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

X | Ricky

WE HAD NO front line in our war. A front line only exists when two standing armies look over a field at one another. Our army didn’t do much standing, and we were fighting the ever-changing sea we swam in. But we didn’t swim continuously. We stepped into and out of that sea; the front gate of the FOB was the shore, and there I turned the switch on and off.

Out in the city, on the highway, in the helicopter, danger lurked everywhere. No smiling locals, no pile of trash, no abandoned parked car could be trusted. Your brain was always on, your back never turned, your rifle always ready, finger on the trigger.

But once we got back to the FOB, back to the HAS, a two-foot-thick concrete dome sheltered your righteous head from that crashing sea. The vest came off, the rifle was set down, the breath came easier. A take-out dinner from the chow hall and a cigarette and a laugh around the fire pit outside with your brothers. Back inside the gate, you were safe again.

And so every day the pendulum swung. Danger to safety. Safety to danger. As the missions piled up, getting back to the HAS took on new urgency. It was bad luck to die at all, but getting schwacked with three weeks left, two weeks left, one week, would be the height of tragedy. Eventually the end of the deployment was in sight, and we counted the days until there were no more missions, no more trips off the FOB, no more forays into danger. The goal was to go home, because if the HAS was safe, home was Safe.

He drove the robot down to the hidden device, camouflaged with trash and debris, on the side of the windblown highway on the south end of Kirkuk. The worst of the summer heat had broken, but that only reduced the temperature from broil to bake, and the sun still oppressed. While Mengershausen stared at the robot screen, I kept one eye on the crowd gathered to watch and one eye on our security.

“Hey, watch your sector, not us!” I shouted over to the gunner atop the nearest Humvee.

Our security was new, green, fresh off the plane. They couldn’t run logistics convoys without getting shot, they couldn’t go on patrol without getting blown up, and if they did accidentally stumble across an undetonated IED in a stroke of luck, they couldn’t tell us where it was so we could clear it. It took an hour of searching to find this one; we eventually had to call in helos to scout the road ahead. They discovered it hundreds of meters away from the initially reported spot. Clocks ticking as they ran out of fuel, the mini Kiowa helicopters eventually flew right up next to the thing and dropped smoke grenades on it. Ten feet off the deck, tipped on their side, the pilot popped and tossed the purple canister out the window, rotor wash churning up the surrounding desert, each blade tip inches from the road.

The infantry brigade in place when we arrived — which had shown us the ropes, driven and flown us everywhere, and protected our teams on every mission — had reached the end of their tour, packed up, and gone home. The new brigade was just that, and this kid manning the turret gun looked like he had only been in the Army since breakfast. We served as the overlap, the continuity, and were suddenly the old veterans and voice of wisdom. Not that it mattered much; the new brigade seemed determined to relearn every lesson the hard way. Casualties were way up, and my morale was just as far down. I didn’t have the time or patience to teach a whole brigade how to survive their tour. I certainly didn’t have the faith or goodwill to let them figure it out by experimenting with me. Let the helo drivers pick up their slack, we weren’t going to echo it. Home was too close to start fucking around with newbie security teams now.

“I’ll let you know before we blow anything up, don’t worry,” I yelled up again. “You look for bad guys and let us worry about the IED!”

I almost felt bad for the new brigade. We were leaving too. They’d unknowingly pay for our mistakes, and those of the brigade they replaced — for every cordon and search of the wrong house, farmer’s burned field, flex-cuffed innocent, and pockmarked road. But we had paid for the unknowable actions of those that came before us as well. EFP and car-bomb retaliations as revenge for assaults and firefights forgotten. We paid our due, but not for what we had done. When I left Iraq, the U.S. military had occupied it for five years. But we didn’t collectively have five years of experience; we had one year of experience five times. And through it all, the Iraqis endured, and remembered, and resented, and hated the fresh, young, pimple-faced kid sitting on the Humvee near me, though he was in middle school when the first cruise missiles fell on Baghdad.

“Hey, Mengershausen, did you ID the main charge on the end of that command wire yet?”

“Yeah, it’s another improvised claymore.”

“Rusty cylinder sleeve with nuts and bolts for frag?”

“Yup. Same ones we’ve been seeing the last month.”

“How many is that now since we hit the EFP factory?”

“Sir, I can’t even keep up trying to count.”

“Did we used to have improvised claymores before we did that botched EFP factory job?”

“Not like this.”

“We’re pushing our luck. We’re too short to get blown up again. Just whack this motherfucker and let’s get out of here.”

I don’t remember which mission was my last. It all gets fuzzy at the end. But one day our replacements arrived, and it was our turn to pick them up in Hiluxes and drive them back to their new home in the HAS. Their arrival portended the certainty that the war would continue without us. And just like that, it’s not your job to leave the FOB anymore, not until you get on the airplane bound for home. Your war doesn’t end with a climactic battle or a crescendo of missions. It ends with silence; one day the phone just stops ringing. That call you went on yesterday? Turns out that was your final run outside the wire. When the phone rings again, someone else will answer it. Your war is over.

I thought about two things on the flight home: sex and alcohol. The latter was surer than the former; I had to endure my wife’s anger at my absence for a long time before we had our homecoming.

The alcohol, on the other hand, flowed freely from the moment we hit non-Muslim soil. Back at the FOB the Special Forces guys always had beer smuggled in via C-130, and they were more than happy to share after missions. But we were always discreet, and it was saved for special occasions. We wanted a proper celebration, a survival celebration: kegs and cigars and naked bodies in the hot tub. It started when the plane landed in Germany. It continued in the wee hours during a quick refueling stop in Iceland. The homecoming party at Luke’s house happened two days later, once safely back at Nellis in Las Vegas.

Ricky met me at the door with a giant bear hug. We were on opposite deployment schedules, and so were always around to put each other on the plane and welcome each other back. I had gotten the beer cold for his return eight months prior. Now he was returning the favor.

“It’s good to have you back, sir,” Ricky said. His skinny arms squeezed with surprising strength.

“It’s good to be back, bro,” I yelled over the music.

Ricky’s wife had already joined a flock of giggling girlfriends in the hot tub, and a game of Strip Jenga was in session at the kitchen table. Q handed me a beer, Grish a cigarette, and we talked and joked and smoked and drank and lied and told war stories and savored life and marveled that the indulgent pleasures of this existence endured. Your brothers saw you off. Your brothers welcomed you back. Your brothers ensured your survival in between.

I made it home. So did everyone else I took to Kirkuk on that trip. We did what we had to do to make sure of it. Our mission was to come home in one piece. That the best way to accomplish this mission was to not go on the call, to never leave in the first place, only occurred to me much later.

I never had to go back to Iraq. And I haven’t.

The Army insisted on holding a graduation ceremony, to celebrate the end of our predeployment training at Fort Sill, the last requirement before my trip to Kirkuk. Phillips had to give a speech, as he was the highest ranking officer among us. We were all captains, but he bested me by a couple of months.

Phillips was not excited to give a speech, and I was just as happy the duty didn’t fall to me. Still, I thought of what I would say should it come to it. What would I say to my men, this day before we boarded the plane for Iraq? A first trip for some, return trip for most, second trip for me, my chance to redeem myself, to make right my failure my first time around.

I wrote a speech in my head, and never gave it. I wrote it down later that day and saved it, saved the burning need to deploy, saved the drive, saved the choice to live my dream, saved the idealism and the ego, saved the optimism and the duty, for when I would need it later.

“Fellow EOD operators,” I wrote. “We are riding the front crest of history. In the sixty years of Air Force EOD, we have never been as busy. We are making history every day.

“Lexington. Concord. Saratoga. Tripoli. Baltimore and New Orleans. Shiloh. Gettysburg. Vicksburg. San Juan Hill. The Ardennes and the Marne. Omaha Beach. Anzio. Pearl Harbor and Midway. Inchon and the Yalu River. Khe Sanh. Da Nang and the Mekong Delta. Panama and Kuwait City.

“These names are written in blood upon the heart of every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine. These names are burned into our souls. In fifty or one hundred years, when historians write of our current war, new names will be added to that list. Bagram and Kandahar. Baghdad and Baqubah. Kirkuk. Fallujah. And then we will count ourselves lucky to be among those privileged few who can say they played a small part in the continuing honor and legacy of the Armed Forces of the United States. I am humbled to be among the few who can speak to their children and grandchildren about what history will write of us. Cherish this opportunity.

“The bond among EOD brothers and sisters is our greatest strength. That bond will bring us home.”

I came home, but then what follows? I never considered. But I chose it all the same.

I haven’t seen him since high school, probably graduation night itself. The years have not been kind; more around the middle, less on top, and now a flaccidity to his grip. A droopiness to his face and speech.

“Thank you for coming,” he says.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I respond. “It was good to see you again. I’m glad there was a great turnout.” A turnout to his fundraiser, paying for his medical bills.

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 another, 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.”