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

VII | GUU-5/P

THE THING is, when you think you’re Crazy, you don’t always know that Crazy is the problem. Or that Crazy is what you should call it. At least not at first. Some guys are just angry all the time. Some get spooked and nervous. I thought I had had a heart attack.

What else do you think when you have pain in your left shoulder, and tightness in your chest, and feel like your heart is going to explode? The first time, when it starts with the pain on the left side, you wonder if you slept wrong or lifted too much weight at the gym. Then you realize just thinking about whether it’s a heart attack makes it worse, your heart beating faster and faster the more you analyze. So you tell yourself that you’re fine, not to be a hypochondriac, and move on with life.

But then it continues, the pain in the front left side and the back, and your wife gets nervous and tells you to go in to the emergency room at the VA hospital. So you do, and you get hooked up to the machines and have blood drawn, and after a couple of hours the doctor comes in to say you should just chill out and relax, like it’s as easy as sitting in a chair and tuning out the kids and ignoring the foot in the box and reading a book and all your heart problems will go away.

Maybe the pain goes away for a while. Maybe other odd sensations come and go. A tightness in the neck. A pain in the jaw. A twitch of the eye. Always a twitch of the eye. Little symptoms, coming and going. How do you describe a gurgling that just feels wrong? Nothing specific — the aches and pains of getting old, you say, though your twenties are barely behind you.

Months pass, but then you have that day. Everyone has a day. My day was walking with my aunt through the Pearl District on the west side of Portland, Oregon. I stepped off the curb normal. When my right foot hit the pavement I was Crazy.

That odd combination of twinges, the unspecific aches, the random symptoms that sent you to the doctor over the years, suddenly combine in one overwhelming explosion. My chest flooded with emotional helium. It filled with an oppressive, overpowering distraction that pushed every rational thought from my head. Arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder, gut to neck, I blew up like a balloon. Not with pain, but with unnameable discomfort, a feeling — what feeling? — that demanded attention. I tried to ignore it. It sucked my brain of thoughts. I carried on with the day, but it intruded constantly. I slept, woke up, and it was there. It persisted, for a day, three days, a week. The feeling is intolerable. The persistence is intolerable.

A flight home, and on the plane I rocked and fidgeted as adrenaline bubbled and brewed. The more I thought about the feeling, the Crazy feeling, though I didn’t know to call it that yet, the more it pervaded my every thought. My heart sped up, stopped, skipped, and pounded. I twitched and swelled all the way across the country. By that evening, I was back in the VA emergency room for a heart attack, throwing triple premature ventricular complexes on the beeping computerized heart monitor several times a minute.

But no heart attack had occurred. And the longer I lay in the emergency room, the younger and healthier I looked to the doctors and nurses, otherwise surrounded on that early Sunday morning by ailing drunks and lonely addicts.

“Go home and get some rest,” they said.

“But what’s wrong with me? Something is not right.” On the monitor, my heart stopped for a moment to emphasize my point.

So the workups and testing and appointments began, stretching over the next month. An ECG that proved every vessel in my heart was opening and closing as it should. A stress test and take-home monitor that proved my heart was as fit as a teenager’s. A blood test and fecal smear that declared I needed to get out in the sun more, but little else. Every test eliminated the worst physical possibilities. I had run out of doctor’s appointments, and still the feeling persisted, three months on. Which left me one option.

It’s all in your head.

But it was all in my chest.

Which meant I was Crazy.

Castleman was a reservist, a part-time EOD technician, and back home in Minnesota he was a full-time civilian firefighter. He said once a fire is waist high, you aren’t going to extinguish it by hand. It just needs to burn itself out, or be sprayed with water by professionals from a fire truck.

We didn’t have a fire truck. But we did have a shoulder-high fire, once we detonated the cache of old anti-aircraft rounds.

Twelve years of American aerial bombardment had taught Saddam to love anti-aircraft guns, ineffective though they were. He had them spread liberally throughout the country, in oil fields, cities, and open spaces. They decorated the countryside like lost and forgotten lawn ornaments, in various states of dry-rotting disrepair, random barrels sprouting from unlikely draws and pastures.

These anti-aircraft rounds were small, rusting, discarded. Left behind after the 57-millimeter gun itself had long been disassembled and sold for scrap. They were covered with dirt in a shallow hole in the middle of a farmer’s field. The farmer knew they were there; he had plowed around them, probably for years. But now we had found them, and unfortunately could not ignore them. They were too dangerous to move and too dangerous to leave. It was quite unlikely they would be used in any IED, but you had to be sure. We had seen improvised grenades made out of 57s before — you just had to stick a simple fuze in the front end.

We knew there would be a fire before we blew them. There wasn’t much helping it. The wind caught the flames right away and whipped the wheat field into a frenzy, blowing toward the primeval mud-walled village a couple of acres away. There was an irrigation ditch running in between, so it probably wouldn’t spread. Probably. There was nothing we could do, so we left.

I never heard if our fire spread. Trey’s certainly did. Two weeks later, when he blew a cordless-telephone/mortar combo on the side of a different road far west of Kirkuk, a spark snared the nearby wheat field, almost ripe with the winter crop. His fire didn’t burn down the village, but it did destroy the entire harvest.

We didn’t go to that village much before the fire, but we were back regularly afterward. The town rioted, and with no Americans available to slake their thirst for reprisal, the mob attacked the only symbol of governmental control available, storming their local Iraqi Police substation, killing everyone with a uniform inside. They hung the bodies in makeshift gibbets from the roof, and formed their own militia to guard the village from the attack they knew was coming.

The brigade did an air-assault mission with Shithooks and Black Hawks, prickly porcupines of rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers, to retake the village. We didn’t destroy the village to save the village, but we came close. We eliminated the militia and moved new Iraqi Police back in. But there were IEDs on the roads leading to the town, with additional secondary hidden booby traps to kill the responding bomb technicians, for the rest of our tour.

“Maybe we should try not to burn down any more fields,” I mentioned at dinner one night after the operation to re-seize the town.

“Maybe they shouldn’t put out IEDs in the first place,” was the unanimous reply.

When we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army and Marine Corps still fielded the M16A2, a gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed, shoulder-fired rifle, as the primary weapon of many dismounts (soldiers operating on foot). The A2 was a variation on the Colt M16 famously first introduced in Vietnam. Although the internal mechanisms were updated, new NATO-compatible barrels installed, and open rear iron sights reconfigured with dials and compensators, it remained, to the uninitiated, basically the same weapon.

War, the true mother of invention, changed the rifle significantly. The M4, long in development and short on fielding, was widely introduced soon after the initial invasion. It was shorter and lighter, but still shot a single round or a three-round burst. Much to the delight of gear-loving soldiers, the M4 also had tons of external rails to bolt on extra equipment, such as optical sights, laser designators, and flashlights. The M16 was a long rifle, designed to kill targets several hundred meters away. The M4 was designed for urban combat, where size and weight are at a premium, and the enemy is much closer.

As an Air Force dismount, a term which would make no sense to those in charge, flying the planes, I carried the GUU-5/P, a Frankenstein of a weapon. The upper receiver, the top half of the weapon that carries the bolt assembly and contains the chamber, hailed from a first-production M16 from the early 1960s, slick with no forward assist and possessing a fully integral solid carrying handle on top. The lower receiver was hijacked from an M16A1, complete with fully auto trigger assembly. The collapsible stock came from a GAL-5 used by helicopter crews in Vietnam, and could cinch up quite small. The barrel was the newest portion, recently installed to comply with NATO regulations. We swapped out the hand grips on the barrel and bolted on after-market rail systems so we could mount laser sights, front pistol grips, and SureFires. Even after the modifications it was still shorter than an M4, but as loose as an old jalopy and in need of as much maintenance to keep it operational. Even the lowliest Fobbit — an Army soldier who never had a reason to leave the FOB — carried a shiny, never-used M4 to the chow hall every day, while we endlessly cleaned and resighted our antiques, twice the age of most of my brothers.

It was safe behind the wire, in the HAS, so we kept our rifles lined up on the gun rack right outside the door to the ops center. Grabbing your rifle meant it was time to go to work. It went on right after the body armor and stayed on, held tightly in place via slings and clips, pistol grip high. While outside the wire, conducting business, your right hand stayed nearly affixed to that grip, ready for use, all the time, until, with a sigh of relief, you shed the rifle at the HAS door upon return.

My rifle means it’s time to do a job. It’s time to focus, to observe, to stalk, to prepare, to react, to be ready for that constant song: incoming fire. If gunshots per IED call were a batting average, we’d win the Major League title every year. Potshots while driving through town ringing off the side of your truck. Zips and pings while crouched behind your Humvee, building an explosive charge with a cigarette hanging from your mouth and the robot ready to tear downrange. Single shots from a sniper in the center of Hawija. A sustained firefight while clearing a bridge. The soft breath of a stripper blowing on your neck, on the edge of your ear, a tingle across the very surface of your skin, then an answering shout from the.50-cal machine gun mounted on the security Humvee next to you. Gunfire in the distance. Gunfire in ambush. Gunfire to sing you to sleep.

The first time someone tried to kill me, I experienced a predictable flood of emotions. Fear. Anger. Worry for my brothers. I was not expecting to be confused. Why would they be trying to kill me, I thought. Don’t they know it’s me! That I have a wife and children? A mother who loves me and a house with a mortgage and a master’s degree I haven’t finished yet and plans to hike the Appalachian Trail someday with an old friend from Tennessee? If they only knew all that, they wouldn’t try to kill me. They’d know it’s me they were trying to kill, and they’d stop. They’d understand their mistake.

But they don’t stop. They don’t care, and soon you don’t care, as confusion is swallowed by anger and purpose and an insatiable drive to complete the mission. And the robot clears the path under duress, and the car detonates, and the team downrange is extracted, and the town is seized and the EFP factory is turned over, and the more you are shot at the angrier and more determined you are. To go home. Everyone goes home. Fuck this place.

None of that changes one basic truth, however.

Every moment you are being shot at you are blissfully, consciously, wonderfully, tangibly alive in the most basic visceral way imaginable.

The pictures were grainy, taken with a cell-phone camera. Small, distorted, out of proportion a bit. The pillar and side-view mirror of the tan Suburban truck were also visible in a couple of them.

These guys actually drove down that street in a Suburban and took pictures of this place, I thought. Shit, they’re crazier than us.

The pictures were grainy, but they were also unmistakable. Row upon row of EFP casings. Thousands of them. A line of straining baby-bird mouths, hungry maws reaching up and open, waiting to be packed with plastic Semtex. Waiting to be fitted with their copper-plate lenses. Waiting to be capped and riveted and strung up with det cord. Waiting to be encased in foam and hidden on the road. Waiting to be used on us.

Or waiting for us to come seize them first.

The raid was going to be big. Company sized, the largest operation our infantry brigade had undertaken in several months. A full perimeter of Humvees and armored trucks around fifteen square blocks in the southern industrial section of Kirkuk. A second infil with Shithooks and Black Hawks to seize several objectives. Buzzing Kiowas to monitor for anyone fleeing the scene and seeking to escape. And then us, and K9 dog handlers, and the spooks and special investigators to turn over each site once they were secure.

We didn’t warn the Iraqi Army of the event, or ask for their assistance either; too easy for a mole to tip off the locals. For once, we wanted to surprise a known IED construction cell, actually catch someone before we bled. When the intel had come in I’d leaped out of my skin. The brigade was more sedate; they had been here longer, seen more, were more wary. For a week I begged them to do this op. I was sick of defense. Let’s go on offense. The brigade eventually agreed. The opportunity for decisive success was too great to pass up.

“What do you think we’ll find?” I asked Castleman as we loaded gear and grabbed our rifles, getting ready for the assault. I check my kit twice before every mission, but this was a big op, and we expected trouble. So I unloaded every rifle mag, checked the spring, and reloaded it with a mix of tracers and ball. I did the same with my pistol mags. I replaced my optical rifle-sight batteries, ensured that the rosary was in its pouch on my vest, and then checked everything from top to bottom a third time.

“We’ll be lucky if those casings are still there by the time we arrive. They always seem to know we’re coming,” answered Castleman.

“There might be other stuff, though,” I countered. “Lathes. Presses. Bang. Rivets. Forms to set the copper plates into the packed sleeves?”

“We’ll see,” said Castleman to no one in particular.

We arrived in the third wave to a scene of chaos, a swarm of dismounts and crowds of young men, half-dressed children splashing in muddy potholes, more oil than water, and helicopters making passes dizzyingly close to the ground. We pulled off the main highway into a tangled nest of car-repair joints, machine shops, and scrappers. The sun beat down relentlessly on the washed-out, crumbling concrete cells that passed for commercial storefronts. The narrow open bays faced each other across the dirty half-paved streets in a line, occasionally broken by alleyways that led to ramshackle sheet-metal slums. Your standard Third World paradise, in other words, dressed up with the occasional meager palm tree.

Our area to search was massive and time was limited by the mortar and rocket attacks soon to follow any U.S. action of this size. Our EOD team split up, I grabbed a spook to act as an extra shooter in case I got in a bind, and we made for the first automobile-repair place. On the way in we passed the previous occupants of the shops, a line of young men in polo shirts and loose pants, now sitting flex-cuffed and forgotten, left to bake in the midday sun.

It must be human nature to hoard when poor. Hovels in rat-infested slums the world over are humble on the outside but claustrophobia inducing on the inside, cramped and suffocated with all manner of junk and debris. Nuts and bolts and hand tools and jugs of grease and oil littered the floor. In one corner, a rickety frame and a chain system to hang engines. And then, behind a pile of discarded indiscernible automobile parts, a line of cylinder casings, neatly stacked and organized. But these were rusted, moldy, the wrong diameter, and too tall. They didn’t match the evidence we had collected from previous post-attack investigations. These weren’t right for the EFPs we had seen in the area at all. There must be another stash. Plus, no explosives. No lathes and presses. No top plates. No rivets. I moved on.

The next shop was the same. And the next. Endless heaps of tools and scrap metal. Open drains on the floor to collect piss and spent oil. The occasional pile of cylinder sleeves, but all ragged and worn out. My blood pressure jumped in one shop when I came upon a poster of New York City tacked to a wall. A cartoon tourist map you would find in a million tchotchke shops in southern Manhattan, several years old, as it still had the intact World Trade Center, noted as a tourist destination. But this wasn’t intel, evidence of some new terrorist plot. It was decoration to brighten an otherwise hopelessly dank cellar.

I stepped outside into the brilliant sunshine and was momentarily blinded, so bright was the sun compared to the unlit work areas. I left to check in with others’ results.

A terp dragged a flex-cuffed man through the alley from behind one of the engine bays and back into the center of the street. His head hung as the terp pulled him by the collar. I could see that both of his eyes were swollen shut, and he bled from his nose and mouth into the open gutter on the curb. From behind the shop, the sounds of additional interrogations echoed down the block, an object lesson to future subjects still bound and lined up in the sun outside on the street. I approached the terp.

“Did he say where the EFPs are hidden? Or where they are making them?” I asked.

“He says he knows nothing about EFPs,” said the Kurdish terp in highly accented English. “But you must understand, sir, that he is an Arab, and therefore, a liar. You cannot believe anything he says.”

I shook my head, and the terp noticed that I was about to leave. He reached out and grabbed my arm as I was turning away.

“But do not worry, sir,” the Kurd said. “You can not believe him, but we will keep asking him questions anyway.”

Castleman, Keener, and I leapfrogged from shop to shop, across the street and back again, down alleyways and on rooftops, exposed to a sniper’s whim. The alarm clock in my head was ticking; we had spent too much time on-scene already. I dug through endless mounds of discarded scrap and poorly patched and mismatched power tools. In one shop we spotted a pile of slightly different casings — spun clean, shiny, new, and wrong. These weren’t the casings we had seen on previous EFPs either. Nothing was right.

In the last shop on the block we found a stack of cylinder sleeves from floor to ceiling, marshaled six deep and twelve high. This was the cache from the grainy picture. The mother lode. What we had been sent to find.

And they were the same wrong cylinder sleeves we had found everywhere else.

I stepped outside and considered the scene again, hand on my rifle as gunfire awoke on the edge of town. The more shops we entered, the more the supposedly suspicious EFP casings looked like old rusting cylinder sleeves, waiting to be spun and milled clean to refit fresh piston assemblies, recycled parts for rebuilt engines. The more the nuts and bolts looked like nuts and bolts. The more the tools and dies looked like tools and dies. The more the machine shops looked like machine shops.

This wasn’t an EFP factory.

“There’s nothing here,” I yelled over to Castleman in the next greasy stall.

“I agree,” he responded. “I haven’t seen a single scrap of bang or det cord or anything I’d call a trigger or an initiator. Just a bunch of rusty cylinder sleeves and a pile of shit.”

“I found a mold for a drill press we can take.” It was at the bottom of a pile of hand tools, with no drill press in sight. But it was flat on the top, non-mold end, and so could take a hammer as well.

“It’s the only thing remotely suspicious,” I said. “It’s almost the right size. We’ll see if they can randomly match it to anything at headquarters in Baghdad.”

“What about all these sleeves we came for?” Castleman asked.

The rattle of incoming small arms echoed, still in the distance but moving steadily closer. I didn’t want to stick around for the mortars.

“We’re not blowing up four city blocks to get rid of a bunch of rusting engine parts from semi trucks, and we don’t have the room to take them. They stay. This op was a waste.”

Rounds were plinking off the Humvee by the time we had remounted and rounded up our escort security. We pulled away, leaving broken noses, swollen eyes, sore wrists, sunburns, and a smoldering resentment that seeped into the cracks and crannies of the surrounding neighborhood, a pall that hung like an ill fog.

When we arrived back at the FOB I went directly to the brigade ops center to provide a report on what we didn’t find. There was little need; word had obviously already made it back. The Battle Captain met me in the hallway, red-faced and livid.

“I can’t believe you left everything!” he practically screamed. “We had intel that those sleeves were being made into EFPs. We sent you there to seize them. What part didn’t you understand?”

“What would you have had me do? Call for ten dump trucks and load them with every cylinder sleeve from every shop on the block? They have every right to fix engines in an engine shop! This is their livelihood!”

The Battle Captain was adamant.

“You have the blood of soldiers on your hands,” he said, and the conversation was over.

I am at home, sitting on the landing on the second floor, staring down the narrow, quiet flight of stairs below me. My new son is sleeping in his crib in his blue room behind me. He is three days old. Tiny and pink and perfect. And helpless. Totally helpless. Someone could wring him like a rag and pull him limb from limb. Someone could pinch a little skin on his fat belly, twist and tear, and gut him like a shot duck. They could shake him until his head tore from his neck.

The Crazy stirs, and shows its spidery head.

That can’t happen. I won’t let it happen. No one will kill my son.

So I sit at the top of the stairs, with my rifle, and wait. I have picked a good spot. The narrow staircase has created a funnel, a choke point, where I can kill anyone coming up to the second floor.

My son is defenseless so I will defend him. I sit, and wait, and finger my rifle, and watch, all night.

The doctor wasn’t helpful. He looked in the glass jar at the smashed scorpion, three inches long and translucent, and frowned.

“Well, it’s either the kind that rots your skin off, or the kind that kills you,” he said.

Twenty minutes earlier, turning off the water to the dribbling shower, I had thrown my towel around my shoulders to dry off. A shooting pain in my elbow. Another along my ribs. I jumped and shook and the scorpion fell out of a fold in the drab brown terry cloth. I smeared that scorpion on the wet plastic shower floor with my flip-flopped foot, grabbed the remains for evidence, and trotted back into the HAS still dripping wet. Pants and a shirt went on in a rush, and Griffin drove me to the FOB medical clinic moments later, the sting wounds growing a swollen red.

“Well, that sounds bad,” I told the doc. “Can I get some meds?”

“Oh, we don’t have the antivenom up here in Kirkuk,” the doc replied with a wave of his hand. “And if we medevaced you on a bird now and it’s the kind that kills you, you’ll be dead before you got to Baghdad anyway. Do you know how hard it is to intubate in the back of a Black Hawk? Just go to your room and come back if you feel worse.”

I told Griffin the verdict as we returned to the HAS. I wandered through the front blast doors, under the shady protective concrete canopy, in a daze.

“I’m going to go rack out,” I told Griffin. “Please keep an eye on me. Just stop by every so often to see if I’m still breathing.”

“Don’t worry,” Griffin said. “If you die in your sleep, we won’t tell anyone. We’ll take you out on a call and blow you up. You’ll go out the right way.”

I walk into my Old Counselor’s office on the first floor of the Buffalo VA Hospital. But she’s not my Old Counselor yet.

I’ve been in the VA a lot lately. Chest pain, blood draws, stress tests, EKGs, eye twitches, emergency-room runs for irregular heartbeats. Nothing for being Crazy. But I didn’t know I was Crazy yet.

“Hi, I’m Brian. I’m checking in,” I say to the middle-aged woman at the front counter.

“And what are you here for?” she asks.

“I have an appointment here but I don’t know why,” I answer. “It was made for me after my last ER visit a couple weeks ago.”

“I see. Have a seat.”

And I do. But the room doesn’t feel right, and the Crazy feeling is gnawing at my heart.

My Old Counselor comes out to meet me, and beckons me into a closet-sized side room containing a foot in a box, two chairs, and a table. We sit.

“Do you know why you’re here?” my Old Counselor asks. But she isn’t my Old Counselor yet.

“I guess I’ve been using the ER too much?” I joke, and finger my rifle, and the Crazy jumps into my throat.

“Well, Brian, we just want to make sure everything is okay with you,” my Old Counselor responds softly. “It can be really hard to transition back home, and everyone has their own challenges. I wanted to know if there was anything you wanted to talk about.”

Gurgle. Swell. Twitch.

“Why would I need to talk about anything?”

I’ve figured out how I’m going to strap a pistol to the center console of our family’s minivan. It can sit at my right knee, a modified old 9-millimeter drop holster bolted to the plastic next to the radio and cup holders. Discreet, out of the way, the grip angled up and ready for my right hand when needed. One thumb flick on a strap and it releases, heavy and comfortable and safe.

I need to get the pistol ready because I drive the minivan often, the kids to and from school every day, to the grocery store, the VA hospital. It is nearly impossible to shoot a rifle one-handed and drive at the same time. But with a pistol, I can either shoot out the lowered driver’s window or, in an emergency, through the front windshield.

Reloading is tricky, as I drive with my left hand, but I have developed a work-around. In the back of my armored Humvee I kept a magazine pouch — six pistol mags and six rifle — strapped to the crossbar behind the driver’s seat directly in front of me. Reaching forward to reload is already ingrained in my training. So if I find some heavy-duty Velcro tape I can put strips of the furry part on the very top of the dashboard, just to the right of the speedometer display. I’ll then attach the bristly partner tape to the bottom of each pistol magazine. Then I can line up a couple of pistol mags, standing straight up, right in front of me and ready to go. When I need to reload, while still driving with my left hand, I can release the spent magazine with my right thumb, let it drop away into my lap, and slam the open grip of the pistol on the awaiting fresh magazine on the dashboard. With another thumb reach to the slider-release lever, the upper rail of the pistol slams forward, locks in the mag, round in the chamber, hammer back, and I’ll be ready to fire again.

I’ve practiced a couple of times in my basement at home, and I can change magazines now without looking. The trick is to make sure the new magazine is fully seated in the pistol and clicks, so when you lift and pull it from its heavy Velcro latch, it doesn’t fall out.

“You need to talk, Brian, because everyone needs to talk,” my Old Counselor says.

She smiles weakly at me, her face lined and motherly, graying black hair and a soothing slump to her shoulders. The Crazy is boiling in my chest, and my hands shake, and I look down to see my foot bouncing on the floor.

“I have this feeling,” I start. I don’t tell her it’s the Crazy feeling. Not yet. “It feels like my chest is swollen and my heart is going to burst. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what causes it. But I can’t stop it. And I can’t control it. It’s intolerable, and it’s the only thing I can think about.”

“Are you nervous? Or stressed?” my Old Counselor asks.

“No, that doesn’t sound right. I’m not worried, and no deadline at work ever compares with combat.”

“So why are you afraid?” she asks.

I laugh a stifled, uncomfortable laugh. My eye twitches. My heart gurgles.

“I don’t spend a lot of time being afraid.” Don’t be scared of the soft sand. I chose this. I got to go back. I got everything I wanted. Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

“What are you afraid of?” my Old Counselor presses.

I run up the hill, through the dust cloud, through the helicopter rotor wash, past the screaming women, through the piles of bodies discarded from countless car bombs, vest on, rifle in hand, ready, ready. But I can’t run far enough away. I can’t run fast enough to escape her question. Still I sit, in my Old Counselor’s tiny office for the first time, the helium balloon in my rib cage about to explode.

“I’m scared of ending up like Ricky.”

After that I tell her about Ricky. How we usually run together, and how he visits when he can. I go back the next week, and do the same thing all over again. And the week after that. And the week after that. Appointments pile on top of each other in a blur. Weeks become months, the winter becomes summer, the Crazy feeling endures, and still I cry in my Old Counselor’s office until my grief and fear and detachment from the world has a name and a face.

Everyone poses with their rifles. Go online and search for it, or open any hardcover book on a recent conflict to the center section where they keep the photos, and you’ll see. A line of young men, in vests and gear, helmets on or off, posing in front of a helicopter, or a statue of the disposed leader, or a blast wall, or a mountainside. The backgrounds vary. The faces are nearly identical; dirty smiles and short hair, average builds and day-old stubble. But one thing never changes. They always have their rifles. Hands on the grip, wrists bent, barrels down, cinched and tight on a sling or a retention strap.

You see the same pose struck in the background of photos of heads of state from the Third World. As the president-for-life moves from helicopter to armored car, or makes a speech in front of a blown-up building, they are there. Men with rifles, sunglasses, armored vests, short-sleeved shirts, khaki cargo pants, baseball caps. It’s the uniform of the American mercenary force of the twenty-first century, a group in which I now unexpectedly find myself. I conduct training, others still do the job. No matter. We call ourselves — active military and former alike — by various names: operators, trigger-pullers, door-kickers, knuckle-draggers. All have the same rifle, in the same position, gloved hand on the grip, bent wrist, barrel down. All have the same look. The look of men who are willing to do things, have done things, are planning to do things, violent or extreme things that most do not contemplate. It is the willingness, the attitude, the consideration that matters. That is the important part.

Others have the look. I can see their rifles now too. Faded black-and-white plates from the days of Antarctic exploration. A line of men: dirty, sunburned, and frost-bitten faces; long beards and sunken eyes from months on the trail; a line of mushing sled dogs; a flag for their country; a sea of white behind them. And on each chest, a rifle hung, barrel down, stock to the shoulder. A photo mural of our local hockey team, writ large on the side of the arena downtown, a line of young men, jerseys half on, clad in armor and helmeted, each with a rifle, hands on the grips. On an Olympic podium, three competitors, three rifles.

It’s in their eyes. They know. They feel the weight of the rifle as well.

Those were the three days that broke me. The three days that took my egg of innocence, precious and fragile, and crushed it under booted foot. On Monday we raided the EFP Factory That Wasn’t. On Tuesday we survived the Day of Six VBIEDs. On Wednesday, Trey killed our first civilian, and I told him to do it.

The call came in like all the others. A truck bomb tried to ram a U.S. convoy in the giant traffic circle on the southern edge of Kirkuk, where the highways branch to Hawija to the west and Baghdad, ultimately, to the south. We had had the six car bombs the day before. To have only one truck bomb that day seemed easy. Trey took his team and, exhausted, I stayed in the ops center in the HAS, covered in coffee and reports.

But as the news trickled in it eventually became clear that the call was far from routine. A huge cordoned scene, the roundabout almost half a kilometer wide itself, and three highways’ worth of traffic stopped and stewing. Multiple security teams — the U.S. convoy that got hit, special embedded units that the convoy was escorting, and Trey’s security — only partially able to coordinate or communicate with each other. Small-arms fire that ranged from the usual sporadic to the periodically intense. And stuck in the middle, Trey, his EOD team, and a truck bomb that wasn’t right from the start.

It was a white pickup, an innocuous small Toyota, no load in the open bed, slumped on the side of the road where it had crashed after being riddled with bullets. The driver was also shot, draped against the dashboard, steering wheel pushing into his midsection. He just lay. And bled. And moaned. He wasn’t dead. He might have been trapped. And he refused to even try to leave the truck, despite the gunfire. Despite the security. Despite the pleas and threats from U.S. terps over loudspeakers and bullhorns. He refused to talk or move or die.

Trey was a confident team leader, a southern good ole boy with a dip and a drawl and hound dog at home, a reservist who was a cop in civilian life, fearless and self-assured and independent; I rarely heard from Trey while he was on a call, and I rarely had reason to. There was little he couldn’t handle. But this call was different. He checked back regularly to provide status updates. The tone of his voice changed, a slight quiver, an opening of ambiguity. He knew something wasn’t right. Soon I was locked in the ops center and attached to the radio.

“This guy won’t fucking get out,” Trey crackled over the multiband radio.

“Can he get out?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I’m sending in the robot now to check,” Trey said.

A pause. A split second on scene, an eternity in the ops center, in the HAS, behind the blast walls and security cameras and armed guards.

“Captain, I can’t tell if he’s trapped, but there is another problem,” Trey said. “I can’t find the bomb.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the bed is empty,” Trey replied, “and I don’t see anything through the robot camera in the cab either. There is no crush switch or suicide switch anywhere. So unless he stuffed it in the engine compartment that is crumpled in half, there is no bomb.”

No bomb. We don’t do traffic accidents, we do bombs. Still, you must be sure.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked Trey over the radio.

“The only way I can be sure there is no bomb in the cab is to explosively open it up. So he needs to get out of the truck, and I can’t tell with the robot whether he even can. I need to go look. I’m going down,” Trey said.

A solo approach to an IED, the tactic of last resort. We call it the Long Walk.

Trey’s walk would be a run, in the open street and traffic circle, dodging the gunfire I heard continuously in the background. A run to the truck to pull a man out, a man that rammed a U.S. convoy an hour earlier and was shot for his trouble, to check for a bomb that might not exist.

Trey put the radio down. I gripped my mike tightly in my hand, and waited.

I was trapped in a plywood cage. I stared at the four walls, the map of Kirkuk tacked up on one, covered in red and blue pushpins. Three plywood desks, a whiteboard covered in notes, coffee cups and the remains of this morning’s instant-oatmeal breakfast, papers with lists of equipment, call signs, and schedules. A rack of radios and amplifiers, a secure telephone, three “SECRET” computers and two “UNCLASS” ones. Price standing with his enormous arms crossed, a frown on his face. My rifle and pistol on the rack just outside the door.

None of it let me see what Trey saw. None of it saved Trey from taking the walk. None of it helped.

Price and I looked at each other in the ops center, and waited, because we could do nothing else.

I was never so grateful as when the radio speaker jumped back to life.

“Hey Captain, I was wrong. Number one, that motherfucker’s not trapped. Two, I saw a projo in the passenger foot well, stuck all the way up under there where the robot couldn’t see it. He’s got something there,” Trey reported.

“Do you think it’s a device?” I asked. Nothing small enough to be stuffed up behind the glove box could rightly be called a truck bomb. But something that small could easily have killed Trey if the driver had set it off while he was right there. But the driver didn’t. Why?

“Could be,” Trey said. “I don’t know. I didn’t see a trigger or wires or a battery at all. I just saw the artillery round. This guy could just be a mule, transporting it somewhere else. Or he could just be a scrapper.”

Very few artillery rounds in Iraq had copper rotating bands anymore; they’d long since been clipped and plucked to sell for food money. Lately, we had seen a rise in people trying to sell the steel casing of the rounds themselves, some with the explosives still inside. We ran off kids from our demolitions area regularly, drawn not by curiosity but by direction from their family to retrieve the scrap iron we had, before or after we completed our disposal detonation. There is nothing worse than watching children run toward your pile of projos and mortars, covered in explosives set to blow and with the fuze cooking.

“He could be a scrapper, but we can’t take that chance,” I said.

“He’s still not leaving the truck, though, and the small-arms fire around here is getting worse,” Trey said. “What should we do?”

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to Boot Bang it.”

Taking apart bombs is our business. Killing people is usually security’s business, but it was about to be ours. Mine. I needed to take responsibility for the decision, put it on my shoulders, for whatever would happen after.

I made a phone call to the Battle Captain at the Battalion TOC, who managed the war second by second.

“Hey, you know what’s happening at the traffic circle?” I asked.

“Sure do. Why haven’t you safed the IED yet?” he asked.

With the Army, it always seemed so simple. We made every IED problem go away, it was just a matter of time. Usually too much time for them.

“Yeah, we’ve got a problem. The driver won’t leave the truck. If we set off our explosive tool under the truck with him in it, it’s going to kill him.”

“So what’s the problem?” the Battle Captain asked.

“The problem is we take apart bombs, we don’t use them, and our tools aren’t for killing people. I need to be sure everyone is comfortable with us making an exception this time. That you know this guy is going to die when we blow the truck.”

The Battle Captain seemed confused.

“We already tried to kill him, and shot him at least once,” the Battle Captain said. “He’s going to bleed out anyway, probably. If he wants to sit on the bomb when you clear it, that’s his choice. Are you asking for approval? Yeah, sure. Whatever. Go ahead. Do whatever you need to do.”

The Battle Captain hung up.

Whatever we needed to do. I imagined how many pieces that driver would be in after we lit up this shot. Boot Bangers weren’t designed for trucks, but that little Toyota didn’t stand a chance against one. Whatever was inside would soon be out. Which included the driver, in pieces, most likely. If the charge was directly under him it would likely vaporize his lower half and send the upper chunk up through the roof, out of the truck just like the bomb components we sought to disrupt. But since the artillery round was under the passenger side, Trey would likely put the charge a few more feet over. The driver would then probably stay in one large piece, peeled back and inside out like a dressed deer that has been hung by the leg from a tree and skinned. But his body would be easier to recover, smashed into the ceiling and driver’s door but mostly intact. If we were really lucky, his lungs would simply explode from the tremendous blast over-pressure, and his body would barely have a scratch. Not likely at this range.

I called Trey on the radio.

“You have the green light. Put the Boot Banger under the cab.”

The wait again was agonizing, as Trey’s team built the charge and the robot dragged it down to the truck.

“Captain, the Boot Banger is down there,” Trey said. “The robot is working on sliding it under the passenger side now.”

“When it’s under, don’t wait,” I said. “If the shot placement is good and where you want it, you have permission to crank it off whether he’s in the truck or not.”

“Hold on, Captain, something’s happening,” Trey said, his voice trailing away at the end.

One of Trey’s team members left the open mike on.

“Wait, he’s getting out now! Where’s the terp? Tell him to move away from the truck. Good. Now tell him to stop. I said, tell him to stop. He needs to fucking stop. Tell him he needs to stop coming towards us. He can’t approach us. I will shoot him if he approaches. Tell him that. He’s got something under his man-dress. What’s he doing? Fuck!”

Two shots. Two shots only.

Trey shot him at a hundred meters, one in his chest, one in his head. It was a Koran under his man-dress, we discovered later. Trey only finished what several of us started. The driver wasn’t going to live through that day, and he probably knew it.

Sick of being a stationary target for the constant rain of incoming bullets, Trey simply burned down the pickup truck and left. It didn’t detonate, so it probably wasn’t a bomb, but we never found out.

Objective is white two-story house, fifty meters, directly ahead. Dismount. On me, to the door! Stack up! Stack up! Front door barred. Breacher to the door! Fire in the hole in three … two … one … Boom! Go! Go! Go! Go! Clear left! Stairway up. Watch where you’re sweeping! Covering left. Clear right! You, doorway. You, stairway. You and EOD, with me. Up the stairs. Go! Go! Go!

Get the fuck down! Put the fucking gun down! Get the fuck down! Tell this bitch to shut up! Kef! Kef! Where’s the terp? Get the terp up here! Tell that kid not to move. Tell him to stop right now or I’m going to shoot him. Tell him, and get that bitch to shut up.

Where are the explosives? Ask him where he’s keeping the IEDs and explosives. The things that go boom. Don’t fucking lie to me! Tell him not to lie to me. We know they’re here.

How can you let your kid play with a gun, like a toy? What the fuck is wrong with you people? Don’t you realize I almost shot him? I almost shot your fucking kid. Goddamn. Did you tell him that? This fucking place.

You found it? In the dirt floor, on the ground level? Good. We’re blowing up this fucking house. They won’t hide shit anymore. Where’s the terp? Tell them to get out of the house. That we’re blowing up his fucking house, and he’s going to jail. The wife and kid can leave, I don’t care. Let them go, but take that kid’s gun first.

You ready to go? Big explosion? Cool. Let’s get down.

Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the — Boom — hole!

Fuck it, let’s get out of here.

I simply exist from moment to moment. There is no meaning in my past. My present is intolerable. I don’t expect my future to exist.

I simply run, with Ricky, every day, to cloud with pain what would be immediately exposed without constant distraction.

When the depravity of this world is laid before you in its ruin, and you discover yourself mired in it, rather than above, what hope do you have? All that my feeble actions until now have produced is misery for myself, my children, my wife, and the children of thousands I do not know.

I’m on the road again, conducting training in another faceless city, sitting in a blank hotel room. My wife pleads with me on the phone.

“Please,” my wife begs, sobbing between words. “Please, just cheat on me while you’re gone. Please, just go do it. Let me leave you with a clear conscience. Free me and the children. I can’t follow you into this dark place.”

I put down the phone without answering. I’m too scared to cheat and leave, and so we endure.

The Buddhists say that you must let go of all things. That you must remove your attachment to worldly possessions, and to your professional successes, and even to your loved ones, before you can be free of pain and suffering.

I am utterly detached from the world. I am invested in nothing. I should be steps from enlightenment.

But I am only Crazy.