"The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows" Brian Castner

In an earlier post I was writing about what it takes for something to be considered art.  My students said that it needed to evoke emotions.  I think art needs to take us somewhere we might never have been or paint images that are lasting.  There is no doubt that this book does all of that.

My brother enlisted in the Marines and served in Viet Nam in 1968.  Three decades later, my sister entered the Army National Guard and went through boot camp with other recruits half her age.  A few years later she was deployed to Afghanistan.  She spent most of her time behind the wire, but went out on a few missions.  Viet Nam was the first conflict that was brought directly into our living rooms on TV, but I was too young to really understand what was going on at the time.  The more recent conflicts in the Middle East are even more a part of our everyday lives since the lines of communication are more personal and immediate.  Castner's experience on an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team is different than either of my siblings' experiences, but his story took me back to look at their experiences more closely to see if I could understand them better.

Castner's writing conveys, both through style and content, how all consuming his job in Iraq was -- the hyper vigilance, the constant need to assess the intents of other, the need to kill or be killed -- and how he found it impossible to disengage from that life and reenter his family life when the tour was over.  There is no doubt that reentry is difficult after a tour abroad, under any circumstances. VA hospitals continue to search for the answer to how much of that difficulty is physical or psychological even as the methods of war are constantly changing and complicating the diagnoses by introducing new physical and emotional trauma.  Castner relates his experiences in Iraq while discussing the process of diagnosing and treating his own personal Crazy.

His description of life both inside and beyond the wire is vivid and disturbing.  The "Long Walk" is the trip that an EOD specialist takes in his or her bomb-proof suit up to a live round or bomb to defuse it.  The long walk is also Castner's life as it is now.  For him, the loss of Brothers did not end with the tour of duty, but continues every day of his life.  The terror of the war doesn't end when when you step off onto U.S. soil.  Probably the most frightening images for me in this book were the thoughts running through the author's mind as he drives his son to day care and watches over him at night.

This was a good, yet emotional, read that I won't soon forget.