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    The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
    Unavailable
    The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
    Unavailable
    The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
    Audiobook6 hours

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

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9780449806418
    Unavailable
    The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows

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    Reviews for The Long Walk

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A riveting tale of an explosive ordinance disposal officer that is more like two memoirs blended into one harrowing narrative. Castner skillfully recounts the horrors of war during his mission in Iraq. Woven into this tale is his excruciating transition back to civilian life -- and his struggles with crippling psychological hurdles. Folks who enjoy a neat-and-tidy story line might be rattled a bit by the back-and-forth structure. But it works. An added benefit of listening to the audiobook is hearing Castner narrate his powerful saga.
    • 4/5
      Wow. Jumps around, but the chronology is not the critical point here, it's the emotion.
    • 4/5
      A pain-filled, powerful account of life after a career as an explosive ordinance disposal officer in Iraq. Castner's courage in Iraq is impressive but his courage in baring his weaknesses, fears and injuries here is more impressive still.
    • 4/5
      A raw, vivid memoir of his war and post-war experiences by a U.S. Air Force officer who commanded an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq.
    • 5/5
      The word that keeps rising to the top when I try to describe Brian Castner's THE LONG WALK: A STORY OF WAR AND THE LIFE THAT FOLLOWS is "frightening." It's not an adequate word, and it could be misleading, because I'm not frightened for me, but for him. I worry about the long-term after-effects of what the Iraq war did to this young man, and, consequently, to his family. Because both parts of that subtitle - "the war", and "life that follows" - are given equal time at center stage in this scarifying and often morbidly moving memoir. Castner's damaged mind moves freely between those times - the war and his life after - and often seems to have trouble differentiating between the two. He runs daily up and down the streets near his home in upstate New York, trying to tamp down "the Crazy," often "accompanied" by a former comrade who is dead.This feeling, this terror, he calls "the Crazy" is manifested by erratic heartbeat, a swelling feeling in his chest, paranoid and uncontrollable strategies and plans to kill people he feels are hemming in him in public places, a constant reaching for his rifle which is no longer there - and more. It is an all-consuming paranoia and crippling fear of dying. It sends him repeatedly to VA hospital emergency rooms and, finally, to the shrinks and PTSD counselors. Two tours in Iraq with an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit exposed Brian Castner and others like him to uncountable blasts and explosions which have left their marks, on his brain and on his psyche. He is not the same young man, the former good Catholic schoolboy, who went off to war, eager to prove himself. Here is how he puts it -"I died in Iraq. The old me left for Iraq and never came home. The man my wife married never came home. The father of my oldest children never came home. If I didn't die, I don't know what else to call it." He tells of how "the new me" cries while reading stories to his children or while helping his son into his hockey gear, remembering the blast suit he helped his team members don just before that "Long Walk" down to manually dismantle a particularly troublesome IED that the robots couldn't handle. The old and new "me" of Castner are hopelessly entangled throughout this heartbreaking narrative of war and its aftermath. THE LONG WALK joins what is fast becoming a flood of eloquent and moving memoirs from Iraq and Afghanistan, books like Ben Busch's DUST TO DUST, or Kayla Williams's LOVE MY RIFLE MORE THAN YOU, and others by Chris Coppola, Michael Anthony, Nathaniel Fick, Johnny Rico and Anthony Swofford and Joel Turnipseed. The list continues to grow. At the top of my to-read pile now rests yet another: Mike Scotti's THE BLUE CASCADE. Brian Castner is young enough to be my son, could easily be my son. So yes, I was afraid for him, reading his story. Am still afraid for him, having finished reading it. Because the story hasn't ended for him or for his young family. "The Crazy" continues, tamped down by running and by Yoga. This is a beautiful book, stark, eqolquent and ... Frightening. Yes, that's still the best word I can manage. I can only pray that the telling of his story - writing it all down and putting it into a somewhat structured perspective - has helped; has proved therapeutic. But perhaps the most frightening thing about Castner's book is that his story is only the tip of the iceberg; that he speaks for thousands of others who are unable to articulate what happened to them in Iraq or Afghanistan, young men and women who continue their daily struggle to cope with their own "Crazy." On their behalf, thank you for sharing your story, Brian. Be well. Please.
    • 3/5
      The author describes his struggle adjusting to life after serving tours in Iraq working as a bomb disposal technician. The narrative flips back and forth in time, from yoga class to detonating bombs, from morning jogs in the suburbs to discovering a severed foot in a box after an explosion. Honest, intense, and harrowing.
    • 4/5
      Painful memoir, self exploration of a who is "crazy" after three tours in Iran as an Explosive Ordinance Disposal officer. Some pretty gory stuff here, but also some truths that are better faced than ignored.
    • 3/5
      Hard to review... on the good side I can say that Brian Castner is a good narrator for audiobooks. He's clear and easy to listen to... I guess since he wrote the book he also gave a really good feel for the emotion of the book. Oh the just so-so side, this book was really... so-so... in fact it ended so abruptly that I thought the audio had skipped. No... turns out his "crazy" was just that he was... uh... just a human? and everything was all OK? I mean, I get it, he's written an emotional story about how being a soldier in the middle east impacted him... how being an EOD employee was scary, always on edge, and became mind-game inducing mess... but the story had no value other than to be a sort of "expanded diary". I'm glad for Brian that writing out his "crazy" helped him become not so crazy but as far as war stories go... so-so and that's about it. It is a good story in that he's easy to listen to and you can understand his craziness. Maybe I just expected too much but this was just a long ... but interesting... diary.
    • 5/5
      “Don't be scared of the soft sand."A soldier, decked out in full bomb gear, an 80 pound Kevlar suit, making the “long walk” toward an armed bomb. Is there anything more desolate or terrifying? Brian Castner served three tours in Iraq, as part of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. This is the story of two journeys: the adrenaline-fueled, blood-soaked world of the combat soldier and the equally difficult return to a “normal” life.This is a raw, emotional memoir, filled with riveting prose. Castner describes the everyday intensity and horror of a EOD soldier, disarming bombs and cleaning up the aftermath. Collecting “right hands” to count the casualties. Placing a soldier’s personal info in their boots, because feet “pop” off in an explosion.And then Castner’s long painful recovery back home. The fear, the paranoia. While grocery shopping, he scans the crowd for potential insurgents and targets, clutching a non-existent weapon. Crying, while putting his son’s hockey gear on, which reminds him of donning his bomb suit.Castner vividly places the reader in each of these situations and has created one of the best books on war, that I have ever read. I cannot recommend it higher.
    • 5/5
      Castner's writing conveys, both through style and content, how all-consuming his job in Iraq was -- the hyper vigilance, the constant assessment of danger, the need to kill -- 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, under any circumstances, and VA hospital staff struggle to decide how much of that difficulty is physical or psychological. The answer is a moving target since the methods of war complicate the issue by constantly introducing new physical and emotional trauma. Castner relates his experiences in Iraq and his struggles at home in the context of finding a diagnosis and treatment for his own personal Crazy.His description of life both inside and beyond the wire is vivid and disturbing. The "Long Walk" is the walk that an Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist takes to a live round or bomb to defuse it. The long walk is also Castner's life. For him, the loss of EOD Brothers did not end with the tour of duty; the terror of the war doesn't end when you step onto U.S. soil. Probably the most frightening images for me in this book are the thoughts that run through the author's mind as he drives his son to day care and watches over him at night.Castner says that during the writing of the book his wife asked him how he could remember all the details. He responds that he cannot forget the details. The narrative keeps returning to Iraq or to his battle with the Crazy, sometimes suddenly in the middle of another story. While disconcerting at first, I realized that Castner is trying to help us understand what the Crazy is like. Castner is a talented writer, and this was an emotional read that I won’t soon forget.