The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (3 page)

The car had stopped burning by the time we arrived. A twisted black shell, frame, and engine block smoldering, hot to the touch. The Iraqi Police had cordoned off the scene, yelling at pedestrians to move back. The reverse dichotomy always struck me. The scene of the blast, where so much violence had happened minutes before, was now empty and quiet. The surrounding neighborhood, peaceful until the attack, was now a roiling cauldron of frustration and anger.

Castleman and I started the investigation at the blast hole. The asphalt punctured, wet with a mix of fluids, some mechanical, some human. The car frame was several feet from the crater, thrown by the force of the explosion. It yielded no clues; any wires, switches, batteries, or fingerprints were burned away in the fire. We could have found traces of explosive residue if we had had the time. We didn’t have the time.

I looked up from the hulk and surveyed further out. Chunks of steel frag were buried in a nearby concrete wall. A fully intact artillery projectile, a 130 or 155, probably, from the size and shape, failing to detonate and instead kicked out by the blast, was caught in a fence a hundred feet away. We would grab that and blow it before we left.

“It smells like shit!” I said. And it did.

“Sir, it always smells like shit in this country,” answered Castleman.

He was right. But this wasn’t the normal smell of shit: diesel exhaust, burning trash, sweat, and grime, the body odor of an unwashed city. We smelled that mix every day. No, this smelled like actual shit. Human shit.

“Check this out,” called Castleman.

He had found the target of the car bomb. Bloody shirts and boots of Iraqi policemen. A pair of pants, dropped or torn off, with a month’s wages in frayed and scorched 250-dinar notes poking out from a front pocket. Hands and feet. Several pools of drying blood. The smell of shit was stifling, and getting worse.

A quick count of right hands indicated a couple dead, at least. Who knows how many wounded, pulled out by their fellow police, now dead or dying at the overwhelmed hospital. The Iraqi cops had already picked up the biggest parts, so any count we made was going to be wrong. It wasn’t worth the trouble to get the exact right number anyway. I continued on.

The smell of shit was overwhelming in the afternoon heat. I looked down.

“Hey, I found it!” I yelled to Castleman, who was taking pictures of the scene for evidence.

There at my feet was a perfectly formed, and entirely intact, lower intestine. The small intestine above and anus below were torn off and scattered, but the colon itself was pristine, and lay there like I had just removed it from the organ bag in the gut of a Thanksgiving turkey. It was beautiful, stuffed with the digested remains of an unknown last meal.

Castleman walked over and looked down where I pointed. The intestine smelled like it was cooking in a pan.

He shrugged. I shrugged back.

We walked off and left that shit-filled colon to bake on the black asphalt in the hot Iraqi summer sun.

The cigar must have been a Cuban. If not, it was still damn good.

Cubans were readily available in Iraq, and the Colonel, an old fighter pilot, seemed like he knew his cigars. I didn’t know where he got them, and I didn’t ask. I simply appreciated being offered one, as we sat and talked in the dark hot desert night.

Boom! Ba-boom!

The 155-millimeter howitzers hadn’t stopped for the last hour. I only saw the initial flashes when the guns fired and the result where they landed; the dark dusty haze obscured the artillery pieces themselves.

The Colonel and I sat outside our tent, our temporary sleeping quarters for the night, and watched the show. Tiki torches and miniature lights on a string, bulbs encased in brightly colored Easter Island heads, ringed our makeshift smoke pit. I missed a glass of whiskey, but the cigar, warm night, relaxing chair, and conversation took me back to many a patio bar at home.

Boom! Thump thump thump thump!

The guns never paused as chopper after chopper dredged the same route all night. Wounded and dead came home, fresh Marines went out. The landing lights of the birds flicked on once they hit the edge of the air base, Al Taqaddum, a desolate hole up the Euphrates in western Iraq that the Colonel and I were stuck at for the night. Sticky and wet the helos returned, pausing at the pad, unloading their dripping cargo, and then up and turning to reload grunts on the other end of the base. Round and round they went on their grisly circuit.

Boom! Boom boom boom!

Three illumination rounds followed the high explosives into the town of Habbaniyah, a bad neighborhood on the floodplain below us. The illum rounds hung in the air, kept aloft by parachutes as their candles bathed the town in an eerie too-white light, temporary spotlights for the Marines moving house to house. Small-arms fire popped and belt-fed automatic machine guns carried on their conversation in the distance, beneath our high plateau.

We sat and talked because this wasn’t our fight. We were just stuck there, waiting on a bird to Baghdad.

A student of history, the Colonel had been telling me stories all night. Stories of the old British Royal Air Force Base in Habbaniyah, a strip of concrete in that very town, now being shelled as we watched. How the Iraqi Army, Axis sympathizers, had surrounded the base in 1941, putting artillery on the bluff where we were now sitting. How the RAF decided to strike first, with old World War I–era biplanes, because they had few ground troops to defend the airfield. The Brits launched the aircraft and banked immediately, right into the teeth of the surprised Iraqis, dropping bombs just hundreds of feet from the base’s fence line. They then returned and landed, rearmed and refueled as Iraqi artillery rained on their heads, and launched again, strafing the army on their doorstep. Every sortie was continuously in range of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, from start to finish. The Brits flew anyway.

The siege lasted four days. By then the pilots had to steer around craters on the runway to take off and land. But they did, and the Brits won. Thirty-three obsolete aircraft turned aside a brigade.

It’s a story of British pluck and ingenuity. It’s a story of bravado at its height. It’s a lullaby old fighter pilots tell their young.

Boom! Thump thump thump! Boom!

We puffed on our cigars, and blew smoke rings, and told war stories, and watched new ones being written, in the glow of the tiki torches and colored lights, until late into the night.

What is the Crazy like? How does it actually feel? Do you remember the last week of school before summer vacation? How it felt as a kid to be almost done for the year, but not quite?

You are sitting at a small desk, bathed in sunlight, by a wall of windows, one open to let in the waning cool breeze. Your armpits begin to moisten in the still classroom air, and a single drop of sweat forms on your forehead as the school starts to heat. Lawn mowers buzz in the distance, and you get the first smell of summer: cut grass on a warm day. It smells like soccer games, catching crawfish in the creek, and dreaming of sneaking off to kiss your middle-school crush behind the big oak tree in the neighborhood park. It smells like playing street hockey with your best friend all day long until his mom calls you inside to stay for dinner. It smells like girls in short shorts and bikini tops. It smells like you’ve waited nine long months to smell that smell. It smells perfect.

The only thing standing between you and summer is this exam, and there are only three of you left in the classroom. Everyone else is finished and gone, completed their tests for the summer, but you remain as time runs out. The American history exam swims before your eyes. The gulfs of Mexico and Tonkin blend together. How can you take this exam when every atom in your body screams to escape outside into the sunshine? You long to run and play, though you haven’t played in years. You take the exam as quickly as possible; the goal becomes to simply finish, and the grade is secondary. Your heart pines for the fresh air, and your chest fills until ready to burst. You have to finish … this … exam … now.

My Crazy is just like that. Except, when you do finally finish the test, hand it in, sprint from the exam room, grab your book bag and run outside … there is no relief. There is no relaxation. You feel no different. You’re just Crazy in the goddamn sunshine. Every day. All the time.

The cordon was set. The IED was cleared. The security was still in place. The robot was driving back to us, our truck sheltered by the interposed armored vehicles of our infantry fire-team escort, as we packed up our remaining gear and prepared to move. All that remained was picking up the precious pieces.

Uniform concrete apartment buildings loomed over the traffic circle, closed off by our security so we could clear the bomb at its far edge. An empty bowl—with occasional spectators surrounding, staring at every move we made.

The explosive-filled water bottle we deployed had broken apart the bomb’s outer shell, but we still needed to pick up the revealed inner workings. Detonating cord and electrical wires held the various pieces of foam casing together in a jumbled mess. A cell phone peeked out of one misshapen lump; PROPHET would want us to snag that so they could rip the SIM card. Every other heavy foam chunk held an EFP, an Explosively Formed Projectile—a steel and copper and explosives mix that punctures armor and splatters molten metal around inside our trucks. We hate them. This one was set up across from the Iraqi Police station. Targeting them? Placed by them? We never do find out.

EFPs are real bad. They take off legs and heads, put holes in armor and engine blocks, and our bosses in Baghdad and Washington want every one we find. So we aren’t going to blow these up in a traffic circle. We are going to bring back all the pieces, each EFP, and crate them up in a wooden box, and put them on the first helo south so they can be analyzed. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, our robot operator, Mengershausen, couldn’t further break up the foam chunks, or rip the wires, or snap the plastic-encased detonating cord. So we are going to have to drive up and then manually cut, disassemble, and grab the pieces ourselves. In the traffic circle. Under the watchful eye of the assembled crowd. Among whom are probably the bombers who put the device there in the first place.

Castleman, Keener, and I made a plan. We’re going to drive around to the other side of the cordon, move our security back to protect our rear, and then drive in and pick up the foam remains. As team leader, Castleman will get out with his heavy-bladed knife, cut all the remaining detonating cord currently linking each EFP in a daisy chain, and throw them in a metal ammo can we keep in our Humvee for just such a purpose. I’m going to dismount, stand over him, and cover him with my rifle; if he is looking down at the bomb, he can’t be looking up for possible threats. Keener will stay behind the wheel, on the radio, and either call for help or drive us out if things go bad.

It was not an in-depth plan. It may not have even been a good plan. But we had few other choices, with the EFPs a hundred yards away and us at the edge of the security. And it was better than Castleman taking the Long Walk alone, exposed in the open in an eighty-pound bomb suit. This way, at least I could cover him.

We drove across sidewalks and past storefronts, and arrived at our starting point on the edge of the traffic circle. The crowd had not grown bored and thinned; they kept watching, pointing and curious. Our security was impatient, and didn’t like being stuck in one spot this long. Neither did we; the longer you stayed in one place, the more time Haji had to find his friends and drop mortars on your head.

Castleman pulled out his knife. I turned up the intensity of the red dot in my electronic rifle sight, so I would be sure to see it in the brilliant sunshine. Castleman’s easy smile, his generous Midwestern grin, was replaced with a mask of will. Keener’s constant grimace deepened; little made him happy, this plan least of all. One last breath, Castleman gave the go-ahead, and we drove in.

The Humvee mounted the curb and sped toward our prize. Keener looked for other bombs, hidden away, meant to protect the EFPs or kill us if we got too close. Castleman thought of nothing but cutting apart the remains of the IED as quickly as he could. I scanned rooftops, for gunmen or lookouts. If a sniper was waiting in a dark upper window of a nearby apartment building, I would never see him, even after Castleman was shot and dead. But I could spot other, more conspicuous, threats among the assembled crowd.

Keener screeched the armored truck to a halt, two feet from the foam lumps. Castleman leaped from the front seat, ran to the heavy awaiting chunks, and furiously began cutting. I dismounted, stood over him, raised my rifle, and dared the crowd to shoot. Ninety seconds. That should be all the time we needed.

Most of the pedestrian onlookers at the base of the closest apartment building didn’t even move when I pointed my rifle at them. Then slowly, as a trickle, several families turned and left, wishing to avoid the gunfight they now saw coming. Eighty seconds.

I surveyed the crowd again. We were totally exposed at the bottom of the concrete canyon.