The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (9 page)

I could do it today. I do it every day.

Then back to the ops desk—where was the IED, the car bomb, the crater in the road left from a blast that just hit one of our convoys? Map in hand, we talked. Hey, we were just there yesterday. Do you remember the second pressure-plate-actuated device, hidden where we planned to work? That is where Ewbank got hit. That’s our third truck bomb in that neighborhood this week. Grim pins stuck in the wall-sized map of Kirkuk reminded us of each call.

The calls come all day and night. Rockets in the morning at breakfast. Car bombs all afternoon. In between prayer times, sung from the minarets. After dinner as darkness sets in. After curfew, when all average citizens should be home snug in their beds, and only trouble awaits on patrol.

Trey said it’s not today until you sleep. Sometimes, when the calls pile up, you can go from yesterday to tomorrow and never get to today.

Dawn and a wakeup, tepid mushy oatmeal, a run to clear a crush switch and a couple of 130s left from the night prior, hardened hamburgers on dry stale buns, the regular afternoon suicide car bomb downtown at a school or police station, the weekly serving of pork adobo, dusk, a suspicious-looking white trash bag called in by a hesitant patrol that turns out to be nothing, midnight chow of rubbery steaks and pancakes, an endless drive out and back at twenty miles per hour to a cell phone and dual-tone multi-frequency decoder-board setup discovered by a long-haul convoy in the dark and distant desert, dawn, breakfast of spicy sausage patties and cold omelets, a cordon-and-knock takedown of a weapons cache in downtown Hawija, more hardened hamburgers, and finally, exhausted and delirious, sleep.

It was never today. It was only yesterday and tomorrow.

The worst calls are the ones just after midnight and in the earliest pre-dawn. Sometimes you just know a call is coming. You can feel it in the air; your Spidey sense tingles. Maybe it was a quiet day. Maybe it was good weather; Haji doesn’t like the cold or the rain, so a long hot quiet day means a long hot busy night. When you know a call is coming, you stay up late, waiting for it. No point in going to sleep if you are just going to be woken up. But then a call doesn’t come. 2200. 2230.

“Hey, Price. Do you think we’re getting any calls tonight?” you ask.

“Nah, why don’t you hit the rack,” answers Price, a hovering mother hen in a linebacker’s body, massive black arms the size of your thighs crossed over his wide chest while reading intel reports. Price guards the phone each night, and suffers worse insomnia than you.

“I’ll stay up a little longer and see.” So you wander over to the adjacent room, and play a little Halo. Every alien is a bad guy, and needs to die. It’s so refreshingly simple. Now it’s 2300. 2330. Still no call. But you can’t hang on any longer; your eyes are closing on their own.

“Price, I’m bushed. I’m giving up for the night.”

“Sounds good, sir.”

A half hour later, Price is banging on your door with a call. A string of pressure-switch contacts Christmas-tree-light-style and two 122-millimeter projos on Route Cherry. So you roll off your cot and start the ritual: gear on, grab a sugar-and-caffeine energy drink, hop in the Humvee, slam the sickening concoction in one gulp, a stomach rumble, open the door, puke onto the awaiting dirt, and you’re ready to run all night long, on a half hour of sleep.

And out you go, out of your compound, off the FOB, outside the wire, past the guards and spotlights and blast barriers and gates, and into the unknown.

What do you think when you leave the gate? When you leave the protected enclosure and false security of your ringed base? I thought of an uncle, filling a C-130 with bullet holes over tiny jungle airstrips in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. A grandfather who built the double runway on Guam in 1944. Another grandfather who landed in southern France and marched to Berlin. A great-great-grandfather, a lumberjack and pig farmer in North Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, fresh from the boat and the Kaiser’s army, who at the age of forty-one, and with seven (of his eventual nine) children at home, left his plow in the field to march south with the 63rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, to the Peninsula Campaign and the Second Battle of Bull Run. He returned ten months later, with a bullet hole and a Purple Heart. How would I return?

Thoughts drift further, as the dust and palm groves and empty desert landscape crawl by outside the thick windows of the armored truck. Does the thin line go back further? How far? What blood runs in my veins? Am I from a Line of Old? What may rise in me, unbidden and unknown, to meet this oldest of challenges? How many battlefields has my blood made wet, in empires made and gone, on bare green islands and cold forested mountains of myth, in lands whose names have changed countless times? How many arrows have I dodged? How many rifles have hung from my shoulder? How many bandages have I wrapped? How many helmets have I worn? In the line of my people, all the way back to the beginning.

What resides hidden within me, lying in wait to be revealed, once the cycle continues and renews?

In the darkness of my bedroom, at night, when I try to fall asleep, the top of my head comes off. My chest fills and floats, the ceiling crushes down, and my head cracks open. In a clear line, from temple to temple, around the back of my skull, it lifts free. I can feel it release and open. The spider crawls off the back of my head and runs to the ceiling. I feel every leg detach, as the body forms from the rear cranial knob, and the massive gray hairy spider runs across space and walls and over the foot sitting in a box in a corner.

Living with the Crazy feeling is intolerable. When I awake in the morning, I open my eyes and try not to move. It is the only time all day that the Crazy feeling is not overwhelming and all powerful. It hasn’t had time to build throughout the day, and for a brief second, it lies still. I wish my whole day could be that first split second.

Instead, my first thought is always the same. Will I be Crazy today?

And the answer is always “yes” before my feet hit the floor, children screaming, wife rushing to dress for work, my day an agonizing marathon of eye twitches, rib aches, heart gurgles, and chest fullness until I can struggle back to oblivion again, in that bed, eighteen hours later.

When I make breakfast for the children, I feel Crazy.

When I drive them to school, I feel Crazy.

When I sit in front of the computer, fixing PowerPoint slides, I feel Crazy.

When I wait for dinner to finish cooking, I feel Crazy.

When I get on a plane, I feel Crazy.

When the foot sits in the box, I feel Crazy.

When I read my children a book before bed, I feel Crazy.

When I lie next to my wife at night, I feel Crazy.

And then I fall asleep and do it all over again. Why?

The Crazy feeling distracts from every action, poisons every moment of the day. It demands full attention. It bubbles, and boils, and rattles, and fills my chest with an overwhelming unknown swelling. My misery compounds.

I wake every morning hoping not to be Crazy. Every morning I am. I grind through. Month follows month.

This is my new life. And it’s intolerable.

I can’t do this.

I hated going out at night. Our security hated going out at night too. Yes, we had all the fancy NVGs, our night-vision goggles, and other gear so we could “rule the night,” as the grunts liked to say. But we didn’t use them because we had to drive in downtown traffic, and we’d hit every civilian vehicle between us and the IED if we didn’t turn on our headlights. So instead, in the worst possible combination of circumstances, the bad guys got to hide in dark houses, and we had to drive with two bright white targets on the front of our Humvee, and two red ones on the back.

A call came in from Cougar 13, a regular infantry patrol, for a bomb on the big bridge spanning the Khasa River, just a tiny stream at that time of year that trickled through the center of Kirkuk from north to south. The big bridge, a glowing target visible from miles around, above the dark gash of rabbit warrens and wadis.

At least it was a respectable hour, not long after full dark. This night the patrols got out earlier and found the IEDs quicker, so my teams and I were still awake. Which meant the city and Haji were still awake. A city of a million Arabs and Kurds and Turks, ancestral homelands for each, depending on which century you consulted. The Kurds were the best organized, controlled the levers of official political, law-enforcement, and military power, and had a plan for restoring Kurdistan: outbreed their neighbors. Arabs who had relocated to Kirkuk during Saddam’s rule did not take kindly to bullying eviction, and sympathized with the terrorist networks that retaliated. The city’s gory present conspired to spoil the city’s hopeful future, so prodigious the blood soaking into the ground that it contaminated the oil reserves hidden beneath the rocky desert.

Four armored Humvees pulled into the parking and staging area in our compound, right in front of the HAS. After donning our helmets, sandy Kevlar hiding Castleman’s sandy blond hair, we walked up and met the security lead, Bayonet 23. Bayonet didn’t normally take us out. It was usually Psycho, the mortar platoon. But Psycho was on a personal-security-detail mission with the brigade commander, and Bayonet was stuck with us. Or we with them.

We shook hands, bullshitted, and looked at the map to figure out where we were going. It was our job to clear the IED upon arrival, and Bayonet’s to get us there and keep us alive while we worked. We had done it many times before, but this time there was one wrinkle—we had a passenger. The Colonel, my boss, was nervous about our overall mission. He couldn’t figure out what we did. He didn’t understand why Air Force guys were driving around on the ground with the Army, where they could get hurt. He didn’t understand that EOD technicians from all four services were nearly interchangeable, received virtually the same training from the first day of school. He didn’t understand that the stenciled “U.S. Air Force” name tapes on our uniforms signified little to us. He didn’t understand that we were now more comfortable with the Army, had more in common with the grunts who went outside the wire every day than the wrench-turners and computer junkies who stayed on their safe air base. He wanted to come see for himself, and I couldn’t tell him no, so he had waited all day to get a call himself. This was his chance. He stood an attentive distance away from our powwow and didn’t ask any questions. When we broke and mounted up, I put him in the back right seat, where he was less likely to get killed.

Our convoy of five armored trucks drove off from the compound to the FOB gate, popped on the jammer, locked and loaded our weapons, and thundered out the serpentine, out of the wire, and immediately to the right, joining Kirkuk’s unceasing traffic midstream. South down Route Cherry, then left at the auto dealership, where we had investigated a car bomb a couple of days prior. We drove in the middle of the road, as fast as the Humvees would go, local cars pulling to the side to avoid being overrun. Stopping is dangerous and so to be avoided, but to evade collisions, all civilian traffic must pull aside when you need to change course. The front gunner carried a dazzling green laser and would flash it in the eyes of oncoming motorists when we had to make left-hand turns against traffic. Everyone stops driving when they can’t see. Thus did our armored convoy barrel toward the western base of the bridge, parting a sea of jammed, congested humanity. The Colonel just sat, his tall frame wedged uncomfortably between his armored window and our robot control station, gripping his too-clean rifle unfamiliarly, staring at the city going by. He had never been off the FOB before.

Cougar 13 and several of their Humvees were already waiting for us in an empty lot at the base of the bridge when we arrived. We eased our armored truck up to the inner command vehicle, parked, and Castleman dismounted to query the sergeant in charge of the cordon.

No, this wasn’t their normal sector, they were just returning from a patrol. Yes, they had blocked off all traffic, both this side of the bridge and the other. No, they didn’t mark the IED. Yes, it was definitely on the bridge, though it was dark when they found it, and they weren’t sure where. What did it look like? A pile of trash. Good, that should help. There wasn’t too much trash littering the side of every road in every town of this godforsaken country. Fuck me.

I got out and peered down the road, out over the bridge that reached into the darkness. Gunfire popped in the distance and occasionally tinged and zipped off the truck or nearby abandoned buildings that were more rubble than intact. The harsh headlights of the Humvees glared in our face, so the remaining deep black night beyond swallowed the bridge whole. I put my hand out, blocked the worst of the direct beams, and drank in the twinkle and shimmer of the city on the other side of the wadi. White and yellow streetlights, with the occasional reddish-white muzzle flash of small-arms fire, followed by a
ping
or two nearby. Flame jumped from a snub-nosed automatic machine gun above me and to my left, as a Cougar turret gunner tracked the flashes from the incoming, and soon it paused again.

Castleman wanted to drop the robot here and send it up into the inky blackness of the bridge to search for the IED with its small cameras and lights. I didn’t disagree. It was my team leader’s job to run the mission. It was my job to run everything else.

Turning to go back to the Humvee to build an explosive charge for the robot, I bumped into the Colonel instead.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Please get back in the truck, sir.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re getting shot at.”

The Colonel looked shocked and confused, but complied, turned around and crawled back in. After putting a mandatory cigarette in my mouth, I dug in the back of our truck, found an old plastic Gatorade bottle filled with water and explosives, set it up to detonate, and handed it to the robot.

We employed a variety of robots, each fitting a specific mission need. PackBots were small but maneuverable, light enough to be carried short distances by one man, with a four-jointed arm and multiple camera systems. The Talon was rugged and durable, bigger and heavier but stronger too. Our largest robot was the F6A, nearly four hundred pounds but also practically indestructible, strong enough to lift a hundred-pound tank round, with excellent lights and cameras. Everyone had their favorites. In the dark, with an unknown IED, Castleman picked the F6A.