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

by Brian Castner

  My wife and I are walking through the airport in Colorado Springs. I’m working at Fort Carson, training another EOD unit for deployment. It’s our fifth job at Fort Carson in three years: more men for the meat grinder.

  My wife has been visiting me, taking a break from the kids, trying to reconnect with her Crazy husband. Our Marriage Counselor says we should do things together that we enjoy, start slow by just having fun. It’s not my wife’s fault that we struggle with this; I find little joy in anything.

  Still, as we hold hands and walk together, it is clear that she is not looking forward to getting on the plane without me. I’m staring out into space, the Crazy feeling on a low boil, distracted, lost in my thoughts. My rifle hangs at my shoulder.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asks.

  “Kermit,” I reply.

  Her face betrays her shock. This is clearly not the answer she was expecting. We haven’t talked about Kermit in a year or two.

  “Why Kermit?” she asks.

  How do I answer that I think about Kermit every day?

  VII | GUU-5/P

  THE THING is, when you think you’re Crazy, you don’t always know that Crazy is the problem. Or that Crazy is what you should call it. At least not at first. Some guys are just angry all the time. Some get spooked and nervous. I thought I had had a heart attack.

  What else do you think when you have pain in your left shoulder, and tightness in your chest, and feel like your heart is going to explode? The first time, when it starts with the pain on the left side, you wonder if you slept wrong or lifted too much weight at the gym. Then you realize just thinking about whether it’s a heart attack makes it worse, your heart beating faster and faster the more you analyze. So you tell yourself that you’re fine, not to be a hypochondriac, and move on with life.

  But then it continues, the pain in the front left side and the back, and your wife gets nervous and tells you to go in to the emergency room at the VA hospital. So you do, and you get hooked up to the machines and have blood drawn, and after a couple of hours the doctor comes in to say you should just chill out and relax, like it’s as easy as sitting in a chair and tuning out the kids and ignoring the foot in the box and reading a book and all your heart problems will go away.

  Maybe the pain goes away for a while. Maybe other odd sensations come and go. A tightness in the neck. A pain in the jaw. A twitch of the eye. Always a twitch of the eye. Little symptoms, coming and going. How do you describe a gurgling that just feels wrong? Nothing specific—the aches and pains of getting old, you say, though your twenties are barely behind you.

  Months pass, but then you have that day. Everyone has a day. My day was walking with my aunt through the Pearl District on the west side of Portland, Oregon. I stepped off the curb normal. When my right foot hit the pavement I was Crazy.

  That odd combination of twinges, the unspecific aches, the random symptoms that sent you to the doctor over the years, suddenly combine in one overwhelming explosion. My chest flooded with emotional helium. It filled with an oppressive, overpowering distraction that pushed every rational thought from my head. Arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder, gut to neck, I blew up like a balloon. Not with pain, but with unnameable discomfort, a feeling—what feeling?—that demanded attention. I tried to ignore it. It sucked my brain of thoughts. I carried on with the day, but it intruded constantly. I slept, woke up, and it was there. It persisted, for a day, three days, a week. The feeling is intolerable. The persistence is intolerable.

  A flight home, and on the plane I rocked and fidgeted as adrenaline bubbled and brewed. The more I thought about the feeling, the Crazy feeling, though I didn’t know to call it that yet, the more it pervaded my every thought. My heart sped up, stopped, skipped, and pounded. I twitched and swelled all the way across the country. By that evening, I was back in the VA emergency room for a heart attack, throwing triple premature ventricular complexes on the beeping computerized heart monitor several times a minute.

  But no heart attack had occurred. And the longer I lay in the emergency room, the younger and healthier I looked to the doctors and nurses, otherwise surrounded on that early Sunday morning by ailing drunks and lonely addicts.

  “Go home and get some rest,” they said.

  “But what’s wrong with me? Something is not right.” On the monitor, my heart stopped for a moment to emphasize my point.

  So the workups and testing and appointments began, stretching over the next month. An ECG that proved every vessel in my heart was opening and closing as it should. A stress test and take-home monitor that proved my heart was as fit as a teenager’s. A blood test and fecal smear that declared I needed to get out in the sun more, but little else. Every test eliminated the worst physical possibilities. I had run out of doctor’s appointments, and still the feeling persisted, three months on. Which left me one option.

  It’s all in your head.

  But it was all in my chest.

  Which meant I was Crazy.

  Castleman was a reservist, a part-time EOD technician, and back home in Minnesota he was a full-time civilian firefighter. He said once a fire is waist high, you aren’t going to extinguish it by hand. It just needs to burn itself out, or be sprayed with water by professionals from a fire truck.

  We didn’t have a fire truck. But we did have a shoulder-high fire, once we detonated the cache of old anti-aircraft rounds.

  Twelve years of American aerial bombardment had taught Saddam to love anti-aircraft guns, ineffective though they were. He had them spread liberally throughout the country, in oil fields, cities, and open spaces. They decorated the countryside like lost and forgotten lawn ornaments, in various states of dry-rotting disrepair, random barrels sprouting from unlikely draws and pastures.

  These anti-aircraft rounds were small, rusting, discarded. Left behind after the 57-millimeter gun itself had long been disassembled and sold for scrap. They were covered with dirt in a shallow hole in the middle of a farmer’s field. The farmer knew they were there; he had plowed around them, probably for years. But now we had found them, and unfortunately could not ignore them. They were too dangerous to move and too dangerous to leave. It was quite unlikely they would be used in any IED, but you had to be sure. We had seen improvised grenades made out of 57s before—you just had to stick a simple fuze in the front end.

  We knew there would be a fire before we blew them. There wasn’t much helping it. The wind caught the flames right away and whipped the wheat field into a frenzy, blowing toward the primeval mud-walled village a couple of acres away. There was an irrigation ditch running in between, so it probably wouldn’t spread. Probably. There was nothing we could do, so we left.

  I never heard if our fire spread. Trey’s certainly did. Two weeks later, when he blew a cordless-telephone/mortar combo on the side of a different road far west of Kirkuk, a spark snared the nearby wheat field, almost ripe with the winter crop. His fire didn’t burn down the village, but it did destroy the entire harvest.

  We didn’t go to that village much before the fire, but we were back regularly afterward. The town rioted, and with no Americans available to slake their thirst for reprisal, the mob attacked the only symbol of governmental control available, storming their local Iraqi Police substation, killing everyone with a uniform inside. They hung the bodies in makeshift gibbets from the roof, and formed their own militia to guard the village from the attack they knew was coming.

  The brigade did an air-assault mission with Shithooks and Black Hawks, prickly porcupines of rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers, to retake the village. We didn’t destroy the village to save the village, but we came close. We eliminated the militia and moved new Iraqi Police back in. But there were IEDs on the roads leading to the town, with additional secondary hidden booby traps to kill the responding bomb technicians, for the rest of our tour.

  “Maybe we should try not to burn down any more fields,” I mentioned at dinner one night after the operation to re-seize the town.
r />   “Maybe they shouldn’t put out IEDs in the first place,” was the unanimous reply.

  When we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army and Marine Corps still fielded the M16A2, a gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed, shoulder-fired rifle, as the primary weapon of many dismounts (soldiers operating on foot). The A2 was a variation on the Colt M16 famously first introduced in Vietnam. Although the internal mechanisms were updated, new NATO-compatible barrels installed, and open rear iron sights reconfigured with dials and compensators, it remained, to the uninitiated, basically the same weapon.

  War, the true mother of invention, changed the rifle significantly. The M4, long in development and short on fielding, was widely introduced soon after the initial invasion. It was shorter and lighter, but still shot a single round or a three-round burst. Much to the delight of gear-loving soldiers, the M4 also had tons of external rails to bolt on extra equipment, such as optical sights, laser designators, and flashlights. The M16 was a long rifle, designed to kill targets several hundred meters away. The M4 was designed for urban combat, where size and weight are at a premium, and the enemy is much closer.

  As an Air Force dismount, a term which would make no sense to those in charge, flying the planes, I carried the GUU-5/P, a Frankenstein of a weapon. The upper receiver, the top half of the weapon that carries the bolt assembly and contains the chamber, hailed from a first-production M16 from the early 1960s, slick with no forward assist and possessing a fully integral solid carrying handle on top. The lower receiver was hijacked from an M16A1, complete with fully auto trigger assembly. The collapsible stock came from a GAL-5 used by helicopter crews in Vietnam, and could cinch up quite small. The barrel was the newest portion, recently installed to comply with NATO regulations. We swapped out the hand grips on the barrel and bolted on after-market rail systems so we could mount laser sights, front pistol grips, and SureFires. Even after the modifications it was still shorter than an M4, but as loose as an old jalopy and in need of as much maintenance to keep it operational. Even the lowliest Fobbit—an Army soldier who never had a reason to leave the FOB—carried a shiny, never-used M4 to the chow hall every day, while we endlessly cleaned and resighted our antiques, twice the age of most of my brothers.

  It was safe behind the wire, in the HAS, so we kept our rifles lined up on the gun rack right outside the door to the ops center. Grabbing your rifle meant it was time to go to work. It went on right after the body armor and stayed on, held tightly in place via slings and clips, pistol grip high. While outside the wire, conducting business, your right hand stayed nearly affixed to that grip, ready for use, all the time, until, with a sigh of relief, you shed the rifle at the HAS door upon return.

  My rifle means it’s time to do a job. It’s time to focus, to observe, to stalk, to prepare, to react, to be ready for that constant song: incoming fire. If gunshots per IED call were a batting average, we’d win the Major League title every year. Potshots while driving through town ringing off the side of your truck. Zips and pings while crouched behind your Humvee, building an explosive charge with a cigarette hanging from your mouth and the robot ready to tear downrange. Single shots from a sniper in the center of Hawija. A sustained firefight while clearing a bridge. The soft breath of a stripper blowing on your neck, on the edge of your ear, a tingle across the very surface of your skin, then an answering shout from the .50-cal machine gun mounted on the security Humvee next to you. Gunfire in the distance. Gunfire in ambush. Gunfire to sing you to sleep.

  The first time someone tried to kill me, I experienced a predictable flood of emotions. Fear. Anger. Worry for my brothers. I was not expecting to be confused. Why would they be trying to kill me, I thought. Don’t they know it’s me! That I have a wife and children? A mother who loves me and a house with a mortgage and a master’s degree I haven’t finished yet and plans to hike the Appalachian Trail someday with an old friend from Tennessee? If they only knew all that, they wouldn’t try to kill me. They’d know it’s me they were trying to kill, and they’d stop. They’d understand their mistake.

  But they don’t stop. They don’t care, and soon you don’t care, as confusion is swallowed by anger and purpose and an insatiable drive to complete the mission. And the robot clears the path under duress, and the car detonates, and the team downrange is extracted, and the town is seized and the EFP factory is turned over, and the more you are shot at the angrier and more determined you are. To go home. Everyone goes home. Fuck this place.

  None of that changes one basic truth, however.

  Every moment you are being shot at you are blissfully, consciously, wonderfully, tangibly alive in the most basic visceral way imaginable.

  The pictures were grainy, taken with a cell-phone camera. Small, distorted, out of proportion a bit. The pillar and side-view mirror of the tan Suburban truck were also visible in a couple of them.

  These guys actually drove down that street in a Suburban and took pictures of this place, I thought. Shit, they’re crazier than us.

  The pictures were grainy, but they were also unmistakable. Row upon row of EFP casings. Thousands of them. A line of straining baby-bird mouths, hungry maws reaching up and open, waiting to be packed with plastic Semtex. Waiting to be fitted with their copper-plate lenses. Waiting to be capped and riveted and strung up with det cord. Waiting to be encased in foam and hidden on the road. Waiting to be used on us.

  Or waiting for us to come seize them first.

  The raid was going to be big. Company sized, the largest operation our infantry brigade had undertaken in several months. A full perimeter of Humvees and armored trucks around fifteen square blocks in the southern industrial section of Kirkuk. A second infil with Shithooks and Black Hawks to seize several objectives. Buzzing Kiowas to monitor for anyone fleeing the scene and seeking to escape. And then us, and K9 dog handlers, and the spooks and special investigators to turn over each site once they were secure.

  We didn’t warn the Iraqi Army of the event, or ask for their assistance either; too easy for a mole to tip off the locals. For once, we wanted to surprise a known IED construction cell, actually catch someone before we bled. When the intel had come in I’d leaped out of my skin. The brigade was more sedate; they had been here longer, seen more, were more wary. For a week I begged them to do this op. I was sick of defense. Let’s go on offense. The brigade eventually agreed. The opportunity for decisive success was too great to pass up.

  “What do you think we’ll find?” I asked Castleman as we loaded gear and grabbed our rifles, getting ready for the assault. I check my kit twice before every mission, but this was a big op, and we expected trouble. So I unloaded every rifle mag, checked the spring, and reloaded it with a mix of tracers and ball. I did the same with my pistol mags. I replaced my optical rifle-sight batteries, ensured that the rosary was in its pouch on my vest, and then checked everything from top to bottom a third time.

  “We’ll be lucky if those casings are still there by the time we arrive. They always seem to know we’re coming,” answered Castleman.

  “There might be other stuff, though,” I countered. “Lathes. Presses. Bang. Rivets. Forms to set the copper plates into the packed sleeves?”

  “We’ll see,” said Castleman to no one in particular.

  We arrived in the third wave to a scene of chaos, a swarm of dismounts and crowds of young men, half-dressed children splashing in muddy potholes, more oil than water, and helicopters making passes dizzyingly close to the ground. We pulled off the main highway into a tangled nest of car-repair joints, machine shops, and scrappers. The sun beat down relentlessly on the washed-out, crumbling concrete cells that passed for commercial storefronts. The narrow open bays faced each other across the dirty half-paved streets in a line, occasionally broken by alleyways that led to ramshackle sheet-metal slums. Your standard Third World paradise, in other words, dressed up with the occasional meager palm tree.

  Our area to search was massive and time was limited by the mortar and rocket attacks soon to
follow any U.S. action of this size. Our EOD team split up, I grabbed a spook to act as an extra shooter in case I got in a bind, and we made for the first automobile-repair place. On the way in we passed the previous occupants of the shops, a line of young men in polo shirts and loose pants, now sitting flex-cuffed and forgotten, left to bake in the midday sun.

  It must be human nature to hoard when poor. Hovels in rat-infested slums the world over are humble on the outside but claustrophobia inducing on the inside, cramped and suffocated with all manner of junk and debris. Nuts and bolts and hand tools and jugs of grease and oil littered the floor. In one corner, a rickety frame and a chain system to hang engines. And then, behind a pile of discarded indiscernible automobile parts, a line of cylinder casings, neatly stacked and organized. But these were rusted, moldy, the wrong diameter, and too tall. They didn’t match the evidence we had collected from previous post-attack investigations. These weren’t right for the EFPs we had seen in the area at all. There must be another stash. Plus, no explosives. No lathes and presses. No top plates. No rivets. I moved on.

  The next shop was the same. And the next. Endless heaps of tools and scrap metal. Open drains on the floor to collect piss and spent oil. The occasional pile of cylinder sleeves, but all ragged and worn out. My blood pressure jumped in one shop when I came upon a poster of New York City tacked to a wall. A cartoon tourist map you would find in a million tchotchke shops in southern Manhattan, several years old, as it still had the intact World Trade Center, noted as a tourist destination. But this wasn’t intel, evidence of some new terrorist plot. It was decoration to brighten an otherwise hopelessly dank cellar.

  I stepped outside into the brilliant sunshine and was momentarily blinded, so bright was the sun compared to the unlit work areas. I left to check in with others’ results.

  A terp dragged a flex-cuffed man through the alley from behind one of the engine bays and back into the center of the street. His head hung as the terp pulled him by the collar. I could see that both of his eyes were swollen shut, and he bled from his nose and mouth into the open gutter on the curb. From behind the shop, the sounds of additional interrogations echoed down the block, an object lesson to future subjects still bound and lined up in the sun outside on the street. I approached the terp.