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

V | The Day of Six VBIEDs

I DON’T REMEMBER when we realized there were six. Perhaps we should have expected it, after hitting the EFP Factory That Wasn’t the day before. But I was tired, so tired, gorging on coffee from my enormous desert-camouflaged travel mug simply to stay awake, and when the first call came in, I sent off a team like it was any other event, any other bag or suspicious pile of trash along any highway in Iraq.

But it wasn’t. Five minutes later there was another call. And then another. We stepped outside of the HAS, and saw three pillars of black smoke rising from the center of the city. A fourth pillar appeared before we ran inside to answer the phone again. Within fifteen minutes there were six. Six car bombs, attacking locations throughout the city. Later we called it the Day of Six VBIEDs.

Castleman took the first team to the local Patriotic Union of Kurdistan office, the site of the first attack, while I left with the second team five minutes later. Together we leapfrogged from blast site to blast site, from smoke cloud to smoke cloud. Count the bodies, collect the evidence, clear the scene, destroy leftover hazards. Mostly count the bodies.

Ewbank, Mitchell, Crisp, and I headed to the second call, to the Kurdish day care for crippled children. That sounds fake, right? Like I just made that up? Like I picked the stereotype of the most horrific possible target of a suicide car bomb? If only. Just before nine o’clock in the morning, a purple Opel detonated in the outdoor play area after ramming through the mud courtyard wall. We arrived to comb through the aftermath.

There was little to see at the day care. A smoking and charred black skeleton of a car, an engine block thrown through a crumbling home. The screaming crowds that would accompany us the rest of the day were thinning quickly, having already carried off the biggest portions of the victims. Two mangy feral dogs chewed on the little that was left. Four more car bombs to get to. We quickly pressed on.

Jimbo and I are running along the secluded creek-side path, past heaps of winter flotsam, tree-trunk strainers and rocky curves, a gray chilly winter day in eastern Washington. Jimbo and I are civilian trainers together, always on the road, EOD unit to EOD unit, a blur of travel and teaching. I’m running down the Crazy, and Jimbo obliges me as a running partner. But today my knee is screaming, and my lungs are ragged, and I can’t keep up a pace that tamps the Crazy down. So Jimbo runs on ahead, but Ricky is on the trip too, and he hangs back and keeps me moving, even if it’s at a slower gait.

“How far you wanna run today?” Ricky asks.

“I want to go my full six miles. Do a 10K. Can you do it?” I respond, huffing and wincing. My knee won’t stop protesting, but at least the pain fully occupies my mind.

“I’d like to finish the whole thing. I hope we have time,” Ricky answers.

Ricky and I press on, around brown rolling hills and under old abandoned railroads, following the river swollen with the spring thaw. But I’ve developed a limp that is throwing off my stride, no matter how I ignore the pain in the ligament on the outside of my knee. Soon my pace slows again, and Ricky is checking his watch.

“If we’re going to get back in time, before it gets dark, we need to turn around,” Ricky says.

I protest, but he’s right, and reluctantly we turn back toward the hotel. Jimbo catches us on the way back, and we all finish the last leg together as the sunset turns deep purple, the streetlights coming on in bunches. Jimbo ran the full 10K we had mapped out before, and tells us of a waterfall he saw around a bend we never made it to, another mile past where we had to turn around. It sounds great, but Ricky and I never do make it all the way to see it ourselves.

They had already started screaming before we arrived. It continued the entire time we worked. It probably continued after we left.

More than a scream. A high-pitched shriek, and sob, and vomit, and a scream again.

Men usually formed the bulk of the crowds that gathered spontaneously at bombings and attacks, huddled in dress clothes and leather loafers, faces full of concern and suspicion. This crowd was different from the moment we arrived. There was a small group of women across the narrow street from the crater formed by the second car bomb; in their screams they created a din that rivaled any shouts and chants from any male throng I had ever heard. And because there were women, they brought their children, crying an echo of their mothers’ wail. Small children, barefoot in the sewage and blood. And one boy, barely a teenager, who stared at our armored truck as we arrived with overtly hot contempt and hatred. The crowds of men never looked you in the eye, even if you spoke to them. But this boy’s direct gaze burned through the armored glass between us. His eyes never left me, never wavered, never stopped boring through Kevlar and steel and flesh to see what, if anything, lay beneath.

Even the meager trees were blackened by the enormous blast that felled half a city block. Somehow the target, a police colonel and Kurdish commander of the city’s SWAT team, managed to survive. He was still inside his home when the suicide bomber drove the explosive-laden car into his driveway. His bodyguards, who had come that morning to pick him up and take him to work, were standing in the driveway next to the official police vehicle. I never did find much of it. We found the entrails of the bodyguards on the roof of a home a quarter mile away.

The foot didn’t sit in the box. Not yet.

The Iraqi Police who arrived before us made no pretense of holding back the crowds, swelled and frantic, pouring over the scene, collecting pieces of loved ones and already mourning the dead. What evidence could we possibly find in the chaos? My frustration grew as the shell of the suicide bomber’s car was loaded on a tow-truck bed before we had a chance to examine it. Iraqi policemen brought us arms and hands, gesturing and talking hysterically, but with no terp around we understood little. The colonel himself had already left for the main police station to plan a reprisal against the Arab faction that produced the suicide bombers. And through it all, the women never stopped screaming, never stopped chanting, never stopped their piercing clamor.

Why are we even here, I thought, if hundreds have already tromped through, swept up, recovered, snatched, or spirited away whatever tiny shreds of evidence may have been available? Why do I care who the bomber was? Why do I care what explosives he used? What trigger? What car, and where it was stolen from? If they don’t care, why should I?

The boy continued to stare, and the women continued to shriek, and my anger grew with the volume of their grief. Did they think I liked wading knee-deep through their former cousins, sons, brothers, children? Did they not see that I was trying to help? But every move the crowd made set me back another half step, an accumulation of a thousand ingratitudes. The removal of a speck of explosive residue here, the grabbing of the bomber’s license plate there. The mob swarmed like ants anywhere we had to work. Why did they have to make an awful job next to impossible?

And will no one shut these women up! The screams never abated, seared through my earplugs, and branded my brain.

I noted my rifle again, heavy in my hand. I can shut these women up. If no one else will do it, if the Iraqi Police won’t move them on, get them home, then I can stop the screaming.

I put my right thumb on the safety, and my finger on the trigger.

I could do it. There are only, what, five or six? I could kill five or six women to stop the shrieking. It would be worth it, to stop this migraine tearing my skull apart, to stop the mindless wailing and gnashing.

I fantasized about it. My finger got twitchy in anticipation as the adrenaline began to flow. I couldn’t take my eyes off them now, heads modestly veiled, hands covering their wrinkled faces stained with tears. Still the screaming did not stop.

The teenage boy stared through me, and saw nothing inside. I stared back at the women, and flipped my rifle off Safe. I could do this. I am capable of it. I can end this insolent screaming now.

“Come on, Captain, let’s go,” said Ewbank. “There ain’t shit here to find. And anyway, we got another call. They found a car bomb that didn’t go off. Let’s di di mau.”

There are two of me now. The logical one watches the Crazy one.

The Crazy one is living the life. The Crazy one wakes up, and wonders if today I will be Crazy. And the answer is always yes.

The Crazy one dresses the kids, packs lunches, drives them to school. The Crazy one showers, eats, cleans. The Crazy one flies to work, trains soldiers, flies home. The Crazy one sleeps next to my wife, goes to hockey practice, checks math homework. The Crazy one runs and runs and runs. The Crazy one is always Crazy.

But the logical one can step back and observe. The logical one watches, waits, comments. The logical one knows there is another way. Knows that this life is not a life. Knows I used to enjoy things, even some of the things I’m doing now. Knows that there must be a cure for the Crazy. Knows that the Crazy must not always be, simply because it is right now, at this moment. There was a time before the Crazy. The logical one knows there must be a time after.

But the logical one is powerless, trapped, a shade looking over the shoulder of the Crazy one frantically whirling. It can only watch, as my chest fills, and my stomach boils, and my head comes off, and I simply endure from minute to minute.

It took the Kurds just a few minutes to figure out what was going on. But once they did, they started fighting back as ruthlessly as they had for thousands of years. The Kurds and Arabs hate each other more than most can fathom, and the retaliations began before the car-bomb attack had even ended. On the Day of Six VBIEDs, five car bombs went off. One did not. The Kurds shot the sixth driver in the temple as he approached the final target. That failed bomber sat now in the gray Japanese car a hundred yards in front of me, slumped but upright, blood splattered across the interior driver’s window, an intact device under the hatchback ready to blow. A bomb for us to clear, a building and family that would not be destroyed today. It was the only VBIED on the entire tour that we would safe before it detonated.

Mitchell drove the robot down to the car bomb and verified what the Kurds had told us. A dead bomber in the front seat, a suicide switch wrapped around the automatic transmission lever next to the emergency brake, electrical wires running to the car battery, a pile of propane tanks filled with homemade bang, primed with wads of gooey plastic explosives and held together with black electrical tape in the rear cargo compartment.

Crisp and I went to the back of the Humvee to get an explosive tool for the robot to drag down and place under the car. I lit another cigarette; smoking was the least dangerous thing I did all day.

“Which one do you think Ewbank wants?” asked Crisp.

“I guarantee it’ll be the Boot Banger,” I answered.

Sidney Alford, eccentric British inventor and demolitions man, developed the Boot Banger in the mid 1980s to take apart IRA car bombs in Northern Ireland. A boxy briefcase-sized mix of explosives and water, Boot Bangers remove everything from the trunk of a car, usually by turning the vehicle inside out. To the uninitiated a harmless-looking black plastic box, like an overgrown piece of toy luggage, the Boot Banger sandwiched layers of water and explosive to great effect. We had meticulously prepped the tool back at the HAS, carefully slicing the quarter-inch-thick sheets of explosive to fit. All we needed to do was add water and cap in.

The crowd around us predictably began to grow, but this time, instead of a pressing mob or wailing women, our company was AK-47-armed Kurdish peshmerga, tribal militia determined to secure their homes and exact revenge. The radio crackled with a report of multiple black vans of masked gunmen, sporting rocket-propelled grenades, on their way to our location. Our terp had a hurried conversation with the pesh commander, gesturing to the west and north. Soon the gunmen began shouting and running off together toward the heart of the city. Gunfire erupted in the distance, and I never saw a black van.

The robot ripped the suicide switch off the gear shift and then slid the Boot Banger in flat beneath the hatch, on the ground between the pavement and undercarriage. Ewbank popped the initiator, the tool exploded, and propane tanks and detonating cord flew into the air, ripped free by the expelling force of the water jet. In minutes it was safe enough to head down to the car, dismantle the rest of the bomb by hand, and inspect the Kurdish handiwork.

I leaned in the passenger side, collecting pieces of evidence, and examined the body seated behind the steering wheel, still perfectly intact, so focused is the Boot Banger’s effect. The thwarted suicide bomber’s head leaned to the side, covered in a fine layer of dust kicked up from our explosive clearing charge. His eyelashes were dirty; that’s how I knew he was dead. If he were alive, that layer of dust would tickle, and he would have brushed off his eyelids and nose. But the dust had settled and did not irritate. Nothing would spur this fleshbag to move again, even the flies now coming in.

I stared at the hole in his skull. It was dark, empty. His brain had been pushed in, leaked out the exit wound on the other side, and I couldn’t see it from this angle. A black hole in his skull, just above the temple, the diameter of my index finger.

I wanted to put my finger inside of it.

I am alone in my full bed. Alone with the Crazy, in the bed where the spiders crawl out of my head and the ceiling presses down to crush me. Always bubbling, always boiling, always intolerable, the Crazy feeling swells me to bursting again. I’m crawling out of my skin. It’s been three and a half months now. The Crazy hasn’t let up yet.

My wife rolls over and pretends to be asleep. We have gone to bed without speaking. Again. She is wearing a yellow T-shirt as a nightgown, the words “Kirkuk, Iraq” emblazoned across the front in bold black letters. You get a T-shirt for everything now. Running a race. Opening a bank account. Giving blood. Elbowing your neighbor to catch a shot from a pop-gun at a minor-league baseball game. I even have one for fighting the Battle Creek forest fire in South Dakota. A T-shirt for a forest fire. Why not one for fighting a war?

My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.

“How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked.

“He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.”

My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me?

My wife wasn’t prepared to sit and wait for my collapse. She considered it a gift, grace from above, that I got fired and sent home early from Balad. No way I could tempt fate twice and emerge unscathed. Better to consider me dead the day I got on the plane for Kirkuk. Her mental preparation was validated; as far as she could tell, I came home Crazy. She tells me that I didn’t laugh, not once, for an entire year after I got back. Crazy was like dead for her.

I know she’s strong enough to handle it. The girl I met our senior year, straight A’s, future emergency-room nurse, college swim team, was strong enough. Strong enough to deal with my deployments and time away. Strong enough to wait for the knock on the door while watching the carnage on the evening news. Strong enough to deal with a Crazy husband. Strong enough to raise our sons by herself. Strong enough, if called upon, to open the letter I wrote before I left, to be read to our boys if I came home in a bag, explaining why their father went away to die in some city they can’t find on a map. To this day that letter sits in a small safe, inches away from where I now sit and type. It sits in that safe unopened and undiscarded because I don’t remember what I wrote and I can’t bear to look now to find out. But my wife could have done it. She’s strong enough. She’s not scared of the soft sand.

So if she needs to cry herself to sleep next to me in bed, then she just needs to cry. If she needs to not speak, then she will stay silent. If she needs to replan her life to support four sons and a couch-ridden Crazy husband, then she will do what she needs to do. She can hack it. She’s just going to have to. What can I do about it now, lying here in bed alone? I’m Crazy.

Our Marriage Counselor, fat and sweaty, fingers intertwined and resting on the shelf of his enormous stomach, diagnosed the situation.

“Why is the war still in your house?” he huffed. “Get it out of your bed.”

Too late. We are in a bed full of rifles and helicopters and twitching eyes and Kermit’s blue skin and the foot in the box. My wife sleeps next to the shade of a dead man every night.

I sleep alone, with the Crazy. And its gray spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart from the inside out every night as I stare at the ceiling in my solitary bed.

“We should ID this motherfucker. Where are the weapons intel guys?” asked Ewbank.

We had cleared out the last of the physical evidence from the car bomb and were prepping the homemade explosive-filled propane tanks for demolition. Incoming bullets zipped and pinged off our trucks, snicker-snack off the crumbling concrete houses. The dead bomber with the hole in his head still sat in the front seat.

“They’re on another car bomb now with Castleman’s team,” I replied. “Should I call them to get them over here?”

“Nah, we don’t have time. Do we have a fingerprint kit in the truck?” asked Ewbank.

“I don’t think so. Weapons intel has them all.”

“Did we check his wallet at least?”

“Didn’t have one. I bet the Kurds grabbed it before we got here.”

“Well, we need something for this asshole,” said Ewbank, and thought a minute, finger to his lips.

“You guys could cut off his fingers and take them with you,” suggested a voice from above. It was the turret gunner from a nearby security Humvee, obviously eavesdropping on our conversation. The barrel of his short belt-fed machine gun was visibly warm from returning the sporadic incoming fire that had harassed us all afternoon, a faint whisper of smoke slipping from the bore. The kid smiled and looked proud of himself for having such a good idea. Thinking outside of the box.

I considered.

“Probably not a good idea. We don’t have a good way to keep them from rotting on the way to central processing in Baghdad.”

“Yeah, good point. Well, one more unidentified suicide bomber in this world won’t hurt much. Let’s pack up and go,” said Ewbank.

We blew the propane tanks in a nearby field where they wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything. The Kurds must have dragged off the body. I don’t know. We left it and the car where they lay.

Two months later we had a Day of Five VBIEDs. But by that time I was numb, my brain atingle, and I have no memory of it at all.

Terrorism and modern war are only possible in their current form because of the scientific application of high explosives. Poor pale cousins of these dark riders appeared before, but the true potential for human cruelty was only discovered on a grand scale once man could kill tens or hundreds or thousands in one act, rather than take single lives with a spear or a club.

Explosives being the key ingredient in the conflict, it would seem logical that those that neutralize said explosives would play a pivotal role. Such logic, however, is wrong. Most state-employed weapons are designed to detonate immediately at their target, and it is only an unintended consequence that unexploded munitions would be present on the battlefield. Civil War cannonballs, Great War artillery shells and mortars, World War II rockets and flak, Vietnam War anti-aircraft missiles and hand grenades were all meant to kill immediately. It is only when terrorism and modern war are mixed, one side choosing to integrate fear into its strategic plan, that the neutralizer comes to prominence. Because then the bomb technician is not so much a disposer of waste as a bringer of calm, a foil to the fundamental method by which your enemy wishes to wage war.

Twice in modern war has the bomb technician found himself a historic fulcrum. Our first chance we won. The second, we failed before we started.

Nazi Germany swept up the Poles, Belgians, Dutch, and French in a tidal wave that crashed on the high white cliffs of the British Isles. To put another notch in Hitler’s belt, the Luftwaffe needed to defeat two foes: the pesky insects buzzing around the ears of their expansive bomber formations, and the stout hearts of the British people. The first they attacked with Messerschmitts. The second they attacked with fire bombs and V rockets in the Blitz.

Germany knew the factories of Britain, Canada, and the United States would have been able to perpetually provide sufficient airplanes and pilots. Thus the first foe would only fall if the second failed first. The real battle lay with the will of the British people to endure, contingent in large measure on the efforts of the Unexploded Bomb (UXB) brigades.

Not every bomb dropped is going to detonate. Some will malfunction, no matter the precision of the engineering or mechanical specifications. So when German bombs dropped on London neighborhoods but did not detonate, someone had to go clear them. The UXB squads combed through craters and crushed buildings.

Unfortunately, German ingenuity foresaw this eventuality and spotted an opportunity. If a bomb could be dropped with a timer, so that it would hit the ground and not detonate, and by all accounts appear to be a dud, then someone would come to dispose of it. But if the bomb fuze timer was set properly, it could detonate later, surrounded then by men clearing it by hand. The Germans developed such timers in the 1930s, and sold them to Franco’s Spain, where they worked to great effect and delight. This strategy worked the first time in Britain. And probably the second. But soon, the British awoke to the danger, and the bomb technician was born.

Thus a game of cat and mouse developed, each side now fully engaged in the deadly contest before them. British UXB squads learned the inner workings of German timing systems, and disarmed them prior to detonation. German fuze builders then incorporated antitamper features, anti-withdrawal snares, to spoil the new safing methods. The British developed their tactics on the fly, on the battlefield, sending one technician to the bomb with hand tools — hammers, screwdrivers, and hand-crank drills — while the rest of the team stayed back and made meticulous notes. They performed one step at a time, loosened one screw at a time, and detailed each success and failure. If drilling to the left of the fuze caused it to detonate yesterday, then they drilled to the right today, writing a book of procedures to thwart each German re-engineer.

UXB teams cleared the bombs. The fire brigades stopped the inferno. The British people did not yield. The bomb technician gave his full measure, and ultimately shifted the strategic direction of the war.

In Iraq, however, our second opportunity, we saw the challenge before us, and declined to meet it.

As American and British divisions raced over the Kuwaiti border, entering Basra, Kut, and Najaf on the way to Baghdad and beyond, soldiers discovered unguarded and open ammunition bunkers, huge complexes of high-explosive artillery rounds, aircraft bombs, mines, and guided missiles. Instead of securing and destroying those depots, we left them as we found them, moving on to richer targets and swift regime change. In some locations we tested for biological and chemical weapons, finding little other than old rusting hulks, cracked bombs, and hollow rocket warheads. In others, we nabbed the few pieces with technical intelligence value and shipped them back to the United States. Most we left to rot in the open, exposed, vulnerable, not forgotten but simply dismissed as unimportant.

By the end of the year, those ammunition bunkers were empty, stripped clean by Iraqi militants and redistributed for us to dispose of one by one, hidden by the side of the road.

“Let me tell ya something,” the old Chief said to the young officers.

“Are ya ready,” the Chief asked, “because I’m going to blow your fuckin’ minds.”

The Chief had been in EOD longer than I had been alive. I was ready for any insight, any bits of wisdom, as I sat in the nighttime darkness by the man-made lake outside of the Task Force headquarters. A couple of my fellow EOD commanders and I were meeting at the sprawling base west of Baghdad for a little redirection from higher. The Chief was the informal portion of that.

We waited. The Chief considered his dark cigar, held gently in his dark hand.

“IEDs are dope,” the Chief said. “They’re nuthin’ but fuckin’ dope. You think you’re saving the day clearing out that IED? You’re just snatchin’ the user. You think you’re getting ahead taking down the weapons caches? Those are just the sellers. We could wax guys for smokin’ and sellin’ dope for the next thirty years, and there would always be more dope. We could catch ’em bringing it across the border, and there will always be more dope. There is so much dope all over this country, we’ll never find it all. And even if we do, if they still want it, they’ll grow it themselves. That’s the thing about dope. There’s always more.”

We sat in dejected silence for a moment. The Chief took another puff on his cigar, cherry-red tip bright in the desert night.

“Well, then, what do we do?” I asked, for the group.

“You can only do two things,” said the Chief. “The first is to try to get them to not want dope anymore. The problem is, as long as we’re here, everybody wants dope, and they always will.”

“So what’s the second thing, then, if the first won’t work?” I asked.

“Get everybody’s ass home in one motherfuckin’ piece,” the Chief replied, deadly serious. “You gotta take care of everyone and get them home to Mamma. It takes five things to live through Iraq. Luck, training, luck, equipment, and luck. Say your prayers every night before you go to bed, kiss that fuckin’ rosary you got, and maybe we’ll all get home to drink some beer at the fuckin’ strip club before all this shit’s over.”

The first time I met Albietz he was covered in blood. Not his own, but I didn’t know that yet.

Albietz and Meadows and Roy were stuck at Bernstein, a lonely outpost south of Kirkuk. Spartan Bernstein existed to watch over the town of Tuz, a sleepy ville that vacillated between bouts of subsurface tension and extreme violence. As the EOD team there fought boredom and sleep loss in uncertain quantities, I had them come back to the main base every so often for a good meal, a hot shower, and an explosives resupply.

The attack occurred on one such trip. A heavily armed convoy of Humvees doesn’t snake north on the deserted highway from Tuz very often. There is only one wide, main route through the sprawling city of Kirkuk when approaching from the south. There is no way to prevent a solitary spotter down in Tuz from calling his cousin in an IED cell operating up in the city. It is too simple to predict when and where the convoy will pass a certain street corner, chosen for its hidden infiltration and escape routes. It is too easy to cut through our armor with an array of EFPs.

The detonation hit the Humvee directly in front of Albietz, Roy, and Meadows. The front concave plate of each EFP melted into a hot comet of molten copper, a heavy center mass trailing burning globs, morphed by the force of the densely packed explosive propelling it. One dirty slug entered the rear passenger door, cut through three legs, and then splattered and ricocheted inside the compartment of the armored truck.

The EOD team responded first, being the first to see the attack and quickest to the scene. Roy swept for secondary devices that might be lying in wait to kill soldiers providing first aid. Albietz waded into a red wet hell and began to apply tourniquets around thighs, above where knees used to be. The soldier closest to the door lost two legs, the gunner lost one. The femoral artery that runs down the interior of each meaty leg can pump a fire hose of blood when there is a healthy heart of a vibrant twenty-year-old involved. Albietz bathed in it as he worked.

I knew none of this when Meadows, Roy, and Albietz arrived at the HAS, our compound on the FOB. Albietz came in first; silent, pallid, bald head splotchy and brown. I was in the ops center, writing another report, reviewing another report, drinking another cup of coffee to compensate for the late mission the night before. I offhandedly greeted the presence I felt, a brown-and-gray-camouflaged haze in my peripheral vision, without looking up.

Albietz said nothing. He stumbled a bit at the front of the desk.

Griffin noticed something was wrong first. He jumped up from the ops center where he was working, waiting for a call, and grabbed Albietz as he started to sway. I finally looked up to see Albietz reaching for the wall to steady himself, still girded in his body armor, leaning on his rifle. He was not camouflaged in brown and gray. He was camouflaged in gray but drenched in blood now dried brown, splattered across his vest, arms, face. Only deep white patches around his eyes were spared, where his sunglasses had caught the spray instead.

I went with another crew to check out the Humvee that had been hit. It had been towed to the FOB motor pool, and was awaiting our inspection. Blood still pooled in the foot well of the backseat; it hadn’t yet evaporated in the desert heat. The telltale copper of the EFP slug plated the mouth of the Humvee’s entrance wound and was flecked around the interior of the cab, embedded in the back wall, around the gunner’s harness and port. The mortuary team hadn’t made it to the Humvee yet; there was still a boot containing its proper appendage tossed in one corner. I closed the door and left after only a moment or two. There was nothing else to learn here, and I couldn’t take the smell.

I didn’t know Albietz before that day, before I met him for the first time covered in blood that wasn’t his. I hugged him and put him in the shower, unable to do anything more.

The naïve excitement of combat lasted little longer than a month. Every day I tried to appreciate living my dream, and every day I failed. The exhaustion set in, and I walked through the war in a haze.

Up too early in the morning, after a restless night of fever dreams, phone calls, and rockets impacting the base. Cold cereal at my plywood desk, in front of my computer, catching up on intelligence reports that came in overnight. And then the wait for a call: a mission, an assault, a car-bomb detonation in the city, the news that someone died. The mission comes, you go and return, and then the waiting resumes.

The lunches melded into dinners that all tasted the same. The days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. They became a blur of cigarettes and explosions, situation-report deadlines and bloody pieces of children, bone-weary exhaustion and black, black coffee.

And in relief, shoehorned awkwardly in between, phone calls once a week home to my wife to chat, about a son’s failed math test, a child’s anxiety at day care. Her voice was clipped and short. Because she was sick of being lonely, sick of my being gone? Or because she had finally given up and found someone else to warm her bed?

Don’t be scared of the soft sand! This is where I want to be. This is where I need to be. I chose this. Love it! Appreciate it! You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

How do you appreciate dismantled children?

The war didn’t pause for an answer.

“Can you believe they pay us to drive around this country and blow things up? It’s like the whole place is one giant demolitions range!” gushed Hodge, newly arrived and fresh off the plane, at the chow hall one afternoon, over a lunch of ash and ice cream. His buzz hadn’t worn off yet.

“Yes, I can,” answered Keener. He lost his buzz the first time he stepped in something human, and couldn’t tell what it was.

“Let’s go before the afternoon VBIEDs,” I mumbled. We picked up our trays, dropped them with the dishwashers, and, walking outside, watched smoke rise from downtown in the distance. The call would come in before we got back to our compound.

I am sitting in my Old Counselor’s tiny office at the VA hospital in Buffalo. She looks sad. And concerned. She always looks concerned.

I’ve just related how the Crazy feeling expands when I stand in line at McDonald’s. And in airports. Definitely alone in airports. In an unknown crowd, the need to move away.…

The Crazy feeling hasn’t stopped since that day, the day I went Crazy. It’s been four months now. It never gets better; it never goes away. But it does get worse.

My Old Counselor is scribbling on her pad as I am telling the story of trying to get some lunch while out on the road on a job in Texas. “Triggers,” she writes on the off-green top-bound spiral legal pad. What does “triggers” mean? I doubt she is talking about the one on the rifle I have strapped to my chest, snugged up tight to my right shoulder.

“I wasn’t sure before,” she says, “but I am now.”

“What are you sure of?” I ask. I fidget with my flip-flops. I have a bad feeling I know the answer.

“You have PTSD,” she says.

Fuck. I am Crazy.