One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  Copyright © 2014 by Francis J. West, Jr.

  Maps copyright © 2014 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  West, Francis J.

  One million steps : a marine platoon at war / Bing West.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6874-6

  eBook ISBN 978-1-58836-933-8

  1. West, Francis J. 2. Afghan War, 2001– —Personal narratives, American. 3. Afghan War, 2001– —Campaigns—Afghanistan—Sangin (Helmand). 4. United States. Marine Corps—History—Afghan War, 2001– 5. Marines—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  DS371.413.W46 2014

  958.104′745—dc23

  [B]

  2014016063

  www.atrandom.com

  Title-spread photo: Cpl. Jordan Laird

  Cover design: Dan Rembert

  Cover photograph: © Scott Olson/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Battalion 3/5 suffered the highest number of casualties in the war in Afghanistan. This is the story of one platoon in that distinguished battalion.

  Preface

  Suppose you’re offered $15,000 to walk two and a half miles each day for six months. In total, you will take one million steps and be well paid for losing a few pounds. Interested?

  There are a few provisos. First, you must live in a cave. Second, your exercise consists of walking across minefields. Third, each day men will try to kill you. The odds are 50-50 that you will die or lose a leg before you complete the one million steps. Still interested?

  This is the story of fifty men who said yes. Third Platoon fought the hardest sustained battle of the Afghanistan war. When we think of courage, we imagine a man acting bravely in a terrifying situation that lasts for a minute or an hour. These men battled fiercely for 200 days. Because U.S. forces were leaving Afghanistan, they knew their effort was a footprint in the sand. Yet every day they went forth to find and kill the enemy. Half of them didn’t make it intact to the end of their tour.

  What kept them going?

  When I embedded with 3rd Platoon, I felt at home with them because I’m a Marine infantryman, a grunt. That was how I was raised. After Pearl Harbor, my uncle and his baseball team joined the Marines. In 1942, I was two years old when they came home after seizing the island of Guadalcanal. The team spent their leave hanging out in their clubhouse in our attic. Assuming they were the resident babysitters, my mother placed me in their care.

  Thus began my four-year education. After each campaign—Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—the survivors returned to their clubhouse. They gave me a toy rifle and tiny uniform, played endless games, and smuggled me down the back stairs wrapped in a blanket when they went out. No boy ever had more protective or peculiar guardians.

  A few months after my college graduation, I said good-bye to my parents and left for law school. Across from the train station, the Marine Corps had a recruiting station. When I returned home a few hours later, my mother simply said, “You joined the Marines, didn’t you?”

  Like thousands of my fellow grunts, I wore out several pairs of boots in the jungles of Vietnam. I wrote two books about that war, a manual of small unit tactics and the story of a squad that lived in a Vietnamese village for a year. Forty years later, I went back to war. Between 2003 and 2013, I embedded with dozens of Army and Marine units in repeated trips to Iraq and Afghanistan.

  From one war to the next, I joined our grunt platoons and grew close to many who died in battle. In Afghanistan, the realities confronting the platoons mocked the proclamations of our generals. Our officials insisted that our troops act as nation builders, a Sisyphean task that confused both the Afghan tribes and our troops. Our generals promised victory, while insisting that killing the enemy could not win the war. Instead, our grunts were ordered to persuade medieval Islamic tribes to support a mendacious government in Kabul. This strategy was contrary to military and political logic.

  We invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. We stayed to build a nation. This required fighting the Taliban insurgents who were woven into the fabric of the society, while the Afghan government failed to foster a spirit of nationalism. Our grunts departed Afghanistan deeply skeptical of the wisdom of their senior commanders.

  This is my sixth and final book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I look back, it is clear that America and the West tried to do too much. When Saigon fell in 1975, the secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, assured our soldiers that “your cause was just and noble.” That is equally true of Iraq and Afghanistan. A flawed war policy can coexist with a soldier’s determination to fight for his country.

  Afghanistan was America’s longest war, persisting for thirteen years. The fiercest fighting took place in a farming community called Sangin in southern Afghanistan. In response to the Marine offensive in the fall of 2010, the Taliban mounted a stout resistance. Week after week, the casualty toll mounted. Appalled, the secretary of defense offered to pull the Marines back. The Marines refused.

  Third Platoon was one of three platoons in Kilo Company; Kilo was one of three rifle companies in 3/5—the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment. When I arrived in January of 2011, 3rd Platoon was locked in mortal combat. Their lieutenant was in a hospital with an amputated leg. Their inspirational sergeant, who led in every fight, was dead. One of their squad leaders was gone, and his replacement was limping around with a bullet wound, fearing he would be sent to the rear if he sought treatment.

  They lived in caves outside friendly lines, without computer connections. Twice a month, they called home to lie about how safe they were. Each day, they patrolled in search of a ghostlike enemy who planted mines to maim them. When a Marine was struck down, the others bound his wounds, stood guard while he was evacuated, and resumed the patrol. Each night, they returned to their caves, scratched stick figures of their kills on a wall next to the skins of coyotes, and roasted goats over their campfires, rituals little changed from that of war parties centuries ago.

  Based on the platoon’s hand-printed log, two embeds, and months of interviews, I try to describe what 3rd Platoon did. In six months, 3rd Platoon conducted about 400 foot patrols and engaged in 171 firefights. Imagine being on one patrol, and then another and another, always expecting to be blown to bits. Had these Marines been policemen anywhere in the States, the intensity of their battles would have made front-page news every week. To 3rd Platoon, each week only meant a few more stories shared around the campfire.

  In Vietnam, our casualties were more numerous, because many more of us were fighting. But we didn’t have it harder. Today’s grunts are more muscular than we were back then, but not as good-looking. Aside from that, the differences aren’t great. In a platoon then and now, you lived, laughed, fought, killed, and died in about the same numbers.

  Seven decades ago, my uncle, Sgt. Walter West, gave me a picture of the 1943 assault against the island of Tarawa. Sgt. Alex Deykeroff, who appears in this book, has that same picture on his Facebook page. Time does not separate Sergeant Deykeroff in Afghanistan from Sergeant West in the Pacific islands or from me in Vietnam or from my son who fought in Iraq. Marines have gone to war before us, with us, and after us. The dead, the living, and the unborn are links in an unbroken Marine tradition of service in war.

  The infantry—specifically Marine grunts—comprise the heart of this book. The
theme is cohesion, how one platoon—fifty young men—fused into a resolute fighting machine. Third Platoon knew we were pulling out of Afghanistan. Yet they didn’t slack off. When their leaders fell, they raised up new ones and continued to attack. Six months of daily patrolling. One million steps, with steady losses from start to finish.

  Who are these men? What spirit sustained them?

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  PREFACE

  MAP

  INTRODUCTION

  TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

  1. SHOCK

  2. LEADER LOST

  3. WITH THE OLD BREED

  4. LEADERS FOUND

  5. TOE-TO-TOE

  6. THANKSGIVING

  7. GONE

  8. ENEMY RESPITE

  9. MIDWAY TO HOME

  10. THE ROUTINE

  11. END OF TOUR

  12. THE ENDLESS GRUNT

  13. WHO WILL FIGHT FOR US?

  Photo Insert

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX A. ADDRESS BY LT. GEN. JOHN KELLY, USMC, NOVEMBER 13, 2010

  APPENDIX B. 3RD PLATOON AND KILO COMPANY 3/5 EXCERPTS FROM DAILY LOGBOOKS

  APPENDIX C. NAMES IN APPRECIATION

  APPENDIX D. 3RD PLATOON QUESTIONNAIRE

  APPENDIX E. 3RD PLATOON, KILO COMPANY, 3RD BATTALION, 5TH MARINE REGIMENT AT SANGIN, AFGHANISTAN

  NOTES

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Setting

  Sangin was the most violent district in Afghanistan, a remote farmland in southern Helmand Province at the bottom of the country. Beginning in 2006, British forces defended the government compound next to the district market, while the Taliban controlled the outlying fields where poppy was grown in abundance. To profit from the opium export, the Taliban planted thousands of land mines around the British outposts and attacked every patrol that sallied forth. Afghan officials never ventured beyond the market. Helicopters provided resupply only at night. Daylight flying was too dangerous. By 2010, Sangin was isolated and under siege.

  Then the U.S. Marines were sent in.

  “What does Sangin mean?” four-star Marine general John Kelly said when it was over. “They sent us there to fight—so we fought.”

  The British Effort

  In 2001, America and its allies invaded Afghanistan in response to the destruction of the Twin Towers. However, the invasion was botched, allowing the Al Qaeda terrorists to escape into Pakistan, along with the Taliban Islamists who had harbored them. America then stayed to build a democratic nation. As President George W. Bush explained, nation building was America’s “moral obligation.”

  The U.S. commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, claimed that the Taliban had been “squeezed into extinction.” By 2005, however, the Taliban had surged back. Helmand Province in the south was in danger of being completely overrun. Sharing an open border with Pakistan, Helmand accounted for 70 percent of the world’s opium and heroin supply. The New York Times reported $155 million in drug money went into Taliban coffers.

  Helmand had to be brought under government control. The tribes in the province were Pashtuns, as were the Taliban. The few Afghan soldiers were northern Tajiks who spoke a different language and hovered inside a few bases. So in 2006, the British sent in a 5,000-man brigade. But the province, 300 miles in length and home to a million farmers, was half the size of England, far beyond the control of 5,000 soldiers. One British general likened the effort to “mowing the lawn,” with the Taliban returning as soon as the British left an area.

  At the top of the province lay Sangin, a 200-square-mile rectangle of farmlands, bordered on the west by the Helmand River and on the east by a rutted road called Route 611. Beyond those boundaries lay miles of uninhabitable desert. Near and around the district market about 15,000 Pashtuns lived in a maze of one-story cinder-block-and-mud houses and slypes bare of shade trees. To the north, several thousand farmers lived in compounds in the middle of vast fields of corn and poppy.

  Next to the market, the British established a Forward Operating Base (FOB) called Jackson that was under constant siege. The Brits decided that trying to control the outlying farming areas was not worth the cost in casualties. By staying inside their forts, however, they were routinely attacked.

  The British opened schools and built up the market. Dozens of stores with gaily colored goods lined the “Avenue of Hope,” a half-mile-long strip of Route 611 next to Jackson. Despite the constant attacks, a British general explained, “The central theme of the counterinsurgency, winning the hearts and minds, was still core to our plans.”

  But no Afghan official wanted to serve in the district and the few police refused to venture beyond the market. Riding in motorbikes and pickup trucks, the Taliban drove around the outlying farmlands in teams of five to twenty, paid and supplied by patronage networks called mahaz. Operations were directed by military commissioners, or nizami, who reported to the main headquarters in Quetta, Pakistan, eighty miles to the east. The Taliban in Pakistan provided hardened Punjabi fighters, some not even speaking Pashto, to train the locals in tactics and bomb making.

  In Sangin, the Taliban drew most of its local fighters from the Ishaqzai tribe. The Taliban went from farm to farm, saying, “You are not Muslim unless you support jihad. Send at least one of your sons to fight with us.” Left unsaid was that when the Taliban seized power, the cooperative tribes would be rewarded with a larger share of the poppy trade.

  At the end of his tour, one British platoon leader wrote, “Sangin was no safer than when we found it. In fact, it was more dangerous and getting even more so.” A soldier described his outpost as “ringed in.” The British troops called the district “Sangingrad,” a reference to the World War II siege of Stalingrad. Finally, the Afghan provincial governor asked the British to “stop referring to Sangin as a district, when all you occupy is a base.”

  Marine-istan

  With the situation out of control in Sangin and across Helmand Province, in mid-2009 President Barack Obama authorized the U.S. Marines to move in. The Marines were the vanguard in a surge of 30,000 American troops that the president said would last only for eighteen months. From the first day of their deployment, the Marines knew they would be leaving based on a calendar rather than victory.

  One sweltering night in July of 2009, I was sitting with a few newly arrived Marines in an outpost in Helmand when a helicopter landed. A wiry Marine with close-cropped gray hair hopped out and called us together.

  “Here’s the deal,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson rasped, the red battle scar on his neck glistening in the candlelight. “We’re here to take their home turf from the Taliban. I want you to patrol until your asses fall off. Run every fucker who shoots at you out of the district.”

  I had first met Nicholson in 2006, when he was a colonel fighting in Fallujah. Back then, when Nicholson met with the city council, he promised fair treatment.

  “I have pulled Marines who do not act properly out of the city,” he said. “They had betrayed my trust; I lost confidence in them.”

  At the same time, he threw up a dirt berm around the city, erected concrete walls sealing off each neighborhood, and placed Marines on every street corner. Once the insurgents were killed in one neighborhood, he moved on to the next. He ground down the enemy.

  Marines fight the way the Chicago Bears play football; they line up and run over the opposition. Nicholson’s commander, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, had set the tone in Iraq, telling defiant sheiks, “I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

  Now in Afghanistan, Nicholson issued the same clear order every corporal could understand. The mission: drive the enemy out of Helmand by walking every foot of farmland. Nicholson spread his forces out along the Helmand River where the people lived, with orders to clear their way south. Sangin, in the remote north,
would wait until last.

  At the higher levels, though, a more sophisticated, or squishy, philosophy prevailed. A few weeks before the Marines arrived, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had announced that America, after eight years of fighting, finally had “the right strategy” for Afghanistan. Mullen explained that the U.S. troops were building a nation. As a model, he praised the book Three Cups of Tea, which espoused village-level projects, and spent a day visiting a girls school in Afghanistan. America’s top military leader had replaced war with social evangelism. The Muslim tribes would be converted by the secular gods of liberalism—schools, electricity, and other benefits bestowed from America via Kabul. “We can’t,” Mullen asserted, “kill our way to victory.” Empathy was to be the path forward.

  Confusion about the Marines’ role deepened a few months after they arrived in Helmand. The White House changed the mission from “defeat” to “diminish” the Taliban. Asked to explain the meaning of “diminish,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was stumped.

  “I urge our troops,” he said, “to think carefully about how they will accomplish the mission they have been assigned.”

  Was the mission of the Marine Corps to act as a Peace Corps? Down in Helmand, 500 miles physically and psychologically removed from Kabul, Nicholson walked a fine line. The Marine command did not know they were going to war under such a cloud of bureaucratic confusion. Their focus was upon defeating the enemy.

  The Marines are a small, tight outfit. Think of a golf ball—inside a hard shell are hundreds of tightly coiled elastics. An order relayed down the chain of command is like dropping that ball down a flight of stairs. From top to bottom, the golf ball bounces the same way with the same energy.

  Tensions between the Marines and the top command grew. In February of 2010, the Marines pushed the Taliban out of one of their strongholds called Marjah. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Kabul, then announced, “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.”