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

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.

When the trail became too tight even for Kurdish pickups, Castleman and I dismounted and followed our guide into a maze of covered markets and shops half buried at the base of the crowded concrete apartments that rose like cliff walls around us and smothered the neighborhood. I looked at Castleman, and he looked at me, and we both checked our rifles before we ducked our heads and descended into the dim cavern.

The tunnel-like nature of the market had ensured the death of many. I stepped over broken benches, ripped and torn merchandise, and ankle-deep sticky puddles of people for a hundred meters before we got to the chai shop itself. In the narrow covered confines the blast wave had echoed and reverberated, bounced and doubled back on itself and multiplied until it produced a freight train of agony that scoured this path red. Worse, the chai shop itself had plate-glass windows separating the kitchen and brewing area from public space where patrons sat on benches and at tables to sip their tea. I saw little shattered glass on the ground; I assumed most of it was now at the hospital, embedded in victims.

Castleman spotted a slight depression in the concrete floor where the IED had been placed. So small a dent, so small a device, so much damage in such an enclosed place. The target was a meeting of Kurdish elders, old men with long beards who sat here each morning with their tea and discussed their troubles, and the troubles of their families, and the troubles of their people. The device was disguised, probably in a plastic crate or a tomato can or olive-oil tin. All of the elders died, as did the workers at the chai shop and the shoppers and vendors at the few market stalls I passed on my way in. I never got a full body count. Fifteen? Twenty?

Castleman and I searched for evidence, pieces of the bomb, but it quickly proved useless. The pesh had evacuated the scene and stood respectfully back, but there was little left to grab. Even the discarded body parts of the victims were mostly liquefied — an unidentifiable organ here, half a scalp there, but mostly a ruddy smear across the ceiling, walls, and floor of the concrete market tube.

An eerie quiet permeated, unfamiliar to our ears. I noticed an erect table to one side, out of place among the destruction, with an intact cardboard box on top. The box had to have been put there after the detonation; there was no way it could have survived the blast intact. I looked inside, and did not know immediately what I saw. The thing, it had been human at one time, or at least part of one. There was a sandal, but the flesh inside of it didn’t bear any resemblance to a body part I knew. At the top the thing was flayed, opening like a meat flower, muscle petals and a bone central stigma. At its base was a purple engorgement, and this lumpy bag was stuffed into straining leather straps, ten pounds in a five-pound bag.

Was that a foot, in the sandal? I peered closer, and got my first whiff as flies started to buzz around me. I found toenails on the lumpy bag, and a tuft or two of hair, and eventually counted five protrusions. That made the upper splayed-open portion a leg, or the former lower half of one. I eventually found something I would call a tibia and fibula and charred calf muscle in the surrounding skin, holding the mass together in a hollow open cone.

Yes, I had figured it out. It was definitely a foot lying in this cardboard box.

A foot in a box.

Someone had put a foot in a box. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. They must have found the foot at the scene, and stuck it in the box for safekeeping. It makes sense, right? Why not put the foot in the box?

I called over to Castleman to look, to show him the joke, but he was distracted by a conversation with our terp and a Kurdish witness. Oh well, his loss.

“Does anyone know how this foot got in the box?” I called out. But few of the pesh knew much English, and with our terp otherwise engaged, I got mostly blank stares back. Never mind.

I took a picture of the foot in the box to save for the report. The guys at headquarters in Baghdad would get a kick out of it.

Before I walked away from the table I looked down at my own foot. My formerly tan boots were darkly stained halfway up to the laces, a consequence of doing missions like this one. Buried in those laces on the right boot I had a dog tag: my name, Social Security number, branch of service, blood type, and religious affiliation so they could find me a Catholic priest at the end. Up around the top of each of my boots I had written NKA and O+ in dark black permanent marker: a directive to the medic working on me that I had no allergies and what blood to give me so the priest would not be required.

You put this information on boots because feet survive detonations. They pop off and live to tell the tale, though the rest of you ceases to exist. If I was at the chai shop, I would be a victim, but at least I would not be nameless, like this foot in this box. If I was at the chai shop, they would know it was part of me they were putting in the ground. If I was at the chai shop … I looked at the box again.

How easily my own foot slips into that box.

The foot sat in the box. My foot sat in the box.

I stopped laughing. No. No, it’s not. It’s not my foot in the box. My foot is staying where it is. Whole and recognizable and pink and warm and intact. I’m alive. I’m not scared of the soft sand. I’m living behind my weapon.

I checked my rifle. I’m not scared of the soft sand.

Fuck this place. Fuck that foot in the box. I’m going home.

I have a picture of the dead suicide bomber, sitting upright in the driver’s seat of the small silver car, brain smeared across the window, a black hole in his head.

I have a picture, but I don’t need a picture, you understand. I see the hole in his head right now. I’ve memorized every speck of dust clinging to his eyelashes. I could relate every detail today.

“How do you remember everything?” my wife asks, as she stands over my shoulder while I type this book. She has noted the lack of research, journals, annotations, personal effects, and mementos piled on the writing desk.

“You can’t remember the children’s first words. You can’t remember them being born, family vacations, or preschool graduation. How do you remember all of this, to be able to go back and write it all down now?” my wife asks again, frustration and emotion in her voice.

I don’t try to remember. I don’t need to. I’m surrounded by reminders; the images simply emerge in the front of my thoughts. I’m not talking about trite, superficial reminders, like fireworks at the Fourth of July. Oh, to be startled at fireworks again! That is so temporary. The same for the slamming of car doors, or spotting bags and tires on the side of the road, appearing as IEDs on Interstate 90.

It’s the small, everyday reminders that are insidious. The rumble of a diesel engine. The smell of gasoline. A large tin can of tomatoes. Traffic circles. Putting on a life jacket. Lacing up a pair of winter boots. Unrolling a sleeping bag.

I’d just as soon forget it all. Replace a dead body or two with a birthday party. But I can’t, not while I’m surrounded by the war every day.

When dressing my son before his hockey games, I am always careful with the gear, with each legging, each strap and buckle. But today is special, and I am particularly deliberate for the big game, the championship in Mite Hockey.

First, the cotton socks and undergarments. Then the padded shorts, plates covering his thin thighs, and his skates, extra tight, around the back of his ankle, double-knotted in front, just as he likes. Next, the large, bulky goalie pads, with their complicated laces around the skate blade housing. Then a series of nylon braces and clips along the back of his leg. He looks so skinny, patiently lying on the locker-room floor while I meticulously check each fitting point. Not only are his slight legs swallowed by the wide pads, but his chest and arms are covered only by a tight shirt, accentuating the contrast. Next the puffy upper-body protector, insulated sleeves, and jersey overtop. The final step is the helmet. I start crying as I place it on his head, cinch down the chin cup, and close the cage over his face.

The tears come all the time now. Bedtime stories, movies, the Olympics, news events, and long-form NPR radio pieces, a discordant and unassociated conglomeration of triggers. But those tears are usually in private, in my home, my car, in my son’s bed, snuggled up with his back to me so he can’t see. These tears, on the other hand, the ones currently blurring my vision, are in the locker room at the arena, and in front of the other children, parents, and coaches, with no filter of privacy. My Crazy is running down my face for all to see.

I’ve developed some strategies for this kind of moment. You can rub your nose and pull out your handkerchief like you have allergies or a cold. That sometimes works. Or you can make a show of cleaning your glasses, and try to throw in a discreet wipe of the eyes. But under no circumstances can you speak, because your voice will catch and the game will be up. You will be forced to explain why you are crying while putting on your son’s goalie equipment.

I just put my seven-year-old son in a bomb suit and sent him on the Long Walk.

Everyone deals with it differently. Many of my brothers that have come home get angry. Angry at themselves. Angry at the world.

I can see it on Bill’s face as we stand in line together at the grocery checkout. The store is crowded and busy, and the consolidated feeder line wraps back on itself twice before arriving at our place in the queue. Children cry and tug at their mother’s sleeve to buy them a candy bar. A teenage girl talks loudly on a cell phone about some upcoming event and which of her friends will be attending. At one nearby register, a retiree has created congestion by asking the checkout girl to call a manager regarding the use of a particular coupon. The line has not moved in four minutes.

Bill’s jaw is set, his knuckles white on the shopping-cart handle. I can see the rage behind his eyes. How can everyone not realize all of the time we are wasting here? Just tell your kids to shut up! They don’t need a candy bar. They should be happy there is food on the table. And who cares about the coupons? Are these the problems you have in your life? Candy bars and coupons and who is going to be at the school dance?

The line is a target for a suicide bomber. The line is sucking precious minutes away from his life. All of these little people and all of their little problems. They don’t understand what real problems are, or how precious are the minutes that they thoughtlessly dribble away.

“How can you be so calm?” Bill asks as we stand unmoving.

“Why shouldn’t I be? It won’t make the line move faster,” I respond.

“Don’t you get angry at how fat and ignorant they all are?” Bill presses.

“I’m not angry. I’m jealous,” I say. “I remember when I was ignorant. That was better.”

I admire Bill for being angry. When you’re angry, you still care. You’re still passionate, and engaged, and find meaning in righting a wrong. The line reminds Bill that life is too precious to waste in trivial things.

Not me. The incessant chattering and self-importance of the line reminds me of the priceless ignorance I lost. It reminds me of what I previously considered a problem. Would I graduate from EOD school? Would I get a chance to go back to Iraq and redeem myself? The line reminds me that now I’m just a stupid Crazy vet with a blown-up brain. I’m jealous of the unaware masses I stand with.

When you are Crazy, it’s not the war movies, or fireworks, or the nightly news that bother you, as the unafflicted often think. It’s the thoughts that come unbidden from grocery lines.

When I get sick of standing in a grocery line, I make a detailed plan to kill those I am surrounded by, allowing me to leave the store.

When I get sick of standing in a grocery line, I’m reminded life is a futile drudgery, and then it will end.

Even now I can see Ewbank’s laughing face, streaked brown from the swirling dust stuck to his dripping sweat, as the gunfire opened up in the downtown roundabout. The whistles and pings filled the air, followed shortly by the answering thump-thump of our security’s.50-caliber machine gun. Ewbank laughed through it all.

“Civilian life, sir!” Ewbank yelled at me over the din. “It lacks punctuation!”

In World War I they called it shell shock. In Vietnam they called it the thousand-yard stare. In World War II they didn’t talk about it at all.

The name that best describes what I feel comes from the Civil War: Soldier’s Heart. In 1871, Jacob Mendes Da Costa published his report on three hundred veterans who complained of “irritable heart.” The colloquialism “Soldier’s Heart” was soon born, and remained in popular usage until the early twentieth century. Da Costa’s Syndrome, the official new name for the disease, consisted of palpitations, left-side pain, swelling of the chest, breathlessness, mental distraction, and a reduction in physical endurance and lust for life. Dr. Da Costa attributed the disorder to the prolonged wearing of heavy, restrictive gear, overtight straps on black powder bags, and packs carrying spare clothes and food. Since the Civil War, a soldier’s physical load has only grown more burdensome, though the mental toll is timeless.

Today we call it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. That’s what the Crazy feeling is. My Old Counselor has just diagnosed it so.

Now that I have a verdict, a documented disorder, my Old Counselor is energized. I need a shrink. I need the mental-health clinic. I need a month-long retreat in a rehab facility in the country. Most of all, I need drugs.

The wheels of the VA kick into overdrive. My Old Counselor works the phones. She has an emergency PTSD case. Can I be seen right away? Yes, an emergency walk-in. She is going to escort me now.

We rush out of her fussy closet office to the patient transport elevators segregated for hospital staff priority use. To the tenth floor my Old Counselor hurries me, arm in arm, past the check-in window, past the waiting room filled with hushed sad faces, to a back office where my New Shrink awaits.

“Thank you so much for seeing him right away,” my Old Counselor says, out of breath from the rushed transfer.

“He has PTSD and I am very concerned,” my Old Counselor repeats, several times.

The blond woman at a small desk decorated with green house plants slowly turns from the computer screen she had been reviewing. She smiles at me, a serene, reassuring smile.

“We’ll take a look at him, thank you,” my New Shrink says as she leads my Old Counselor from the office, easing her out with a slowly closing door.

A quiet stillness settles over the blue, airy office with the click of the door latch. My New Shrink, younger, calmer, gestures for me to sit near her desk. I take a deep breath, sit in the chair, and await my sentence.

“Brian,” my New Shrink begins, “why do you think you’re here?”

“Because I’m Crazy. And because my Old Counselor says I need drugs.” I thought this was self-evident.

“Do you think you need medication?” she asks.

“I don’t know if I need them. I know I don’t want them.”

“Why not?”

“I’m scared. I’m scared to not be myself. I’d rather be Crazy than be someone else.”

“Well, you aren’t Crazy,” my New Shrink gently corrects. “We don’t use that word here. Are you going to kill yourself, Brian?”

No one has ever asked me that before. I have to really think about it.

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe before, but I’m not going to now.”

“Then, if you aren’t going to kill yourself, I’m not going to prescribe anything today either,” my New Shrink says.

“You’re not?”

“No,” she says. “I’ll respect your wish for now. Until we aren’t able to make progress without them. Until there is no other way.”

She turns toward her computer, pulls up my chart, and briefly scans the various cardiac tests I’ve had, my regular visits to the ER, the months with the Old Counselor endlessly rehashing Jeff, and Kermit, and rifles, and the hole in the bomber’s head. She looks back at me with a hint of sadness.

“Tell me, Brian,” she begins, “about the day you lost all hope, saw your foreshortened future, and realized life had no meaning.”

Metallic airport terminals, a succession of fast-food peddlers and superficial bookstores, consistent and interchangeable. Dulles, O’Hare, Charlotte. Same restaurants. Same newspapers, piled on wooden stands outside the same convenience stores. Same rushing businessmen, flight attendants and pilots, young families, and visiting Chinese tourists.

I swim against this sea regularly, on my way from one EOD unit to another, training another deploying crew, a repeated timeless cycle on a grueling schedule. The airports have melded into a blur; plug-and-play passengers, overpriced burritos. My layovers are on autopilot, endured to the next flight.

But once in a while, my subconscious notes an anomaly.

A tingle on the nerves that something is different, a fly in the soup of the otherwise homogeneous and busy crowd.

I’ve been walking from one terminal to the next, burning off adrenaline, bypassing the automated walkways, taking the stairs up and down, working up a sweat under my coat and flannel shirt. The Crazy feeling won’t let me sit at a gate anymore, and with a long layover, my wanderings have taken me farther afield. I pace in a cloud of my overactive mind’s self-reflections and distractions until that nerve tingle pushes aside the muddled haze. I come alert to find myself in the international terminal, at the gate of Ethiopian Airlines and a flight bound for Addis Ababa.

I scan the waiting travelers, to find the source of my unbidden arousal. Which one of these is not like the others? Dark East African families with children, lighter Somali graduate students, white European businessmen with multinational firms. Everyone and everything is in place. Everyone, except for the three trim men sitting a bit to the side, backs to the wall, trying to blend in. They may be innocuous to most, but to anyone who does the job, they might as well have a strobe light above their heads.

Their team leader is older than me by a couple of years, short brown hair graying slightly, all khaki safari shirt and cargo pants, high-end hiking boots. His Oakley sunglasses are perched on his head, his watch face covers almost his entire wrist, and the laptop on his knees came out of a black, hardened, over-engineered waterproof case. His two companions, one black and one white, share the athletic physique, the overpriced sunglasses, the choice in footwear. But both are younger, listening to iPods, assault packs tossed at their feet. Beards are starting on all their faces — the call for the job must have been last minute. All appear ready to run five miles uphill at a moment’s notice. Contractors. Mercenaries. Like me, but going overseas, for more money, most likely for a three-letter agency. Ethiopia is probably not their final destination. Somalia? Sudan?

The leader looks up from his laptop, charade put aside for the moment, and faintly nods in my direction. I nod back. Their rifles materialize at their feet, a desert mirage, propped among their backpacks and gear, pistols tucked in drop holsters on their legs. I can feel the familiar grip of my rifle in my hand. The comforting grooves on the bolt-release paddle on my left thumb, the heavy satisfying thunk as the spring is released, the bolt moves forward, and the round slides into the chamber. A deep breath. I wonder if they need a fourth man on the team. What’s the job? Personal security detail? Door kickers? Every stack needs a bomb technician.

I think about going back every day. Back to the job. Back to the clarity of thought, the singleness of purpose, the mundane details of the world falling away and only the essential remaining. No bills. No to-do lists. No children asking for attention. No tear-filled marital counseling with my wife. No broken lawnmower and early-morning soccer practice and dentist appointments to schedule. No clutter.

For a moment, I do more than just consider going back. The helo inserts, rifle slung and feet dangling out the side, legs kicking in the breeze. The cordon-and-search assaults, knocking on a door in the middle of the night, lighting a valley on fire with thousands of pounds of explosives. The Crazy purrs its approval.

The safe and familiar and comfortable beckon. Why not go back? To where life makes sense, and I’m good at what I do.

Maybe someday, but not today. My flight will be leaving soon. I need to get back to my gate. The man in khaki catches my eye, nods one more time, and then looks away down the concourse. I follow his gaze that has perked up, and the Spidey sense tingles again.

First a stare, from a businessman standing outside the gate. Then a watchful eye from a couple in a lounge across the way. I catch a glance. They look away. An awareness floods me, surges from my groin and drowns my brain.

I’m in danger. I’m alone, isolated, surrounded and suffocated by the crowd. I need to egress, violently if necessary. Avoid a static direct firefight. Shoot, move, and communicate. Live behind your weapon. Do whatever is required to go home.

I grasp my rifle, which has been waiting for me at my shoulder. I need to leave this airport terminal right now. I need to get out.

The closest emergency exit is two gates down, on the left. I know because I’ve scouted the area before, part of my regular contingency planning. I should be able to get there in less than a minute. As my right hand settles into its familiar position on my carbine’s pistol grip, elbow bent, wrist fully turned, index finger above and outside of the trigger guard, I choose my targets. The main transit security force is in the next concourse, and I don’t see a roaming cop between me and the door. The female airline staff personnel manning the gate will duck and run. The crowd of sheep blocking me from the exit are helpless, except for a few.

The man in the suit thirty meters ahead spends a lot of time in the gym. He is taller and stronger than I am. He is the biggest threat, and is in my way. He should be first. I grip my rifle tighter, and pick up my pace.

Next is the teenager, just past him, with the navy high-school football T-shirt. His slight father next to him will cower, but he won’t. I’ll have to kill him too.

I count the rounds in my rifle magazine. I visualize the first two into the chest of the man in the suit, the frightened reaction of the crowd, the next two through the football player. I visualize stepping over them to the exit. The foot sits in the box on the counter at the next gate. My breath is coming faster now, as I begin to make my move. My blood is pounding in my ears, my heart strong, quick and regular, the typical gurgling and skipping corrected and overcome. I prepare to drop the first target. I need to get out of this terminal.

I quicken my pace. Ten meters to the first mark, twenty-five to the emergency exit.

I put my finger on the trigger. I am going to make it home.

The man in the suit catches me staring at him. Square in the eye.

Goddamn it.

I stop, self-consciously pause, then turn away. I know the look I have on my face.

What the fuck am I doing?

It’s happening again. I thought it would have gone away by now.

Ashamed, I awkwardly shuffle out of the main concourse thoroughfare, mumbling apologies, head down, looking away. I place my back to the wall, between the Nuts on Clark stand and the woman trying to get me to fill out a credit-card application. My heart is pounding out of my chest, and the Crazy is in my throat. Desperate, I reach for my cell phone, and dial my wife as quickly as I can.

“I’m doing it again.” I skip even saying hello.

“What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be on a layover?” she says.

“I’m picking people to kill.” Tears come unbidden.

There is a pause at the other end of the line.

“It’s your anniversary, you know,” my wife says.

I had forgotten, but I know which one she is referring to. I got home two years ago today.

“You’re always worse on an anniversary,” she says.

She’s right. I wish I knew why.

“I don’t like being like this. Normal people don’t do this. Planning to kill random strangers.”

“Just go to your plane, and you’ll be fine. We’ll talk when you get home. Are you okay now?” she asks.

No.

“Sure,” I say instead. She hangs up.

Breathe, Brian. Breathe.

I pick my head up, and re-see a harmless crowd, the anonymous normalcy, the unthreatening busyness.

The young dark-haired woman from the credit-card kiosk walks up to me. “You could earn twenty-five thousand miles by applying for a new platinum card today,” she coos.

I put my rifle down and head to Gate C23.

I looked for Ricky on my run today, but he wasn’t there to meet me. He didn’t say he was coming, but I expected him. We run together most days now. It’s nice to have a brother on the run, to help me through the uphill sections, encourage me when I need to dig in, dig deeper.

But Ricky wasn’t there, so I ran alone. Overcast sky, blustery headwind, a struggle from beginning to end. The Crazy boiled the whole way, barely waning at the height of my exertion. I returned troubled, alone.

It is now evening, darkness coming quickly in the early winter, and I sit on the mattress in my bedroom at home, eyes closed, my wife and children downstairs. I breathe like my New Shrink has been trying to teach me. Mindful of my breath. Mindful of my presence. Being present, simply in the breath.

My mind re-creates the yoga forms. Then they too blur, a stillness comes over me, and my mind is blank.

Silence in the room, the clatter from the house shut out. With each breath, I feel the Crazy deflate, compact, coalesce, first into my gut, and then lower, further compressing, passing down and out. I sense an incredible emptiness in my chest, a blessed smallness.

My Crazy is still. For the first time in over half a year, my Crazy is extinguished. Not smothered with pain, or burned to evaporation, but gone. It returns a minute later, a bubbling rise, but for a moment, there was nothing.

I can beat this.

Maybe outside of my head there is an objective reality. At peace.