The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
Brian Castner
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0307950875
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them in Iraq as the head of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. Whenever IEDs were discovered, he and his men would lead the way in either disarming the deadly devices or searching through rubble and remains for clues to the bomb-makers’ identities. And when robots and other remote means failed, one technician would suit up and take the Long Walk to disarm the bomb by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in the Middle East. When Brian returned stateside to his wife and family, he entered an equally inexorable struggle against the enemy within, which he comes to call the “Crazy.”
This thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book alternates between two harrowing realities: the terror, excitement, and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the unshakeable fear, anxiety, and survivor guilt that he—like so many veterans—carries inside.
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
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
but not for what we had done. When I left Iraq, the U.S. military had occupied it for five years. But we didn’t collectively have five years of experience; we had one year of experience five times. And through it all, the Iraqis endured, and remembered, and resented, and hated the fresh, young, pimple-faced kid sitting on the Humvee near me, though he was in middle school when the first cruise missiles fell on Baghdad. “Hey, Mengershausen, did you ID the main charge on the end of that command
you have never before encountered in your daily life—like how the inner gears and lockballs of a setback-armed, mechanically timed and graze-impact-fired mortar fuze work—and then the next morning take and pass a test. If you fail that test, you may get a second chance. If you fail your second chance, you start that section over again with the next class below you in line. But after that, your third strike, you’re out. EOD school is an assembly line. If you fail your quality check, you may go
before it strikes. To unscrew a fuze on a bomblet dispenser. To melt a pressure pad on a land mine. And most important, to shoot jets of water into improvised devices to tear them apart before they function. When water is concentrated, focused, and directed by explosives, it creates an unyielding blade that rips and pushes without sympathetically detonating an IED’s hidden payload. Water does not compress. The wooden boxes, PVC pipes, burlap bags, and sheet metal containers of the renegade