The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (18 page)

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.