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

by Brian Castner

  Trey put the radio down. I gripped my mike tightly in my hand, and waited.

  I was trapped in a plywood cage. I stared at the four walls, the map of Kirkuk tacked up on one, covered in red and blue pushpins. Three plywood desks, a whiteboard covered in notes, coffee cups and the remains of this morning’s instant-oatmeal breakfast, papers with lists of equipment, call signs, and schedules. A rack of radios and amplifiers, a secure telephone, three “SECRET” computers and two “UNCLASS” ones. Price standing with his enormous arms crossed, a frown on his face. My rifle and pistol on the rack just outside the door.

  None of it let me see what Trey saw. None of it saved Trey from taking the walk. None of it helped.

  Price and I looked at each other in the ops center, and waited, because we could do nothing else.

  I was never so grateful as when the radio speaker jumped back to life.

  “Hey Captain, I was wrong. Number one, that motherfucker’s not trapped. Two, I saw a projo in the passenger foot well, stuck all the way up under there where the robot couldn’t see it. He’s got something there,” Trey reported.

  “Do you think it’s a device?” I asked. Nothing small enough to be stuffed up behind the glove box could rightly be called a truck bomb. But something that small could easily have killed Trey if the driver had set it off while he was right there. But the driver didn’t. Why?

  “Could be,” Trey said. “I don’t know. I didn’t see a trigger or wires or a battery at all. I just saw the artillery round. This guy could just be a mule, transporting it somewhere else. Or he could just be a scrapper.”

  Very few artillery rounds in Iraq had copper rotating bands anymore; they’d long since been clipped and plucked to sell for food money. Lately, we had seen a rise in people trying to sell the steel casing of the rounds themselves, some with the explosives still inside. We ran off kids from our demolitions area regularly, drawn not by curiosity but by direction from their family to retrieve the scrap iron we had, before or after we completed our disposal detonation. There is nothing worse than watching children run toward your pile of projos and mortars, covered in explosives set to blow and with the fuze cooking.

  “He could be a scrapper, but we can’t take that chance,” I said.

  “He’s still not leaving the truck, though, and the small-arms fire around here is getting worse,” Trey said. “What should we do?”

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to Boot Bang it.”

  Taking apart bombs is our business. Killing people is usually security’s business, but it was about to be ours. Mine. I needed to take responsibility for the decision, put it on my shoulders, for whatever would happen after.

  I made a phone call to the Battle Captain at the Battalion TOC, who managed the war second by second.

  “Hey, you know what’s happening at the traffic circle?” I asked.

  “Sure do. Why haven’t you safed the IED yet?” he asked.

  With the Army, it always seemed so simple. We made every IED problem go away, it was just a matter of time. Usually too much time for them.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a problem. The driver won’t leave the truck. If we set off our explosive tool under the truck with him in it, it’s going to kill him.”

  “So what’s the problem?” the Battle Captain asked.

  “The problem is we take apart bombs, we don’t use them, and our tools aren’t for killing people. I need to be sure everyone is comfortable with us making an exception this time. That you know this guy is going to die when we blow the truck.”

  The Battle Captain seemed confused.

  “We already tried to kill him, and shot him at least once,” the Battle Captain said. “He’s going to bleed out anyway, probably. If he wants to sit on the bomb when you clear it, that’s his choice. Are you asking for approval? Yeah, sure. Whatever. Go ahead. Do whatever you need to do.”

  The Battle Captain hung up.

  Whatever we needed to do. I imagined how many pieces that driver would be in after we lit up this shot. Boot Bangers weren’t designed for trucks, but that little Toyota didn’t stand a chance against one. Whatever was inside would soon be out. Which included the driver, in pieces, most likely. If the charge was directly under him it would likely vaporize his lower half and send the upper chunk up through the roof, out of the truck just like the bomb components we sought to disrupt. But since the artillery round was under the passenger side, Trey would likely put the charge a few more feet over. The driver would then probably stay in one large piece, peeled back and inside out like a dressed deer that has been hung by the leg from a tree and skinned. But his body would be easier to recover, smashed into the ceiling and driver’s door but mostly intact. If we were really lucky, his lungs would simply explode from the tremendous blast over-pressure, and his body would barely have a scratch. Not likely at this range.

  I called Trey on the radio.

  “You have the green light. Put the Boot Banger under the cab.”

  The wait again was agonizing, as Trey’s team built the charge and the robot dragged it down to the truck.

  “Captain, the Boot Banger is down there,” Trey said. “The robot is working on sliding it under the passenger side now.”

  “When it’s under, don’t wait,” I said. “If the shot placement is good and where you want it, you have permission to crank it off whether he’s in the truck or not.”

  “Hold on, Captain, something’s happening,” Trey said, his voice trailing away at the end.

  One of Trey’s team members left the open mike on.

  “Wait, he’s getting out now! Where’s the terp? Tell him to move away from the truck. Good. Now tell him to stop. I said, tell him to stop. He needs to fucking stop. Tell him he needs to stop coming towards us. He can’t approach us. I will shoot him if he approaches. Tell him that. He’s got something under his man-dress. What’s he doing? Fuck!”

  Two shots. Two shots only.

  Trey shot him at a hundred meters, one in his chest, one in his head. It was a Koran under his man-dress, we discovered later. Trey only finished what several of us started. The driver wasn’t going to live through that day, and he probably knew it.

  Sick of being a stationary target for the constant rain of incoming bullets, Trey simply burned down the pickup truck and left. It didn’t detonate, so it probably wasn’t a bomb, but we never found out.

  Objective is white two-story house, fifty meters, directly ahead. Dismount. On me, to the door! Stack up! Stack up! Front door barred. Breacher to the door! Fire in the hole in three … two … one … Boom! Go! Go! Go! Go! Clear left! Stairway up. Watch where you’re sweeping! Covering left. Clear right! You, doorway. You, stairway. You and EOD, with me. Up the stairs. Go! Go! Go!

  Get the fuck down! Put the fucking gun down! Get the fuck down! Tell this bitch to shut up! Kef! Kef! Where’s the terp? Get the terp up here! Tell that kid not to move. Tell him to stop right now or I’m going to shoot him. Tell him, and get that bitch to shut up.

  Where are the explosives? Ask him where he’s keeping the IEDs and explosives. The things that go boom. Don’t fucking lie to me! Tell him not to lie to me. We know they’re here.

  How can you let your kid play with a gun, like a toy? What the fuck is wrong with you people? Don’t you realize I almost shot him? I almost shot your fucking kid. Goddamn. Did you tell him that? This fucking place.

  You found it? In the dirt floor, on the ground level? Good. We’re blowing up this fucking house. They won’t hide shit anymore. Where’s the terp? Tell them to get out of the house. That we’re blowing up his fucking house, and he’s going to jail. The wife and kid can leave, I don’t care. Let them go, but take that kid’s gun first.

  You ready to go? Big explosion? Cool. Let’s get down.

  Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the—Boom—hole!

  Fuck it, let’s get out of here.

  I simply exist from moment to moment. There is no meaning in my past. My present is i
ntolerable. I don’t expect my future to exist.

  I simply run, with Ricky, every day, to cloud with pain what would be immediately exposed without constant distraction.

  When the depravity of this world is laid before you in its ruin, and you discover yourself mired in it, rather than above, what hope do you have? All that my feeble actions until now have produced is misery for myself, my children, my wife, and the children of thousands I do not know.

  I’m on the road again, conducting training in another faceless city, sitting in a blank hotel room. My wife pleads with me on the phone.

  “Please,” my wife begs, sobbing between words. “Please, just cheat on me while you’re gone. Please, just go do it. Let me leave you with a clear conscience. Free me and the children. I can’t follow you into this dark place.”

  I put down the phone without answering. I’m too scared to cheat and leave, and so we endure.

  The Buddhists say that you must let go of all things. That you must remove your attachment to worldly possessions, and to your professional successes, and even to your loved ones, before you can be free of pain and suffering.

  I am utterly detached from the world. I am invested in nothing. I should be steps from enlightenment.

  But I am only Crazy.

  VIII | The Science and the Chakras

  THE MEDICAL DOCTORS and researchers first noticed the phenomenon in Serbia and Bosnia, following the war in the early 1990s, the first conflict in which modern western armies with modern armor and equipment met modern western medicine. Soldiers on both sides survived explosive detonations that would have killed in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Body armor and helmets caught frag, armored vehicles survived blasts, and soldiers walked away seemingly unhurt from what would have been death sentences two decades before.

  But they were not unhurt. The symptoms of their injuries only appeared later. Doctors in Serbia noticed odd combinations of complaints from veterans of the Balkan War in the old Yugoslavia. Headaches that wouldn’t go away. Lost memories, or challenges forming new ones. Personality changes. The inability to make a decision or solve problems. Sleeping disorders, insomnia, or nightmares. Some had mild complaints that merely hindered daily life. Some could barely function at all.

  The soldiers had a new kind of wound, a kind not previously recognized because no victim that had ever received one survived long enough to tell about it. The name for this new condition? Blast-induced Traumatic Brain Injury.

  TBI had previously been known to aging football players, boxers, or victims of car accidents and falls from high places. In each of those cases a concussion occurred, a condition familiar to doctors and lay people alike. During a concussion the brain slams into the interior of the skull, either because a hard object struck the skull directly, or because the skull was moving very quickly and then came to a sudden stop. The initial symptoms of concussions are well known: headaches, vomiting, disorientation. The long-term effect, concussion-induced TBI, is less understood, but sustaining multiple damaging incidents increases the risk for permanent debilitating brain damage and Parkinson’s-like effects.

  But the skull and brain are built to survive injuries of this type. There is an evolutionary need for our tree-dwelling ancestors to still find food after an accidental fall to the ground on their heads. Concussions are natural events that our body is prepared for. Blast waves from a detonation, on the other hand, are not naturally occurring. We have no intrinsic defenses.

  A blast wave is a glorified sound wave, and obeys all the same basic laws of physics. It can bounce and reflect. It dissipates rapidly over distance. And it can travel through objects, like the human body. When a blast wave vibrates through a substance—walls, cars, human tissue—it moves at a speed related to the density of the material through which it is traveling. Air is not dense, and so the blast wave moves relatively slowly, though still several thousand feet per second, depending on the type of explosive used to produce the blast wave initially. Concrete walls and fluid-filled organs are dense, however, and the blast wave speeds up in these materials. The damage to the material, and thus the body, comes at the barrier between dense and airy substances.

  Imagine you are standing too near a car bomb detonating on a city street. When the blast wave enters your gut, it speeds up through the outer skin of the human body, through the fluid-packed muscle of the abdominal wall, and into the colon. But there it finds open air, and slows down, causing shearing, ripping, and tearing. The same trauma occurs when the wave reenters the opposing colon wall, and so on throughout the body. At each density junction, shear forces and rapid expansion and contraction cause devastating injuries. Small and large intestines hemorrhage and bleed internally. Kidneys disconnect from fragile connecting tissue and fail. Delicate alveoli rupture and fill the lungs with blood, suffocating the victim. And in the brain, even small blast waves can have large consequences.

  Scientists and doctors once considered the brain a big fluid-filled organ, no different in this respect than your liver, and relatively resistant to blast damage. Then Bosnia happened, and injured veterans presented never-before-seen symptoms of brain trauma. When a blast wave enters the head, it speeds up at each threshold, through the skin and the skull and the bag of cushioning fluid that surrounds the two main lobes of the brain. Then the wave encounters tiny nerve endings, neurological fibers, and slight synapses. Faced with a couple of billion density junctions, it shears, strains, rips, and tears its way to the back of the skull and out the other side.

  The soldier who experiences this trauma is often unaware of it. If he is caught close to a large detonation then fragmentation damage to the rest of his body is the first concern—he may be bleeding from amputated stumps or body puncture wounds. If he is in an armored truck, he may be thrown about inside the steel box, slamming his helmeted head into the ceiling and suffering a standard concussion in addition to any blast-induced damage. In both cases, it is only after the immediate acute injuries are treated and survived that the long-term TBI nightmare becomes apparent.

  The most insidious damage, however, occurs during missions where you think you’re fine. Where you see the pavement erupt in front of your vehicle as you scream down a lonely Iraqi highway. The driver notes the danger too late, tries to stop and swerve, but the windshield suddenly fills with smoke and debris as the blast wave overwhelms the front of the truck. Your chest thumps, your ears ring, and your head splits under the weight of the crack. Chunks of asphalt embed themselves in the armored glass, and pieces of bumper and grille and headlight are torn and scattered. Your front tire thuds into and out of the newly created crater as your vehicle finally grinds to a halt. You pat yourself down; all fingers and toes accounted for. No blood or missing pieces. Your harness kept you locked to your seat. The radio jumps to life. Are you all right, the convoy commander wants to know. Is everyone fine?

  You look at the driver, he looks at you. You both laugh, as the adrenaline takes over and you start to shake. Fuck yeah, you’re fine. Luckiest sons of bitches on the planet.

  But you are not fine. Inside your head, nerve connections that used to exist have been torn and broken. If the blast was close and more damage done, you may have lost parts of high school geometry, the coordination needed to tie flies for your fishing reel, or the ability to make decisions at the supermarket about what meat to buy. If you are lucky, you only lost your son’s first steps or the night you asked your wife to marry you.

  And if you are a bomb technician, one of my brothers, chances are you don’t have only one lucky scrape, only one detonation where you were a little too close. You have dozens. Or hundreds. Spray-foam-encased EFPs that detonate while you are trying to disrupt them. Daisy-chained 130-millimeter artillery rounds that hit your vehicle on the way to a call. Truck bombs you choose to detonate, but must be unnervingly close to, watching and guarding and keeping children from drawing too near in a dense city center. Large-scale demolition to destroy hundreds of tons of stockpiled arms found in caches. Det
onations in training when you are preparing to deploy in the first place. Every day, something is blowing up. Every day, your brain rips just a little bit more.

  Blast waves tear up memories and functions. They leave holes where your identity used to be. You lose parts of your past and have trouble retaining the present or remaking a future. The strong, capable soldier now can’t sleep, can’t discern or differentiate among voices and noises, becomes easily distracted, gets tired, cries randomly in public, and doesn’t know what to order for dinner. Where does Crazy stop and TBI begin? Who knows?

  The good news is that your brain can regrow paths and you can reclaim skills you’ve lost. Particularly bad TBI victims, those who have lost the ability to speak or walk, often eventually relearn those skills after months and years of grueling therapy. But the new pathways are longer, more complex, and take more energy to use. Those with blast-induced TBI can experience fatigue of many varieties and intensities. This fatigue isn’t like being tired after a long workout. This fatigue is being so tired you can’t get out of bed, into the shower, can’t make breakfast or summon the energy to dial a phone. Some have difficulty completing the most basic tasks of daily living. Some just have trouble concentrating, doing a complicated task for long periods of time. Your brain literally hurts because it is tired. It has had to work much harder, fire neurons over a much greater distance than before the injury. You no longer have some of the efficient neural pathways laid down in infancy, as you taught yourself how to lift a red block and set it on a blue one. Now your brain runs a marathon to do the same task. If you are lucky like me, then the fatigue and pain just set in after a long day of thinking, of solving complex problems or learning new skills. Your mind and body are exhausted from the process. It hurts in a way that overwhelms my ability to communicate.