The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (5 page)

You are a different person on graduation day from the day you started. The crucible eliminates self-doubt and instills supreme confidence. The combination of intellectual and physical requirements, academic rigor, emotional stress, and final consequences is unparalleled. It’s like being a surgeon, except if you screw up, you die, not the patient.

I entered EOD school a skinny dumb kid who hoped he could hack it. I left a focused, dedicated, obsessive, invincible man whose only purpose was to go to Iraq and blow things up for real.

I’m running again, always running, along the river, down the road from my home, left eye twitching, footfalls on pavement burning away the Crazy in my chest and mind.

I run alone. Ricky doesn’t run with me, not yet. Back at Nellis, at my last Stateside assignment, Ricky and Grish and Luke and I and the whole unit ran together almost every day, four miles through the desert on the base’s outskirts, staring down the flight line at the Las Vegas Strip shimmering in the early morning sun. Now my feet fall on empty pavement, shuffling stampede an echo, my breath alone in my ears, the road bare ahead and behind.

I push against the mountain of Crazy in my chest and pick up my pace.

Clouds move in, and a sprinkle starts, a drop or two that grows heavier with every step. A block later, steady rain falling, puddles growing along the side of the road. Two blocks later, sheets and standing water in my shoes, plastering my shirt to my back and chest. I grunt. The Crazy bubbles.

Tropical Storm Bill was bearing down on Florida, dark and full, as I carried my tools into the practice yard at EOD school. My final test on bombs; the most involved yet. The fuze I had to remove from the back of a two-thousand-pound bomb was long and heavy. Unscrewing one can cause it to detonate, so you definitely don’t want to do the work by hand and be around for that. Instead, I would need to construct a complicated series of leads and pulleys with a wrench that operated remotely by pulling a rope. I carried the rebar stakes for the pulley system under one arm, and a sledgehammer under the other, as the rain started to fall.

“We’re gunna get this fuckin’ test done real quick, you understand? Fuckin’ hooyah?” asked my Navy instructor, whom we called Chief Bongo, his actual Pacific Islander name being completely unpronounceable.

Bill grew darker, swirling overhead, and the rain grew in size and intensity.

“Hooyah, Chief,” I replied, soaked to the shorts before I had even made it to the bomb.

The fuze had to slide out backward completely straight; cant it slightly at the start and it would jam and get hung up inside. So after attaching the rope-actuated, spring-released mechanical wrench, you have to lay out a series of bungee cords to provide the pulling force to extract the fuze. Then pulleys attached to the stakes guide the rope several hundred feet away to a safe area from which you actually pull. Once the entire system is in place—bungees, pulleys, stakes, and rope—you tug on the line, which after running and switching through several pulleys activates the wrench, which turns the fuze. Once you fully unscrew the fuze and overcome the last thread, the bungee cords yank the fuze out and the test is over.

I struggled at building this Rube Goldberg machine during practice days. Now, in the middle of my test, Bill was getting angry.

By the time I was done attaching the impact wrench, the bomb was nearly underwater. I picked up my sledgehammer to drive in the first stake and thunder cracked, not overhead, but to our right.

“How you fuckin’ doin’, Lieutenant! Let’s go! Hooyah?” roared Chief Bongo.

“Hooyah, Chief.” I swung the sledge and pounded in the first unintentional lightning rod.

The rain came sideways and in waves. Bill darkened the sky as an early night, and lightning jumped from cloud to cloud, striking and splitting pine trees with ear-rattling cracks in the surrounding forest. I pounded in stake after stake and attached pulley and line, water in my eyes, sledgehammer slick, boots soaked, shirt and pants heavy and waterlogged.

Bill was at full roar as I ran the rope through the last pulley and humped the remainder out to my distant safe area. No time to rest, I simply grabbed the rope and pulled.
Tink
went the wrench, barely audible over the fury of the wind in the trees. Heave went the rope.
Tink
went the impact wrench. Heave and
tink
. Heave and
tink
. Heave and silence.

I couldn’t see the bomb, low in the water, through the windblown sheets of rain. I was out of breath, my back and shoulders aching from the strain of pulling the rope after driving so many stakes. Nothing to do but pull. Heave, and the fuze stayed stuck. Heave again. The rain ran in my nose and mouth as I put my head down and panted, hands on my knees.

“Lieutenant, finish right fuckin’ now! Got it? Fuckin’ hooyah!”

Lightning lit up the Chief screaming in the distance, rain lashing his silhouette. I heard him fine, no matter Bill’s howl.

I wrapped the rope around my waist, and leaned into the pull. Heave, and wind and water and thunder, but no fuze. It stayed jammed in the back of the bomb.

“Right fuckin’ now, Lieutenant! You hear me? Hooyah? Right fuckin’ now!”

“Hooyah, Chief.” One more heave, one more lean, one more strain.
Tink
. The fuze slid out.

EOD school doesn’t just teach the technical aspects of bomb disposal. More important, it instills the culture of the profession.

There is no choice but to work hard. But hard work is not enough. You won’t survive EOD school if you can’t work with a team, and can’t relax when the job is done.

Fortunately, my class naturally banded together, and the beaches and bars of northwest Florida provided ample opportunity to blow off steam. “Cooperate to graduate” is a common mantra, as students test each other and work together to cross each hurdle. Every Friday night of EOD school was a blur of bars, clubs, beer, and few clothes. Many EOD guys prefer to drink with their pants off. Or as a hat on their head. I can’t explain why.

It is impossible to overemphasize how important beer is to the EOD profession. Beer at the end of a long week of school, to ease the stress of tests and retests. Beer to quench your thirst from a full day of clearing the bombing range in the relentless desert sun. Beer to dull the pain of a lost brother on the battlefield, near or far, known or unknown. Beer to bond, and celebrate, and mourn, and remember, and forget.

As weekend planner and surrogate older brother for every member of our class, Jeff organized elaborate marathons of fun. Every night ended with holes in your memory, requiring careful reconstruction with the class the next day. Only a few nights ended in a fight with the locals, or being tossed from a bar, wrecking it on the way out. Most nights ended with breakfast, a tasteless plate of grits and waffles, and a ripe hangover to endure on your one day off. Jeff was tireless, relentlessly upbeat, and more than once dragged my exhausted body onto his boat the next day to swim my headache away with the dolphins in the full sun of the Gulf. A quick nap on his couch, and I was ready to party again, this time dancing at the club late into the night.

Jeff was as lucky with women as he was with the rest of his life. Not only did I have to endure fantastic tales of his past exploits, we all had to watch him and his wife together, dancing and partying, at the bar, at the club, on the stage reserved for the most attractive women and guarded by granite blocks of men. Jeff’s wife was a vision: sultry, playful, sweet as cantaloupe on a summer day, and hotter than a firecracker. Jeff’s lack of inhibitions included public dancing, and his wife had the ability to draw the attention of the entire club to her swaying and dipping form, especially when she was invited onstage.

“Are you looking at my wife?” Jeff would yell at the club, to no one in particular.

Jeff’s grin was ear to ear, and his wife gave a devilish smile from above.

“You better not be looking at her,” Jeff continued. “She’s coming home with me tonight!”

I learned many things from Jeff during EOD school. I learned the best way to bury a keg in beach sand to keep it cool all day long, despite the hot sun. I learned to put skin moisturizer on a new tattoo, but not a kind with aloe, because it might react with the ink. I learned that after twelve hours of drinking, it’s possible to fall asleep sitting up, on the toilet, still eating a fast-food hamburger. I learned how to discipline a young enlisted kid without breaking his spirit or breeding resentment. I learned that a certain inlet off Okaloosa Island is a great place to park your boat and watch drunk topless girls frolic in the warm, waist-deep water. I learned to study hard after partying hard. I learned to never give up.

Jeff would lead our class’s physical-training sessions a couple of mornings a week before instruction started. I endorsed and needed the workouts; to keep my brain lubricated and spinning, I drank gallons of coffee and ate high-sugar foods all day long. The calories kept my exhausted brain functioning, but they also added to my midsection. Jeff’s workouts of flutter-kicks, push-ups, and pull-ups kept the worst of my diet at bay.

The Navy guys had to attend dive school before EOD training, to ensure they could endure the rigors of working underwater. It’s difficult to render safe an underwater mine or torpedo if you can’t swim in a mask, fins, and rebreather. But dive school is less about learning to use new equipment and more about getting an old-fashioned ass-kicking. The Navy is not going to send you to EOD school unless they are sure you have the endurance, the will, the gumption to handle a certain amount of physical punishment. When I played soccer in high school, if the coach was mad at our performance we would run for hours and never see a ball. In dive school, you swim until you can’t move and drift to the bottom of the training pool.

So despite a bit of flab from years of drinking, Jeff could run most of his fellow non-Navy students into the ground. His job leading PT was to bring the rest of us up to speed.

Jeff’s favorite morning workout, after an excruciating set of crunches and flutter kicks, was running the Hill of Woe. Outside of the eastern gate at Eglin Air Force Base are a set of power lines that run up a hill, into the forest, and back through a neighborhood adjoining the base. The three-mile loop up that incline would have been bad, but not epic; no simple slope deserves the name Hill of Woe. But this was Florida—the run was torture because the hill was made of sand. A mile and a half of soft sand uphill.

Up we went, in a line, in step and on pace, singing songs to take the mind off burning calves and thighs. We had done one loop already, but when half of us turned for home like horses that had spotted the barn, Jeff dug us back in and we turned up the hill again for a second round. A third loop for good measure was on its way, but fortunately I did not know that yet.

Up the Hill of Woe, single file in the soft sand. Every step forward brought a half step back as the sand gave way under the weight of our shoes. Ahead of me Shipstead stumbled, put a hand on the ground to steady himself, and then was back up slipping through the viscous silt. My knees aching, my legs on fire, I looked over at the grass on the edge of our running path. We ran up the soft sand path, but paralleling us the whole way, out of the main traffic area, the ground was firmer from plant roots and bits of dirt stabilizing the slope. Would anyone notice? If I ran to the side, just a bit?

I stepped off the soft path and my feet found solid purchase. My backache eased, I stood straighter, and I tore up the hill.

“Whatcha doin’ there, LT?” yelled out Chaney.

“I’m coming, Boats,” was my sheepish reply.

“Come on, LT. Don’t be scared of the soft sand,” Jeff called. He was friendly, but firm.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

My next footfall was back on the path, but it slipped immediately half a foot down the hill. My hips felt the change with a twinge, and my thighs burned anew.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

Up and down, forward and back, I labored up the hill, in the soft sand, on this lap, and the next.

By the end of school, you have learned the ways of the Brotherhood. When you get the Crab placed on your chest, you have thousands of new brothers and a few sisters. They are unknown but loved. You will travel all over the world together, work together, drink together, laugh and cry and bleed and fight together. You have a new family. They are all that will sustain you.

Jeff died outside of Tikrit the summer after I got back from Kirkuk.

His team got a call that a security unit found an IED on one of the main routes into the city. The security had backed off and set up a cordon a safe distance away. As soon as his armored convoy appeared, as soon as he arrived on scene, there was a massive detonation under his vehicle. It was triggered by a wire concealed in the ground, so his electronic radio jammer couldn’t stop it. The unit he was coming to assist never saw the wire or the explosives. Jeff was driving the newest blast-resistant vehicle, with an underbody hull specifically designed to deflect large explosions. But this bomb was almost two thousand pounds of explosives and buried in the road. Nothing can withstand that. His twenty-six-ton assault truck was decimated. The bomber had waited until the EOD team arrived on the scene, had waited while the other security unit unknowingly sat on top of their own deaths, and only triggered his device once the EOD truck pulled up to the exact spot. Jeff never had a chance. I don’t know how much there was left to bury.