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

VI | Kermit

KERMIT DIED IN December, the December after I got back from Kirkuk, the December I didn’t laugh, several Decembers before I went Crazy. Looking back on it now, how our paths bent together, met, and then diverged again, each following the other’s trail in a tragic mirror, I see that there were too many coincidences for Fate to have allowed our relationship to turn out well.

Captain Kermit O. Evans was from the little town of Hollandale in western Mississippi. I never made it to that town for the memorial service, though now I wish I had. I was already going to four funerals and memorial services for Kermit, so I skipped the fifth. I didn’t want to endure a fifth. I was too tired to go. How silly that sounds now.

I met Kermit while he was training to become an EOD technician in Florida and I was rotting away for a month at a useless professional development course for officers, a knife-and-fork school in Montgomery, Alabama. We had dinner at a bad chain restaurant, sat in the bar, and spent the entirety of our mealtime discussion on his new world as a bomb technician. I, the old experienced veteran, passing on wisdom to the new guy.

Kermit and I met because he was taking over command of my EOD unit in New Mexico. Despite my recent firing in Balad, I was being reassigned to Nellis, a bigger unit at a bigger base, in Las Vegas. Kermit was headed to Cannon after finishing up his EOD training, but had come from an engineering job at Nellis previously. We were swapping bases. The officer who saw past my checkered history and pulled the strings to get me the Nellis job also put in a good word to get Kermit a slot at EOD school. Chance and a couple of phone calls brought us to the same town at the same time. He told me places to buy a house in Vegas. I told him when his new unit was headed back to Iraq. Kermit was very earnest and excited. He was always earnest and excited, often to the delight of those around him. I do not delight easily; I saw a naïve black kid who was taking over my job and who had no idea what he was getting himself into.

We ate, I drank a beer, we wished each other well, and our paths, briefly together, diverged once again. But Fate was not done. Fate would lead us back together and tie us in knots, but not on this side of Heaven; that dinner was the first and only time I saw Kermit alive.

I get the call from my boss, the commander of my squadron. It’s on my home phone. Odd, since my commander usually calls on the smart phone given to me for that exact purpose. And it’s late on a Sunday, after dinner. Also odd.

“Do you know a Kermit Evans?” my boss asks.

“Sure. He took over for me at Cannon. He’s in Iraq now, I think, doing that weapons intel job.”

“He’s missing,” my boss says.

“Missing how?” I ask.

“Missing as in his helicopter went down over the Haditha Dam and they can’t find his body. Do you know Perneatha, his wife?”

“No, we’ve never met.”

“Perneatha moved back home to Las Vegas while Kermit went to Iraq,” my boss says. “They live a couple blocks from you. You’re the Family Liaison Officer now — have your blues on and meet me in the morning. We’re going to tell her.”

My boss hangs up. I keep holding the phone.

My wife comes up and asks what’s wrong. “Kermit’s dead, and I’m the FLO,” I say. I’ve never done that before. I have no idea what to expect.

“This may be the most important thing I ever do in the military,” I tell her, and I mean it. I go into the bedroom and iron my uniform. Shoes polished, pants crisp. The story of my last eight years, told in little scraps of colored silk, endlessly straightened until perfect. I shine and shine and shine my Crab.

The next morning I meet my boss, who is also in blues, and we go get the Chaplain. Much discussion takes place about when to go to Perneatha’s house. What time is best to tell a wife her husband is missing? It should not be too early in the morning, or one may rudely wake the wife, or catch her before she has gotten ready for the day. At the same time it can’t be too late in the day. If you wait until noon, the wife will ask what took you so long, especially if it becomes clear her husband has been missing for some time. We go mid-morning. We don’t know what else to do. This feeling pervades.

My boss says he will go in alone, and the Chaplain and I should wait. He doesn’t want to overwhelm Perneatha. This is his job, the notification — we have other jobs later. We park in one of the ubiquitous Las Vegas cul-de-sacs. My boss approaches the door and does the unthinkable. The Chaplain and I wait in the car. The Chaplain makes small talk. He does death all the time. I’m the newbie to this version.

Later the door opens and we go in. Perneatha is sitting on the couch, calm, composed and put together, making phone calls, informing the family. Kermit Junior runs around the house in his diaper, barely a year old and excited by the visitors and entertainment. Perneatha asks questions. Why haven’t they found him yet? Do you think he is dead? What is the chance he is not dead? Can you swim with body armor on? When will we know more? We have no good answers.

Family begins to arrive. Perneatha’s sister lives in Las Vegas as well, and is at the house in a flash. Aunts and women from church arrive soon after. I never do figure out all the relations, but the house fills quickly. With nothing to do but wait for news, a routine sets in. The women cook: greens, chicken, biscuits. Kermit Junior runs around the living room while everyone watches. Perneatha chases him and smiles brave smiles. I sit on the couch. The foot sits in a box in the corner.

We find out later what happened to Kermit. He was based in Baghdad, but was traveling around Iraq, visiting the men and women who worked for him. Out west in Anbar, Kermit had loaded up on a CH-46 to fly to his next FOB. He was last in a line of three guys trying to fly Space A — meaning he would pack on at the end to fill any sliver of open room. On this bird only one seat was available, and the two Marines in front of him wanted to fly together. Kermit noted his good luck and skipped ahead to take the last seat.

After all scheduled passengers were aboard, Kermit was waved on by the flight engineer. When you load in the back of a chopper, you listen to the engineer without question. The bird comes in fast and loud, and you do a quick hot transfer. Two lines of buffeted men and women file out of the back and are dismissively waved to the side. You stand in line, loaded up with your body armor, pack, and weapon, and await the signal from the engineer in the back to move up. Kermit loaded up the same way I did a hundred times: into the back, to the side, file to a jump seat, the bird lifting off in seconds and then hurtling through space over a uniformly tan desert.

Except this time, Kermit’s bird had a problem.

There are always problems when flying, though it is safer than driving. We stuffed our armored Humvees full of every piece of gear and article of faith we could find. C4 and TNT, plus commandeered enemy Semtex and PE4. Blasting caps, electric and non, and time fuze, shock tube, and radio systems to ignite them. Rolls of det cord and water tools of every description: Bottlers, Maxi-candles, EXIT charges, Boot Bangers, and modified Gatorade bottles, snuck out of the chow hall in bulk and surgically altered with a knife and electrical tape to accept a jerry-rigged explosive core. A bomb suit, bang sticks, one or two robots, their controllers, and extra batteries for both. A Barrett.50-cal sniper rifle, extra ammo, extra pistols, frag grenades, smoke grenades, and claymores when we could get them. Food and water for days. Always more water, to drink and for work, and empty bottles to piss in. Mounted between the driver and team chief we put the radio, the GPS, and the jammer, flickering its stream of reassurance.

The superstitious rituals of EOD school melded with resignation to Providence: never change your lucky underwear, never change your lucky pencil, never so much as touch the jammer that brought your ass home every day. I once nearly had to break up a fistfight when the poor contractor stopped by the HAS to swap out our old jammer for a newer model. I made sure the contractor left in peace, his eye unblackened, but only if he took the new jammer with him and promised to never come back.

On the outside of our Humvees we hung more talismans to ward off our fears. Antennas and turret mounts and storage bins for possibly hazardous IED components and pronged front-bumper kits to ram our way through civilian traffic. The infantry went a step further and mounted massive bolt-on armor kits to each door. An armored door already weighed more than two hundred pounds. Now each would be three hundred or more. I said no to the extra kits as well. Our first week at Kirkuk, Price dropped a wheel over the lip of a narrow canal road. The bank gave way and the Humvee slid in sideways, filling with water at the bottom of the sewage-filled channel. Our entire four-man team was trapped; wedged into that tiny box, no one had the strength or leverage to push a two-hundred-pound door open upward. The security team jumped on top of the sinking Humvee, and with three men lifting each door, extricated my brothers. If they had had the bolt-on kits, no amount of extra help would have been enough, and we would have lost four that day.

Steel beasts loaded with kit and dismounts, armored Humvees work better in packs. The trust was sacred between security and EOD team: outside the wire, they protected us from gunfire and grenades and kept us from getting lost; we protected them from IEDs and hidden danger and kept them from getting blown up. Only once did I ever drive alone, separated from our security. Within two klicks of our base at Balad, the FOB a dome of light on the horizon, our security allowed us to drive back on our own from an aborted mission. What could happen so close to home? Driving center of the road as fast as he could, Weston never saw the string of low highway barriers on the double-yellow stripe. It was just past twilight, too light for night-vision goggles and too dark to keep your headlights off, and we drove our armored truck at full speed into the awaiting concrete ram. Twelve thousand pounds of man and machine stopped in an instant. Stationed behind the driver, I flew forward into his seat and surrounding frame. My bifocal NVGs, mounted on my helmet, split in half on impact. Weston was saved when the plate in his vest absorbed the crushing steering wheel against his chest. The Humvee nosed in, and the front tires curled and bent, coming to rest on top of the hood. We were alone, without security, our mount a dead heap on the side of the road, put down through our carelessness. We radioed the FOB for help, and then waited in the dark for relief, guarding that armored truck and the millions of dollars’ worth of classified equipment it contained. At that moment, jumping at every snap and pop and sound of distant gunfire, surrounded by hobgoblins and the shades of gunmen, I swore I’d never leave our convoy escort for any reason ever again.

Flying is safer than driving, but when you’re nothing but helpless baggage, it wears at the nerves. People and cargo are loaded on together and shoehorned into stifling sweatboxes for the duration. Every bird has its quirks. Black Hawks are tiny — ten to twelve seats — and provide a unique intimacy with the side gunners and outside world. The “hurricane seat” on the starboard rear will fill your face with dust and grime, as the downdraft from the overhead rotor ripples and shakes your cheeks. I always begged for the hurricane seat because I had too many vivid memories of baking in Shithooks, Sherpas, and Hercs, desperate for a non-fuel-encrusted whiff of fresh air.

C-130 Hercules cargo planes made the milk run visiting FOBs in Iraq, and were a decent ride if you could get them. I learned to avoid the Aussies; while U.S. Air Force pilots dodge surface-to-air missiles by climbing as high as they can as fast as they can, the suicidal Aussies cling to the landscape to limit the time an enemy has to take aim and fire. The downside: the 150-degree air in the back never cools when you stay a hundred feet from the ground, skimming above the Baghdad palm trees and power lines for thirty minutes, waiting until you hit the outskirts of town and it’s safe to climb.

The Marines are no better, flying at night and in the worst neighborhoods. On approach and landing one night at a postage stamp of an airfield, we started to take incoming fire. This is less obvious than one might think. With no windows or flight plan for reference, the cargo hold becomes a timeless vibrating barrel. The only indication of landing is an odd gravitational sensation as the pilot edges the nose down, banks to the left, points a wing tip toward the airfield below, and begins the corkscrew descent. The shaking increases alarmingly as your back presses into your seat and your heart rises into your throat. The engineers in the tail grab their night-vision goggles and take their positions in the sling seats at the two porthole-like back windows, hands around the flare-ejection triggers, looking for the hot-motor flashes of incoming heat-seeking missiles. Blinding-white flares are the only defense a wallowing C-130 has against smart and agile surface-to-air missiles. Small-arms fire from rifles, the tracers arcing across the sky, is pretty and ignored. They plink ineffectually off the bottom of the plane. Shoulder-fired missiles bring down birds like a Herc, and this is what my Marine flight engineers were searching for that night.

I only knew we were taking missile fire because the engineers began to thumb their buttons furiously, and suddenly daylight shone through their windows, lighting up the entire back of the aircraft. Seconds later we slammed onto the runway, jolted up and forward, and the engines screamed in reverse to bring the bird to an almost immediate stop. The ramp went down, in the middle of the runway where we had come to a halt, and the engineers screamed for everyone to get off. The pilot had called an emergency, audible only in the headsets of the flight crew, and everyone needed to get off the plane. Right. Fucking. Now.

I grabbed my pack and rifle and ran off the plane into the waiting hot night oven. Down the ramp and onto the runway, where the engineers were already ahead of us, not waiting to see if the disoriented passengers could find their way. The airfield was completely blacked out, so as not to provide a tempting target for rocket attacks, but incongruously there was light all over the runway: the flares and flare canisters kicked out of the plane by the engineers as we were only a few feet off the ground had ricocheted, angrily skipping down the tarmac, burning all over the infield. I ran across the concrete and turned to look back at the aircraft, expecting to see engines on fire.

Instead, the pilot threw the emergency engine stop at that moment. The emergency cutoff kills all engine activity immediately, and everything flammable is jettisoned out the back. Like jet fuel. Four Allison AE2100D3 turboprop engines’ worth of jet fuel came showering back, drenching me in liquid soot. I could taste the distinctive nauseating odor of JP-8 on my lips, in my eyes, in my ears. It soaked my uniform and oozed down my rifle like chocolate syrup. I stood on that runway as human tar paper, among the still-burning flares, in the desert night.

I’m sitting with Jimbo in another faceless airport, before dawn, drinking another cup of black coffee, waiting for another flight to I-can’t-remember. Texas? North Carolina? It all blends together. If the city wasn’t printed on the boarding pass, I wouldn’t know where I was going. My life is a bad combination of rental-car shuttles, PowerPoints, identical chain restaurants, jet lag, hotel and airline reward programs, polo shirts, and explosives. The childlike joy of blowing things up is waning, and no longer makes up for the rest of the headaches.

Jimbo and John and Bill and I and the rest of the guys drove to the airport the way we always do: in a convoy, a line of unmarked SUVs and pickup trucks, fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. We use handheld radios to coordinate while we drive, an unbroken column, unconsciously boxing out other drivers, bumper to bumper to keep civilian vehicles from cutting between. The lead truck blocks traffic when we change lanes on the highway, moving over and slowing suddenly to allow the rest of us to pass. Number two truck becomes point, former lead truck takes rear. The last man always runs the red light to stay together.

We never lose a vehicle. We don’t talk about it. We don’t have to.

I take another sip of coffee, look out the window at the awaiting aircraft, and then back over at Jim.

“Hey Jim — you know when you go down the Jetway to get on a plane, and you get that first stuffy whiff of the jet fuel? Do you think of Iraq every time?”

“Sure do, partner,” Jim replies. “Hell, I think of Iraq any time I do anything.”

But either conveyance, the Black Hawk or the C-130, is a blessing compared with the dreaded Chinook, called a Shithook by anyone who has ever flown in the back of one — slower, fatter, uglier, more uncomfortable and less tolerable; the Army cousin to Kermit’s tragically doomed Marine bird. Even routine flights are miserable affairs, with inevitable yet still agonizing delays and hardships. You average one near-death experience per flight, and only some extraordinary bit of luck keeps you alive. It’s a hell of a way to plan a mission. On a good night, you only do something like hit a mountainside, as we did once between Kirkuk and Tikrit. That low ridge of hills has lain between those two cities for thousands of years. Why our pilot flew too low on that dark night, slamming the front of the bird into the hill and throwing us into the air, I’ll never know. The impenetrable blackness of the hazy night out the back ramp was suddenly filled with cliff and rock. I turned to the dirty contractor sitting next to me, pointed, and gave the “Did we really hit the fucking ground?” look. He nodded and shrugged back. What else can you do?

But accidentally hitting something is at least a stimulus, and a welcome relief from the worst rides. On my worst night the Shithook took the same route but stopped at every FOB and tiny airstrip in between. A two-hour trip stretched to twelve. The bird was loaded to capacity: forty-some unlucky Joes on the outside jump seats and three pallets of cargo squeezed down the middle. If you sit up front, you can get a tease of fresh breeze through the hatch past the M60 gunner’s position. If you sit in the very back, you can suck in the main engine exhaust, which is at least moving air. If you are shoehorned in the middle, like me, you have the benefit of smelling all the exhaust but in a completely still bog of hot stale soup. You, your pack on your lap, and your rifle between your legs, all mashed into four cubic feet of space. Dudes on either side press against each hip and shoulder. The cargo pallet comes right up to your seat, so you have to lift your boots when it slides in, for fear of losing a foot. There it stays, eight inches from your nose, for twelve hours. It’s four o’clock in the morning, you’ve been awake for a day and a half, and the air temperature is still well north of 110 degrees. Though you strain to turn your neck, there is little to see beyond indistinct forms and hazy silhouettes in the near darkness. So dehydrated are you that the sweat stopped running down your face hours ago, the only air to breathe is toxic exhaust, and you are vibrating in a tube of pain. If the heat and air don’t make you nauseated, the swaying and shaking will. Don’t worry; the only place to puke is on yourself, since you can’t move anyway. It’s as close to Hell as I can imagine on this earth.

You think about a lot of things on a flight like that. You can do nothing but think. I thought about my rifle. I counted every bullet in every magazine I had. Two hundred forty. I counted the number of motherfuckers trapping me inside that hellcan. I did the math. How many did I have to kill to get off? Twelve, blocking me from the back of the ramp. How many would try to stop me, and how many would try to join me? If the pilot heard shooting, he’d start to land, so the jump out the back might be survivable. My finger moved down to the Safe/Arm switch on my rifle. I could do it. This wasn’t like being trapped on the ramp at O’Hare, a helpless civilian. I had a gun. I could make it all stop. The puking, the vibrating, the mashing. I flipped the switch on the rifle to Single, then to Auto, then back. Safe, Single, Auto, Single, Safe, Single, Auto. I could get off this fucking bird. Single. Safe. Single. Auto. I would do anything to make that flight stop. Single. Safe. Single. Anything. Auto. My thumb started to twitch. Single. I leaned my helmeted head up against the cargo in front of me, and took a noxious breath. Safe. Fuck me.

Kermit’s chopper took off, turned to head out over Lake Qadisiyah behind the Haditha Dam, and immediately encountered trouble. What specific trouble is hard to say. As one might expect, the reports we got immediately after the incident did not match completely with later unclassified published accounts. In addition, any official Marine Corps safety report on the crash is either classified or unavailable. Reconstructing Kermit’s last moments thus involve a mix of foggy memories from blast-shredded minds, educated guesses, and related experience.

What is clear, however, is that the main engine on the CH-46 failed almost immediately after takeoff. One eyewitness says the rear landing gear clipped the top of the dam on the way off the FOB, pitching the helo violently downward along the face of the concrete wall and toward the water. Whether this was a cause or a symptom of later trouble is unclear. In any case, rather than flying over the lake, the helicopter was now nosing toward it. When the motor on a CH-46 starts to shut down, there is no mistaking what is happening. It bucks and whines as the hydraulic pumps suddenly engage and then violently fall in pitch. A passenger hears that sound every time they land and the pilot kills the engine. There is no other sound like it. Hearing it in the air, above a body of water that you are hurtling toward, must have induced heart-bursting terror. Everyone on that bird must have known that the chopper was going down while over the lake.

The flight engineer, who normally mans the machine gun on the aft ramp where you enter and exit, started to evacuate everyone out the back of the aircraft. As the last passenger to board, Kermit was the first to be directed out, jumping into the lake as the chopper struggled. The bird partially recovered, flattening out over the water, and those stuck in the middle of the helo began streaming out the side hatches and gunner’s port. Eventually the pilot and copilot, the last on board, somehow crabbed the damaged bird to the far shore and made a hard landing. Those two in the helicopter and ten of the rear passengers and crew survived with the help of responders who dove in the water to haul out frantic victims. One of those rescue swimmers was Murph, an EOD technician, Kermit’s brother. He searched in the water in vain for the man he had just said good-bye to on the helo ramp moments before. All he ever found was Kermit’s helmet and sunglasses.

Four of the passengers who jumped in the lake — two Marines, an Army Special Forces soldier, and Kermit — were sucked to the bottom by the weight of their gear and drowned.

I’ve imagined that moment in my head countless times. I can’t believe Kermit would have jumped out of the helicopter on his own. As faux cargo, you never get in or out of the chopper unless directed by the engineer. Why didn’t they delay their exit so they had time to remove their bulky armor and weapons? Or abandon the chopper in shallower water, closer to shore? What was Kermit thinking as he jumped, with his pack, rifle, and body armor still strapped on? Did he think he could wiggle out of it? Or was he just desperate to get out of the chopper, as I was over the plains of northern Iraq, and clawing to escape? Was he thinking at all? Did muscle memory take over? Did he know he didn’t stand a chance? Did he know he was going to die?

The ritual was always the same. I put on my body armor first, a vest with attachments and additions, including side plates and ill-fitting shoulder coverings with extra straps. Then the rifle, with a three-point sling. The harness wraps around the left side of your neck, your right shoulder, and under the right armpit before reattaching to the rifle. It is not easy to slip off in normal circumstances; that’s the point. Then a pack on top, shoulder straps on top of rifle sling, rifle sling over body armor closures. In ideal conditions, it takes sixty seconds to put on and thirty seconds to take off. In the water, after having just jumped out of a crashing helicopter, it takes minutes you don’t have.

I’d have been pulled to the bottom under the weight of the life-saving armor. I’d have died with Kermit. When the divers found him in seventeen feet of water, his armored vest was on but open at the front, rifle sling hopelessly tangled about him.

It took a long time to find him, but eventually we get the news at Perneatha’s house. An unrelenting series of memorial services, travel arrangements, and administrative tasks follows. Where is the body? When will it arrive in Delaware at the Air Force morgue? Who is escorting him? Will Kermit make it in time to his funeral? Was he bloated from being in the water, or could we have an open casket for everyone to say good-bye? When is the Las Vegas memorial? The Mississippi memorial? The New Mexico memorial? A wake before the Arlington funeral?

I feel awkward and helpless every day. You enter the house desperate to leave, eager for a task that takes you out again. What do you do for the long hours between news, between plans, between services? Your mind wanders. It’s nearly Christmastime; have to go to the mall to buy the kids Christmas presents. Guilt. Who will buy Kermit Junior Christmas presents? The enormity of the event is overwhelming, and the mind seeks the mundane and familiar routine. You meet a family at the height of tragedy, at the height of their grief, bearing the worst possible news. Do you grieve with them? Is it rude not to? Is it rude of you to try? You don’t share the family’s history. You don’t share their culture. You don’t share their love of Kermit. Kermit was a fellow EOD technician, he is a brother, but he is not my husband, my father, my son. You walk the family through the painful steps of their grief, and then leave their life when only the very worst is over. You have a job to return to. They have a life to put back together. You pledge to keep in touch, but it is tentative. All I am to the family is a reminder of Kermit’s death. All they are to me is the family I could not comfort.

I go home at night and clutch my children, confused and amazed it’s not me lying in a morgue in Delaware.

The first memorial is in Las Vegas, for the friends Kermit had during his time stationed there, for the church Kermit and Perneatha attended, and the family that has flown in to be with her now. It is the first of five such services. In German Catholic Buffalo, where I grew up, you have a wake, a funeral, and coffee at Tim Hortons afterward. No one talks, everyone is fine, and life moves on. Perneatha and her family intend to grieve, in depth, regularly. More awkwardness.

For the Las Vegas memorial, several brothers make the trip from New Mexico. Kermit was their commander. Bill Hailer, Garet Vannes. Brothers I served with for two years during my time at Cannon. The scene comes full circle. I love them, and they love Kermit, and they’re upset, but it feels off, unsettling. In the best of times it’s strange to return to an old unit that you once commanded; “your guys” are no longer yours. Now my guys are mourning a man I don’t really know. Would they have mourned me? I check my rifle. The foot sits in the box. I don’t know why it wasn’t me that fell out of a helicopter behind the Haditha Dam.

I only have a single part to play in the first service, and my part is small: the Last Roll Call and the Final Shot. After the readings, and the pastor’s homily, and the songs, toward the end, you call a final roll call. I am the highest ranking EOD technician, and outranked Kermit, so it is my duty. You call the names of the members of the unit, as you would in any military formation. They respond back that they are present. It is a process that has happened every day in every military unit all over the world for thousands of years, but it takes on a final significance at a service such as this. The roll call is followed by a final shot, a last detonation, in honor of the deceased. It marks the closing chapter of his life as an EOD technician. Explosions mark all the significant events in the life of a bomb tech. Your first shot. Your first day on the bombing range. Your last call in theater. A shot at retirement. A shot at your funeral. How else would the Brotherhood mourn or mark the passing of time? It allows Kermit to rest.

I walk to the front of the base chapel, dress blues ironed, black shoes shined. I am followed by the roll-call formation. The rest of the memorial has been lively, festive even. A life was celebrated. Now the chapel is tempered, unsure. The formation stands in line in front of the altar, facing the assembled, at attention. I come to attention, left face. Absolute quiet fills the nave. I’ve never tried to stand straighter in my life.

“Senior Airman Kory!”

My voice fills the hall. I hear it ring. The response is immediate, full, proud.

“Here, sir!”

“Senior Airman Olguin!”

“Here, sir!”

“Staff Sergeant Leaverton!”

“Here, sir!”

“Technical Sergeant Vannes!”

“Here, sir!”

“Master Sergeant Hailer!”

“Here, sir!”

“Captain Evans!”

Silence.

“Captain Kermit Evans!”

A stifled sob from the front pew.

“Captain Kermit O. Evans!”

The moment hangs. Then, a call from the back of the church.

Fire in the hole!

The Last Shot detonates danger-close. The explosive shock wave strikes the chapel, and the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary erupt and shatter inward. The blast rolls through the church, sunlight streaming in from above my head, and glass shards tinkle like diamond raindrops behind me. None of the brothers moves a muscle.

The December morning of the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery is bright, clear, and cold. My family liaison duties have started to wind down — the family was in Washington and had traveled there without me, Kermit is about to be buried, and there is little left to plan. I drive myself, attend the walk to the grave like anyone else. Arlington has an efficient system of several funerals a day. You are told where to park, where to gather, and when to move on. The crowd for Kermit is many times larger than I thought it would be — the Pentagon emptied of Air Force engineering officers, as it has been decades since one was lost in combat. The Army caisson carrying the casket, drawn by a team of horses, is followed by a parade of blue to the grave site, a brown and green grassy hill with regular dirt mounds, new looking and full of fresh headstones. This is not the shady, restful cemetery of a long-ago conflict. This is the bare, muddy, working cemetery of a country in the midst of war.

The funeral service is efficient and respectful. Flags are presented to Perneatha and Kermit’s parents by the top two-star engineering officer in the Air Force. They play taps and fire a twenty-one-gun salute. The shots ring through your body, snap you awake to the realization that Kermit is about to be lowered into the ground. After the Arlington-organized portion of the funeral, the Masons come out and start over again. Kermit was a Mason, and special rites are now required. The service doubles in length, and the Arlington staff starts to get antsy. This wasn’t in the schedule.

Then Perneatha’s sister gets up to sing, as everyone walks by the casket. I don’t remember any of the words, nor what song she sang. I would not be surprised if she does not remember either. I only remember the emotion, the grief and pure pain, the heartache, the loss. The family’s hurt did not fit the Arlington schedule that day. It took many, many verses to just start to say good-bye.

My wife and I are walking through the airport in Colorado Springs. I’m working at Fort Carson, training another EOD unit for deployment. It’s our fifth job at Fort Carson in three years: more men for the meat grinder.

My wife has been visiting me, taking a break from the kids, trying to reconnect with her Crazy husband. Our Marriage Counselor says we should do things together that we enjoy, start slow by just having fun. It’s not my wife’s fault that we struggle with this; I find little joy in anything.

Still, as we hold hands and walk together, it is clear that she is not looking forward to getting on the plane without me. I’m staring out into space, the Crazy feeling on a low boil, distracted, lost in my thoughts. My rifle hangs at my shoulder.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

“Kermit,” I reply.

Her face betrays her shock. This is clearly not the answer she was expecting. We haven’t talked about Kermit in a year or two.

“Why Kermit?” she asks.

How do I answer that I think about Kermit every day?