the couch, calm, composed and put together, making phone calls, informing the family. Kermit Junior runs around the house in his diaper, barely a year old and excited by the visitors and entertainment. Perneatha asks questions. Why haven’t they found him yet? Do you think he is dead? What is the chance he is not dead? Can you swim with body armor on? When will we know more? We have no good answers.

  Family begins to arrive. Perneatha’s sister lives in Las Vegas as well, and is at the house in a flash. Aunts and women from church arrive soon after. I never do figure out all the relations, but the house fills quickly. With nothing to do but wait for news, a routine sets in. The women cook: greens, chicken, biscuits. Kermit Junior runs around the living room while everyone watches. Perneatha chases him and smiles brave smiles. I sit on the couch. The foot sits in a box in the corner.

  We find out later what happened to Kermit. He was based in Baghdad, but was traveling around Iraq, visiting the men and women who worked for him. Out west in Anbar, Kermit had loaded up on a CH-46 to fly to his next FOB. He was last in a line of three guys trying to fly Space A—meaning he would pack on at the end to fill any sliver of open room. On this bird only one seat was available, and the two Marines in front of him wanted to fly together. Kermit noted his good luck and skipped ahead to take the last seat.

  After all scheduled passengers were aboard, Kermit was waved on by the flight engineer. When you load in the back of a chopper, you listen to the engineer without question. The bird comes in fast and loud, and you do a quick hot transfer. Two lines of buffeted men and women file out of the back and are dismissively waved to the side. You stand in line, loaded up with your body armor, pack, and weapon, and await the signal from the engineer in the back to move up. Kermit loaded up the same way I did a hundred times: into the back, to the side, file to a jump seat, the bird lifting off in seconds and then hurtling through space over a uniformly tan desert.

  Except this time, Kermit’s bird had a problem.

  There are always problems when flying, though it is safer than driving. We stuffed our armored Humvees full of every piece of gear and article of faith we could find. C4 and TNT, plus commandeered enemy Semtex and PE4. Blasting caps, electric and non, and time fuze, shock tube, and radio systems to ignite them. Rolls of det cord and water tools of every description: Bottlers, Maxi-candles, EXIT charges, Boot Bangers, and modified Gatorade bottles, snuck out of the chow hall in bulk and surgically altered with a knife and electrical tape to accept a jerry-rigged explosive core. A bomb suit, bang sticks, one or two robots, their controllers, and extra batteries for both. A Barrett .50-cal sniper rifle, extra ammo, extra pistols, frag grenades, smoke grenades, and claymores when we could get them. Food and water for days. Always more water, to drink and for work, and empty bottles to piss in. Mounted between the driver and team chief we put the radio, the GPS, and the jammer, flickering its stream of reassurance.

  The superstitious rituals of EOD school melded with resignation to Providence: never change your lucky underwear, never change your lucky pencil, never so much as touch the jammer that brought your ass home every day. I once nearly had to break up a fistfight when the poor contractor stopped by the HAS to swap out our old jammer for a newer model. I made sure the contractor left in peace, his eye unblackened, but only if he took the new jammer with him and promised to never come back.

  On the outside of our Humvees we hung more talismans to ward off our fears. Antennas and turret mounts and storage bins for possibly hazardous IED components and pronged front-bumper kits to ram our way through civilian traffic. The infantry went a step further and mounted massive bolt-on armor kits to each door. An armored door already weighed more than two hundred pounds. Now each would be three hundred or more. I said no to the extra kits as well. Our first week at Kirkuk, Price dropped a wheel over the lip of a narrow canal road. The bank gave way and the Humvee slid in sideways, filling with water at the bottom of the sewage-filled channel. Our entire four-man team was trapped; wedged into that tiny box, no one had the strength or leverage to push a two-hundred-pound door open upward. The security team jumped on top of the sinking Humvee, and with three men lifting each door, extricated my brothers. If they had had the bolt-on kits, no amount of extra help would have been enough, and we would have lost four that day.

  Steel beasts loaded with kit and dismounts, armored Humvees work better in packs. The trust was sacred between security and EOD team: outside the wire, they protected us from gunfire and grenades and kept us from getting lost; we protected them from IEDs and hidden danger and kept them from getting blown up. Only once did I ever drive alone, separated from our security. Within two klicks of our base at Balad, the FOB a dome of light on the horizon, our security allowed us to drive back on our own from an aborted mission. What could happen so close to home? Driving center of the road as fast as he could, Weston never saw the string of low highway barriers on the double-yellow stripe. It was just past twilight, too light for night-vision goggles and too dark to keep your headlights off, and we drove our armored truck at full speed into the awaiting concrete ram. Twelve thousand pounds of man and machine stopped in an instant. Stationed behind the driver, I flew forward into his seat and surrounding frame. My bifocal NVGs, mounted on my helmet, split in half on impact. Weston was saved when the plate in his vest absorbed the crushing steering wheel against his chest. The Humvee nosed in, and the front tires curled and bent, coming to rest on top of the hood. We were alone, without security, our mount a dead heap on the side of the road, put down through our carelessness. We radioed the FOB for help, and then waited in the dark for relief, guarding that armored truck and the millions of dollars’ worth of classified equipment it contained. At that moment, jumping at every snap and pop and sound of distant gunfire, surrounded by hobgoblins and the shades of gunmen, I swore I’d never leave our convoy escort for any reason ever again.

  Flying is safer than driving, but when you’re nothing but helpless baggage, it wears at the nerves. People and cargo are loaded on together and shoehorned into stifling sweatboxes for the duration. Every bird has its quirks. Black Hawks are tiny—ten to twelve seats—and provide a unique intimacy with the side gunners and outside world. The “hurricane seat” on the starboard rear will fill your face with dust and grime, as the downdraft from the overhead rotor ripples and shakes your cheeks. I always begged for the hurricane seat because I had too many vivid memories of baking in Shithooks, Sherpas, and Hercs, desperate for
a non-fuel-encrusted whiff of fresh air.

  C-130 Hercules cargo planes made the milk run visiting FOBs in Iraq, and were a decent ride if you could get them. I learned to avoid the Aussies; while U.S. Air Force pilots dodge surface-to-air missiles by climbing as high as they can as fast as they can, the suicidal Aussies cling to the landscape to limit the time an enemy has to take aim and fire. The downside: the 150-degree air in the back never cools when you stay a hundred feet from the ground, skimming above the Baghdad palm trees and power lines for thirty minutes, waiting until you hit the outskirts of town and it’s safe to climb.

  The Marines are no better, flying at night and in the worst neighborhoods. On approach and landing one night at a postage stamp of an airfield, we started to take incoming fire. This is less obvious than one might think. With no windows or flight plan for reference, the cargo hold becomes a timeless vibrating barrel. The only indication of landing is an odd gravitational sensation as the pilot edges the nose down, banks to the left, points a wing tip toward the airfield below, and begins the corkscrew descent. The shaking increases alarmingly as your back presses into your seat and your heart rises into your throat. The engineers in the tail grab their night-vision goggles and take their positions in the sling seats at the two porthole-like back windows, hands around the flare-ejection triggers, looking for the hot-motor flashes of incoming heat-seeking missiles. Blinding-white flares are the only defense a wallowing C-130 has against smart and agile surface-to-air missiles. Small-arms fire from rifles, the tracers arcing across the sky, is pretty and ignored. They plink ineffectually off the bottom of the plane. Shoulder-fired missiles bring down birds like a Herc, and this is what my Marine flight engineers were searching for that night.