The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (6 page)

I have a new job now. Out of the Air Force, out of the military, I’m two weeks into my new civilian life and at my new job, sitting in a bland conference room in a faceless hotel in a blur of a town. I don’t know it yet, but there will be a string of identical hotel rooms, a squadron of stuffy airlines, and piles of free continental breakfasts in my future, traveling the country providing last-minute training to EOD guys before they deploy. A parade of faces, a two-week helping of explosives and robots and running drills until they have their tactics just right. Then up and gone, love ’em and leave ’em, to the next half-month stand, another unit, another bundle of hopes and fears. Faces meld and join, till the memory of each brother and sister is just a smear, a lingering haze, a nagging impression. All the faces return. Most alive. Some dead. The list of EOD technicians killed in battle is now largely a list of my former students.

But this is my first job, and sitting in that conference room, fresh and green and ready to teach my first course, that future is still an unknown. I meet my fellow instructors for the first time: John, JB, Jimbo, Vic. Chris and Matt will join the team soon. All former EOD guys, from all four services, done with the military but not done with the Brotherhood; we can’t bear that thought so we perpetuate. Everyone has a common acquaintance. War stories start, jokes and outrageous deeds. I know Jimbo from my last tour in Iraq; it is not coincidence, it is a law of averages. So few brothers, there are few degrees of separation.

And then the news arrives at the conference room. Before I lose a single student, I lose a former classmate. Jeff has died, and so has his teammate Pat. In a truck, on a stretch of deserted highway south of Tikrit. Command wire. Two thousand pounds. Buried in the road.

The Crazy stirs in its sleep. I check my rifle. The foot sits in a box.

I know Jeff. Jimbo knows Jeff and Pat. JB and Vic know Pat. So now I know Pat too, and JB and Vic know Jeff, as the beer flows, and Vic and Jimbo and JB and I remember long into the night.

My wife said she could never imagine Jeff growing old. Now she won’t have to.

III
|
Failure

W
HAT DO YOU
do when your rights are being read? Your legal rights, out loud, to you directly and right in your face, not on television on some crime drama. Do you remain silent? Do you ask for an attorney? Do you yell and scream? Shrink? Run?

I did none of those things. My words failed and my shoulders slumped. The shock made my heart race and my mind spin and my hands shake all the way up to my elbows. I was expecting an ass-chewing, an uncomfortable correction, a warning to never make that mistake again. I was not expecting to be charged with a crime.

When I arrived at my boss’s office, a marble-and-plywood box in a captured Iraqi Air Force administration building, I was told to close the door. The First Sergeant and the Chief—witnesses—were standing next to the Colonel’s desk, behind and to the side, eyes looking down. That didn’t happen during typical ass-chewings. I was asked to hand over my sidearm. I removed my 9-millimeter pistol from the holster strapped to my right leg, released the magazine, popped the round from the chamber, and put it on my Colonel’s desk in front of him. That did not typically happen either. The Colonel then looked down, lifted a sheet of paper, and reading word for word in a steady voice, informed me I had been relieved of my command, I had the right to remain silent and any statement I uttered from then on could be used against me in my court-martial proceeding.

The astonishment hit first, but the stoop in my frame did not last. Pride found my spine, confidence my shoulders. As he continued to read, I stood back up, square, at attention, and listened as I was charged with disobeying the direct order of a general during wartime. A crime, if my adrenaline-addled brain could recall correctly, that could send me to Leavenworth.

When he was finished, I ignored my first right.

“Sir, I am very confused. What’s going on here?”

The Colonel looked at me with sad eyes. He sighed.

“You need to call the defense lawyer in Germany,” he responded.

When I arrived at Cannon Air Force Base immediately following EOD school, I thought of nothing but deploying. Afghanistan was winding down, and the EOD guys there were bored, looking for work. But Iraq was still exciting—the initial push into Baghdad had gone well, and there was a palpable sense that we needed to deploy soon, before all the fun was gone. I saw pictures e-mailed back from guys at the Baghdad Airport of guided missiles, submunitions from the First Gulf War, and piles of artillery rounds being destroyed daily. All the things I had only seen in school were there, spread around the country like trash in a giant landfill. I needed to go before it was all destroyed. It had only taken a year for the good times to end in Afghanistan, and we were afraid we’d miss it twice.

I had only been in my job commanding a unit of about twenty EOD technicians on the flat, windswept prairie of eastern New Mexico a week before I started calling headquarters, asking when I could deploy next. The gray-haired Chief who endured my begging took my enthusiasm in stride; in less than a year, I was in the training pipeline, the conveyor belt, the cattle chute that leads to the C-130 ride into the box.

I was only beginning to learn about EOD and leadership when my number came, and I had a lot of catching up to do. For all of my self-assured ego and confidence, EOD school really only put tools in my metaphorical toolbox, but hadn’t taught me how to use them. Plus, the specific ordnance and devices I encountered in school were quickly becoming obsolete in the war that was developing. The roadside bomb did not fully exist as a weapon in the imagination of the Iraqi insurgent when I completed the IED section of Explosive Ordnance Disposal school. As a student I studied pipe bombs, the Unabomber, and 1980s Eastern European terrorist designs. We investigated the fake training devices using X-rays and a heavy metal disrupter designed during World War II. The robots were old and kept out of the way where the students couldn’t break them, and we saw none of the other new technology that was available only months later in Iraq itself. I was learning to be in command, I was learning to shoot, I was learning new equipment, and I was learning a new way of war with everyone else.

EOD had an updated mission. Clear roads, cities, buildings, of IEDs for the grunts and convoys. Find and blow the weapons caches squirreled away throughout the country. Collect evidence from blast scenes to track down and kill the bomb makers. Do all of this while fighting your way through a country on the edge of anarchy. Prepare yourself for the worst. If your security is overrun, and every soldier meant to guard you instead lies rent in pieces, a wet mess strewn about their smoking armored Humvees, be prepared to extricate your EOD team by shooting your way home. No matter what, your brothers come home alive.

Three months before my first real combat tour we began serious deployment workups, leaving home to conduct training we couldn’t do at our small base. A week of trauma medicine—IVs, intubations, and tourniquets. Driving our Humvees in a convoy at high speed through mock villages and ambushes. Advanced electronics, to analyze circuits soldered together in dirt-floored caves thousands of miles away. Clearing and rendering safe IEDs with the newest equipment—electronic jammers, British water-and-explosive-mix disruption charges, and sleek robots half the size and weight of the clunkers we had at home—most of which we had never seen before. A combat shooting course, put on by civilian contractors, where we moved and fired our weapons in ways that never would have been allowed by the safety-soaked and risk-averse larger Air Force.

The muddy and ramshackle shooting range looked more like the forgotten corner of an old farmer’s property than the scene of advanced tactical marksmanship training. Two picnic tables, a temporary shelter, rows of railroad ties that demarked shooting lanes, a pile of dirt on one side of the long gallery to catch our lead. Located at the end of a winding track off our maps, the contractor’s firing range was isolated in the low, thick central Texas woods, wet with November rain.

But initial looks could be deceiving. Piled on those picnic tables, in unmarked separate cardboard boxes, were a hundred thousand rounds of 5.56- and 9-millimeter ammunition. Rifles, pistols, magazines, optical sights, scopes, infrared lasers, drop holsters, cross-draw and multi-mag vests, body armor, helmets, slings, armored gloves, and cool-guy sunglasses littered the surrounding grass, fell out of the back of pickup trucks, and stood ready for use. And at one end, against the dirt berm, were rows of heavy steel targets, some with paper coverings depicting Middle-Eastern-looking men, some blank and naked.

My right thumb was raw from loading magazines by lunch on the first day. To the firing line, for warm-up shots with the rifle and then pistol. Back to the picnic tables for remotivation and magazine reloading. At the firing line again, for transition drills between rifle and pistol. More lectures and magazine loading. To the line again. Three shots with the rifle to the chest, switch magazines, then three more. Professionals do the simple things well: accurate and sustained fire, counting rounds so you are never dry, reloads under fire, immediate actions to fix a broken weapon, transitions from rifle to pistol and back, squaring your body to the threat so your vest absorbs the shock of impact if you are shot, moving and communicating and working as a team while under duress. The
plink
of lead on steel was a soothing song of success.

All the while, our contracted instructor, an ex–Marine Recon trigger-puller, barked, cajoled, mocked, ridiculed, and motivated. A command to the line, to prepare to fire. A call to shift fire, as a new threat emerged. A distracting whisper in your ear while you slowly squeezed the trigger. Grunts and yells and shouts to communicate over the din of twelve talking assault rifles.

The worst of all sins: not hitting the target. “Whatever you do, Captain, don’t miss!” came the regular admonishment from behind me.

By the third day, simply killing steel was not enough. We graduated to battle drills—recovering and tending to a fallen comrade, dismounting a vehicle under fire, entering and clearing a building, moving and evading hostile fire through an organized violent retreat. Peels from the left, peels from the right, Australian in-line peels, shoulder taps and foot pressure to move through a room. Timing reloads to ensure a constant hail of bullets on the head of the enemy.

The upgraded shooting regimen was interspersed with words of combat wisdom from our instructor, aphoristic
hadith
pearls from the master, blessings on the student. We sat at his feet, loaded yet more magazines with row upon row of ammunition, and absorbed the enlightenment. Simple concepts that inspired confidence in ourselves and our ability to return alive.

You must be willing to commit more violence than your enemy. A firefight is a test of wills to kill.

You must mentally prepare to be shot. To absorb the impact, to brace your chest against it, and then continue to return fire.

Live behind your weapon. Take cover behind your weapon. If you are shooting at your enemy, he will put his head down and not shoot back. If he is not shooting at you, you cannot get shot.

Your rifle, your pistol, your vest, your head, and your heart are a five-man team on your side. They will save you. Stay alive no matter what. You don’t quit until you are dead.

Always be alert, be present, be ready to kill. When the moment comes, your training and muscle memory will save you.

The last day of training, the final exam, the last shooting sequence, was a combination of all previous exercises. We moved down the grassy field on patrol, soggy scrub trees transformed into dusty crumbling walls of an Iraqi village in my mind’s eye. Suddenly, our instructor calls contact front! Twelve of us came on line, and a thousand rounds are fired in the first minute, overwhelming violence perpetrated upon our imaginary foe.

I needed to change mags, and yelled, “Reloading!” over the roar to my right and left. My partner next to me called, “Covering,” and killed my targets and his during my five-second change-out. In one rote motion I dropped the old mag with my right index finger, reached for the replacement with my left hand, and keeping my eye on the target and never looking down, inserted the new mag and brought the bolt forward and home. “Up,” I shouted, and the fire continued.

A command from the instructor. To my right, DJ called for a peel. One by one, the shooter on the right end of the line called, retreated, turned, and began firing again, into the enemy and past the line in front of him. Yard by yard we retreated down the cobbled Iraqi street.

Then, to my left, Brown fell. Hit. Wounded by a phantom bullet, a shoulder tap from our merciless instructor. He had to be recovered and brought to safety.

“Man down!” I called, and stepped back over Brown’s prone body.

“Covering,” came the immediate reply, as Olguin and DJ filled my spot, and placed their squared bodies between Brown and the ghostly incoming fire.

I flicked my rifle to Safe and moved to grab Brown from behind, around the chest in a massive bear hug. Hot shell casings, discarded from the relentless protective fire above us, fell in a rain, onto exposed necks and wrists, into armor gaps and down under my shirt. I sat Brown up, reached around, locked my hands, squeezed, and lifted. Five hundred pounds of man, armor, helmet, tactical vest, rifle, and ammunition lurched backward in one heave. We fell in a pile, inches from where we started.

Don’t be scared of the soft sand.

I yelled to DJ to help, and Olguin shifted fire to cover his targets. DJ and I each grabbed one of Brown’s shoulder straps, and after a quick count to three, surged forward. My left arm nearly dislocated as we fell again.

Our Marine instructor loomed over me and barked in my ear, harassed and mocked, screamed obscenities, questioned my love for my wounded brother at my feet. Would I leave him to die on the battlefield? Alone? Olguin called for a reload and our team’s collective fire waned. We had spent five minutes and four thousand rounds retreating a hundred meters down this exposed Iraqi street. Brown was wounded. I was exhausted. Ammo was running low.