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

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. Detonations 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.

I’m not just Crazy. I have a broken brain exhausted from fixing itself.

My New Shrink and I are doing a guided-meditation session. I haven’t relaxed in months, and this is supposed to help. I sit in my upright chair, close my eyes, and try to concentrate on her words.

“First, feel your left thumb,” she says. “Flex your left thumb. Make it as tight as you can. Good. Now relax it. Now your left index finger. Slowly now. Feel the tension build in each finger, and your whole hand, and then release it.

“Release the tension and relax,” she says.

But I can’t relax. I’ve already flexed my left arm and right thumb and right hand and right arm and gut and legs and feet before she has made it above my elbow. And anyway, I can’t flex the Crazy, and I can’t release it.

“Good,” my New Shrink says, assuming I have followed along with each individual step instead of skipping ahead to the end.

“Now we breathe,” she says. “Breathe deeply into the base of your stomach. Breathe into your entire rib cage. Breathe into the base of your spine. And relax.”

But I don’t relax. The Crazy expands in my chest. I breathe deeply and it fills with Crazy. I exhale completely, but my rib cage is still full.

“Open your collarbones. Be present. In your mind,” she says.

My mind is aware. It sits behind my closed eyelids, staring into nothingness. It directs the tension, the breath. It sees through the darkness.

But my mind is not centered. It is not balanced, does not lie equally behind my eyelids. It drifts, first barely favoring the left eye over the right, then slipping further to the side, then abandoning the right completely. My mind sits to the left of my eyes, looks back at an angle at the black void stretching endlessly before my physical body’s line of sight. I sit beside myself and breathe.

My New Shrink tells me to open my eyes.

“How was that?” she asks. “Do you feel more relaxed?”

I describe how my mind drifted away from behind my closed eyelids. How I stared into the depths off-balance.

“Fascinating!” she exclaims.

It is the birthday of my fourth son. He is two today, and the family has come over for a party. Grandma and Grandpa, aunt and cousin. Even Ricky unexpectedly stopped over, the first time he was able to come. His little daughter is four now, growing up too fast, though she couldn’t make the party.

The two-year-old is gleefully unwrapping presents, discovering puzzles and games and cars. He opens a red stuffed animal, and with a squeal, dives on top of it and rolls around on the carpet, his older brothers tickling and giggling with him.

I don’t remember any of their second birthday parties.

I concentrate on the sights and the sounds and I check my rifle. I gulp it in, watching, analyzing, encoding. Burn this one in, Brian. Remember it.

My wife is pulling out the camera and elicits a “cheese” from the tangle of arms and legs on the floor. Grandpa is in search of another piece of cake. Grandma watches with a small smile on her lips.

But it’s already starting to slip away. A fading echo. I concentrate harder.

Remember it, Brian!

I grasp the slipping sand with both hands. There are plenty of gaps for this party to fill, but my bucket has a hole in the bottom, and by the end of the day, it’s nearly gone.

I died in Iraq. The old me left for Iraq and never came home. The man my wife married never came home. The father of my oldest three children never came home. If I didn’t die, I don’t know what else to call it.

I liked the old me, the one who played guitar, and laughed at dumb movies, and loved to read for days on end. That me died from a thousand blasts. Died covered in children’s blood. Died staring down my rifle barrel, a helpless woman in the crosshairs and my finger on the trigger. That me is gone.

The new me is frantic and can’t sit still. The new me didn’t laugh for a year. The new me cries while reading bedtime stories to my children. The new me plans to die tomorrow. The new me runs almost every day, runs till knees buckle and fail. The new me takes his rifle everywhere. The new me is on fast-forward. The new me is Crazy.

The new me has a blown-up Swiss-cheese brain, and doesn’t remember all of the old me. But he remembers enough. Enough to be ashamed. Enough to miss the old me. Enough to resent the old me. Resent the way everyone mourns him, while I am standing right in front of them.

Do you remember when Daddy used to? That daddy is gone. He doesn’t do those things anymore. Do you remember when we used to be happy? Husband isn’t happy anymore.

Maybe my wife should pull out the letter I left for my sons and read it to them. Maybe it would explain why Daddy didn’t come home.

When you go to war, and die, and come home Crazy and with a ragged brain, you get to watch your family carry on without you.

Everyone longs for the old me. No one particularly wants to be with the new me. Especially me.

The yoga studio is on the second floor of a rather dingy 1960s-era retail box. This flat storefront, uniform block and picture windows, sits dissonantly in a neighborhood of historic wrought iron and brick, the wide squares and monuments of downtown Savannah, my two-week home while on the road teaching at the local Army post. Thin worn carpet covers the creaking stairs leading up to the stifling studio. It’s summer in the South, and the heater is on. Intentionally.

My New Shrink first suggested the yoga. It holds the symmetry and release I crave. The muscle strain boils off the Crazy. The repetition dulls, then frees, the mind. On a bad day, the forms demand all of my concentration: my legs shake, my arms twitch instead of my eyes, and I hold the Crazy at bay for another hour. On a good day, the flow reverses the Crazy for a moment and my healing mind is present beneath and apart from the movement. Yoga is club and scalpel. Yoga is exhaustion and insight.

My Yogini likes hot yoga, and she has the space heaters cranking in the wide hardwood-floored space. I strip as far as public modesty allows, and the sweat builds on my brow even as we sit, cross-legged, waiting to begin our practice.

The Yogini walks to the front of the room and sits on her own mat, crossing her legs and placing her feet on the top of her thighs. She is younger and shorter than I, athletic, confident, with a high calm voice and the gift of putting everyone around her at ease. I would find her presence and choice of tight clothing distracting if I weren’t so embarrassed at being Crazy.

“We start our yoga practice by breathing the word ‘Om,’ ” my Yogini begins. “When you say your Om, pull it from the deepest part of you. Press your hips and flesh into the earth below us. Your Om comes from there, up through your body, through your lungs and out of your mouth.”

I sit flat and wide and prepare my Om as best as I know how.

“We will send our Om into the universe,” says the Yogini. “Our Om will join and harmonize with all that is. Then we will let it go.”

She takes a deep breath, and an enormous Om, astonishingly loud and deep, erupts from the small form seated in front of me. The rest of the class joins, choosing her octave or another above or below.

My breath fills my lungs all the way down into my stomach, and I self-consciously release my Om. My voice is deep, but my Om does not resonate. It is thin and tempered.

“Do not judge your Om,” the Yogini says in my mind, but the Crazy does not let go easily.

When our collective Om is a memory of an echo, and hot humid silence has returned, the Yogini begins the vinyasa, the flow, the sequences of poses and forms that exhaust and renew mind and body.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

Mountain. Standing Forward Bend. Plank and lower. Upward Dog. Downward Dog. Feet forward. Mountain. Repeat your vinyasa.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

I have to think about the forms at first, watch my hand placement, concentrate on the turn of my arm, stretching my legs, pulling the Ujjayi, the Sounding Breath, from deep in my belly. The first vinyasa is clumsy; my muscles’ thoughts are full of rifles and pistols and transitions between the two, and my body struggles to remember the forms. On the second vinyasa the sweat is already building, oppressive heat turning skin sheen to stream. The third aligns my breath and movement. The fourth I don’t remember.

I spend more and more of my time at the VA hospital now. Tall, gray, in four wings with a skullcap cupola at the top, Buffalo’s veterans hospital is a monolith to sorrow and loss; that mausoleum could double in size and it still wouldn’t be big enough to contain the misery it houses. I started as a patient in the emergency room for heart trouble. But it turns out it was Crazy, not Cardiac. So now I go to Mental Health on the tenth floor instead of Internal Medicine on the eighth.

The longer elevator ride gives you momentary relief to feel healthier, comparing yourself with other patients. Decrepit World War II veterans, amputees from combat or diabetes, slumped in their wheelchairs and dressed in flimsy gowns and baseball hats denoting their last ship or unit. Vietnam veterans, always in insulated camouflage jackets keeping out the winter chill, covered in patches that read “These Colors Don’t Run” and “Never Forget” to honor POWs and MIAs. Younger guys, dark jeans and too-short hair, taking the trip all the way to Ten with me. One guy has a tan T-shirt with a comic-book-style drawing of a soldier, full kit, hand on his rifle, his amputated right leg replaced with an ergonomic flexible running prosthetic. Alongside is written “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

You look at the floor. So do they. You check your rifle. So do they. You walk up to the same check-in counter. You sit in the same waiting room. You wait your turn to talk about your Crazy. In silence.

Today I turn away from the Behavior Health office and head to Neuro-Psych testing. It’s the next step in my evaluation. How much of me being Crazy is a shredded brain?

I enter the smallish office and sit across from a young, dark-haired PhD. She writes down my medical history, deployment history, occupation, and stressors, using a long, just-sharpened pencil on a crisp white form. We’re probably the same age, but today, sitting in that chair and after the elevator ride, Crazy following in my shadow, I feel twice as old as the fresh-faced promising girl across the table from me.

“What did you do in the military?” the PhD asks.

“I took apart bombs.” It’s my standard reply now.

“How often?”

“Most days. Some days were worse than others.”

“And you were safe while you did this,” she assumes innocently.

I’m not sure how to answer that.

“Well, the enemy is trying to kill you. So no, not really.” It’s the best I can do. She looks confused.

“So you didn’t decommission bombs? These are bombs the enemy made?” she asks.

I think she is starting to get it.

“Right. Those roadside IEDs you hear about on the news.”

“So every day you thought you were going to die?”

“You could say that.”

Furious note scribbling.

“So when was your traumatic brain injury?” she asks.

“All the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I blew up something every day. Sometimes the enemy tried to blow us up. Sometimes we were far enough away. Sometimes we weren’t.”

More furious note scribbling.

“I bet OCD is useful in your job,” she notes.

“Yeah, it can be.” Less useful now.

“We don’t get a brain like yours in here very often,” she concludes.

Is that a good thing, I wonder.

We get up and she leads me to the testing station. An empty desk, white walls, a pale institutional notepad, four yellow number-two pencils. For three hours I repeat numbers in order, memorize obscure lists of animals and vegetables, do mental arithmetic, draw geometric figures, and then recall those animal and vegetable names again. Zebra giraffe cow squirrel onion celery cabbage spinach. See, I can do it now.

Why can I remember shapes and vegetable names, but not the events of my life as I live them?

The problem isn’t that I’m dumb. The problem is that I’m Crazy. This doesn’t seem to be a test for that.

Now we move to a nearby large, boxy desktop computer station where she calls up an antiquated blue-and-white text program. I’m supposed to rate my feelings of worry and stress. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Do your hands shake? Do you feel on edge? Do you have trouble sitting still? Do you fear people are out to get you? Do you feel scared to go outside? Terrified of the future? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you relive traumatizing experiences while you are awake?

No questions about eye twitches. No questions about gurgles. No questions about carrying your rifle everywhere you go.

Certainly no questions about the Crazy feeling.

I finish the computer screening unsatisfied and go to the glaring fluorescent basement cafeteria for an early lunch of overcooked chicken, waiting for my test results and screening scores to come back. I hope for a positive result, a positive find, a massive failure of some orb or cortex. I pine for a physical reason for the Crazy symptoms. Physical damage to my head would finally be an explanation, a reason, a scapegoat. I finish my limp broccoli and return to the doctor’s spare office on the tenth floor.

My results are spread out before the pretty PhD. The check marks are mostly on the right-hand side of the handwritten white page. I maxed out the test one way or the other.

“Every brain is built differently, and every brain is damaged differently,” the PhD says. “Most people would be thrilled to have your spatial and cognitive abilities. We don’t know how your brain worked before, but we know it works fine now.”

“So, I don’t have a TBI?”

She considers.

“No, you probably have some damage. No one could do what you did and not have damage. It’s just not impairing your short-term memory or reasoning,” she says.

Giraffe Zebra Cow Squirrel Spinach Celery Onion Cabbage. No, I guess not.

“What about the long-term memory?”

“I’m not in your head,” she says. “I don’t know what used to be there. I don’t know what you lost, and there is no way to test for it.”

“But there is something wrong. What is it?”

“The problem isn’t your brain,” she says. “The problem is how you react to your brain.”

So I’m Crazy. But I knew that already.

The sweat is pouring down my face now in a stream, stinging my eyes, hanging and dripping off my nose, my mat slick in front of me.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

I lose count of vinyasas. The flow loosens my binds, frees my mind from the cage of the now-distracted body. It moves with my Ujjayi, the Crazy forming a puddle on the floor.

My mind follows my Om, of breath and flecked with spit, released into the universe, back through time, no time, the continuum of the river flowing, no start or end. My mind flows upstream, dips into the HAS at Kirkuk, to a call coming, to the rhythm of timeless combat.

The Warrior is called and the Warrior goes. It has ever been so. Who will go? I will go.

When the call comes in, the ballet begins. First, the armor. My dō, my cuirass, my armored vest first. Then shoulders, sode, strapped and down. Tekko on my hands. My kabuto on my head. Thousands of times before. Thousands of times again. A miasma of ages but the same dance. Katana and wakizashi, broadsword and dirk, rifle and pistol. It has been ever thus, in our human river flow. My Om is their Om.

Rifle in hand, suneate on my shins, Chaturanga Dandasana. My vinyasa flows out of the HAS, to meet security, to go on the call, to meet the challenge. Girded with breastplate and mail, the shake and clank of metal on metal, we meet in a circle, surrounding the Chaplain, the Padre, the sanctifier of our mission, on one knee, head down, rifle inverted to forehead. A cross over our helmets, a blessing before battle. In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Rifle stock, barrel, magazine, optics. The flow continues.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

My grandfather runs from the landing craft onto the cold, storm-racked beach. His plane lands on the jungled island, a speck upon the wide peaceful sea. He charges up the mosquito-infested Virginian killing field. He falls in the black forest.

I am but a drop in the river. My Crazy is but a drop in a drop in the river. My Crazy has always been, if not in me, then in the river. The flow continues.

Tadasana. Uttanasana. Chaturanga Dandasana. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Adho Mukha Svanasana. Tadasana.

Blessed and mailed and armed and mounted, we charge to the call.

When we got to the deserted street corner in southern Kirkuk the Iraqi Police were already on scene, shooting at the IED with their AK-47s.

“How many times have we told them they can’t do this anymore?” I vented in frustration, to no one in particular.

“It’s their country and they’ll do what they want,” Castleman replied. “But if they don’t quit it now we’re leaving.”

The Iraqis lacked robots and training, and so shooting at an IED with a rifle was an attractive option to the desperate or slightly sane. The more typical Iraqi Army soldier or policeman, however, had little compulsion with invoking Insha’Allah and simply walking up to the IED and cutting it apart by hand. This is precisely what happened, in fact, as Mengershausen unloaded the robot and I started to build an explosive charge. Castleman was still chatting over security requirements with our local infantry fire team when a plainclothes cop walked up to us with a plastic box in his hand.

“It is okay now,” he said in broken English. “It is safe now. All done. I do it. Okay now. You go home.”

“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, down 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.