The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (14 page)

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.