The Long Walk

The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows is a memoir by U.S. war veteran Brian Castner. Formerly an active member of the Air Force, Castner was sent to fight in the Iraq War on two separate assignments in 2005 and 2006. Though the book chronicles the brutalities of Castner’s deployment, it focuses primarily on the jarring psychological transitions he experienced as he ricocheted between soldier and civilian life. Castner looks broadly at the period from his deployment through the last return home, where he was eventually diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after a long stretch of anxiety and mental fog. He later learned that most of the effects were from an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. The memoir intimately relates the various effects of trauma and contextualizes the evolution of a soldier’s attitude towards the American politicization of war. The memoir has been construed as a criticism of America’s chronic failure to support veterans due to its vivid depiction of the debilitating, yet underdiagnosed, PTSD epidemic.

Castner begins his memoir looking back at the history of World War II in order to contextualize the Iraq War. Though they took place more than a half-century apart, they share themes of reckless risk-taking, the lionization of individual “heroes,” and huge death tolls. He also notes that these wars both were historical modes of discourse about bomb technology: bomb technicians were sorely needed during World War II, and bombs have been massively deployed in the Iraq War. He contends that the tides of World War II were mostly shifted in a sequence of bombings between the British and Germans, their outcomes contributing to the formation of different “we” groups that were crucial to the identity politics that perpetuated them.

Castner, during his time in the Air Force during the more recent war, led an Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD, on different deployments in Iraq. He went on to become a private military contractor and led the military’s pre-deployment strategy in bomb disposal. He laments that the United States was not as proactive as Britain in deploying bombs before its enemies could escalate an arms race. Instead, it delayed too long; after a failed mission in 2003, US enemies in Baghdad stripped a large number of weapons bunkers that had remained intact, redistributing arms around the country. Castner details the trials his team went through as they set out to destroy remaining arms bases, one by one, using remote-controlled robots and precision-targeting equipment. “The Long Walk,” from which the book gets its name, is the term for the rare instance where a human has to go into the battlefield to defuse a bomb. Even the shortest of these journeys, EOD officers agree, feels like an eternity.



Castner reflects that most of the work of a bomb defuser actually takes place forensically, in the aftermaths of explosions. These experiences are just as traumatic, if not more, than the jarring anxiety of approaching an active bomb. He recalls having to wade past body parts, unknown fluids, and other charred, potentially dangerous remains to perform his work. He equates bomb forensics to an almost spiritual reading of the artifacts of war.

Castner’s mental health took a turn for the worse when he began imagining his newborn son dying in an explosion, even after returning home to the United States. He began to keep watch outside his son’s room as he slept, unable to shake the feeling that enemies waited at every turn. He recalls seeing phantom guns and other weapons in everyday locations, including supermarkets and airports. After a PTSD diagnosis that did little to alleviate his fears, he eventually learned that he had also sustained a series of traumatic brain injuries from enduring successive blasts on the battlefield. He vividly recalls the images and feelings that this condition induced: once, he was unable to remember as much as his son’s birthday party on the evening of the day it took place.

Eventually, Castner learned to manage his anxiety. His memory effects lingered, and he notes that he may never isolate which specific mental or physical trauma they originate from. He equates the fear and difficulty of recounting his past to the fear and difficulty of defusing an active bomb. The Long Walk is a testament to the fact that no experienced soldier ultimately comes home “safe.” Rather, the images and atrocities of war remain embedded in the human mind, merely taking new forms as one returns home.