The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (22 page)

But no such offerings can be made in combat, and eventually luck runs out. For luck is the only true defense against Murphy. With each passing mission your luck stretches further and further, allowing Murphy’s power to grow. The odds say Murphy always wins in the end. There is no true appeasement. My lucky streak will eventually snap. The only question is whether I will make it home first.

Off again on my new civilian job, training another anonymous EOD unit, in another faux combat town, planting death for the soldiers to discover. Jimbo and JB and John and I are storytellers, traveling bards, spinning a tale of success from unit to unit across the country. Learn these steps, operate these robots, use these explosives, and you too can disassemble the IED, catch the bad guy, and come home a hero. In our training, fighting a pretend war on a training range, the EOD unit always finds the evidence, makes the intel link, unearths the terrorist. And as in a bad television sitcom, all problems are resolved by the end of the weeklong show. Not like when Jimbo and John and I were all deployed. Not like when we burned down the villages, searched the bomb maker’s house hours after he had left, combed the countryside for months fruitlessly searching for the nameless foe killing our friends. Not like that. We write the story now, and in our version, the EOD guys win.

But not tonight.

I’m in the basement of a bombed-out apartment complex, built in the Army post’s training area in the 1990s to look like Bosnia. Now it is an adequate substitute for Iraq, the sort of concrete container scattered throughout the globe to house the world’s poor. There, in the dripping cellar, I’m setting up.

The EOD unit got intel that a U.S. soldier was captured. They’ve been looking for him all week. They’ll get more intel tonight of where he is being held, and will come to try to rescue him.

You never let yourself get captured. Never. In Balad, Hallenbeck had run a line of det cord with thirty seconds of time fuze from the front seat of the Humvee to the main explosives storage cache in the back. If we had gotten overrun, he’d have blown the whole truck, well over two hundred pounds of bang, with us inside. In Kirkuk, Ewbank kept a stock of grenades by his seat. The first couple were for them. The last three were for us. They cut your head off in Iraq when you get snatched. No way I’d have let my wife and children go through that.

For my training scenario I have a volunteer hostage, one young poor kid, recently enlisted, who doesn’t know what he’s getting into. He’s followed me into the cellar with my toys, eager to play an Army game that isn’t real to him yet; it hasn’t sunk in what’s about to happen.

“Listen to me,” I say to him before we get started. “I’m about to duct-tape you to a chair, put a fucking bag on your head, and leave you in the dark in a basement torture chamber. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the EOD team to find you. Are you sure you’re cool with this?”

He is cool with it. I have no idea how that’s possible, but we get started anyway.

The concrete cellar is dark and spartan—chair, table, rat nests, and assorted garbage—with only my flashlight sporadically illuminating the deep pitch. I begin by strapping the hostage to the chair, duct tape around his wrists behind his back. In Iraq they would hang men in this position from hooks attached to the ceiling, the full weight of the body dislocating the shoulders during beatings and abuse. Next I taped his legs to the base of the chair and slipped a pressure-release system behind his back, hidden from view and set to blow if he leaned forward. A cell-phone-triggered device under his seat and taped to the underside of the chair. A third booby trap across his chest.

On the table next to him I lay out my tools. Framing hammer. Pliers. Hand pick and hatchet. Coiled hole saw: ragged spiral teeth attached to a power drill. My young hostage’s eyes are getting a little wild. I set up a video camera a few feet away in front of him, an old clunky VHS on a tripod to tape his last moments: begging and the hole saw to the temple. I splash a bucket or two of fake blood—red food coloring and corn syrup that attracts flies—on the floor around him, and splatter the rusting tools. A trip line across the entrance doorway, and I’m nearly set.

“Okay, I’m almost done. Are you ready for the bag?” I ask.

“This is just like Halloween!” he answers, giddy.

Not quite. I duct-tape up his mouth, slip the bloodstained and frayed burlap bag over his head, and ask if he can breathe. A mumble confirms it.

I step back, observe my scene. A bound, gagged, and hooded soldier, covered in explosives, head slumping and apparently bashed in. A grisly work area, a nightmare painting across walls and floor and saw, a foot in the box, and the tools of confession. I’ve transported suburban Baghdad to the United States.

I turn off my flashlight and ink swallows my victim.

The hostage and EOD team should be dead by the end of the night.

Most of the post-blast investigation missions we ran in Kirkuk fell into one of two camps: attacks on U.S. convoys or car bombs set for prominent civilian targets. The roadside IEDs that plagued our patrols and long-haul missions often struck on the open highway between towns or on the boulevards and plazas of the inner cities. The schools, day cares, government ministries, police stations, marketplaces, regime officials’ compounds, and hospitals that saw the lion’s share of the car-bomb strikes had to be readily accessible by vehicle and thus were often wide, public spaces. The terrain was gruesome, but not claustrophobic.

Not so the scene at the chai shop in the rabbit warrens of northern Kirkuk.

Keener drove our armored Humvee until it ran out of room in the back alleys of the confusing tenement maze. Our U.S. security was lost as well, so many were the twists and turns, false paths, and dingy sewer trails. Kurdish
peshmerga
led us in; not the average Iraqi Police, who as Shiite Arabs were not trusted in this section of town. Sometimes a narrow
pesh
Hilux pickup passed through an opening our Humvees could not and we were forced to reverse course and retreat to another more open fork. This was no place for a firefight. If we got ambushed and needed to leave we wouldn’t be leaving quickly.

When the trail became too tight even for Kurdish pickups, Castleman and I dismounted and followed our guide into a maze of covered markets and shops half buried at the base of the crowded concrete apartments that rose like cliff walls around us and smothered the neighborhood. I looked at Castleman, and he looked at me, and we both checked our rifles before we ducked our heads and descended into the dim cavern.

The tunnel-like nature of the market had ensured the death of many. I stepped over broken benches, ripped and torn merchandise, and ankle-deep sticky puddles of people for a hundred meters before we got to the chai shop itself. In the narrow covered confines the blast wave had echoed and reverberated, bounced and doubled back on itself and multiplied until it produced a freight train of agony that scoured this path red. Worse, the chai shop itself had plate-glass windows separating the kitchen and brewing area from public space where patrons sat on benches and at tables to sip their tea. I saw little shattered glass on the ground; I assumed most of it was now at the hospital, embedded in victims.

Castleman spotted a slight depression in the concrete floor where the IED had been placed. So small a dent, so small a device, so much damage in such an enclosed place. The target was a meeting of Kurdish elders, old men with long beards who sat here each morning with their tea and discussed their troubles, and the troubles of their families, and the troubles of their people. The device was disguised, probably in a plastic crate or a tomato can or olive-oil tin. All of the elders died, as did the workers at the chai shop and the shoppers and vendors at the few market stalls I passed on my way in. I never got a full body count. Fifteen? Twenty?

Castleman and I searched for evidence, pieces of the bomb, but it quickly proved useless. The
pesh
had evacuated the scene and stood respectfully back, but there was little left to grab. Even the discarded body parts of the victims were mostly liquefied—an unidentifiable organ here, half a scalp there, but mostly a ruddy smear across the ceiling, walls, and floor of the concrete market tube.

An eerie quiet permeated, unfamiliar to our ears. I noticed an erect table to one side, out of place among the destruction, with an intact cardboard box on top. The box had to have been put there after the detonation; there was no way it could have survived the blast intact. I looked inside, and did not know immediately what I saw. The thing, it had been human at one time, or at least part of one. There was a sandal, but the flesh inside of it didn’t bear any resemblance to a body part I knew. At the top the thing was flayed, opening like a meat flower, muscle petals and a bone central stigma. At its base was a purple engorgement, and this lumpy bag was stuffed into straining leather straps, ten pounds in a five-pound bag.

Was that a foot, in the sandal? I peered closer, and got my first whiff as flies started to buzz around me. I found toenails on the lumpy bag, and a tuft or two of hair, and eventually counted five protrusions. That made the upper splayed-open portion a leg, or the former lower half of one. I eventually found something I would call a tibia and fibula and charred calf muscle in the surrounding skin, holding the mass together in a hollow open cone.

Yes, I had figured it out. It was definitely a foot lying in this cardboard box.

A foot in a box.

Someone had put a foot in a box. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. They must have found the foot at the scene, and stuck it in the box for safekeeping. It makes sense, right? Why not put the foot in the box?

I called over to Castleman to look, to show him the joke, but he was distracted by a conversation with our terp and a Kurdish witness. Oh well, his loss.

“Does anyone know how this foot got in the box?” I called out. But few of the
pesh
knew much English, and with our terp otherwise engaged, I got mostly blank stares back. Never mind.

I took a picture of the foot in the box to save for the report. The guys at headquarters in Baghdad would get a kick out of it.

Before I walked away from the table I looked down at my own foot. My formerly tan boots were darkly stained halfway up to the laces, a consequence of doing missions like this one. Buried in those laces on the right boot I had a dog tag: my name, Social Security number, branch of service, blood type, and religious affiliation so they could find me a Catholic priest at the end. Up around the top of each of my boots I had written NKA and O+ in dark black permanent marker: a directive to the medic working on me that I had no allergies and what blood to give me so the priest would not be required.

You put this information on boots because feet survive detonations. They pop off and live to tell the tale, though the rest of you ceases to exist. If I was at the chai shop, I would be a victim, but at least I would not be nameless, like this foot in this box. If I was at the chai shop, they would know it was part of me they were putting in the ground. If I was at the chai shop … I looked at the box again.

How easily my own foot slips into that box.

The foot sat in the box. My foot sat in the box.

I stopped laughing. No. No, it’s not. It’s not my foot in the box. My foot is staying where it is. Whole and recognizable and pink and warm and intact. I’m alive. I’m not scared of the soft sand. I’m living behind my weapon.

I checked my rifle. I’m not scared of the soft sand.

Fuck this place. Fuck that foot in the box. I’m going home.

I have a picture of the dead suicide bomber, sitting upright in the driver’s seat of the small silver car, brain smeared across the window, a black hole in his head.

I have a picture, but I don’t
need
a picture, you understand. I see the hole in his head right now. I’ve memorized every speck of dust clinging to his eyelashes. I could relate every detail today.

“How do you remember everything?” my wife asks, as she stands over my shoulder while I type this book. She has noted the lack of research, journals, annotations, personal effects, and mementos piled on the writing desk.

“You can’t remember the children’s first words. You can’t remember them being born, family vacations, or preschool graduation. How do you remember all of this, to be able to go back and write it all down now?” my wife asks again, frustration and emotion in her voice.

I don’t try to remember. I don’t need to. I’m surrounded by reminders; the images simply emerge in the front of my thoughts. I’m not talking about trite, superficial reminders, like fireworks at the Fourth of July. Oh, to be startled at fireworks again! That is so temporary. The same for the slamming of car doors, or spotting bags and tires on the side of the road, appearing as IEDs on Interstate 90.

It’s the small, everyday reminders that are insidious. The rumble of a diesel engine. The smell of gasoline. A large tin can of tomatoes. Traffic circles. Putting on a life jacket. Lacing up a pair of winter boots. Unrolling a sleeping bag.