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

by Brian Castner

  He is now the one in the class with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It strikes five out of every hundred thousand people. Our class was only two hundred. Because he has it, now I won’t. That’s how these things work. We both know it, as do the rest of his former classmates that have come to the event. Our donations are thanksgiving sacrifices of gratitude.

  I’m standing in an awkward circle of those former classmates, sixteen years since we last saw each other. An accountant, a dentist, a lawyer. One guy has a daughter with leukemia. Another lost his wife in a car accident. I’m the one that’s Crazy. I feel better that my wife and kids are now safe from car accidents and leukemia. If they knew, they’d feel better that they aren’t going to become Crazy.

  We exchange pleasantries and make modest inquiries. What do you do now? Oh, you work for the bank? Are you married? Children? It is all very harmless and polite until someone innocently asks me my occupation.

  “I just got back from Iraq. I disarm bombs.”

  That was a mistake. Mild shock, wide eyes from a few. Do they not expect it from me personally? Or just not from anyone they might regularly encounter in their lives? The war is very far away from here.

  “That sounds terrible. I’m not sure I could do that,” says the accountant.

  “Oh, it’s tons of fun, actually. Now that I lived through it. We’ve lost a lot of bomb technicians over the last nine years. I’m just really lucky I didn’t die.”

  Nervous laughter from the dentist.

  “Hey, but don’t worry. I don’t blow people up anymore.”

  Silence.

  I know where this is going. At my sister’s wedding I cornered the parents of an old friend for an hour, drunk and inappropriate and occasionally crying, painting a detailed study of the pink mist that hangs over a scene after a car bomb explodes, intestines and arms hanging from trees. How the foot was in the box. Because, I mean, really, where else would you put it, if you had a foot no longer attached? In a box! Isn’t that hilarious!

  I check my rifle. I’ve learned how to cope now. Time to turn the filter back on.

  “But I’ve still got all my fingers and toes!” I wiggle them for effect—that always seems to work. “So I must have done something right. I’m just happy to be home with my wife and kids. How many kids do you have now? Congratulations. Don’t they grow up fast? Oh, I love that age. They’re learning so much, and so much fun, and almost ready for school. Enjoy them while you can. My oldest is nearly a teenager, and man, can they eat!”

  My thighs and lungs are burning as fiery hot as the cooked desert pavement beneath my feet, the Texas summer robbing me of breath and endurance. But every painful step keeps the Crazy in check for another moment, a blessed delay of the inevitable.

  Ricky seems indefatigable and presses on ahead, always a step or two in front so I never quite catch him. I redouble my effort, strain and claw and chase him up over the next rise, finally catching him at the top of the low bluff. The path heads down again, and we settle into an easier rhythm, opening our stride to take advantage of the descent.

  “I’m all alone, Ricky,” I say to him once I catch my breath.

  “What do you mean, sir?” he replies.

  “It’s tough being out. Not having a unit or the guys around, like when we were stationed together. There are no EOD guys at home in Buffalo. I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. And I travel all the time, teaching, a new city every month. I’m never settled,” I say.

  “What about your psychologist at the VA?” Ricky asks.

  “I’m on my second one!” I say. We laugh and pick up the pace.

  “Give her a chance,” Ricky says. “And anyway, you’ve always got me.”

  “That’s true.” I pause. “I miss you, bro.”

  “I know.”

  At first I felt cheated.

  When I got home, I knew the signs to look for, the indicators that one is having trouble readjusting to American life. I even sought out those signs, secretly hoped for at least a few of them. Instead, the bulk of the horrors initially faded, and it was with a drop of regret that I saw them go. I had always heard combat was a life-altering event, and my pride wanted my experience to qualify. If a little jumpiness came with the mark, so be it.

  I had needed to go back, and now I needed it to count.

  Instead, as the homecoming parties ended, and the hangover faded, and I cut back on the cigarettes, life returned to a surprising normal relatively quickly. After a couple of months home, the slam of a car door no longer made me jump, and I didn’t look for IEDs on the side of the road while driving. I left the military, got my civilian job as a trainer, taught EOD technicians without flashbacks or distraction. The vigilance lapsed, comfort returned, and a sigh of relief eventually came unbidden.

  Perhaps I don’t measure up with those that came before after all, I thought. Perhaps it was only delusion or adrenaline in the moment that led me to believe so. You aren’t so special, Brian. This won’t be the defining episode you had hoped for.

  Time to move on with life. I guess I made it back in one piece.

  But I didn’t. I had a blown-up brain, a foot in a box, and Crazy lurking around the corner. I just didn’t know it yet.

  My Crazy was waiting for me, stalking, hiding in the shadows and on the edge of my vision. I see it now, in retrospect. Some old habits that never did go away. Some memories that stayed fresh. Until one day, seemingly out of the blue, it surprised me walking down the street. I stepped off a curb normal. I landed Crazy.

  There is no explanation for why I went Crazy when I did. I don’t know why that was my day. Nothing had happened. I had been out of the military for over two years. I had been home for even longer. The wars continued without me: brothers deployed, came home, died, survived. Shouldn’t I have gone Crazy when Kermit died? When Jeff died? But I didn’t. My day was February 6th, in the Pearl District, in Portland, Oregon. The day my chest swelled and never released and my overactive mind eradicated all sensible thought and temperance. The day I went Crazy.

  The strangeness of the feeling struck me first, then the discomfort, the unease. I continued up the street, among the trendy shops and bars. My eye was twitching by the time I sat down for dinner in a McMenamins restaurant. Three beers and dinner and the Crazy feeling didn’t subside. It followed me to bed in my hotel room, kept me awake past midnight, and then greeted me before dawn. Beyond unsettled, beyond distracted. I took it to work teaching each day for the rest of the week, packed it in my carry-on bag on the airplane, and brought it home. Still the Crazy didn’t subside. I twitched and gurgled all the way to the emergency room when I could stand no more.

  I don’t deserve to be Crazy. Not that I’m too good for it, but rather not good enough. Not enough tours. Not enough missions. Not enough bodies. Not enough IEDs. Not enough near misses. No friend dead in my arms. No lost limbs. No face exploding in my rifle scope. Plenty of other guys did more, endured more, and came home in worse shape. They deserved it, not me.

  I’m still scared of the soft sand. I didn’t earn Crazy.

  What did I assume it would be like, once I came home? A Goldilocks state of solemn pride. Remembering those that came before, telling the story of their valor, a satisfaction in having done my part, and a successful life to follow. A single tear at the Veterans Day parade once a year, and otherwise, dignity and bearing and no more.

  I managed no such balance. Instead, I vacillated from breezy inattention to the inescapable rush of Crazy. What I would give for the initial flippancy again.

  Emerson was right. Life does consist of what you spend your whole day thinking of. I think of the Crazy all day now, either in the forefront of my mind, or as a shadow that follows me, always there if looked for. The life of the mind used to be a joy but now it is a cursed downward spiral, the Crazy feeding on itself, growing and amplifying unless I run it into the ground or meditate it away. I can’t exercise or practice yoga all day, and so the Crazy creeps back, first one intrusive thought, then anoth
er, until it writhes again at full boil.

  If life is what I think about all day and I’m Crazy all day then my life is now Crazy.

  “But I was going to kill those women,” I say to my New Shrink. “On the Day of Six VBIEDs.”

  I can hear their screams in my mind unbidden, breaking my constantly sought peace. The heat, and the dust, and ankle-deep pools of rotting blood and sewage fill my nose. It makes me as angry now as it did then. They never shut up. They still don’t shut up. Their cries and mourning have followed me home and into the VA hospital.

  “I could have done it,” I said. “I was capable of doing it.”

  Is this a boast or a confession? And am I trying to convince her or myself?

  “But you didn’t do it,” my New Shrink soothes. “That’s what’s important, that you didn’t shoot them.”

  “That’s not it,” I reply. “The only reason I didn’t shoot them is because I wasn’t strong enough. I pussed out. I got scared. They were screaming, and I wanted them dead, and I had my rifle and I thought about doing it. But I’m no saint for not pulling the trigger. I would have done it if I wasn’t so weak. I’m no better than any of the terrorists we were chasing. They just had the balls to go through with it, and I didn’t. They had the will. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  “It’s to your credit that you spared them,” my New Shrink insists. “As well as the fact that it bothers you now.”

  “Over there, the Kurds and Arabs, they hate each other more than they love their own children. But I’m no better. I don’t hate them or their children, but I’d kill them all if it brought back Jeff and Ricky.”

  Ricky died in an operating room in Seattle, two months before I went Crazy.

  His brain exploded on a plane from Florida to Washington, traveling with his wife and daughter to visit family. An aneurysm, a flood to his frontal lobe. Released because of the pressure differential in the aircraft? We’ll never know. He had a splitting headache on the plane and was nauseous from the pain by the time they landed. Disoriented, confused, mumbling, and no longer speaking English in the car on the way to the hospital. He attacked the medical technician giving him a CT scan in the emergency room, a different person with a different personality. He was unconscious by midnight, and dead the next morning.

  It could have been random bad luck. It could have been related to the melanoma he had successfully fought years before. A bit of metastasized tumor released, growing in his brain but randomly disengaged on the flight.

  I don’t think so. I think it was a remnant of his own traumatic brain injury, a time bomb left dangling on a thread waiting for the right moment to let go. Ricky was on the airborne team, jumped out of planes, and had survived multiple trips to Iraq. He did everything right, paid his dues, lived behind his weapon, made it home, and took a lower-stress, lower-risk job at the EOD school in Florida. Ricky died not in combat, but as a teacher. A teacher on vacation.

  They killed him. He made it back from the mission, and back to the FOB, and then back home, and was finally safe. But he wasn’t. None of us are. They can still kill us anytime.

  I picked up the pace of my race after that.

  “Wow,” my New Shrink said. “You are on fast-forward.”

  “Sir, have you ever heard the parable about the jar of marbles?” says Ricky. “About the guy who figured out, based upon his age and average life expectancy, about how much time he had left in his life. He filled a jar with that many marbles and every day took one out. Every day the jar of marbles got emptier. It reminded him of how precious life is. There is too much to do, too much to enjoy and savor. Life is too short to waste on worries and being Crazy.”

  “That’s horseshit, and you know it,” I reply. “The day we all got off the plane in Iraq, all of us decided to take our jars of marbles and pour them out all over the floor. We don’t have any time left. It’s all borrowed from now on. You want a marble analogy? It’s more like we dumped ours out, and decided to add a marble every day we lived. But who knows how many you can add? Jeff and Kermit didn’t get to add any marbles. And you only got to add a few. Who knows how many I get to add. Today might be the last one. They can still kill me. They still killed you. And every day I look at my jar of marbles and try to decide if I’ve packed enough in to justify my little pile. And every day the answer is no.

  “Ricky, we’re all running a race. And I used to think it was a marathon, nice and long and a set distance. That I could plan my race well, knew where the landmarks were, knew where the finish line was, and that by the end I could look back with pride at how I ran.

  “But I was wrong. Now I know better. It’s not the distance that’s set, it’s the time. Fate has a clock counting down, and you don’t get to see how much time is left. I thought I had time to finish the race. But now I see that if I don’t speed up, I’ll never make it. I won’t get as far as I want. I need to run faster to run farther. Forget the starter’s pistol. There is a finisher’s pistol, and it could go off at any time.”

  “You are concentrating so hard on how far you run,” says Ricky, “that you have ignored how well you run. Or enjoyed the steps you are taking today. Learn from me. I enjoyed each of my steps. Are you enjoying yours?”

  “No,” I respond. “Every delay, every moment I spend waiting in a line, at the airport, at a restaurant, makes me Crazier. And every accomplishment gets pushed aside to focus on the next task. This extra time, to put marbles in my jar, is not a gift. It’s a curse of knowledge and responsibility. To make each marble worthy. And to put in all the marbles you couldn’t.”

  “You can’t run two races, yours and mine,” says Ricky. “Mine is done.”

  “So why then should I take any more steps, if each one is so miserable? Why start in the first place? When I know now what I’m capable of? I have a reason to run faster, Ricky, but not a reason to run at all.”

  XI | The Mountain

  THE GENTLE SWAYING of the Humvee had put Ackeret to sleep several hours earlier. He sprawled in the rear seat next to me, head back, mouth open, gently snoring. I could only see him when Trey, sitting in the team-chief seat ahead of us, turned on his dim red tactical light. In the dull glow, Ackeret’s dark moustache stood out starkly on his pale face. It was a terrible moustache; thin, spotty, rodentlike. He loved it. I loved telling him how bad it was.

  Despite the hour I couldn’t sleep. It was the kind of day that was never today, according to Trey’s logic. We had never quite made it to our racks when the call came in. We left the FOB after dark, drove the empty highway to clear a crush-switch-initiated artillery round forty klicks away that was blocking a route-clearance mission, and were now headed back. Driving barely faster than a crawl so the lead security vehicle could use its high-power strobe lights to search for hazards, the entire mission would last more than eight hours. Plenty of time for Ackeret to sleep.

  I peered again out my window, thick armored glass distorting the view. Not a single light broke the complete darkness; the horizon and sky united in a black wall of undetermined depth. Out the front window, the red running lights of the Humvee we followed were barely visible, obscured by the dust kicked up off the road by our security convoy. Our feeble headlights did little to pierce the gloom; as the clouds of dirt and sand waxed and waned, our view never extended far. Like snow flurries back home, the dust just reflected back at us what little light we gave off. Often we could see no further than the front bumper of our armored truck. The world was all tan and black, darkness and dust; a layer of tan silt covered our tan truck, our tan uniforms and armor, inside and out, lit first by Trey’s small lamp, then not at all. Bolger drove often and knew the road well. He just kept us straight and true, unfazed by the fact that he could see the truck in front of us less than half the time.

  The world fell completely away, and I could sense nothing beyond the warm rocking cocoon the four of us shared. The hum of the diesel engine. The glint off Trey’s rifle, and the racks of 5.56-millimeter magazines hanging from the d
river’s seat in front of me. The musky communal smell of four men who had missed their last shower. Trey’s iPod was playing quietly over the speakers wired into the cab, and he and Bolger were having a whispered conversation at the edge of my hearing, trying to let Ackeret and me sleep. A snore from next to me. A soft laugh from Trey. I smiled.

  Cushioned and wrapped in the comforting false security blanket of our truck’s armored chassis and the insulating impenetrable dark, my mind wandered. It escaped our dingy capsule and flitted among trivialities, remembered the trifling normality at home. Tucking my children into their beds. Giving them a bath. Setting a morning cup of coffee on the nightstand next to my sleeping wife, waiting for her to wake.

  For a moment, I could taste the coffee on my lips, feel my wife’s hand on my hand, smell the clean-washed hair of my just-bathed son.

  A gust of wind blew against the side of the truck, and another cloud of dust washed over us, blotting out the world anew. And then, at that moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of us, on the bumper of the Humvee, and looked steadily at me.

  It was a pigeon, common gray and completely unremarkable except for the fact that it just landed on the grille of a moving armored truck in a dust storm.

  “Holy shit, look at that,” Bolger burst out from the driver’s seat.

  “Trey, don’t move,” I whispered. The pigeon had landed right in front of him.

  “What the fuck,” Trey said, laughing quietly, but he didn’t move much.

  The bird looked at us, readjusted its footing, flapped its wings once, but made no move to fly away. It stayed perched on the brush guard, the metal trim surrounding the headlight, swaying gently with the roll of the road amid the swirling grime.

  The world was now the four of us and a pigeon.

  “What should we do?” asked Bolger.

  “Why do we need to do anything?” I said. “He’s not hurting anything.”

  A respectful silence settled on the truck, the bird content to join us, as we drove slowly through the darkness. I stared at the bird, an eternity passed, and I broke the quiet.