The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (19 page)

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.

VIII
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The Science and the Chakras

T
HE MEDICAL DOCTORS
and researchers first noticed the phenomenon in Serbia and Bosnia, following the war in the early 1990s, the first conflict in which modern western armies with modern armor and equipment met modern western medicine. Soldiers on both sides survived explosive detonations that would have killed in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Body armor and helmets caught frag, armored vehicles survived blasts, and soldiers walked away seemingly unhurt from what would have been death sentences two decades before.

But they were not unhurt. The symptoms of their injuries only appeared later. Doctors in Serbia noticed odd combinations of complaints from veterans of the Balkan War in the old Yugoslavia. Headaches that wouldn’t go away. Lost memories, or challenges forming new ones. Personality changes. The inability to make a decision or solve problems. Sleeping disorders, insomnia, or nightmares. Some had mild complaints that merely hindered daily life. Some could barely function at all.

The soldiers had a new kind of wound, a kind not previously recognized because no victim that had ever received one survived long enough to tell about it. The name for this new condition? Blast-induced Traumatic Brain Injury.

TBI had previously been known to aging football players, boxers, or victims of car accidents and falls from high places. In each of those cases a concussion occurred, a condition familiar to doctors and lay people alike. During a concussion the brain slams into the interior of the skull, either because a hard object struck the skull directly, or because the skull was moving very quickly and then came to a sudden stop. The initial symptoms of concussions are well known: headaches, vomiting, disorientation. The long-term effect, concussion-induced TBI, is less understood, but sustaining multiple damaging incidents increases the risk for permanent debilitating brain damage and Parkinson’s-like effects.

But the skull and brain are built to survive injuries of this type. There is an evolutionary need for our tree-dwelling ancestors to still find food after an accidental fall to the ground on their heads. Concussions are natural events that our body is prepared for. Blast waves from a detonation, on the other hand, are not naturally occurring. We have no intrinsic defenses.

A blast wave is a glorified sound wave, and obeys all the same basic laws of physics. It can bounce and reflect. It dissipates rapidly over distance. And it can travel through objects, like the human body. When a blast wave vibrates through a substance—walls, cars, human tissue—it moves at a speed related to the density of the material through which it is traveling. Air is not dense, and so the blast wave moves relatively slowly, though still several thousand feet per second, depending on the type of explosive used to produce the blast wave initially. Concrete walls and fluid-filled organs are dense, however, and the blast wave speeds up in these materials. The damage to the material, and thus the body, comes at the barrier between dense and airy substances.

Imagine you are standing too near a car bomb detonating on a city street. When the blast wave enters your gut, it speeds up through the outer skin of the human body, through the fluid-packed muscle of the abdominal wall, and into the colon. But there it finds open air, and slows down, causing shearing, ripping, and tearing. The same trauma occurs when the wave reenters the opposing colon wall, and so on throughout the body. At each density junction, shear forces and rapid expansion and contraction cause devastating injuries. Small and large intestines hemorrhage and bleed internally. Kidneys disconnect from fragile connecting tissue and fail. Delicate alveoli rupture and fill the lungs with blood, suffocating the victim. And in the brain, even small blast waves can have large consequences.

Scientists and doctors once considered the brain a big fluid-filled organ, no different in this respect than your liver, and relatively resistant to blast damage. Then Bosnia happened, and injured veterans presented never-before-seen symptoms of brain trauma. When a blast wave enters the head, it speeds up at each threshold, through the skin and the skull and the bag of cushioning fluid that surrounds the two main lobes of the brain. Then the wave encounters tiny nerve endings, neurological fibers, and slight synapses. Faced with a couple of billion density junctions, it shears, strains, rips, and tears its way to the back of the skull and out the other side.

The soldier who experiences this trauma is often unaware of it. If he is caught close to a large detonation then fragmentation damage to the rest of his body is the first concern—he may be bleeding from amputated stumps or body puncture wounds. If he is in an armored truck, he may be thrown about inside the steel box, slamming his helmeted head into the ceiling and suffering a standard concussion in addition to any blast-induced damage. In both cases, it is only after the immediate acute injuries are treated and survived that the long-term TBI nightmare becomes apparent.

The most insidious damage, however, occurs during missions where you think you’re fine. Where you see the pavement erupt in front of your vehicle as you scream down a lonely Iraqi highway. The driver notes the danger too late, tries to stop and swerve, but the windshield suddenly fills with smoke and debris as the blast wave overwhelms the front of the truck. Your chest thumps, your ears ring, and your head splits under the weight of the
crack
. Chunks of asphalt embed themselves in the armored glass, and pieces of bumper and grille and headlight are torn and scattered. Your front tire thuds into and out of the newly created crater as your vehicle finally grinds to a halt. You pat yourself down; all fingers and toes accounted for. No blood or missing pieces. Your harness kept you locked to your seat. The radio jumps to life. Are you all right, the convoy commander wants to know. Is everyone fine?

You look at the driver, he looks at you. You both laugh, as the adrenaline takes over and you start to shake. Fuck yeah, you’re fine. Luckiest sons of bitches on the planet.

But you are not fine. Inside your head, nerve connections that used to exist have been torn and broken. If the blast was close and more damage done, you may have lost parts of high school geometry, the coordination needed to tie flies for your fishing reel, or the ability to make decisions at the supermarket about what meat to buy. If you are lucky, you only lost your son’s first steps or the night you asked your wife to marry you.

And if you are a bomb technician, one of my brothers, chances are you don’t have only one lucky scrape, only one detonation where you were a little too close. You have dozens. Or hundreds. Spray-foam-encased EFPs that detonate while you are trying to disrupt them. Daisy-chained 130-millimeter artillery rounds that hit your vehicle on the way to a call. Truck bombs you choose to detonate, but must be unnervingly close to, watching and guarding and keeping children from drawing too near in a dense city center. Large-scale demolition to destroy hundreds of tons of stockpiled arms found in caches. Detonations in training when you are preparing to deploy in the first place. Every day, something is blowing up. Every day, your brain rips just a little bit more.

Blast waves tear up memories and functions. They leave holes where your identity used to be. You lose parts of your past and have trouble retaining the present or remaking a future. The strong, capable soldier now can’t sleep, can’t discern or differentiate among voices and noises, becomes easily distracted, gets tired, cries randomly in public, and doesn’t know what to order for dinner. Where does Crazy stop and TBI begin? Who knows?

The good news is that your brain can regrow paths and you can reclaim skills you’ve lost. Particularly bad TBI victims, those who have lost the ability to speak or walk, often eventually relearn those skills after months and years of grueling therapy. But the new pathways are longer, more complex, and take more energy to use. Those with blast-induced TBI can experience fatigue of many varieties and intensities. This fatigue isn’t like being tired after a long workout. This fatigue is being so tired you can’t get out of bed, into the shower, can’t make breakfast or summon the energy to dial a phone. Some have difficulty completing the most basic tasks of daily living. Some just have trouble concentrating, doing a complicated task for long periods of time. Your brain literally hurts because it is tired. It has had to work much harder, fire neurons over a much greater distance than before the injury. You no longer have some of the efficient neural pathways laid down in infancy, as you taught yourself how to lift a red block and set it on a blue one. Now your brain runs a marathon to do the same task. If you are lucky like me, then the fatigue and pain just set in after a long day of thinking, of solving complex problems or learning new skills. Your mind and body are exhausted from the process. It hurts in a way that overwhelms my ability to communicate.

I’m not just Crazy. I have a broken brain exhausted from fixing itself.

My New Shrink and I are doing a guided-meditation session. I haven’t relaxed in months, and this is supposed to help. I sit in my upright chair, close my eyes, and try to concentrate on her words.

“First, feel your left thumb,” she says. “Flex your left thumb. Make it as tight as you can. Good. Now relax it. Now your left index finger. Slowly now. Feel the tension build in each finger, and your whole hand, and then release it.

“Release the tension and relax,” she says.

But I can’t relax. I’ve already flexed my left arm and right thumb and right hand and right arm and gut and legs and feet before she has made it above my elbow. And anyway, I can’t flex the Crazy, and I can’t release it.

“Good,” my New Shrink says, assuming I have followed along with each individual step instead of skipping ahead to the end.

“Now we breathe,” she says. “Breathe deeply into the base of your stomach. Breathe into your entire rib cage. Breathe into the base of your spine. And relax.”

But I don’t relax. The Crazy expands in my chest. I breathe deeply and it fills with Crazy. I exhale completely, but my rib cage is still full.

“Open your collarbones. Be present. In your mind,” she says.

My mind is aware. It sits behind my closed eyelids, staring into nothingness. It directs the tension, the breath. It sees through the darkness.

But my mind is not centered. It is not balanced, does not lie equally behind my eyelids. It drifts, first barely favoring the left eye over the right, then slipping further to the side, then abandoning the right completely. My mind sits to the left of my eyes, looks back at an angle at the black void stretching endlessly before my physical body’s line of sight. I sit beside myself and breathe.

My New Shrink tells me to open my eyes.

“How was that?” she asks. “Do you feel more relaxed?”

I describe how my mind drifted away from behind my closed eyelids. How I stared into the depths off-balance.

“Fascinating!” she exclaims.

It is the birthday of my fourth son. He is two today, and the family has come over for a party. Grandma and Grandpa, aunt and cousin. Even Ricky unexpectedly stopped over, the first time he was able to come. His little daughter is four now, growing up too fast, though she couldn’t make the party.

The two-year-old is gleefully unwrapping presents, discovering puzzles and games and cars. He opens a red stuffed animal, and with a squeal, dives on top of it and rolls around on the carpet, his older brothers tickling and giggling with him.

I don’t remember any of their second birthday parties.

I concentrate on the sights and the sounds and I check my rifle. I gulp it in, watching, analyzing, encoding. Burn this one in, Brian. Remember it.

My wife is pulling out the camera and elicits a “cheese” from the tangle of arms and legs on the floor. Grandpa is in search of another piece of cake. Grandma watches with a small smile on her lips.