“What’s okay now?” I asked, taking the plastic box from the Iraqi policeman.
“I cut it off the bomb. No boom. It’s all okay,” he replied.
“Where is the bomb you cut it off of?” I asked, a bit more directly.
“Right there, you see it,” he said, and pointed to a large concrete block sitting in front of a pile of garbage not twenty yards away. Too close, too close.
I resisted the urge to throw the potentially dangerous bomb component away like a live grenade and instead looked at it closely. A black plastic box the size of my fist, large enough to hide triggering components. Several heavy-gauge white and red wires, the ends recently sheared from this cop’s knife, led from holes in the box. But something didn’t look right.
“Where was this box?” I asked again.
“On the side. On the bomb. Right there. I cut it off. It’s all okay now. Very good for you now,” the young cop insisted.
I recognized this particular policeman. He was one of their nominal detectives and leaders, with a slight build and embarrassingly thin moustache on his sweating upper lip. I didn’t trust any Iraqi policeman, and they didn’t trust us, but this one was a Kurd, and he had never specifically led us into any trouble that I knew of. Younger than me, but he probably had a brood of eight kids and a wife at home in some hovel across the river. They all did.
I looked at the box and I looked at the IED he had indicated. Why would the bomber put an easily accessible trigger mechanism on the outside of otherwise solidly encased concrete? The heavy block itself was now flecked with divots and cracks, evidence that the police had been shooting at the device for a long time but had made little headway at breaking it apart. Why would the bomber give us an easy target to remove?
I looked up at the rest of my team. Mengershausen had the robot nearly on top of the concrete block now, and was reaching toward it with one heavy stainless-steel arm. Explosive workups done, Keener was mounted in his normal spot behind the steering wheel. Castleman was out in the open, looking at the concrete block through binoculars, guiding Mengershausen in. To our north, west, and south dense, impenetrable slums and faceless tenements closed us in. To our east lay the river, and beyond, on the far bank, onlookers gathered on rooftops of shanties, watching our every movement. Watching and waiting.
“Hey, Castleman, check this out,” I called, and threw him the black plastic box.
Castleman caught it, looked it over once, and then popped it open with a flick of his knife tip. The plastic box was empty. The wires led inside to nothing; they were simply knotted and tied off, so they wouldn’t fall out.
It was a hoax.
“Hey Mengershausen, be careful of this one. It’s not right,” Castleman called in to his robot driver.
But it was too late. My world erupted in thunder and hate and confusion, ears cleaved from my skull. A shock wave threw me to the ground and overwhelmed my senses and capacity to reason. A cloud of choking dust swept by and chunks of concrete fell about us, hailstones that bounced off my helmet and the top of the Humvee. Did we get hit by a mortar? Rocket-propelled grenade? An accidental detonation of one of our explosive tools? I shook my head and tried to get up and found I couldn’t stand. It was only when a robot tire came bouncing toward us, like a child threw it in a game, rolling between our armored truck and the next, that I understood.
I learned later that Mengershausen had tried to wedge his robot gripper under the leading lip of the concrete block, to flip it and examine its soft underbelly. Was it the lifting action? The pushing? We never found out.
When the IED detonated twenty yards away it tore the four-hundred-pound robot to pieces, mangled it beyond recognition, leaving only the rear stump of an amputated arm and a single set of knobby tracks behind. The blast sent molten metal fire and jagged rock in all directions, blowing out the windows and tires of the soft-skinned Iraqi Police trucks and peppering the broadside of our armored Humvee. Keener and Mengershausen were safe from the frag in the truck. Castleman had taken cover behind the engine block when he recognized the danger of the fake trigger mechanism. By luck or unconscious habit I had kept the bulk of the Humvee’s cab between me and the IED; only my shins and the top of my head were exposed.
I calmly patted down my legs and boots and was amazed to find no blood. I tried to stand again and found myself only slightly steadier. All about me our security was suddenly energized, the platoon sergeant barking orders for his turret gunners to wake up and scan rooftops for gunmen. The Iraqi Police huddled to the side confused, except for the weaselly mustached detective who had cut off the hoax black box. He waved his arms in the air and wailed that he was stupid and suicidal and would never walk up to a bomb again.
I raised my rifle to my cheek and looked through my optics across the river and into the slums. The site picture bounced violently. I checked my grip and arm placement; every muscle remembered where to go. Why can’t I get a steady shot? I latched on to the rifle tighter, but still I couldn’t settle it. I took a deep breath, just as I was taught, and tried again. The red dot danced from riverbed to sky.
“Hey Captain, you okay?” called Castleman, checking and confirming the safety of the team.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I called back.
“You sure,” he said again, and pointed at my leg.
I looked down. My left leg was bucking and shaking uncontrollably, twitching like a dead animal in its death throes. I willed my leg to be still, but it was possessed and the wild spasms continued unabated. No wonder I couldn’t shoot and could barely stand. As the physical symptoms of the coursing adrenaline took over, my veins began to boil. Detachment yielded to anger, shock to bloodlust. They tried to fucking kill me. Fuck them. Fuck this place. We’re going home.
I raised my rifle and scanned rooftops again, but smartly no silhouettes remained after the detonation. I wanted a target, somewhere to vent my frustration and powerlessness, but none appeared. The weapons of our security stayed quiet too, and an odd silence settled as it became clear the booby trap was not a signal for ambush.
“I’m going down,” announced Castleman.
“The fuck you are,” answered Keener.
“I am. Someone has to clear it and we don’t have another robot. Get the bomb suit. Put it on me. I’m doing the search for secondaries alone and then we’re going to get the fuck out of here.”
The Long Walk. Armor on, girded with breastplate and helm and leggings and collar. Eighty pounds of mailed Kevlar. No one can put on the bomb suit alone; your brother has to dress you, overalls pulled up, massive jacket tucked, earnest in his careful thoroughness. One last check, face shield down, and then into the breach alone.
There is no more direct confrontation of wills between bomber and EOD technician than the Long Walk. Donning the suit, leaving behind rifle and security, to outwit your opponent nose to nose. The lonely seeking of hidden danger. To ensure no more hazards lie in wait to snatch the next soldier to pass that way, the next EOD brother or sister, the next local shopkeeper or taxi driver or child playing in a garbage-laden sewer.
No one takes the Long Walk lightly. Only after every other option is extinguished. Only after robots fail and recourses dwindle. The last choice. Always.
But when the choice comes, when the knife’s edge between folly and reason finally tips, training affords a decisiveness to guide your higher purpose. Castleman went so Keener didn’t have to. So Mengershausen didn’t have to. So I didn’t have to. You take the Long Walk for your brother’s wife, your brother’s children, and their children, and the line unborn.
No greater love does one brother have for another than to take the Long Walk.
Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.
Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.
And Chair. I shake, from high extended fingertip through outstretched arm, chest full of the Sounding Breath, hips and quivering thighs, d
own to the end of my toes. The vinyasa evolves, flows from Adho Mukha Svanasana to Virabhadrasana. Warrior.
I am Warrior and my Om and my free mind. My Crazy has melted under the radiant vinyasa. I am Warrior from all ages. But I am also Warrior without my rifle. It lies discarded and forgotten. I am the river and I let it go.
“Now we move to Tree,” the Yogini says. “Root yourself into the ground. Spread your toes wide. Lift your leg. Hands to prayer position.”
I lift my right leg up, and try to push it into my inner left thigh. I stumble the first time, and try again.
“Do not judge yourself,” the Yogini says. “If you have trouble balancing, note it and throw it away. If you easily balance, notice and let it go.”
I lift my leg again, and retake the position. I press harder, and this time it holds. I stare ahead, a spot on the wall unmoving, and place my hands. I sway. I hold. My vision starts to swim as my eyes grow unfocused and inward. Outward.
“Root yourself to the floor, the rock beneath our feet,” says the Yogini. “Feel your Om pass silently out of you and in you.”
I am my Om. My Om is not mine. I let it go.
“Open yourself to sight,” says the Yogini. “Feel your Third Eye Chakra open on your forehead. Allow yourself to see. Let go of what you see.”
I am Tree. My roots are deep. My trunk is slender. My arms are above my head. I sway. I stare into the void.
Spinning and swirling and profound depth. My Third Eye opens. The gray hairy spider crawls out of my forehead and never comes back.
IX | The Foot in the Box
THERE WAS SOMETHING about the number one hundred. No one liked getting to a hundred missions. You might not start counting right away, but after a month or two most would go back and make the tally. Seventeen IEDs. Twelve post-blast investigations. Seven weapons caches, buried in dirt floors of crumbling houses. Thirty-six missions. Then, a month later, fifty-three. Sixty-eight. Eighty-seven. As the counter kept clicking up, as you closed in on a hundred, the always-present stomach rumble that came with leaving the FOB gate now grew in intensity. The milestone of one hundred held no particular significance, except that it indicated you had been working too long and soon your luck would run out.
In EOD culture, the role of Chaos is personified in the minor deity Murphy, of the popular Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will. Murphy is invoked as a force of random failure by even the most hardened EOD operator to explain any chance occurrence that conspires to kill him or hamper his mission. Ropes that inexplicably loosen or snap. Blasting caps that fail to detonate the plastic explosives they are encased in. Robot batteries dying prematurely despite having been charged the night before. Knives falling from sheaths.Gear coming up missing from prepacked and inventoried bags. Flat tires and cracked brake lines. A bomb suit’s cooling fan breaking only in the worst of the summer heat. In training, Murphy bred annoyance and frustration. In combat, Murphy killed.
An EOD technician learns to respect Murphy at a young age. Like Vikings slaughtering a goat to the sea gods before an expedition to secure good sailing luck, students about to take their final exams in the Ground Ordnance Division of EOD school leave sacrifices and gifts before a totem of Murphy, a wooden pole stuck in the ground with a gorilla mask perched on top. As per tradition, the offerings were cases of beer, cartons of cigarettes, and piles of porno magazines. A purported pragmatic reasoning exists to explain this form of sacrifice, as it was the instructors about to observe and grade your practical test who discreetly snatched up the early-morning presents. I doubt that this ceremony, replayed every couple of weeks when each class completed the division, actually made a bit of difference; my instructors were too bitter and cynical to be easily distracted by smokes and a fresh pair of tits. Still, the psychological benefit for the student was unmistakable. It gave a false impression of control over the random.
But no such offerings can be made in combat, and eventually luck runs out. For luck is the only true defense against Murphy. With each passing mission your luck stretches further and further, allowing Murphy’s power to grow. The odds say Murphy always wins in the end. There is no true appeasement. My lucky streak will eventually snap. The only question is whether I will make it home first.
Off again on my new civilian job, training another anonymous EOD unit, in another faux combat town, planting death for the soldiers to discover. Jimbo and JB and John and I are storytellers, traveling bards, spinning a tale of success from unit to unit across the country. Learn these steps, operate these robots, use these explosives, and you too can disassemble the IED, catch the bad guy, and come home a hero. In our training, fighting a pretend war on a training range, the EOD unit always finds the evidence, makes the intel link, unearths the terrorist. And as in a bad television sitcom, all problems are resolved by the end of the weeklong show. Not like when Jimbo and John and I were all deployed. Not like when we burned down the villages, searched the bomb maker’s house hours after he had left, combed the countryside for months fruitlessly searching for the nameless foe killing our friends. Not like that. We write the story now, and in our version, the EOD guys win.
But not tonight.
I’m in the basement of a bombed-out apartment complex, built in the Army post’s training area in the 1990s to look like Bosnia. Now it is an adequate substitute for Iraq, the sort of concrete container scattered throughout the globe to house the world’s poor. There, in the dripping cellar, I’m setting up.
The EOD unit got intel that a U.S. soldier was captured. They’ve been looking for him all week. They’ll get more intel tonight of where he is being held, and will come to try to rescue him.
You never let yourself get captured. Never. In Balad, Hallenbeck had run a line of det cord with thirty seconds of time fuze from the front seat of the Humvee to the main explosives storage cache in the back. If we had gotten overrun, he’d have blown the whole truck, well over two hundred pounds of bang, with us inside. In Kirkuk, Ewbank kept a stock of grenades by his seat. The first couple were for them. The last three were for us. They cut your head off in Iraq when you get snatched. No way I’d have let my wife and children go through that.
For my training scenario I have a volunteer hostage, one young poor kid, recently enlisted, who doesn’t know what he’s getting into. He’s followed me into the cellar with my toys, eager to play an Army game that isn’t real to him yet; it hasn’t sunk in what’s about to happen.
“Listen to me,” I say to him before we get started. “I’m about to duct-tape you to a chair, put a fucking bag on your head, and leave you in the dark in a basement torture chamber. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the EOD team to find you. Are you sure you’re cool with this?”
He is cool with it. I have no idea how that’s possible, but we get started anyway.
The concrete cellar is dark and spartan—chair, table, rat nests, and assorted garbage—with only my flashlight sporadically illuminating the deep pitch. I begin by strapping the hostage to the chair, duct tape around his wrists behind his back. In Iraq they would hang men in this position from hooks attached to the ceiling, the full weight of the body dislocating the shoulders during beatings and abuse. Next I taped his legs to the base of the chair and slipped a pressure-release system behind his back, hidden from view and set to blow if he leaned forward. A cell-phone-triggered device under his seat and taped to the underside of the chair. A third booby trap across his chest.
On the table next to him I lay out my tools. Framing hammer. Pliers. Hand pick and hatchet. Coiled hole saw: ragged spiral teeth attached to a power drill. My young hostage’s eyes are getting a little wild. I set up a video camera a few feet away in front of him, an old clunky VHS on a tripod to tape his last moments: begging and the hole saw to the temple. I splash a bucket or two of fake blood—red food coloring and corn syrup that attracts flies—on the floor around him, and splatter the rusting tools. A trip line across the entrance doorway, and I’m nearly set.
“
Okay, I’m almost done. Are you ready for the bag?” I ask.
“This is just like Halloween!” he answers, giddy.
Not quite. I duct-tape up his mouth, slip the bloodstained and frayed burlap bag over his head, and ask if he can breathe. A mumble confirms it.
I step back, observe my scene. A bound, gagged, and hooded soldier, covered in explosives, head slumping and apparently bashed in. A grisly work area, a nightmare painting across walls and floor and saw, a foot in the box, and the tools of confession. I’ve transported suburban Baghdad to the United States.
I turn off my flashlight and ink swallows my victim.
The hostage and EOD team should be dead by the end of the night.
Most of the post-blast investigation missions we ran in Kirkuk fell into one of two camps: attacks on U.S. convoys or car bombs set for prominent civilian targets. The roadside IEDs that plagued our patrols and long-haul missions often struck on the open highway between towns or on the boulevards and plazas of the inner cities. The schools, day cares, government ministries, police stations, marketplaces, regime officials’ compounds, and hospitals that saw the lion’s share of the car-bomb strikes had to be readily accessible by vehicle and thus were often wide, public spaces. The terrain was gruesome, but not claustrophobic.
Not so the scene at the chai shop in the rabbit warrens of northern Kirkuk.
Keener drove our armored Humvee until it ran out of room in the back alleys of the confusing tenement maze. Our U.S. security was lost as well, so many were the twists and turns, false paths, and dingy sewer trails. Kurdish peshmerga led us in; not the average Iraqi Police, who as Shiite Arabs were not trusted in this section of town. Sometimes a narrow pesh Hilux pickup passed through an opening our Humvees could not and we were forced to reverse course and retreat to another more open fork. This was no place for a firefight. If we got ambushed and needed to leave we wouldn’t be leaving quickly.
The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows Page 16