'The Long Walk': A striking forthcoming memoir of leading a bomb squad in Iraq, and then going crazy when back home

I recently read The
Long Walk, a book about leading an EOD team on two tours in Iraq. It isn't really a narrative, more a prolonged
rant. I think a better title would have been "The Crazy: A memoir of Iraq and
after." But it certainly evoked Iraq for me in a way that many memoirs do not.
It has a lot of lines that resonated with me -- I found myself reading the book
for these:

--"Everything about Iraq sucked. I
loved it."

--"No one drives through the center
of Hawija unless forced: so much hate packed into such small space."

--"You are a different person on
graduation day from the day you started [EOD school]. . . . It's like being a
surgeon, except if you screw up, you die, not the patient."

--On driving an Iraqi dirt road at
night: "Like snow flurries back home, the dust just reflected back at us what
little light we gave off."

--"Sometimes, when the calls pile
up, you can go from yesterday to tomorrow and never get to today."

--". . . so prodigious the blood
soaking into the ground that it contaminates the oil reserves hidden beneath
the rocky desert."

--"Two months later we had a Day of
Five VBIEDs. By that time I was numb, my brain a tingle, and I have no memory
of it at all."

--"Every moment you are being shot
at you are blissfully, consciously, wonderfully, tangibly alive."

--Murphy's Law: "The odds say
Murphy always win in the end."

--"I died in Iraq. The old me left
for Iraq and never came home . . . . I liked the old me. . . . Everyone longs
for the old me. No one particularly wants to be with the new me. Especially
me."

--"Until one day, seemingly out of
the blue, it surprised me walking down the street. I stepped off a curb normal.
I landed Crazy." 

--"There are two of me now. The
logical one watches the Crazy one."

--"my first thought is always the
same. Will I be Crazy today? And the answer is always 'yes' before my feet hit
the floor."

--Considering going back for
another tour in Iraq: "The Crazy purrs its approval."

--"Twitch. The left eye has been
bad today."

--"When the depravity of this world is laid
before you in its ruin, and you discover yourself mired in it, rather than
above, what hope do you have?"

--"Forget the starter's pistol.
There is a finisher's pistol, and it could go off at any time."