The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
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Brian Castner. (2012). The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Brian Castner. 2012. The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Brian Castner, The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Brian Castner. The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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1. • value: Biography
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Castner, Brian
   • bioText: BRIAN CASTNER, a graduate of Marquette University with an electrical engineering degree, served three tours in the Middle East as an officer of the U.S. Air Force—two of them as the head of an EOD team in Iraq. In 2006, he received a Bronze Star for his service. Upon returning to the United States following his service, he consulted as a independent civilian contractor, training military EOD units on tactical bomb-disposal procedures prior to their deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives in Buffalo, New York, with his wife and children.
   • name: Brian Castner

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2012-07-10T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Long Walk

fullDescription

In the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming.

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivor’s guilt that he terms The Crazy. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within—the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as “normal”? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Quil Lawrence, NPR's Morning Edition
   • content: "[A] painful but compelling read."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "At times, The Long Walk...is almost unbearable to read. Not because the writing is bad -- it's often excellent. It's unbearable because of Castner's brutally vivid descriptions of the war and the way it tore apart his mind and his life.... [T]his is an important book to read for anyone who wants to get some sense of the long-term human toll of the Iraq war. How many soldiers have been damaged as Castner has? How many lives and families have been destroyed -- or will be -- by the effects of TBI? The Long Walk brings home in a visceral way the hidden, personal burden of war that many veterans continue to carry."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Associated Press
   • content: "Vivid.... Castner's book intersperses stateside scenes of intense military training, off-hours hijinks and marital strife with vivid, often grisly accounts from Iraq's war-ravaged landscape, where his EOD teams disarmed improvised explosive devices, hunted for the bomb makers or cleaned up after their horrific handiwork while dodging gunfire and angry locals... [He writes] bluntly in describing how he has been changed by the war."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Jennifer Miller, Christian Science Monitor
   • content: "The Long Walk is a powerful, intimate, disturbing look at the ways that war can infect the life of a soldier. By the end of the story...we've watched him fight a deftly drawn series of battles, from the physical, to the emotional, to the existential. Each one of these is more intense and wrenching than the last. The Long Walk is not for the faint of heart.... Castner tells us what he is thinking and feeling at all times and has the magnificent ability to fill his scenes with the suspense of the moment.... It is the ultimate show-not-tell."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Chloe Fox, www.newyorker.com
   • content: "Not the typical testosterone-driven account that plagues the war-memoir genre.... [Castner] gives equal, if not more, weight to the time and effort that goes into readjusting to his family life, and his straightforward, unself-conscious writing paints an absorbing picture of war in the twenty-first century.... [This] memoir forces a reader to empathize with these unrelenting psychic and emotional pressures."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Eli Jelly-Schapiro, the Nation
   • content: A Freudian might reply that this identification with death is one way of expressing the impossible burden of living. At the end of his narrative, Castner seems to be improving--coming back to himself, and to his family--though "The Crazy" still follows him like a shadow. We leave The Long Walk trusting that the shadow will one day leave him--but also understanding why, for a disquieting number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, the fight against the war's after-effects is ending in suicide....[It] demands to be read now. These stories remind us that we are at war, and that the effects of war will be with us long after the final soldier returns home. They begin to make audible the too-silent struggles of the people who wage it, over there and over here. And in awakening our empathy, they can perhaps inspire that most urgent and rarest of leaps: toward a reckoning with how the war is lived and relived by the people--Iraqi and Afghan, Pakistani and Yemeni--upon whom it is waged."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Daily Beast
   • content: "Although the stress and terror of war is tough, this memoir shows the return to civilian life presents the biggest, longest challenge.... Castner offers a brutally honest, sharply observed account of life at war.... [His] descriptions are written with a clarity that brings alive not just the stress, terror, and anxiety of disarming improvised explosive devices, but also the difficult stretches of boredom and loneliness, not to mention the glimmers of joy and brotherhood that go along with it. Even more compelling is Castner's account of just how hard it is to return to civilian life. Back in the U.S. with his wife and children, Castner struggles to keep at bay a host of troublesome emotions and reflexes--together denoted simply as "Crazy" in his telling. The Long Walk is both harrowing and poignant--an intensely personal story of what it takes not just to survive war, but also to fully leave
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 19, 2012
     With a degree in electrical engineering, Castner served as an air force officer in Saudi Arabia in 2001, and Iraq in 2005 and 2006, where he earned a Bronze Star. He then trained military Explosive Ordnance Disposal units in tactical bomb procedures. Castner’s chilling account of those years is, he feels, “as correct as a story can be from someone with blast-induced memory lapses.” He details daily rituals and routines, and the Humvee expeditions, seeking improvised explosive devices (IED) with robots. When robots fail, there is the Long Walk, wearing the bomb suit (“eighty pounds of mailed kevlar”). Castner edges through this world of hidden dangers, suicide bombers, and scattered body parts. Throughout, he splices in scenes of the aftermath—his return to his wife and family in the U.S., where he is told he has post-traumatic stress disorder. Haunted by what he calls “the Crazy” (“it’s grey spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart… every night”), he sees constant reminders that blur reality (“IEDs on Interstate 90”). The intercutting of these two different narratives effectively conveys how a disturbing mental condition can erupt in the aftermath of nightmarish war horrors. Agent: Bob Mecoy, Bob Mecoy Literary Agency.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 15, 2012
     "The first thing you should know about me is that I'm Crazy." So begins this affecting tale of a modern war and its home-front consequences. The capitalization is deliberate, for by debut author and combat veteran Castner's account, that Crazy is something like another person lying inside, more than a shadow within, something that can be neither stilled nor exorcised. The ordinary-Joe author found himself as a volunteer Army officer in Iraq--and not just a soldier, but one with the very special job of disarming bombs. It's a business of acronyms, EFP (explosively formed projectile) being a particularly dreaded one. "EFP's are real bad," writes Castner. "They take off legs and heads, put holes in armor and engine blocks, and our bosses in Baghdad and Washington want every one we find." Given that demand, a dangerous job becomes even more dangerous, and the "long walk"--the one an explosives disposal expert takes toward the bomb and the task of denaturing it--becomes ever longer. It's an assembly-line sort of job, one of "stamping machines" and "broken widgets," in which a single mistake means being vaporized. For Castner, there were no good days. Most days were a blend of boredom and terror, with some more terrifying than others, as with the "Day of Six VBIEDs"--i.e., six very nasty car bombs within 15 minutes. That's the kind of thing that can wear on a person, to say nothing of the sound of small-arms fire, mortars, bombs and artillery. All of this fed the Crazy, whose "spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart from the inside out every night." And the Crazy turns out to be very real, on the way to the dread thing called TBI, traumatic brain injury, which all that exploding ordinance spawns just as surely as cigarette smoking gives way to emphysema. Scarifying stuff, without any mawkishness or dumb machismo--not quite on the level of Jarhead, but absolutely worth reading.

     COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2016
      

      As the head of a unit responsible for advance disarming of bombs and IEDs, Caster would sometimes be called upon to take "the long walk" to disarm a device manually when technology failed. As well as describing combat, the book also masterfully portrays the struggle many soldiers encounter for peace and sanity after returning home.

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

309

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In the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming.

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and...

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   • description: History / Wars & Conflicts / Iraq War (2003-2011)
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   • description: History / Military / Special Forces