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

II | The Soft Sand

I GOT MY first tattoo with Jeff Chaney the day before my second son was born. That tattoo eased my son into this world, his mother so angry that she went into labor.

My first tattoo is one day older than my son because Jeff Chaney had convinced me I needed some ink, and that we were going to go together. Jeff’s quest for fun had few boundaries and only occasional limits, either personal or actual. He would try anything himself twice … and then do anything with you a third time. Jeff’s devotion to the savoring of life was infectious and magnetic. He was generous with his time, his friendship, and his alcohol. He did outrageous things with lots of people. I’m lucky that I was around to be a part of it.

Jeff picked out the tattoo parlor on Route 98, the beachside strip in Destin, Florida. Jeff was in the Navy, and several years older than I, had half a career already under his belt, driving boats and ships all over the world. This was not his first tattoo, and he knew what to look for in a good artist.

We spent weeks planning our designs, in between study sessions and ordnance tests. I wanted an upside-down sword with two gas masks hanging from the hilt, one the U.S. Air Force MCU-2/P, the other the round-eyed British mask often caricatured in apocalyptic comic books. I had acquired a couple of masks from my first Air Force assignment, and Jeff and I took countless pictures of them hanging from broom handles on his back porch, ensuring that we got the angles just right to give the tattoo artist the perfect perspective to copy. They reminded me of my time before Explosive Ordnance Disposal school, before my new life. This was my rite of passage on leaving my old world, but I was not yet fully in my new one. I was closing a door behind, but the one in front had not yet been opened to let me in.

Jeff got a huge squid on his calf, and he wasn’t worried that the door was still closed in front of him as well. Inside of the sea creature’s tentacles he left space for the EOD badge, the Crab, to be placed after he graduated from the school. Actually graduating wasn’t a concern for Jeff. Of course he wouldn’t actually get the Crab portion tattooed right away. That would jinx it; superstition is ubiquitous among those who work with explosives regularly. Nor would he disrespect the EOD operators that went before him by getting a tattoo of the Crab before he had earned it. But earning it was a matter of when, not if. Jeff had never failed at anything in his life that he put his carefree mind to, and his easy positivity was a delight that drew others to him. Jeff always got the girl, got the boat, got the job, and he would get his Crab. And we did.

I was a snot-nosed, baby-faced, butter-bar lieutenant deployed to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on a quick ninety-day rotation when the planes flew into the Word Trade Center. We watched on TV like everyone else. But once the second tower fell, we turned the TV off and got down to work that I never actually expected to do.

The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained. The day the Air Force recruiter came to my high school, I marched up to his table and declared my intent. He looked me straight in the eye, through my thick glasses, lied to me, and said I was a shoo-in. So I took the scholarship to be an electrical engineer, and only when it was too late did I learn that my poor eyesight would ensure that flying in space was not in my future.

But the Air Force didn’t want me to be a circuit geek after all. Once I finished college and earned my engineering degree and received my commission, they assigned me to be a civil engineer, pouring runways and fixing buildings. But I never learned how to do that either because upon arriving at my first assignment, I was placed in disaster preparedness, the stepchild of Air Force civil engineering. I taught people how to wear their gas mask and survive nuclear war.

So when I arrived in Saudi Arabia in August of 2001, as there was no chemical, biological, or nuclear war going on, all I prepared for was to be bored until it was time to go home. Obviously, that plan failed. We opened up crates of chemical-agent detectors that had been gathering dust for a decade. We stockpiled bleach to clean up an Al Qaeda nerve-agent attack on Osama bin Laden’s homeland. We fired up the biological-agent detectors and ran them twenty-four hours a day. We sat up all night, and watched, and waited, and scared ourselves to death, because there was nothing else to do. I was overwhelmed.

But we weren’t the only ones who were worried. One day, several months after 9/11, I was invited to a meeting whose agenda was kept secret. As a young lieutenant, I was not normally invited to meetings like this. I sat in a packed makeshift classroom with several of my fellow chemical-warfare specialists, most of the fire department, a couple of security police officers, and some emergency staff from the hospital. At the front of the classroom, looking out over the group with grim faces and closed mouths, were two guys not in military uniforms. They had hiking boots, tan cargo pants, loose short-sleeved shirts, and beards. At that time, beards were universally recognized code for “I have a job that’s special.” Sitting in the front corner were several other Air Force guys whom I recognized but did not really know. They stayed by themselves and carried guns, which the rest of us never did. And they had lots of guns, and gear, and over-vests to put the gear in. They talked quietly to the two men in beards before sitting down when the briefing started.

“The reason you are all here,” the bearded guys said to the whole group, “is because the United States has intelligence that Osama bin Laden has acquired two of the missing Soviet suitcase nukes and intends to use them. If such a device is discovered, employed and counting down on a timer, there will not be time to call for help. You are all first responders, and so most likely to discover the device. If you find it, you will have to turn it off yourself.”

The bearded guys were there to teach us how to do that.

They pulled out a package, as big as a shopping bag and covered in a blanket. Inside the wrapping was a dull green metal cylinder, fat and smooth, except for one flat end that had several dials and switches on it.

“This is a model of the old Soviet suitcase nuke,” they said. “And here is how you turn it off.”

I sat in silent rapture, and memorized every word. No one in the hall spoke, except for the small group of Air Force guys in front with the gear and the guns. They asked lots of questions, and it sounded like they already knew what they were talking about. This device wasn’t new to them. The concept was almost … commonplace.

“Those are the EOD guys, right?” I whispered to a fellow gas-mask instructor sitting next to me, looking lost in the details of the complicated shutdown sequencing.

“That’s right,” was the reply.

EOD. Explosive Ordnance Disposal. The bomb squad.

“And they get to do this all the time?” I asked, mostly to myself.

Now I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would make the Air Force let me do it.

It took me a full year of begging my commander, pleading with headquarters, and badgering the bureaucratic system to get into EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. But I eventually got my wish, and one chilly January morning, after moving my uneasy wife and growing family down to the Gulf of Mexico, I sat in a plain white classroom with twenty-nine other hopefuls for my first day of training. Only three of us would graduate together nine months later.

In the first three days of class students take three tests. A passing score on every test in EOD school is 85 percent. Many questions are worth sixteen points. You have exactly one day to learn new material that you have never before encountered in your daily life — like how the inner gears and lockballs of a setback-armed, mechanically timed and graze-impact-fired mortar fuze work — and then the next morning take and pass a test. If you fail that test, you may get a second chance. If you fail your second chance, you start that section over again with the next class below you in line. But after that, your third strike, you’re out.

EOD school is an assembly line. If you fail your quality check, you may go back through the stamping machine. Fail again, and you get tossed out with the other broken widgets.

EOD school focuses the mind in a way high school or college never did. I never worked so hard or wanted something so much. It dominates your time, your thoughts, your conversations, and every aspect of your life. You arrive before dawn to study, and leave late in the evening long after dinner. The only true day off was Saturday, since Sundays were “optional” study halls; in truth, anything but. The only way to absorb so much material was to think of nothing else. The only way to graduate was to want nothing else.

By the time I was done, the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life, however long that might be, was taking apart bombs.

In my initial class of thirty on the first day of EOD school I was the only commissioned officer. I got used to that pretty quickly, and was often the only officer everywhere I went for the rest of my time in the military. The Navy runs EOD school, on an Air Force base, with instructors of all four services, and students of each branch get mixed together. We had seven Army soldiers, five Navy guys, fifteen other Air Force kids (all but one straight out of boot camp), and two Marines. Four didn’t last the first week. Barely half lasted the first two months.

Boatswain’s Mate First Class Jeff Chaney was the highest ranking enlisted guy in the class. That meant he was my number two, my partner, my problem solver and my confidant. He also was chief party planner, beer procurer, morale enforcer, and physical-training guru. He led the runs in the morning, and got the kegs for the weekend at the beach. He made sure everyone was studying, that the new kids were staying out of trouble, that the “deck” got “swabbed.” He quickly became my best friend.

EOD school builds in complexity and momentum every day. We started with physics and the fundamentals of ordnance: bombs, rockets, missiles, grenades, land mines, and more. Then basic demolitions. Remote tools. Biological and chemical agents. Ground ordnance. Air ordnance. IEDs — improvised explosive devices. And finally, the culmination, nuclear weapons.

Explosive theory becomes practical application becomes physical trial to master. First, the science: how materials detonate. The fine details of the explosive train, starting with a small speck of sensitive compound and culminating in a powerful burst of heat and light, transforming potential into chaos. How detonations are simply supersonic chemical chain reactions. How the speed of the wave flowing through a block of C4 relates directly to the velocity of the frag then thrown by that blast — the chunks of steel, ball bearings, nuts, bolts, nails, or pieces of dead dog now moving at a rate we referred to as Mach Oh My God.

Next, how to harness that explosive power for your own ends. To propel steel slugs, wedges, forks, buckshot, and water into the delicate mechanisms that make ordnance work. To shear a firing pin before it strikes. To unscrew a fuze on a bomblet dispenser. To melt a pressure pad on a land mine.

And most important, to shoot jets of water into improvised devices to tear them apart before they function. When water is concentrated, focused, and directed by explosives, it creates an unyielding blade that rips and pushes without sympathetically detonating an IED’s hidden payload. Water does not compress. The wooden boxes, PVC pipes, burlap bags, and sheet metal containers of the renegade bomber all succumb to that universal solvent.

Finally, book learning done, go out to a range and do it for yourself under the unblinking eye of your ever-watchful instructor.

Using what you learned on day 1 to solve a problem on day 4 is hard enough, considering the three tests you have sweated over in between. Applying what you learned in demolitions in month 1 to dissect a Soviet guided missile five months later is more vexing. Students become overwhelmed with the mountain of material, the broad scope, the relentless pace, and the stress. Always more stress. Make a mistake, fail a test. Fail two tests, start over. Fail three, and the dream is done. All your energy, your desires, your focus, revolved around passing the next test.

Everyone had rituals. I had a lucky set of red boxers, ratty with holes, and a lucky pencil, still squirreled away in the back of a dresser drawer in my bedroom upstairs in case of emergency. Some guys always had sex before a test, and some poor saps never did. One guy managed to convince his girlfriend he needed a lucky blow job every time. I started with my wife on the lucky sex, but soon had to give it up with the birth of our second son, post-tattoo. Even so, every night before a test I sat on our bed, closed my eyes, and visualized every step of the next day. Being called by an instructor, walking to the practical area, doing a long-range recon of the Chinese spin-stabilized rocket, choosing a technique to disarm the firing system, placing the explosives. Every step. Blasting cap on time fuze, crimpers on, turn your head, squeeze. Every step. To pass and survive to the next day. For nine months.

You are a different person on graduation day from the day you started. The crucible eliminates self-doubt and instills supreme confidence. The combination of intellectual and physical requirements, academic rigor, emotional stress, and final consequences is unparalleled. It’s like being a surgeon, except if you screw up, you die, not the patient.

I entered EOD school a skinny dumb kid who hoped he could hack it. I left a focused, dedicated, obsessive, invincible man whose only purpose was to go to Iraq and blow things up for real.

I’m running again, always running, along the river, down the road from my home, left eye twitching, footfalls on pavement burning away the Crazy in my chest and mind.

I run alone. Ricky doesn’t run with me, not yet. Back at Nellis, at my last Stateside assignment, Ricky and Grish and Luke and I and the whole unit ran together almost every day, four miles through the desert on the base’s outskirts, staring down the flight line at the Las Vegas Strip shimmering in the early morning sun. Now my feet fall on empty pavement, shuffling stampede an echo, my breath alone in my ears, the road bare ahead and behind.

I push against the mountain of Crazy in my chest and pick up my pace.

Clouds move in, and a sprinkle starts, a drop or two that grows heavier with every step. A block later, steady rain falling, puddles growing along the side of the road. Two blocks later, sheets and standing water in my shoes, plastering my shirt to my back and chest. I grunt. The Crazy bubbles.

Tropical Storm Bill was bearing down on Florida, dark and full, as I carried my tools into the practice yard at EOD school. My final test on bombs; the most involved yet. The fuze I had to remove from the back of a two-thousand-pound bomb was long and heavy. Unscrewing one can cause it to detonate, so you definitely don’t want to do the work by hand and be around for that. Instead, I would need to construct a complicated series of leads and pulleys with a wrench that operated remotely by pulling a rope. I carried the rebar stakes for the pulley system under one arm, and a sledgehammer under the other, as the rain started to fall.

“We’re gunna get this fuckin’ test done real quick, you understand? Fuckin’ hooyah?” asked my Navy instructor, whom we called Chief Bongo, his actual Pacific Islander name being completely unpronounceable.

Bill grew darker, swirling overhead, and the rain grew in size and intensity.

“Hooyah, Chief,” I replied, soaked to the shorts before I had even made it to the bomb.

The fuze had to slide out backward completely straight; cant it slightly at the start and it would jam and get hung up inside. So after attaching the rope-actuated, spring-released mechanical wrench, you have to lay out a series of bungee cords to provide the pulling force to extract the fuze. Then pulleys attached to the stakes guide the rope several hundred feet away to a safe area from which you actually pull. Once the entire system is in place — bungees, pulleys, stakes, and rope — you tug on the line, which after running and switching through several pulleys activates the wrench, which turns the fuze. Once you fully unscrew the fuze and overcome the last thread, the bungee cords yank the fuze out and the test is over.

I struggled at building this Rube Goldberg machine during practice days. Now, in the middle of my test, Bill was getting angry.

By the time I was done attaching the impact wrench, the bomb was nearly underwater. I picked up my sledgehammer to drive in the first stake and thunder cracked, not overhead, but to our right.

“How you fuckin’ doin’, Lieutenant! Let’s go! Hooyah?” roared Chief Bongo.

“Hooyah, Chief.” I swung the sledge and pounded in the first unintentional lightning rod.

The rain came sideways and in waves. Bill darkened the sky as an early night, and lightning jumped from cloud to cloud, striking and splitting pine trees with ear-rattling cracks in the surrounding forest. I pounded in stake after stake and attached pulley and line, water in my eyes, sledgehammer slick, boots soaked, shirt and pants heavy and waterlogged.

Bill was at full roar as I ran the rope through the last pulley and humped the remainder out to my distant safe area. No time to rest, I simply grabbed the rope and pulled. Tink went the wrench, barely audible over the fury of the wind in the trees. Heave went the rope. Tink went the impact wrench. Heave and tink. Heave and tink. Heave and silence.

I couldn’t see the bomb, low in the water, through the windblown sheets of rain. I was out of breath, my back and shoulders aching from the strain of pulling the rope after driving so many stakes. Nothing to do but pull. Heave, and the fuze stayed stuck. Heave again. The rain ran in my nose and mouth as I put my head down and panted, hands on my knees.

“Lieutenant, finish right fuckin’ now! Got it? Fuckin’ hooyah!”

Lightning lit up the Chief screaming in the distance, rain lashing his silhouette. I heard him fine, no matter Bill’s howl.

I wrapped the rope around my waist, and leaned into the pull. Heave, and wind and water and thunder, but no fuze. It stayed jammed in the back of the bomb.

“Right fuckin’ now, Lieutenant! You hear me? Hooyah? Right fuckin’ now!”

“Hooyah, Chief.” One more heave, one more lean, one more strain. Tink. The fuze slid out.

EOD school doesn’t just teach the technical aspects of bomb disposal. More important, it instills the culture of the profession.

There is no choice but to work hard. But hard work is not enough. You won’t survive EOD school if you can’t work with a team, and can’t relax when the job is done.

Fortunately, my class naturally banded together, and the beaches and bars of northwest Florida provided ample opportunity to blow off steam. “Cooperate to graduate” is a common mantra, as students test each other and work together to cross each hurdle. Every Friday night of EOD school was a blur of bars, clubs, beer, and few clothes. Many EOD guys prefer to drink with their pants off. Or as a hat on their head. I can’t explain why.

It is impossible to overemphasize how important beer is to the EOD profession. Beer at the end of a long week of school, to ease the stress of tests and retests. Beer to quench your thirst from a full day of clearing the bombing range in the relentless desert sun. Beer to dull the pain of a lost brother on the battlefield, near or far, known or unknown. Beer to bond, and celebrate, and mourn, and remember, and forget.

As weekend planner and surrogate older brother for every member of our class, Jeff organized elaborate marathons of fun. Every night ended with holes in your memory, requiring careful reconstruction with the class the next day. Only a few nights ended in a fight with the locals, or being tossed from a bar, wrecking it on the way out. Most nights ended with breakfast, a tasteless plate of grits and waffles, and a ripe hangover to endure on your one day off. Jeff was tireless, relentlessly upbeat, and more than once dragged my exhausted body onto his boat the next day to swim my headache away with the dolphins in the full sun of the Gulf. A quick nap on his couch, and I was ready to party again, this time dancing at the club late into the night.

Jeff was as lucky with women as he was with the rest of his life. Not only did I have to endure fantastic tales of his past exploits, we all had to watch him and his wife together, dancing and partying, at the bar, at the club, on the stage reserved for the most attractive women and guarded by granite blocks of men. Jeff’s wife was a vision: sultry, playful, sweet as cantaloupe on a summer day, and hotter than a firecracker. Jeff’s lack of inhibitions included public dancing, and his wife had the ability to draw the attention of the entire club to her swaying and dipping form, especially when she was invited onstage.

“Are you looking at my wife?” Jeff would yell at the club, to no one in particular.

Jeff’s grin was ear to ear, and his wife gave a devilish smile from above.

“You better not be looking at her,” Jeff continued. “She’s coming home with me tonight!”

I learned many things from Jeff during EOD school. I learned the best way to bury a keg in beach sand to keep it cool all day long, despite the hot sun. I learned to put skin moisturizer on a new tattoo, but not a kind with aloe, because it might react with the ink. I learned that after twelve hours of drinking, it’s possible to fall asleep sitting up, on the toilet, still eating a fast-food hamburger. I learned how to discipline a young enlisted kid without breaking his spirit or breeding resentment. I learned that a certain inlet off Okaloosa Island is a great place to park your boat and watch drunk topless girls frolic in the warm, waist-deep water. I learned to study hard after partying hard. I learned to never give up.

Jeff would lead our class’s physical-training sessions a couple of mornings a week before instruction started. I endorsed and needed the workouts; to keep my brain lubricated and spinning, I drank gallons of coffee and ate high-sugar foods all day long. The calories kept my exhausted brain functioning, but they also added to my midsection. Jeff’s workouts of flutter-kicks, push-ups, and pull-ups kept the worst of my diet at bay.

The Navy guys had to attend dive school before EOD training, to ensure they could endure the rigors of working underwater. It’s difficult to render safe an underwater mine or torpedo if you can’t swim in a mask, fins, and rebreather. But dive school is less about learning to use new equipment and more about getting an old-fashioned ass-kicking. The Navy is not going to send you to EOD school unless they are sure you have the endurance, the will, the gumption to handle a certain amount of physical punishment. When I played soccer in high school, if the coach was mad at our performance we would run for hours and never see a ball. In dive school, you swim until you can’t move and drift to the bottom of the training pool.

So despite a bit of flab from years of drinking, Jeff could run most of his fellow non-Navy students into the ground. His job leading PT was to bring the rest of us up to speed.

Jeff’s favorite morning workout, after an excruciating set of crunches and flutter kicks, was running the Hill of Woe. Outside of the eastern gate at Eglin Air Force Base are a set of power lines that run up a hill, into the forest, and back through a neighborhood adjoining the base. The three-mile loop up that incline would have been bad, but not epic; no simple slope deserves the name Hill of Woe. But this was Florida — the run was torture because the hill was made of sand. A mile and a half of soft sand uphill.

Up we went, in a line, in step and on pace, singing songs to take the mind off burning calves and thighs. We had done one loop already, but when half of us turned for home like horses that had spotted the barn, Jeff dug us back in and we turned up the hill again for a second round. A third loop for good measure was on its way, but fortunately I did not know that yet.

Up the Hill of Woe, single file in the soft sand. Every step forward brought a half step back as the sand gave way under the weight of our shoes. Ahead of me Shipstead stumbled, put a hand on the ground to steady himself, and then was back up slipping through the viscous silt. My knees aching, my legs on fire, I looked over at the grass on the edge of our running path. We ran up the soft sand path, but paralleling us the whole way, out of the main traffic area, the ground was firmer from plant roots and bits of dirt stabilizing the slope. Would anyone notice? If I ran to the side, just a bit?

I stepped off the soft path and my feet found solid purchase. My backache eased, I stood straighter, and I tore up the hill.

“Whatcha doin’ there, LT?” yelled out Chaney.

“I’m coming, Boats,” was my sheepish reply.

“Come on, LT. Don’t be scared of the soft sand,” Jeff called. He was friendly, but firm.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

My next footfall was back on the path, but it slipped immediately half a foot down the hill. My hips felt the change with a twinge, and my thighs burned anew.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

Up and down, forward and back, I labored up the hill, in the soft sand, on this lap, and the next.

By the end of school, you have learned the ways of the Brotherhood. When you get the Crab placed on your chest, you have thousands of new brothers and a few sisters. They are unknown but loved. You will travel all over the world together, work together, drink together, laugh and cry and bleed and fight together. You have a new family. They are all that will sustain you.

Jeff died outside of Tikrit the summer after I got back from Kirkuk.

His team got a call that a security unit found an IED on one of the main routes into the city. The security had backed off and set up a cordon a safe distance away. As soon as his armored convoy appeared, as soon as he arrived on scene, there was a massive detonation under his vehicle. It was triggered by a wire concealed in the ground, so his electronic radio jammer couldn’t stop it. The unit he was coming to assist never saw the wire or the explosives. Jeff was driving the newest blast-resistant vehicle, with an underbody hull specifically designed to deflect large explosions. But this bomb was almost two thousand pounds of explosives and buried in the road. Nothing can withstand that. His twenty-six-ton assault truck was decimated. The bomber had waited until the EOD team arrived on the scene, had waited while the other security unit unknowingly sat on top of their own deaths, and only triggered his device once the EOD truck pulled up to the exact spot. Jeff never had a chance. I don’t know how much there was left to bury.

I have a new job now. Out of the Air Force, out of the military, I’m two weeks into my new civilian life and at my new job, sitting in a bland conference room in a faceless hotel in a blur of a town. I don’t know it yet, but there will be a string of identical hotel rooms, a squadron of stuffy airlines, and piles of free continental breakfasts in my future, traveling the country providing last-minute training to EOD guys before they deploy. A parade of faces, a two-week helping of explosives and robots and running drills until they have their tactics just right. Then up and gone, love ’em and leave ’em, to the next half-month stand, another unit, another bundle of hopes and fears. Faces meld and join, till the memory of each brother and sister is just a smear, a lingering haze, a nagging impression. All the faces return. Most alive. Some dead. The list of EOD technicians killed in battle is now largely a list of my former students.

But this is my first job, and sitting in that conference room, fresh and green and ready to teach my first course, that future is still an unknown. I meet my fellow instructors for the first time: John, JB, Jimbo, Vic. Chris and Matt will join the team soon. All former EOD guys, from all four services, done with the military but not done with the Brotherhood; we can’t bear that thought so we perpetuate. Everyone has a common acquaintance. War stories start, jokes and outrageous deeds. I know Jimbo from my last tour in Iraq; it is not coincidence, it is a law of averages. So few brothers, there are few degrees of separation.

And then the news arrives at the conference room. Before I lose a single student, I lose a former classmate. Jeff has died, and so has his teammate Pat. In a truck, on a stretch of deserted highway south of Tikrit. Command wire. Two thousand pounds. Buried in the road.

The Crazy stirs in its sleep. I check my rifle. The foot sits in a box.

I know Jeff. Jimbo knows Jeff and Pat. JB and Vic know Pat. So now I know Pat too, and JB and Vic know Jeff, as the beer flows, and Vic and Jimbo and JB and I remember long into the night.

My wife said she could never imagine Jeff growing old. Now she won’t have to.