The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (13 page)

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.

VI
|
Kermit

K
ERMIT 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.