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

IV | The Daily Grind

THE REHEARSED BALLET began when a call came in. A bomb squad doesn’t drive around town all day searching for IEDs any more than firefighters patrol the city streets looking for plumes of smoke on the horizon. Instead, the entire compound waited in perpetual anticipation, one ear trained for the phone, muscle and concrete taut in preparation, a coiled spring. Armored trucks lay in wait in the yard, noses toward the gate, robots loaded, explosives stowed, doors open and adorned with body armor and helmets at the ready. Teams sorted gear, packed and repacked, checked and rechecked. Every day the explosives were inventoried and refreshed. Every day the robot batteries were swapped through the trickle charger. Every day the jammer was turned on and cycled, load set confirmed. Every day the bomb suit came out of each truck, to inspect the pants and suspenders and spine guard, the zipper and ties, the diaper that swaddles your groin, the heavy overcoat and front Kevlar plate, quick-release tabs, helmet and air snorkel, microphone and power-fan electrical connections, a line of fresh batteries and a wipe of the two-inch-thick visor.

Everyone had a different ritual. No one started a task they could not quickly put aside. Some cleaned their rifles over and over again. Others fretted over the last e-mail from their wife or girlfriend. Mengershausen slept, with one eye open and a black watch cap on, even in the heat of the summer. Ewbank slipped on wide black sunglasses and a Hugh Hefner silk robe, proper loungewear, he called it, took a seat to wait with a cup of specially prepared fancy coffee and Magnum, P.I. reruns. Keener pored over supply inventories and bitched that no one completed their paperwork right. Mitchell and Crisp, black and white partners in crime, smoked and joked the minutes away in front of the HAS. I endlessly read reports, wrote reports, rewrote reports, and justified not having to write reports. It filled the time between phone calls, and beat the slow death waiting brings. The ops desk, continuously manned, existed simply to answer that phone. For a call.

Sometimes there was a warning of a call — thunder in the distance on a clear day, a black cloud hanging over the city. Usually we were not so fortunate. Monotony, a string of tasks, the long wait, and then, piercing the quiet, a ring. The ring. Time to go on a call.

If I close my eyes now and let my mind drift I can see every ritualized movement, every inch of concrete crossed, every step between my desk and the waiting armored truck. The papers thumbtacked to the plywood wall next to the phone, the computer that printed maps of the location of each call, the dust on the gray floor, the placement of my pistol in the gun rack, the metal peg on the HAS blast doors where my body armor hung, the contents of every pocket.

My brain has been torn and ripped by explosions, memories of my children stolen or faded, blown apart in each blast. So how do I remember every inch, every second of the move to a call? I am surrounded by reminders. They come unbidden, springing to mind. Every pair of boots I own are sandy. My rifle is always waiting for me. My children’s first steps are my walk to the truck.

When the phone rang, and we knew it was a call, I began the rite. Out of the office that I shared with the phone and the ops desk and the big map of Kirkuk on the wall. A yell to the team on standby: time to wake up, time to go, time to do the job. To the gun rack, where I unbuckled my pants and tucked in my long desert camouflage blouse to get it out of the way. Nine-millimeter pistol first, stuck in the back of my trousers. Rifle next, out of the rack, in my hand, then out of the ramshackle work space and into the wide-open covered aircraft shelter we used as our base. Across the dirty floor, past the racks of spare robots and radios and.50-caliber sniper rifles. To my gear, rifle down, pistol out. Body armor on first, lashed across, shoulder armor strapped in place. Tactical vest on top, covered in pouches and pockets containing six rifle magazines, extra pistol mag, flashlight, crimpers, Leatherman tool, knife, a note from my wife begging me to come home, the rosary from my dead Aunt Mary and a scapular, so when I died I wasn’t going to Hell, no matter what I had done on the call. Pistol in the cross-draw holster on my front left side. Helmet on my head. Gloves on, earplugs in, sunglasses. Rifle magazine in, bolt forward, round in the chamber.

I could do it today. I do it every day.

Then back to the ops desk — where was the IED, the car bomb, the crater in the road left from a blast that just hit one of our convoys? Map in hand, we talked. Hey, we were just there yesterday. Do you remember the second pressure-plate-actuated device, hidden where we planned to work? That is where Ewbank got hit. That’s our third truck bomb in that neighborhood this week. Grim pins stuck in the wall-sized map of Kirkuk reminded us of each call.

The calls come all day and night. Rockets in the morning at breakfast. Car bombs all afternoon. In between prayer times, sung from the minarets. After dinner as darkness sets in. After curfew, when all average citizens should be home snug in their beds, and only trouble awaits on patrol.

Trey said it’s not today until you sleep. Sometimes, when the calls pile up, you can go from yesterday to tomorrow and never get to today.

Dawn and a wakeup, tepid mushy oatmeal, a run to clear a crush switch and a couple of 130s left from the night prior, hardened hamburgers on dry stale buns, the regular afternoon suicide car bomb downtown at a school or police station, the weekly serving of pork adobo, dusk, a suspicious-looking white trash bag called in by a hesitant patrol that turns out to be nothing, midnight chow of rubbery steaks and pancakes, an endless drive out and back at twenty miles per hour to a cell phone and dual-tone multi-frequency decoder-board setup discovered by a long-haul convoy in the dark and distant desert, dawn, breakfast of spicy sausage patties and cold omelets, a cordon-and-knock takedown of a weapons cache in downtown Hawija, more hardened hamburgers, and finally, exhausted and delirious, sleep.

It was never today. It was only yesterday and tomorrow.

The worst calls are the ones just after midnight and in the earliest pre-dawn. Sometimes you just know a call is coming. You can feel it in the air; your Spidey sense tingles. Maybe it was a quiet day. Maybe it was good weather; Haji doesn’t like the cold or the rain, so a long hot quiet day means a long hot busy night. When you know a call is coming, you stay up late, waiting for it. No point in going to sleep if you are just going to be woken up. But then a call doesn’t come. 2200. 2230.

“Hey, Price. Do you think we’re getting any calls tonight?” you ask.

“Nah, why don’t you hit the rack,” answers Price, a hovering mother hen in a linebacker’s body, massive black arms the size of your thighs crossed over his wide chest while reading intel reports. Price guards the phone each night, and suffers worse insomnia than you.

“I’ll stay up a little longer and see.” So you wander over to the adjacent room, and play a little Halo. Every alien is a bad guy, and needs to die. It’s so refreshingly simple. Now it’s 2300. 2330. Still no call. But you can’t hang on any longer; your eyes are closing on their own.

“Price, I’m bushed. I’m giving up for the night.”

“Sounds good, sir.”

A half hour later, Price is banging on your door with a call. A string of pressure-switch contacts Christmas-tree-light-style and two 122-millimeter projos on Route Cherry. So you roll off your cot and start the ritual: gear on, grab a sugar-and-caffeine energy drink, hop in the Humvee, slam the sickening concoction in one gulp, a stomach rumble, open the door, puke onto the awaiting dirt, and you’re ready to run all night long, on a half hour of sleep.

And out you go, out of your compound, off the FOB, outside the wire, past the guards and spotlights and blast barriers and gates, and into the unknown.

What do you think when you leave the gate? When you leave the protected enclosure and false security of your ringed base? I thought of an uncle, filling a C-130 with bullet holes over tiny jungle airstrips in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. A grandfather who built the double runway on Guam in 1944. Another grandfather who landed in southern France and marched to Berlin. A great-great-grandfather, a lumberjack and pig farmer in North Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, fresh from the boat and the Kaiser’s army, who at the age of forty-one, and with seven (of his eventual nine) children at home, left his plow in the field to march south with the 63rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, to the Peninsula Campaign and the Second Battle of Bull Run. He returned ten months later, with a bullet hole and a Purple Heart. How would I return?

Thoughts drift further, as the dust and palm groves and empty desert landscape crawl by outside the thick windows of the armored truck. Does the thin line go back further? How far? What blood runs in my veins? Am I from a Line of Old? What may rise in me, unbidden and unknown, to meet this oldest of challenges? How many battlefields has my blood made wet, in empires made and gone, on bare green islands and cold forested mountains of myth, in lands whose names have changed countless times? How many arrows have I dodged? How many rifles have hung from my shoulder? How many bandages have I wrapped? How many helmets have I worn? In the line of my people, all the way back to the beginning.

What resides hidden within me, lying in wait to be revealed, once the cycle continues and renews?

In the darkness of my bedroom, at night, when I try to fall asleep, the top of my head comes off. My chest fills and floats, the ceiling crushes down, and my head cracks open. In a clear line, from temple to temple, around the back of my skull, it lifts free. I can feel it release and open. The spider crawls off the back of my head and runs to the ceiling. I feel every leg detach, as the body forms from the rear cranial knob, and the massive gray hairy spider runs across space and walls and over the foot sitting in a box in a corner.

Living with the Crazy feeling is intolerable. When I awake in the morning, I open my eyes and try not to move. It is the only time all day that the Crazy feeling is not overwhelming and all powerful. It hasn’t had time to build throughout the day, and for a brief second, it lies still. I wish my whole day could be that first split second.

Instead, my first thought is always the same. Will I be Crazy today?

And the answer is always “yes” before my feet hit the floor, children screaming, wife rushing to dress for work, my day an agonizing marathon of eye twitches, rib aches, heart gurgles, and chest fullness until I can struggle back to oblivion again, in that bed, eighteen hours later.

When I make breakfast for the children, I feel Crazy.

When I drive them to school, I feel Crazy.

When I sit in front of the computer, fixing PowerPoint slides, I feel Crazy.

When I wait for dinner to finish cooking, I feel Crazy.

When I get on a plane, I feel Crazy.

When the foot sits in the box, I feel Crazy.

When I read my children a book before bed, I feel Crazy.

When I lie next to my wife at night, I feel Crazy.

And then I fall asleep and do it all over again. Why?

The Crazy feeling distracts from every action, poisons every moment of the day. It demands full attention. It bubbles, and boils, and rattles, and fills my chest with an overwhelming unknown swelling. My misery compounds.

I wake every morning hoping not to be Crazy. Every morning I am. I grind through. Month follows month.

This is my new life. And it’s intolerable.

I can’t do this.

I hated going out at night. Our security hated going out at night too. Yes, we had all the fancy NVGs, our night-vision goggles, and other gear so we could “rule the night,” as the grunts liked to say. But we didn’t use them because we had to drive in downtown traffic, and we’d hit every civilian vehicle between us and the IED if we didn’t turn on our headlights. So instead, in the worst possible combination of circumstances, the bad guys got to hide in dark houses, and we had to drive with two bright white targets on the front of our Humvee, and two red ones on the back.

A call came in from Cougar 13, a regular infantry patrol, for a bomb on the big bridge spanning the Khasa River, just a tiny stream at that time of year that trickled through the center of Kirkuk from north to south. The big bridge, a glowing target visible from miles around, above the dark gash of rabbit warrens and wadis.

At least it was a respectable hour, not long after full dark. This night the patrols got out earlier and found the IEDs quicker, so my teams and I were still awake. Which meant the city and Haji were still awake. A city of a million Arabs and Kurds and Turks, ancestral homelands for each, depending on which century you consulted. The Kurds were the best organized, controlled the levers of official political, law-enforcement, and military power, and had a plan for restoring Kurdistan: outbreed their neighbors. Arabs who had relocated to Kirkuk during Saddam’s rule did not take kindly to bullying eviction, and sympathized with the terrorist networks that retaliated. The city’s gory present conspired to spoil the city’s hopeful future, so prodigious the blood soaking into the ground that it contaminated the oil reserves hidden beneath the rocky desert.

Four armored Humvees pulled into the parking and staging area in our compound, right in front of the HAS. After donning our helmets, sandy Kevlar hiding Castleman’s sandy blond hair, we walked up and met the security lead, Bayonet 23. Bayonet didn’t normally take us out. It was usually Psycho, the mortar platoon. But Psycho was on a personal-security-detail mission with the brigade commander, and Bayonet was stuck with us. Or we with them.

We shook hands, bullshitted, and looked at the map to figure out where we were going. It was our job to clear the IED upon arrival, and Bayonet’s to get us there and keep us alive while we worked. We had done it many times before, but this time there was one wrinkle — we had a passenger. The Colonel, my boss, was nervous about our overall mission. He couldn’t figure out what we did. He didn’t understand why Air Force guys were driving around on the ground with the Army, where they could get hurt. He didn’t understand that EOD technicians from all four services were nearly interchangeable, received virtually the same training from the first day of school. He didn’t understand that the stenciled “U.S. Air Force” name tapes on our uniforms signified little to us. He didn’t understand that we were now more comfortable with the Army, had more in common with the grunts who went outside the wire every day than the wrench-turners and computer junkies who stayed on their safe air base. He wanted to come see for himself, and I couldn’t tell him no, so he had waited all day to get a call himself. This was his chance. He stood an attentive distance away from our powwow and didn’t ask any questions. When we broke and mounted up, I put him in the back right seat, where he was less likely to get killed.

Our convoy of five armored trucks drove off from the compound to the FOB gate, popped on the jammer, locked and loaded our weapons, and thundered out the serpentine, out of the wire, and immediately to the right, joining Kirkuk’s unceasing traffic midstream. South down Route Cherry, then left at the auto dealership, where we had investigated a car bomb a couple of days prior. We drove in the middle of the road, as fast as the Humvees would go, local cars pulling to the side to avoid being overrun. Stopping is dangerous and so to be avoided, but to evade collisions, all civilian traffic must pull aside when you need to change course. The front gunner carried a dazzling green laser and would flash it in the eyes of oncoming motorists when we had to make left-hand turns against traffic. Everyone stops driving when they can’t see. Thus did our armored convoy barrel toward the western base of the bridge, parting a sea of jammed, congested humanity. The Colonel just sat, his tall frame wedged uncomfortably between his armored window and our robot control station, gripping his too-clean rifle unfamiliarly, staring at the city going by. He had never been off the FOB before.

Cougar 13 and several of their Humvees were already waiting for us in an empty lot at the base of the bridge when we arrived. We eased our armored truck up to the inner command vehicle, parked, and Castleman dismounted to query the sergeant in charge of the cordon.

No, this wasn’t their normal sector, they were just returning from a patrol. Yes, they had blocked off all traffic, both this side of the bridge and the other. No, they didn’t mark the IED. Yes, it was definitely on the bridge, though it was dark when they found it, and they weren’t sure where. What did it look like? A pile of trash. Good, that should help. There wasn’t too much trash littering the side of every road in every town of this godforsaken country. Fuck me.

I got out and peered down the road, out over the bridge that reached into the darkness. Gunfire popped in the distance and occasionally tinged and zipped off the truck or nearby abandoned buildings that were more rubble than intact. The harsh headlights of the Humvees glared in our face, so the remaining deep black night beyond swallowed the bridge whole. I put my hand out, blocked the worst of the direct beams, and drank in the twinkle and shimmer of the city on the other side of the wadi. White and yellow streetlights, with the occasional reddish-white muzzle flash of small-arms fire, followed by a ping or two nearby. Flame jumped from a snub-nosed automatic machine gun above me and to my left, as a Cougar turret gunner tracked the flashes from the incoming, and soon it paused again.

Castleman wanted to drop the robot here and send it up into the inky blackness of the bridge to search for the IED with its small cameras and lights. I didn’t disagree. It was my team leader’s job to run the mission. It was my job to run everything else.

Turning to go back to the Humvee to build an explosive charge for the robot, I bumped into the Colonel instead.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Please get back in the truck, sir.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re getting shot at.”

The Colonel looked shocked and confused, but complied, turned around and crawled back in. After putting a mandatory cigarette in my mouth, I dug in the back of our truck, found an old plastic Gatorade bottle filled with water and explosives, set it up to detonate, and handed it to the robot.

We employed a variety of robots, each fitting a specific mission need. PackBots were small but maneuverable, light enough to be carried short distances by one man, with a four-jointed arm and multiple camera systems. The Talon was rugged and durable, bigger and heavier but stronger too. Our largest robot was the F6A, nearly four hundred pounds but also practically indestructible, strong enough to lift a hundred-pound tank round, with excellent lights and cameras. Everyone had their favorites. In the dark, with an unknown IED, Castleman picked the F6A.

The stainless-steel robotic gripper latched on tightly to the explosive charge I offered it, our robot driver Mengershausen deftly snatching it via the control station in the Humvee. Each robot was paired with its own flip-open control unit, an LCD television screen, and dashboard of joysticks, dials, toggle switches, and remote-firing systems that allowed a human driver, protected in an armored Humvee, to guide the robot’s movements and see what the robot sees using a variety of cameras. It was a disorienting experience, no depth perception at all and spatial awareness at a premium, unless you practiced regularly and honed your skills. Thus each team had one dedicated robot driver, who thought of little else. Quiet, soft-spoken, watch-cap-clad Mengershausen was this team’s operator.

I waved into the robot’s tall mast camera, indicating he was clear to send the mechanism downrange. The F6A rumbled down the road and over the bridge, searching for our mysterious pile of trash.

Seconds turned into minutes. Minutes piled up. Plenty of trash, but none hiding a bomb. The robot had dug through its eighth pile of innocuous dirt when Castleman started to get frustrated and called Cougar 13 on the radio.

“Where’s the fucking IED?” he politely asked.

“You mean you can’t find it?”

“No, we can’t find it.”

“Well.…” There was a pause on the radio from Cougar 13.

“Maybe it’s closer to the other end of the bridge,” Cougar 13 finally replied.

The bridge over the Khasa was half a mile long. Our robot’s range was much less than that. We couldn’t get to the bomb from where we were. Our security had driven us to the wrong side of the bridge.

The sweltering darkness of the desert night was starting to press in as the sweat dripped down my face, to the end of my nose, and then onto my rifle, hanging down the center of my chest. There was a restlessness to the air, an agitation vibrating through the city. The gunfire was increasing from the other side of the wadi. The honking of horns in the traffic backup created by our security blockade was increasingly agitated. Shouts and gunshots would occasionally startle from behind, or to the side, and then stop suddenly. A crowd had begun to form at the edge of the security cordon, onlookers that talked on cell phones, yelled after their children, barely flinching at the sound of the gunfire. At times, Kirkuk can be a peaceful town, high and dry in the north Iraqi uplands. But at night, the city sometimes transformed, turned, became a thing alive. The tension in the air was rising, a tingle on the scalp. You could feel it grow angry, violent, uncontrolled, edging to a riot. It’s exhilarating and terrifying to be the focus of a city’s tentacled hate. This whole town was about to go bat-shit crazy, and we were on the wrong side of the bridge.

“What do you want to do now?” I asked Castleman.

“We need to get on the other side of the bridge, and it’ll take too long to drive around,” he responded.

He was right — the detour to the other side of the river was several miles, and almost an hour’s drive in nearly unmoving traffic.

“So you want to drive across the bridge?” Was I actually asking this?

“That’s right.”

“Past the IED we can’t find and through the small-arms fire?”

“Got a better idea?” Castleman’s tone was final.

In point of fact, I did not.

Several minutes later we remounted to drive across the bridge, our robot re-stowed and explosives tossed in the back of the Humvee. The rest of the Cougar 13 element was already waiting for us, having spent the last hour holding up traffic on the eastern end of the span. The Colonel, who had been waiting patiently inside the truck with Mengershausen, looked at me and gave an “Are we really driving over that?” look. I nodded. And with a quick extinguishing of our headlights, we plunged into the deep surreal.

We crept forward, the bridge decking rising steadily ahead of us, a slightly lighter gray against the impenetrable night sky. The gunfire on the opposing bank was constant, but no longer directed at us, as we took the long drive alone and unlit. The occasional ricochet pinged off the top of the truck, an annoying buzzing insect just out of reach. Keener looked forward as he drove. Castleman and Mengershausen scanned the front and sides of the road for our suspicious pile of dirt and trash. I stared at the jammer.

All IEDs fall into one of three basic categories: victim-operated, timed, and command. This one probably wasn’t set to go off when someone stepped on it or drove past, or else it would have been tripped when Cougar 13 found it. It also probably wasn’t time initiated, a tactic normally reserved for attacks on large infrastructure. A device this small wasn’t going to bring down the bridge, and how did the bomber know when we’d drive by? That left command, meaning that the bomb was waiting for a signal to detonate. A power dump via a long copper wire. Or a call from a cell phone. Or a code transmitted on a walkie-talkie. Even Iraqi security would have noticed a guy stringing a half mile of lamp cord along the bridge railing, so command wire was probably out. That left radio transmission as the most likely scenario. We had one defense against this threat, and I was monitoring it now.

The green LED display continuously flickered through its cycle as we slowly inched up the bridge, the jammer scanning and monitoring and broadcasting its drowning tone thousands of times a second. The tiny readout, a sick joke by the designing engineers, provided precious little information. Just a string of numbers to be dissected and fretted over.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

Each number a channel, each channel hit in sequence, each digit a different threat frequency momentarily squashed. The numbers flicked by so quickly I could barely discern them.

7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13

2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2 6 7 8 2 9 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2

“I think we’re getting closer,” I called up to Castleman.

6 7 8 9 2 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 2 5 6 2 7 8 2 9 2 10

2 11 2 12 2 13 2 14 2 1 2 3 2 4 2 5 2 6 2 7 2 8 2 9 2 10 2

“We’re almost on top of it.”

Two little metal boxes in our truck, two innocuous antennas mounted on the exterior hardened skin, matching wits with someone hidden trying to kill us as we drove. Could he hear our truck? Could he see us? A glint off our reflective headlights providing a lethal clue?

Soon we came upon, and nearly hit, some abandoned cars left in the roadway. When Cougar 13 evacuated the area, not everyone took their ramshackle Vauxhalls with them. Slowly we swerved around these cars and trash, threading a needle of potential car bombs, nearing the top of the span, looking for the bomb that must be close, when our driver stopped short.

“Dude, why are you stopping?” I yelled up to Keener.

“There’s a guy pointing a gun at me!”

“What?!” Castleman and I dismounted into mayhem. A crowd of Iraqi Police were milling about on the top of the bridge, their American partners nowhere to be found. Light blue police uniform shirts untucked, clutching their dirty AK-47s, the IP looked lost and confused. I don’t speak Arabic, and our terp was safely back with the Bayonet 23 security detail at the base of the bridge. Castleman leaned his blond head back into the truck and picked up the radio, screaming and incredulous that an IP patrol would be stranded on the bridge next to an IED and inside of a supposedly sealed cordon. The police had obviously independently discovered the bomb and had been guarding it, waiting for us to respond. Now they were lost in the middle of a firefight with no radio communication, stuck on a bridge between two American security teams that would shoot them if they approached. I would have laughed if I wasn’t stuck on the bridge with them.

I waved at the IP to follow me as I took cover behind an abandoned car, putting the beat-up sedan between me and the threat: an unfound IED to my front and gunfire on the far right bank. Several IP approached hesitantly, more nervous about me than the chance of getting shot out in the open on the top of the bridge. Insha’Allah.

“You need to get off the bridge,” I yelled over the drone of our Humvee’s diesel engine.

I received blank stares in return. I tried again with a mixture of sign language and basic English.

“Big Boom!” I said, and pointed further ahead. They started arguing among themselves, pointing at either end of the bridge. This wasn’t working.

I then noticed one policeman, quieter and standing to one side, who looked out of place. A bandanna on his head, and a face a little too clean shaven. A navy blue shirt, too dark. No moustache, and a paler face. Not Arab. Not Kurdish. Turk? American spook?

I went with my gut.

“You need to get these guys off the fucking bridge right now. That way.” I pointed behind me.

“Mista, Mista!” he responded back, shaking his head and putting up his hands in a sign of incomprehension. But the “mista”s didn’t sound right either. I looked at him, and he back. A blink. And then he was off, yelling at the IP to follow, down the bridge behind us. The spook vanished.

“What the fuck was that about?” Keener asked.

“They’re lost.” So are we. “Let’s go.”

Again we remounted, and resumed slowly crawling forward, peering at the fuzzy grays and blacks of the dark roadway, the green flicker of the jammer lighting up the inside of the truck. Castleman was radioing to Cougar 13 on the other side of the bridge, coordinating and clearing our approach, when Keener suddenly veered to the right, off the center stripe of the road where we had been driving, and buried the gas pedal, tearing toward the brightening headlights of the awaiting soldiers. I guess we found it.

I quickly looked out my window and down. There it was. A pile of garbage just a little different than every other pile of garbage. A wire looped out of the trash. A rounded metal curve in the otherwise random jumble. A pile of refuse like all the others on every street in this city … except this one contained enough explosives to kill me where I sat. Inches from my door, from my feet and legs and heart. The other piles of trash in this city could contain an IED. This one actually did. The sure proximity was unnerving no matter how many times I endured it. The bomb lay right there, next to me, out my window, waiting.

Keener flipped a U-turn at the end of the bridge and buried us amid the welcoming blanket of the far-side security. I redeployed the robot, grabbed another explosive water bottle, and soon it was working its way toward the pile of trash we had spotted. This side of the bridge was freer of small-arms fire but just as rowdy, a crowd of honking horns and headlights and empty bombed-out apartments looming over us. A dark single-family home with an open mouth lay to our right. I peered into the open door, saw movement, blinked my eyes and shook my head, and it was gone. We needed to clear this IED and be done.

Castleman called out that the robot camera had found our prize. I turned back to the Humvee, and watched through the controller screen as the robotic claw closed on a small two-way radio and started to pull. Motorola 5320? 8530? I’d have to check later, when we wrote the report. Normal setup for the radio bomber who worked in this area was a crude mechanical timer as a safety backup, a nine-volt battery, and a single electric blasting cap. The robot arm lifted and extended, revealing just that: radio connected to battery connected to cap connected to a heavy gray 120-millimeter mortar shell. The Colonel was leaning forward, transfixed, staring at the flat screen, its eerie light iridescent in the deep night. Now to place our explosives, blow everything apart, and get out of here. None too soon.

I went to the back of the truck to prepare our charge for detonation, and instead saw our security trucks, which had been blocking traffic, starting to line up in a convoy formation. To leave. They can’t leave — we’re not done yet.

“Why is our security leaving?” I called to the front of the truck, yelling to make myself heard over the constant diesel din.

Castleman grabbed the radio and had too short of a conversation.

“Cougar 13 says they’ve been fragged to investigate a car bombing in the Kurdish market on the north end of the city,” Castleman yelled back.

“Why are they leaving without us? We’re the ones that do the investigation!”

Castleman laughed.

“Tell them to stop. We’re not done here!”

There was another short pause, and then Castleman started swearing and hitting the radio handset against the side of the Humvee in frustration. My turn, to see if an officer talking sense had more effect.

“Cougar 13 …” I needed a call sign. What number do Army commanders take? “Cougar 13, this is EOD 6. Where are you going?”

“EOD 6, Cougar 13. FOB Warrior TOC has fragged us to Mike Echo 4473 2681. VBIED detonation, over.”

“You are our outer security. You aren’t leaving.”

“EOD 6, Cougar 13. Bayonet 23 is going to handle your security.”

VBIEDs — Vehicle-Borne IEDs, pronounced Vee-Beds — always got the command post excited, thus the urgent change of plans. And Cougar 13’s point made sense; Bayonet 23 came with us, after all. Their swap might even have worked under normal circumstances. Tonight, though, there was a bridge, gunfire, and a still-live IED between us and Bayonet 23. If Cougar 13 left, there would be no one holding off the mobs pressing against the security line on this east end of the bridge. We couldn’t disarm bombs and be riot police at the same time.

“Cougar 13, EOD 6. Negative. You are staying put until we’re done with this one. Then you can take us to the VBIED blast site.”

The radio went quiet for a moment. Follow the TOC’s direction? Or disobey their ops center to follow my order from the field? Tension filled the line.

“I’ll call the FOB Warrior Battle Captain myself on my cell phone and let him know what’s happening,” I added.

That obviously made Cougar 13 feel better.

“Roger that, EOD 6,” came the belated reply.

Being a captain had occasional advantages, and Castleman had not wasted the time I bought him. While I kept us from being abandoned, our robot had placed an explosive-and-water mix near the wires connecting the battery to the blasting cap, and was reloaded back in our truck.

“Fire in the Hole!” Booom! The device came apart and scattered across the bridge, alerting half of Kirkuk to our presence.

The small-arms fire exchanges increased between Bayonet 23 and the gunmen on the near bank as we made the lonely drive back up the bridge to investigate the dismembered device. Quickly pieces and parts were loaded in our truck: a possible fingerprint here, a telltale wire knot there. I grabbed the mortar shell, a massive turkey leg, five pounds of explosives encased in thirty-five pounds of steel, and dumped it unceremoniously in the back of the truck for future disposal. Castleman called on the radio to Bayonet 23, who could now finally cross the bridge, as we quickly lined up and left the angry crowds behind. The Colonel stared out the window.

Off we drove, our little five-truck convoy, through the twitching city, to a smoldering car, a burning market, a pile of bodies, screaming children, and a long, long night.

I read in my hometown newspaper that a local art gallery, the big one at the college, has a new exhibit. It’s an antiwar piece, a mix of media that demonstrates how terrible conflict is. The paper says it’s earnest and powerful and contains Truth. I decide to go.

The room is small. A video plays on the far wall, continuously scrolling a list of names. Names of our dead. Black bags hang on strings from the ceiling, like giant popcorn necklaces, filling half the room. Each bag is supposed to hold the name of a soldier. More names of our dead. There are a lot of bags.

The artist has a narrative posted on the wall, an explanation of the piece. It talks about the moral choice of being a soldier in war. It says soldiers, when confronted with the horrors of war, have to make a choice: To fight or not. To participate or not. Suicide, it says, is the only moral choice.

The Crazy feeling explodes in my chest and makes my head spin. I start to shake.

Maybe it’s right. Maybe I’ve made the wrong choice all along. I know what I did. I know what I wanted to do.

And now it’s caught up with me. I can’t live like this.

Not my whole life. Not the rest of my life like this. With the Crazy.

Something has to change.

It has to end.