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

by Brian Castner

  I only knew we were taking missile fire because the engineers began to thumb their buttons furiously, and suddenly daylight shone through their windows, lighting up the entire back of the aircraft. Seconds later we slammed onto the runway, jolted up and forward, and the engines screamed in reverse to bring the bird to an almost immediate stop. The ramp went down, in the middle of the runway where we had come to a halt, and the engineers screamed for everyone to get off. The pilot had called an emergency, audible only in the headsets of the flight crew, and everyone needed to get off the plane. Right. Fucking. Now.

  I grabbed my pack and rifle and ran off the plane into the waiting hot night oven. Down the ramp and onto the runway, where the engineers were already ahead of us, not waiting to see if the disoriented passengers could find their way. The airfield was completely blacked out, so as not to provide a tempting target for rocket attacks, but incongruously there was light all over the runway: the flares and flare canisters kicked out of the plane by the engineers as we were only a few feet off the ground had ricocheted, angrily skipping down the tarmac, burning all over the infield. I ran across the concrete and turned to look back at the aircraft, expecting to see engines on fire.

  Instead, the pilot threw the emergency engine stop at that moment. The emergency cutoff kills all engine activity immediately, and everything flammable is jettisoned out the back. Like jet fuel. Four Allison AE2100D3 turboprop engines’ worth of jet fuel came showering back, drenching me in liquid soot. I could taste the distinctive nauseating odor of JP-8 on my lips, in my eyes, in my ears. It soaked my uniform and oozed down my rifle like chocolate syrup. I stood on that runway as human tar paper, among the still-burning flares, in the desert night.

  I’m sitting with Jimbo in another faceless airport, before dawn, drinking another cup of black coffee, waiting for another flight to I-can’t-remember. Texas? North Carolina? It all blends together. If the city wasn’t printed on the boarding pass, I wouldn’t know where I was going. My life is a bad combination of rental-car shuttles, PowerPoints, identical chain restaurants, jet lag, hotel and airline reward programs, polo shirts, and explosives. The childlike joy of blowing things up is waning, and no longer makes up for the rest of the headaches.

  Jimbo and John and Bill and I and the rest of the guys drove to the airport the way we always do: in a convoy, a line of unmarked SUVs and pickup trucks, fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. We use handheld radios to coordinate while we drive, an unbroken column, unconsciously boxing out other drivers, bumper to bumper to keep civilian vehicles from cutting between. The lead truck blocks traffic when we change lanes on the highway, moving over and slowing suddenly to allow the rest of us to pass. Number two truck becomes point, former lead truck takes rear. The last man always runs the red light to stay together.

  We never lose a vehicle. We don’t talk about it. We don’t have to.

  I take another sip of coffee, look out the window at the awaiting aircraft, and then back over at Jim.

  “Hey Jim—you know when you go down the Jetway to get on a plane, and you get that first stuffy whiff of the jet fuel? Do you think of Iraq every time?”

  “Sure do, partner,” Jim replies. “Hell, I think of Iraq any time I do anything.”

  But either conveyance, the Black Hawk or the C-130, is a blessing compared with the dreaded Chinook, called a Shithook by anyone who has ever flown in the back of one—slower, fatter, uglier, more uncomfortable and less tolerable; the Army cousin to Kermit’s tragically doomed Marine bird. Even routine flights are miserable affairs, with inevitable yet still agonizing delays and hardships. You average one near-death experience per flight, and only some extraordinary bit of luck keeps you alive. It’s a hell of a way to plan a mission. On a good night, you only do something like hit a mountainside, as we did once between Kirkuk and Tikrit. That low ridge of hills has lain between those two cities for thousands of years. Why our pilot flew too low on that dark night, slamming the front of the bird into the hill and throwing us into the air, I’ll never know. The impenetrable blackness of the hazy night out the back ramp was suddenly filled with cliff and rock. I turned to the dirty contractor sitting next to me, pointed, and gave the “Did we really hit the fucking ground?” look. He nodded and shrugged back. What else can you do?

  But accidentally hitting something is at least a stimulus, and a welcome relief from the worst rides. On my worst night the Shithook took the same route but stopped at every FOB and tiny airstrip in between. A two-hour trip stretched to twelve. The bird was loaded to capacity: forty-some unlucky Joes on the outside jump seats and three pallets of cargo squeezed down the middle. If you sit up front, you can get a tease of fresh breeze through the hatch past the M60 gunner’s position. If you sit in the very back, you can suck in the main engine exhaust, which is at least moving air. If you are shoehorned in the middle, like me, you have the benefit of smelling all the exhaust but in a completely still bog of hot stale soup. You, your pack on your lap, and your rifle between your legs, all mashed into four cubic feet of space. Dudes on either side press against each hip and shoulder. The cargo pallet comes right up to your seat, so you have to lift your boots when it slides in, for fear of losing a foot. There it stays, eight inches from your nose, for twelve hours. It’s four o’clock in the morning, you’ve been awake for a day and a half, and the air temperature is still well north of 110 degrees. Though you strain to turn your neck, there is little to see beyond indistinct forms and hazy silhouettes in the near darkness. So dehydrated are you that the sweat stopped running down your face hours ago, the only air to breathe is toxic exhaust, and you are vibrating in a tube of pain. If the heat and air don’t make you nauseated, the swaying and shaking will. Don’t worry; the only place to puke is on yourself, since you can’t move anyway. It’s as close to Hell as I can imagine on this earth.

  You think about a lot of things on a flight like that. You can do nothing but think. I thought about my rifle. I counted every bullet in every magazine I had. Two hundred forty. I counted the number of motherfuckers trapping me inside that hellcan. I did the math. How many did I have to kill to get off? Twelve, blocking me from the back of the ramp. How many would try to stop me, and how many would try to join me? If the pilot heard shooting, he’d start to land, so the jump out the back might be survivable. My finger moved down to the Safe/Arm switch on my rifle. I could do it. This wasn’t like being trapped on the ramp at O’Hare, a helpless civilian. I had a gun. I could make it all stop. The puking, the vibrating, the mashing. I flipped the switch on the rifle to Single, then to Auto, then back. Safe, Single, Auto, Single, Safe, Single, Auto. I could get off this fucking bird. Single. Safe. Single. Auto. I would do anything to make that flight stop. Single. Safe. Single. Anything. Auto. My thumb started to twitch. Single. I leaned my helmeted head up against the cargo in front of me, and took a noxious breath. Safe. Fuck me.

  Kermit’s chopper took off, turned to head out over Lake Qadisiyah behind the Haditha Dam, and immediately encountered trouble. What specific trouble is hard to say. As one might expect, the reports we got immediately after the incident did not match completely with later unclassified published accounts. In addition, any official Marine Corps safety report on the crash is either classified or unavailable. Reconstructing Kermit’s last moments thus involve a mix of foggy memories from blast-shredded minds, educated guesses, and related experience.

  What is clear, however, is that the main engine on the CH-46 failed almost immediately after takeoff. One eyewitness says the rear landing gear clipped the top of the dam on the way off the FOB, pitching the helo violently downward along the face of the concrete wall and toward the water. Whether this was a cause or a symptom of later trouble is unclear. In any case, rather than flying over the lake, the helicopter was now nosing toward it. When the motor on a CH-46 starts to shut down, there is no mistaking what is happening. It bucks and whines as the hydraulic pumps suddenly engage and then violently fall in pitch. A passenger hears that sound every time
they land and the pilot kills the engine. There is no other sound like it. Hearing it in the air, above a body of water that you are hurtling toward, must have induced heart-bursting terror. Everyone on that bird must have known that the chopper was going down while over the lake.

  The flight engineer, who normally mans the machine gun on the aft ramp where you enter and exit, started to evacuate everyone out the back of the aircraft. As the last passenger to board, Kermit was the first to be directed out, jumping into the lake as the chopper struggled. The bird partially recovered, flattening out over the water, and those stuck in the middle of the helo began streaming out the side hatches and gunner’s port. Eventually the pilot and copilot, the last on board, somehow crabbed the damaged bird to the far shore and made a hard landing. Those two in the helicopter and ten of the rear passengers and crew survived with the help of responders who dove in the water to haul out frantic victims. One of those rescue swimmers was Murph, an EOD technician, Kermit’s brother. He searched in the water in vain for the man he had just said good-bye to on the helo ramp moments before. All he ever found was Kermit’s helmet and sunglasses.

  Four of the passengers who jumped in the lake—two Marines, an Army Special Forces soldier, and Kermit—were sucked to the bottom by the weight of their gear and drowned.

  I’ve imagined that moment in my head countless times. I can’t believe Kermit would have jumped out of the helicopter on his own. As faux cargo, you never get in or out of the chopper unless directed by the engineer. Why didn’t they delay their exit so they had time to remove their bulky armor and weapons? Or abandon the chopper in shallower water, closer to shore? What was Kermit thinking as he jumped, with his pack, rifle, and body armor still strapped on? Did he think he could wiggle out of it? Or was he just desperate to get out of the chopper, as I was over the plains of northern Iraq, and clawing to escape? Was he thinking at all? Did muscle memory take over? Did he know he didn’t stand a chance? Did he know he was going to die?

  The ritual was always the same. I put on my body armor first, a vest with attachments and additions, including side plates and ill-fitting shoulder coverings with extra straps. Then the rifle, with a three-point sling. The harness wraps around the left side of your neck, your right shoulder, and under the right armpit before reattaching to the rifle. It is not easy to slip off in normal circumstances; that’s the point. Then a pack on top, shoulder straps on top of rifle sling, rifle sling over body armor closures. In ideal conditions, it takes sixty seconds to put on and thirty seconds to take off. In the water, after having just jumped out of a crashing helicopter, it takes minutes you don’t have.

  I’d have been pulled to the bottom under the weight of the life-saving armor. I’d have died with Kermit. When the divers found him in seventeen feet of water, his armored vest was on but open at the front, rifle sling hopelessly tangled about him.

  It took a long time to find him, but eventually we get the news at Perneatha’s house. An unrelenting series of memorial services, travel arrangements, and administrative tasks follows. Where is the body? When will it arrive in Delaware at the Air Force morgue? Who is escorting him? Will Kermit make it in time to his funeral? Was he bloated from being in the water, or could we have an open casket for everyone to say good-bye? When is the Las Vegas memorial? The Mississippi memorial? The New Mexico memorial? A wake before the Arlington funeral?

  I feel awkward and helpless every day. You enter the house desperate to leave, eager for a task that takes you out again. What do you do for the long hours between news, between plans, between services? Your mind wanders. It’s nearly Christmastime; have to go to the mall to buy the kids Christmas presents. Guilt. Who will buy Kermit Junior Christmas presents? The enormity of the event is overwhelming, and the mind seeks the mundane and familiar routine. You meet a family at the height of tragedy, at the height of their grief, bearing the worst possible news. Do you grieve with them? Is it rude not to? Is it rude of you to try? You don’t share the family’s history. You don’t share their culture. You don’t share their love of Kermit. Kermit was a fellow EOD technician, he is a brother, but he is not my husband, my father, my son. You walk the family through the painful steps of their grief, and then leave their life when only the very worst is over. You have a job to return to. They have a life to put back together. You pledge to keep in touch, but it is tentative. All I am to the family is a reminder of Kermit’s death. All they are to me is the family I could not comfort.

  I go home at night and clutch my children, confused and amazed it’s not me lying in a morgue in Delaware.

  The first memorial is in Las Vegas, for the friends Kermit had during his time stationed there, for the church Kermit and Perneatha attended, and the family that has flown in to be with her now. It is the first of five such services. In German Catholic Buffalo, where I grew up, you have a wake, a funeral, and coffee at Tim Hortons afterward. No one talks, everyone is fine, and life moves on. Perneatha and her family intend to grieve, in depth, regularly. More awkwardness.

  For the Las Vegas memorial, several brothers make the trip from New Mexico. Kermit was their commander. Bill Hailer, Garet Vannes. Brothers I served with for two years during my time at Cannon. The scene comes full circle. I love them, and they love Kermit, and they’re upset, but it feels off, unsettling. In the best of times it’s strange to return to an old unit that you once commanded; “your guys” are no longer yours. Now my guys are mourning a man I don’t really know. Would they have mourned me? I check my rifle. The foot sits in the box. I don’t know why it wasn’t me that fell out of a helicopter behind the Haditha Dam.

  I only have a single part to play in the first service, and my part is small: the Last Roll Call and the Final Shot. After the readings, and the pastor’s homily, and the songs, toward the end, you call a final roll call. I am the highest ranking EOD technician, and outranked Kermit, so it is my duty. You call the names of the members of the unit, as you would in any military formation. They respond back that they are present. It is a process that has happened every day in every military unit all over the world for thousands of years, but it takes on a final significance at a service such as this. The roll call is followed by a final shot, a last detonation, in honor of the deceased. It marks the closing chapter of his life as an EOD technician. Explosions mark all the significant events in the life of a bomb tech. Your first shot. Your first day on the bombing range. Your last call in theater. A shot at retirement. A shot at your funeral. How else would the Brotherhood mourn or mark the passing of time? It allows Kermit to rest.

  I walk to the front of the base chapel, dress blues ironed, black shoes shined. I am followed by the roll-call formation. The rest of the memorial has been lively, festive even. A life was celebrated. Now the chapel is tempered, unsure. The formation stands in line in front of the altar, facing the assembled, at attention. I come to attention, left face. Absolute quiet fills the nave. I’ve never tried to stand straighter in my life.

  “Senior Airman Kory!”

  My voice fills the hall. I hear it ring. The response is immediate, full, proud.

  “Here, sir!”

  “Senior Airman Olguin!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Staff Sergeant Leaverton!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Technical Sergeant Vannes!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Master Sergeant Hailer!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Captain Evans!”

  Silence.

  “Captain Kermit Evans!”

  A stifled sob from the front pew.

  “Captain Kermit O. Evans!”

  The moment hangs. Then, a call from the back of the church.

  Fire in the hole!

  The Last Shot detonates danger-close. The explosive shock wave strikes the chapel, and the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary erupt and shatter inward. The blast rolls through the church, sunlight streaming in from above my head, and glass shards tinkle like diamond raindrops behind me
. None of the brothers moves a muscle.

  The December morning of the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery is bright, clear, and cold. My family liaison duties have started to wind down—the family was in Washington and had traveled there without me, Kermit is about to be buried, and there is little left to plan. I drive myself, attend the walk to the grave like anyone else. Arlington has an efficient system of several funerals a day. You are told where to park, where to gather, and when to move on. The crowd for Kermit is many times larger than I thought it would be—the Pentagon emptied of Air Force engineering officers, as it has been decades since one was lost in combat. The Army caisson carrying the casket, drawn by a team of horses, is followed by a parade of blue to the grave site, a brown and green grassy hill with regular dirt mounds, new looking and full of fresh headstones. This is not the shady, restful cemetery of a long-ago conflict. This is the bare, muddy, working cemetery of a country in the midst of war.

  The funeral service is efficient and respectful. Flags are presented to Perneatha and Kermit’s parents by the top two-star engineering officer in the Air Force. They play taps and fire a twenty-one-gun salute. The shots ring through your body, snap you awake to the realization that Kermit is about to be lowered into the ground. After the Arlington-organized portion of the funeral, the Masons come out and start over again. Kermit was a Mason, and special rites are now required. The service doubles in length, and the Arlington staff starts to get antsy. This wasn’t in the schedule.

  Then Perneatha’s sister gets up to sing, as everyone walks by the casket. I don’t remember any of the words, nor what song she sang. I would not be surprised if she does not remember either. I only remember the emotion, the grief and pure pain, the heartache, the loss. The family’s hurt did not fit the Arlington schedule that day. It took many, many verses to just start to say good-bye.