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

III | Failure

WHAT DO YOU do when your rights are being read? Your legal rights, out loud, to you directly and right in your face, not on television on some crime drama. Do you remain silent? Do you ask for an attorney? Do you yell and scream? Shrink? Run?

I did none of those things. My words failed and my shoulders slumped. The shock made my heart race and my mind spin and my hands shake all the way up to my elbows. I was expecting an ass-chewing, an uncomfortable correction, a warning to never make that mistake again. I was not expecting to be charged with a crime.

When I arrived at my boss’s office, a marble-and-plywood box in a captured Iraqi Air Force administration building, I was told to close the door. The First Sergeant and the Chief — witnesses — were standing next to the Colonel’s desk, behind and to the side, eyes looking down. That didn’t happen during typical ass-chewings. I was asked to hand over my sidearm. I removed my 9-millimeter pistol from the holster strapped to my right leg, released the magazine, popped the round from the chamber, and put it on my Colonel’s desk in front of him. That did not typically happen either. The Colonel then looked down, lifted a sheet of paper, and reading word for word in a steady voice, informed me I had been relieved of my command, I had the right to remain silent and any statement I uttered from then on could be used against me in my court-martial proceeding.

The astonishment hit first, but the stoop in my frame did not last. Pride found my spine, confidence my shoulders. As he continued to read, I stood back up, square, at attention, and listened as I was charged with disobeying the direct order of a general during wartime. A crime, if my adrenaline-addled brain could recall correctly, that could send me to Leavenworth.

When he was finished, I ignored my first right.

“Sir, I am very confused. What’s going on here?”

The Colonel looked at me with sad eyes. He sighed.

“You need to call the defense lawyer in Germany,” he responded.

When I arrived at Cannon Air Force Base immediately following EOD school, I thought of nothing but deploying. Afghanistan was winding down, and the EOD guys there were bored, looking for work. But Iraq was still exciting — the initial push into Baghdad had gone well, and there was a palpable sense that we needed to deploy soon, before all the fun was gone. I saw pictures e-mailed back from guys at the Baghdad Airport of guided missiles, submunitions from the First Gulf War, and piles of artillery rounds being destroyed daily. All the things I had only seen in school were there, spread around the country like trash in a giant landfill. I needed to go before it was all destroyed. It had only taken a year for the good times to end in Afghanistan, and we were afraid we’d miss it twice.

I had only been in my job commanding a unit of about twenty EOD technicians on the flat, windswept prairie of eastern New Mexico a week before I started calling headquarters, asking when I could deploy next. The gray-haired Chief who endured my begging took my enthusiasm in stride; in less than a year, I was in the training pipeline, the conveyor belt, the cattle chute that leads to the C-130 ride into the box.

I was only beginning to learn about EOD and leadership when my number came, and I had a lot of catching up to do. For all of my self-assured ego and confidence, EOD school really only put tools in my metaphorical toolbox, but hadn’t taught me how to use them. Plus, the specific ordnance and devices I encountered in school were quickly becoming obsolete in the war that was developing. The roadside bomb did not fully exist as a weapon in the imagination of the Iraqi insurgent when I completed the IED section of Explosive Ordnance Disposal school. As a student I studied pipe bombs, the Unabomber, and 1980s Eastern European terrorist designs. We investigated the fake training devices using X-rays and a heavy metal disrupter designed during World War II. The robots were old and kept out of the way where the students couldn’t break them, and we saw none of the other new technology that was available only months later in Iraq itself. I was learning to be in command, I was learning to shoot, I was learning new equipment, and I was learning a new way of war with everyone else.

EOD had an updated mission. Clear roads, cities, buildings, of IEDs for the grunts and convoys. Find and blow the weapons caches squirreled away throughout the country. Collect evidence from blast scenes to track down and kill the bomb makers. Do all of this while fighting your way through a country on the edge of anarchy. Prepare yourself for the worst. If your security is overrun, and every soldier meant to guard you instead lies rent in pieces, a wet mess strewn about their smoking armored Humvees, be prepared to extricate your EOD team by shooting your way home. No matter what, your brothers come home alive.

Three months before my first real combat tour we began serious deployment workups, leaving home to conduct training we couldn’t do at our small base. A week of trauma medicine — IVs, intubations, and tourniquets. Driving our Humvees in a convoy at high speed through mock villages and ambushes. Advanced electronics, to analyze circuits soldered together in dirt-floored caves thousands of miles away. Clearing and rendering safe IEDs with the newest equipment — electronic jammers, British water-and-explosive-mix disruption charges, and sleek robots half the size and weight of the clunkers we had at home — most of which we had never seen before. A combat shooting course, put on by civilian contractors, where we moved and fired our weapons in ways that never would have been allowed by the safety-soaked and risk-averse larger Air Force.

The muddy and ramshackle shooting range looked more like the forgotten corner of an old farmer’s property than the scene of advanced tactical marksmanship training. Two picnic tables, a temporary shelter, rows of railroad ties that demarked shooting lanes, a pile of dirt on one side of the long gallery to catch our lead. Located at the end of a winding track off our maps, the contractor’s firing range was isolated in the low, thick central Texas woods, wet with November rain.

But initial looks could be deceiving. Piled on those picnic tables, in unmarked separate cardboard boxes, were a hundred thousand rounds of 5.56- and 9-millimeter ammunition. Rifles, pistols, magazines, optical sights, scopes, infrared lasers, drop holsters, cross-draw and multi-mag vests, body armor, helmets, slings, armored gloves, and cool-guy sunglasses littered the surrounding grass, fell out of the back of pickup trucks, and stood ready for use. And at one end, against the dirt berm, were rows of heavy steel targets, some with paper coverings depicting Middle-Eastern-looking men, some blank and naked.

My right thumb was raw from loading magazines by lunch on the first day. To the firing line, for warm-up shots with the rifle and then pistol. Back to the picnic tables for remotivation and magazine reloading. At the firing line again, for transition drills between rifle and pistol. More lectures and magazine loading. To the line again. Three shots with the rifle to the chest, switch magazines, then three more. Professionals do the simple things well: accurate and sustained fire, counting rounds so you are never dry, reloads under fire, immediate actions to fix a broken weapon, transitions from rifle to pistol and back, squaring your body to the threat so your vest absorbs the shock of impact if you are shot, moving and communicating and working as a team while under duress. The plink of lead on steel was a soothing song of success.

All the while, our contracted instructor, an ex — Marine Recon trigger-puller, barked, cajoled, mocked, ridiculed, and motivated. A command to the line, to prepare to fire. A call to shift fire, as a new threat emerged. A distracting whisper in your ear while you slowly squeezed the trigger. Grunts and yells and shouts to communicate over the din of twelve talking assault rifles.

The worst of all sins: not hitting the target. “Whatever you do, Captain, don’t miss!” came the regular admonishment from behind me.

By the third day, simply killing steel was not enough. We graduated to battle drills — recovering and tending to a fallen comrade, dismounting a vehicle under fire, entering and clearing a building, moving and evading hostile fire through an organized violent retreat. Peels from the left, peels from the right, Australian in-line peels, shoulder taps and foot pressure to move through a room. Timing reloads to ensure a constant hail of bullets on the head of the enemy.

The upgraded shooting regimen was interspersed with words of combat wisdom from our instructor, aphoristic hadith pearls from the master, blessings on the student. We sat at his feet, loaded yet more magazines with row upon row of ammunition, and absorbed the enlightenment. Simple concepts that inspired confidence in ourselves and our ability to return alive.

You must be willing to commit more violence than your enemy. A firefight is a test of wills to kill.

You must mentally prepare to be shot. To absorb the impact, to brace your chest against it, and then continue to return fire.

Live behind your weapon. Take cover behind your weapon. If you are shooting at your enemy, he will put his head down and not shoot back. If he is not shooting at you, you cannot get shot.

Your rifle, your pistol, your vest, your head, and your heart are a five-man team on your side. They will save you. Stay alive no matter what. You don’t quit until you are dead.

Always be alert, be present, be ready to kill. When the moment comes, your training and muscle memory will save you.

The last day of training, the final exam, the last shooting sequence, was a combination of all previous exercises. We moved down the grassy field on patrol, soggy scrub trees transformed into dusty crumbling walls of an Iraqi village in my mind’s eye. Suddenly, our instructor calls contact front! Twelve of us came on line, and a thousand rounds are fired in the first minute, overwhelming violence perpetrated upon our imaginary foe.

I needed to change mags, and yelled, “Reloading!” over the roar to my right and left. My partner next to me called, “Covering,” and killed my targets and his during my five-second change-out. In one rote motion I dropped the old mag with my right index finger, reached for the replacement with my left hand, and keeping my eye on the target and never looking down, inserted the new mag and brought the bolt forward and home. “Up,” I shouted, and the fire continued.

A command from the instructor. To my right, DJ called for a peel. One by one, the shooter on the right end of the line called, retreated, turned, and began firing again, into the enemy and past the line in front of him. Yard by yard we retreated down the cobbled Iraqi street.

Then, to my left, Brown fell. Hit. Wounded by a phantom bullet, a shoulder tap from our merciless instructor. He had to be recovered and brought to safety.

“Man down!” I called, and stepped back over Brown’s prone body.

“Covering,” came the immediate reply, as Olguin and DJ filled my spot, and placed their squared bodies between Brown and the ghostly incoming fire.

I flicked my rifle to Safe and moved to grab Brown from behind, around the chest in a massive bear hug. Hot shell casings, discarded from the relentless protective fire above us, fell in a rain, onto exposed necks and wrists, into armor gaps and down under my shirt. I sat Brown up, reached around, locked my hands, squeezed, and lifted. Five hundred pounds of man, armor, helmet, tactical vest, rifle, and ammunition lurched backward in one heave. We fell in a pile, inches from where we started.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

I yelled to DJ to help, and Olguin shifted fire to cover his targets. DJ and I each grabbed one of Brown’s shoulder straps, and after a quick count to three, surged forward. My left arm nearly dislocated as we fell again.

Our Marine instructor loomed over me and barked in my ear, harassed and mocked, screamed obscenities, questioned my love for my wounded brother at my feet. Would I leave him to die on the battlefield? Alone? Olguin called for a reload and our team’s collective fire waned. We had spent five minutes and four thousand rounds retreating a hundred meters down this exposed Iraqi street. Brown was wounded. I was exhausted. Ammo was running low.

DJ found his second wind, and with a cry and a massive pull, got Brown’s deadweight moving again to our rear. I latched on, dug my boots into the mud, and tugged as my rifle flopped against my chest. Our firing line retreated again, back to our rally point, to safety.

I fell again, next to Brown as he checked his bruised body, roughed up from the drag. I panted in exhaustion, and DJ came up to pat me on the head.

“Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “We’re all coming home together.”

It is at this time, away from family, away from distractions, away from anyone except those with which you will deploy, that the envelopment of the mind occurs. EOD school taught me to want nothing but the life of a bomb technician. Cloistered combat drills taught me to think of nothing but staying alive. I was whisked away into this sublime psychological deployment current, a profound fatalistic insight that further binds you to your EOD brothers and sisters. A collective yielding to luck, to fortune, to Providence, a resignation of self to a timeless continuum of soldiers gone before.

I met Jessie Spencer senior year of college, on the dance floor of a crowded bar. She was wearing tight jeans and drinking cheap tequila and her smile brightened my soul. It was a hot courtship, a quick engagement, marriage only a year later. I needed Jessie down deep in my gut. And yet. So intoxicating was the seduction of my new mistress — drunk as I was on a cocktail of two parts adrenaline, three parts philia, one part noble purpose — that I didn’t realize I had chosen a new lover until years later. The smell of my wife’s auburn hair, the longing of her blue-gray eyes, the heartbeat of my infant son pressed against my breast, all faded into forgotten memory. The daily drumbeat of training for war, planning for war, celebrating and dreaming and devising for war, was incomparably lovely. It consumed all thought and creativity. It engrossed my being. I wouldn’t leave it for as long as I wore the uniform, home or away.

My world became narrow and small — the thirty-five other EOD technicians I would deploy with, a base in Iraq, IEDs, the enemy. Who and what you are leaving behind fades nearly unnoticed. Your time horizon begins when you step onto Iraqi soil and ends when you leave. There are no considerations beyond the handful of brothers in the room with you and the next nine months. There is no thought to the consequences of your decisions past that abbreviated timeline, no imagining of what might follow you home. Home is a lifetime away. Your immediate present, your whole world, is the war. That is where you are going, like countless others before you over the centuries, a line of young men from American small towns and European peasant farms, from great Roman cities and Japanese pagodas on terraced mountainsides. Don the armor, mount the horse, and join your brothers in battle.

But before you leave, on a ship, on the jet, marching out of your village in a column down muddy medieval tracts like previous faceless hordes, you celebrate life even as death stalks in your shadow. The strip club filled to capacity every evening, a long day of training on the range giving way to an overtime of partying. Previous nonsmokers bought cartons of cigarettes. The beer and liquor flowed generously. Even the most button-downed spent money they didn’t have on stripper after stripper until closing time. And why shouldn’t they? They were going to war.

“Are you a soldier, shugah?” cooed the mostly naked girl on my lap.

“Close enough,” I replied. She had dark hair, and relied on hard work rather than God-given good looks for repeat business. I liked that.

“Are you all together? There sure are a lot of you,” she asked again, making small talk in between songs. I had thrown another couple of twenties down, so she knew she would be with me for a while.

“We are. We’re all bomb technicians, and we leave for Iraq in a couple days.”

“Well, this place sure was boring till you got here,” she lied in a whisper, her lips brushing my ear, soft breath inducing shivers up my spine. She ran her fingers down the back of my head and neck, along my shoulders and torso, and placing both hands on my hips, lifted herself into a straddle across me.

She leaned in, and I could feel the warmth of her breasts through my shirt.

“You guys deserve to have some fun before you go,” she breathed.

The bird touched down at Balad just after the New Year. I was fired less than a month later.

My first C-130 ride ever was my flight from Qatar into Iraq. The deployment was still an indistinct dream in my mind until the main lights turned off in the back of the cargo plane. Stark reality suddenly emerged in the form of a dim red glow that barely illuminated the thirty of us packed onto the cloth bench seats. We had crossed over into Iraqi airspace. Safety and comfort and three-a-day beers at Al Udeid were left behind. I half expected surface-to-air missiles to continuously shoot at us the rest of the way in.

The EOD compound at Balad, a sprawling air base an hour’s drive north of Baghdad, was everything my romanticized brain had hoped for. Hard against the flight line and taxiway were rows of armored trucks and dingy tents, dry-rotting in the desert heat. A trapezoidal bunker squatted in the center of our camp, a shelter during incoming rocket attacks and a vault for a collection of seized small arms and ammunition. Plywood-decked floors in the tents concealed the lairs of constantly chattering mice, squeaking all day and night. The sticky traps littering every nook and cranny were all that stopped a full infestation, though the screams of caught mice, tearing themselves apart to be free of the snare, kept me up much of the night. My sleeping area was just large enough for a single cot, barely secluded as it was by several sheets hung to provide a modicum of privacy; a spanktuary to jerk off in and not much else. My first morning in country I awoke to the vibration of a mortar detonation on the runway half a football field away, a daylight attack from hills to the northwest. It was so close that the thud of the detonation’s compressed-air shock wave, rather than the actual sound of the explosion, startled me awake.

The food was bad. The terrain was desolate. The threat was real — Sunni insurgents outside of the gate were really trying to kill us.

Everything about Iraq sucked. I loved it.

The environment met expectations, but being in command did not. My carefully crafted vision of life as a deployed EOD operator met the practical limits of the Air Force bureaucracy almost immediately. For two solid years I had dreamed of bombs and explosives with a childlike simplicity. Now I was finally here, in the box, living in a rat’s nest, mortars coming down, ready to do the job. But instead of working, we waited.

We waited for approval to store our explosives. We waited for permission to dispose of munitions near the busiest airfield in Iraq. We waited for the General to personally approve every off-base mission we were tasked by the Army to complete. If an IED was on the side of the road, and we were called to clear it, we couldn’t go unless we asked the General first. I spent my first two weeks of combat on the phone and writing request letters to the General’s administrative assistant.

It didn’t take me long to stop waiting for or paying attention to the answers. We were EOD technicians. We had a job to do, and I knew better.

The end came when two of our robots broke. We had a large shelter filled with robots, of every make and model, some experimental, some left over from wars past. But very few of the robots were functional, or fit adequately on the specially prepared ramps mounted to the back of our armored trucks. The robots manually disassembled IEDs so we didn’t have to; they kept us alive. They were also in constant need of repair, but the hub maintenance shop was in Baghdad. Getting there required off-base transport — we needed to ask permission for that.

A week before a scheduled convoy, I drafted an approval letter and sent it to the General’s aide. No reply.

Six days before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office to follow up on the letter. I was told to resubmit the form.

Five days before the scheduled convoy, I e-mailed the request again. No reply.

Four days before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office again.

“Please provide justification for not utilizing C-130 air transit to move the robots,” said the General’s executive officer.

“Those birds only fly once a day, and get canceled half the time,” I replied. “If we drive down, we can turn right around after picking up the new robots. My guys will be back the same day. I need the robots and teams back — I can’t afford to have them stuck in Baghdad for three days waiting on a flight.”

“Please provide written justification for not using C-130 assets,” the General’s exec said again.

Three days before the scheduled convoy, I resubmitted the form, with the required justification.

Two days before the scheduled convoy, a third robot broke.

One day before the scheduled convoy, I called the General’s office, seeking verbal approval.

“We’re currently considering your request,” the administrative assistant answered.

“The convoy is tomorrow. We need to know!” I was not patient.

“Please check your e-mail for approval,” I was reminded.

The day of the scheduled convoy came. No e-mail. No approval. Three broken robots.

“Are we running down to Baghdad or not?” Hallenbeck asked. Hallenbeck was one of my team leaders short a robot; his was sitting in pieces on the imminent convoy.

“They’re leaving in twenty minutes,” Hallenbeck reminded me.

I checked my e-mail again, and looked at the phone. I didn’t want to know what the answer was going to be from the General. We needed the robots.

“Yeah, go get in the convoy. Hurry up so you don’t miss it.”

The e-mail from the General’s office disapproving the mission arrived an hour after the convoy left. Thirty minutes later, I drove to my boss’s office to hear my rights read to me. When the convoy returned later that day, bearing three new fresh robots, I was not at the compound to greet them.

On a clear midwinter day, morning frost yielding to a warming desert sun, the line of townsfolk waiting to vote in their first election stretched down the muddy track bisecting the tiny village. Despite threats and attacks they waited for hours, robes and coverings clutched tight against the chill, to shuffle through decaying schools and crumbling halls, emerging triumphant with a single finger inked blue. On that day, the Balad EOD unit ran calls for twenty hours straight: bombs discovered at early-morning ballot openings, investigations of suicide attacks on lines of expectant hopefuls. On that day, the pinnacle operation of the tour, the EOD teams ran to exhaustion. On that day, I sat in an office and read a book, waiting for my punishment.

We had been preparing for the election from the moment I arrived in Balad. Initially, polling places had been the target of threats and hoaxes to scare the local populace into staying home. When plans for the election still went forward, the real bombs started showing up. Daisy-chained explosives outside of government buildings along the path where voters would wait their turn. Drive-by shootings and sandbags filled with radio-triggered mortar shells tossed from car windows into the queuing crowds. Car bombs left overnight and timed for poll workers the next morning. All of those and more, the Balad EOD team disarmed, safed, investigated, and prevented. Without me.

On Election Day, I did not lead my men into battle.

Instead of fighting my war, I just sat, alone, quarantined from my brothers, awaiting my fate, an impotent, mute, broken failure.

I sit on the couch at home, dark night filling the picture window behind me, Crazy sloshing in my chest. I stare at the bottles in front of me. Twitch. The left eye has been bad today. My relief is spread across the tabletop.

I start drinking as early as I can now, as early as I can justify it. Not every day, but more and more. On the days when the left eye is twitching at its worst, it consumes all thoughts beyond the boiling Crazy. And today is the worst yet. Fluttering and jerking, a pounding pulse under the eyebrow and swish of the lower lid. I’m an animal driven mad by relentless distraction, not of buzzing insects but of my own body betraying me. Uncontrollable. Intolerable. Just like the Crazy feeling.

A couple after lunch. Two bottles of beer before dinner. Twitching through my spaghetti.

Two more during dishes. I start to help with the children’s baths, then give up as my eye distracts me from differentiating between the soap and the shampoo. Twitch. Another bottle before the hockey game. Twitch. To the couch and more beer. Twitch. Twitch.

I don’t notice that my wife has already gone to bed. I sit now, alone, and open another. The number of empty beer bottles on the coffee table is growing.

Twitch.

Twitch.

Please let it stop.

Twitch.

I quickly finish and stumble slightly as I put the glass down. The spinning room slows my eye and pounding heart both.

Twitch. Crazy. Twitch.

The last beer in the carton. How pathetic would I look to my brothers now? How would I explain it? Drinking to keep my eye from vibrating out of my skull. Alone in the dark. And scared.

Twitch.

Stillness. A fall.

And then nothing.

The scene was no more horrific than normal. Most gas stations in Kirkuk consisted of a man on the side of the road with a jug of piss-yellow liquid and a hand pump. This gas station, however, for police and government officials, had actual inground storage tanks, poured concrete islands to pull your car up to, and 1950s-era American rotary-dial mechanical pumps. An inviting target for a suicide bomber. Or two.

This time they got past the fences and guards using fake Iraqi Police uniforms and identification cards. Or they were real Iraqi Police, with real uniforms and badges. It was always hard to tell.

One bomber approached the aging pumps, idling cars, and quasi-important politicians and detonated his ball-bearing-laced suicide belt in the thickest portion of the mid-afternoon crowd. Fortunately for the assembled, though, he was also near a concrete light pole and pump that absorbed most of the explosive energy. The first blast caused confusion, hysteria, and a flood of police and nearby citizens drawn to the scene.

That was the moment the second bomber entered, detonating his belt in the middle of the Good Samaritan crowd. He made no mistakes, and was well clear of obstacles that would mitigate his effect.

The bombers probably hoped that the gas station itself would explode as the result of their attack. But Hollywood lies, and even aromatic, poorly maintained Iraqi petrol pumps won’t send up a huge fireball from a small belt or two. Instead, the bombers simply sowed panic, pain, and madness.

I only ever saw one Hollywood-style fireball. In Balad, one year before, on one of the few missions I completed on my brief, aborted tour.

Organizationally, the Balad EOD compound was a virtual hub for five spokes, five combat outposts that relied on the main base for logistical support. I only visited them once, to make the rounds — drop off mail and pick up gear, remind the guys to shave and take a shower, and swap them out, giving them a not always welcome break at the main hub for a while. Delivering the mail in Iraq is not an easy task. Five gun trucks, our EOD Humvee, and hours of planning and preparation were required just to leave the gate. Our security briefed the convoy order, actions to take on stops, the route we would follow — through the village of Al Dineria, where it was either bloody or muddy, according to the First Sergeant in charge — and how we would stop and fight if ambushed.

Bloody or muddy. Al Dineria turned out to be the latter. And how. The potholes in the hamlet’s semi-paved streets were the size of moon craters, and we nearly lost the front end of our Humvee in a harmless-looking puddle in the center of the road. The combat outposts where we stopped resembled frontier forts built to fight the Indian Wars in the American West. At FOB O’Ryan, Bradley armored fighting vehicles were lined up against the outer wall every twenty yards, 30-millimeter chain guns pointing out at the featureless floodplain, ready to respond to rocket and mortar fire. At FOB Paliwoda, foot-thick concrete slabs were stacked like LEGO bricks, building walls, roofs, and shelters for each tin can that housed beds or operations centers. And then to our last stop, across the Tigris, on a pontoon bridge only inches wider than our armored truck.

We picked up a package at that last stop. It was a present from the spooks. There wasn’t enough space at their FOB to detonate it. Could we take it back to Balad and dispose of it there?

“What is it?” I asked.

The bearded, plainclothed man handed me an irregular black package. It was the size and shape of a football, completely wrapped in electrical tape and incredibly heavy. On one end a small strand of green detonating cord stuck out.

“Don’t worry about what it is,” the spook said.

“Sorry, man. I can’t just blow things up if I have no idea what they are.”

Silence from the spook.

“At least tell me how big the bang is going to be.”

“Just blow it by itself — you can cap in here,” he said, pointing to the little strip of det cord.

My curiosity got the better of me, and an hour later my teammate Finch and I were back at Balad setting up a disposal shot on the abandoned infield between the two main runways, our designated demolitions area, as it was the only empty space on an otherwise crowded American complex.

“What the hell do you think this is?” I asked Finch, who had been around a lot longer than me.

“Dude, I have no idea, but we’re moving back,” replied Finch. He had attached the blasting cap to the indicated cord as I was setting up a radio receiver that would electronically initiate the explosion.

“How far back do we need to go?”

“All the way back,” said Finch, as he hopped in the truck, and we drove off.

I pulled out the heavy green radio transmitter once we arrived at our safe area, a protective shelter a sufficient distance from the freshly dug pit that contained the black football.

“Fire in the hole,” I said, far more quietly than usual, as I peered around the steel wall and pressed the final button.

Thunder and hellfire and a plume of black smoke ten stories high. The crack of the shock wave engulfed our metal box and rattled my lungs. The control tower on the far side of the airfield shook. Windows broke in the flimsy, Iraqi-made administrative buildings dotting the complex. Back at the EOD compound, the phone rang about a possible attack on the airbase.

That explosion lived up to Hollywood expectations.

My tour at Balad did not last much longer, though it ended over transportation paperwork, not detonating unidentified explosives recovered from strangers. For minor offenses in the military justice system, the General plays prosecutor, judge, and jury. For reasons unknown to me to this day, my charge was ultimately reduced and my penalty dropped to a reprimand that would be placed in my official record. The real punishment, however, was my removal from the unit. I was fired, disgraced, headed home on a plane less than a week later. The C-130 ride back out of the box — back to three-a-day beers and sun and safety and little Air Force girls in bikinis by the base pool in Qatar — was the longest, least welcome flight I have ever taken. I landed alone, lucky to be simply bereft of my command and not headed to jail. But I found my blessings hard to count.

When I arrived in Qatar, home of Central Air Forces headquarters, the top engineer on staff met me at the plane. He said there was a change of plans. He shredded my paperwork and said I’d serve out the rest of my tour working for him. My work-release package involved a purgatory of shuffling virtual papers in a cheap office trailer, in the rear with the gear, answering phones and going to meetings and “working issues” and “providing the leadership with an accurate sight-picture” for their metaphorical radar screen. Every day I read the incident reports detailing missions that my brothers in Balad had completed. Every day I dreamed of a return up north that I knew was impossible.

I had a taste of it now. The rifles, armored trucks, love, Brotherhood, detonations, IEDs, camaraderie, robots, bearded special-ops guys, and incoming mortar fire were all really there. I knew the life I wanted was possible in that exploding dustbowl.

I had to get back. I needed to get back. But how?

I dutifully served my penance until one day, four months in and nearly done with my staff tour, the phone rang. It was a fellow EOD officer, the commander of the largest EOD unit at that time in the Air Force, at Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas.

“When you get back to the States you’re moving here to take over for me,” he said in a tone that allowed no debate.

“Didn’t you hear, sir? I got fired. I’m done,” I replied.

“Yeah, we heard what happened. Tell your wife you’re leaving Cannon and coming to Nellis as soon as you get back. We’ll get you deployed again to Iraq by this time next year,” he said, and hung up the phone.

It happened all as he said, and now here I was. In Kirkuk. Knee deep in blood, charred cars, yelling Iraqi policemen, and sporadic gunfire. Luckiest son of a bitch I knew.

I checked the date on my watch. I landed back in the box a month ago.

One month. I had survived a full month, in command, without getting fired. And I wouldn’t be.

“Hey, guess what?” I called over to Ewbank, who was sifting for explosive evidence through a mix of gasoline and unidentifiable body parts near the base of a white petrol pump.

Ewbank looked up. His face was equal parts red and black.

“I made it thirty days without being fired.”

“Very groovy, sir!” came Ewbank’s chipper reply. He had left his Elvis sunglasses back at the compound, but the cool attitude was perpetual.

We both laughed, and recognized our good fortune, and continued combing through the burned car parts and piss and brake fluid and odd fingers and ball bearings and shredded clothing, looking for omens in the entrails.

I step out of my home, sun shining, air crisp and cold, Crazy on a slow boil, a pot left on the stove all day bubbling and cooking. Another run, to tame the balloon stew, to burn off the worst of the wave overwhelming my life.

Ricky is waiting for me at the end of the driveway. We don’t always run together, but he is joining me more and more. Rare is the day now I run alone, and Ricky is a good companion. We don’t have to make regular plans; he doesn’t need a specific invitation, and is rarely unwelcome. Running to burn off the Crazy can be lonely, and Ricky loves to run. I meet him at the road, and we turn toward the river, wide and gray on this late November day.

Ricky is a broomstick with knees and elbows. Taller than me and with far longer legs, his natural gait is a steady lope I struggle to keep up with. We settle into a rhythm of breaths and footfalls, faster than I would run naturally. But Ricky knows the harder I work the more Crazy I smother, and he keeps the pace up. Two miles in, despite the level pavement and still-warming sun, I’m struggling to keep up. Ricky turns and looks over his shoulder, eyes squinting against the glare and an easy mocking smile on his lips.

“What’s wrong, Captain? Don’t be scared of the soft sand,” Ricky laughs.

I dig deeper and catch up, and soon we are side by side once again.

The road winds between the water and stately homes, snapping nautical flags on beached boats and trim black-shuttered colonials overlooking the Niagara River. Two miles turns into three. Three into five. The Crazy began to loosen its grip at mile four. The last half is comparative bliss.

Ricky and I turn for home, race in a bit of a sprint at the end. Ricky wins. He always does.

“See ya tomorrow, sir.” Ricky waves and jogs away fading down the street. I pant, struggle up my driveway, open the door to my house, and the unwavering Crazy engulfs me anew.