One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  The instructors back in California had trained the battalion based on lessons from Iraq, where patrols used vehicles and IEDs were buried in trash piles next to hard-paved roads. But no one in 3rd Platoon ever patrolled in a vehicle. Marines walked off to the sides of dirt paths, encased among thousands of corn stalks. Herds of sheep and cows, tended by barefoot boys with long sticks, grazed in the few open fields. Thick undergrowth and rows of tall trees lined the irrigation ditches and canals.

  The day before, Sergeant Dy had heard the firing when Abbate was engaged near Fires. Dy had climbed onto a roof and watched groups of what he assumed were unarmed farmers scurrying around. Later, he watched the helicopters roar by with dead Marines on board. There were no garbage pits out in the fields. Where were the IEDs hidden?

  Slowly, slowly, 2d Squad moved in single file, only a few hundred meters off Route 611. They were walking on an embankment next to a waist-deep canal when LCpl. Tim Wagner, nineteen, saw the edge of a board sticking out of the dirt. Wagner, from Nebraska farm country, needed no prompting. He raised a clenched fist and froze. A few feet away, another Marine stopped, took a careful look around, and pointed at a mound of freshly turned earth. They both backed away.

  Sergeant Dy called back to Big Country, about sixty yards behind them.

  “We got IEDs up here.”

  Lieutenant West was already on super-alert. A farmer had just signaled from his field, shaking his head in a warning not to go farther.

  “Don’t advance,” West said.

  Big Country then did what he was expected to do, and why the loss rate among Marine second lieutenants is so staggering: he walked up to the front. Platoon sergeants often complain about their young officers being headstrong, but no sergeant wants a leader who holds back. Big Country walked the few meters toward Dy, staying in a swept lane marked by squirts of shaving cream.

  He moved carefully around LCpl. Aaron Lantznester, twenty-one, from Ohio. Lantz had bright blue eyes that looked so innocent that the squad called him Bambi. He had found boot camp to be too easy, but later, in infantry training, had paid close attention during the Combat Life Savers course, learning how to treat sucking chest wounds and massive hemorrhages. The instructors shouted at the recruits when they were least expecting it—during a ten-mile march, or in a classroom, or in the squad bay.

  “Jones, lie down! You’ve lost your leg! The rest of you—save him!”

  Lantz was carrying eight tourniquets.

  As West walked by, he gave Lantz a friendly tap on the helmet.

  “Get an engineer up here,” West said.

  LCpl. James Boelk, on his first combat patrol as the radio operator, was a few meters behind, scrambling to catch up to his lieutenant. The largest man in the platoon, his squad nicknamed him “Baloo,” after the gentle bear in The Jungle Book. Less than a foot away from where a dozen other Marines had walked, Boelk slipped on the bank. An explosion hurled his body into the canal, killing him instantly.

  West felt a truck hit him. The force threw him thirty feet backward. He landed with his back against a tree, his leg lying next to him.

  The shock wave drove Lantznester’s face into the dirt. For several seconds, he couldn’t hear or focus his eyes. When his vision cleared, he crawled to West, ripped off his shredded armor, and cinched two tourniquets around the gushing stump.

  “Tell everyone not to move,” West said. “We gotta …”

  West tried to raise his right hand, but it too had been mangled. His face was twisted at an odd angle, a chunk of shrapnel jutting from his left eye.

  “You’re okay, sir,” Lantz said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  West felt no pain, only frustration.

  “Shut the fuck up, Lantz. Nothing’s okay.”

  The blast had scythed down the command group. Burning metal had smashed into LCpl. Zach White’s face, breaking his jaw. Other shards snapped the arm of the corpsman, HM3 Stephen Librando. Two other Marines were holding their torn faces, while a third lay dazed with a concussion.

  With the explosion echoing in their ears, no one could hear. An engineer scraped the ground around the blast area, found another IED within arm’s length of Lantz, and snipped the wires. Lantz continued to look after West.

  Sergeant Dy, a few feet away, felt like he had been hurled underwater. Everything looked white and faded out, with pieces of corn and dirt swirling and bobbing. With both radios blown, Dy fired off red signal flares.

  Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, made his way up from the rear, staying inside the gobs of shaving cream. He organized first aid and used his radio to call in the disaster. Back at Inkerman, Gunny Carlisle ran to the nearest vehicle, hopped in, and told the startled driver to get up the road. Within minutes, the armored vehicle had skidded to a stop near the red smoke signal marking the casualties out in the field. Carlisle ran down the path, took one look at West’s pale face, hoisted him over his shoulder, and lumbered back to the MRAP. Sergeant Cartier directed the movement of the other litters, and within half an hour all the casualties had been flown out of Inkerman.

  The next day, David Boelk, a retired Air Force master sergeant, was sitting at his desk in Washington, D.C. He read of a massive explosion that had killed and wounded several Marines in Sangin. He thought, “Wow, my son’s unit, somebody died, that really hits close to home.” His office phone rang a few minutes later; then two somber Marines were at his house.

  LCpl. James Boelk, twenty-four, left behind his parents, five sisters, and a brother. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, had a soft spot for Boelk, who immediately did everything he was told, with a loopy grin on his face. He was the sort of Marine every sergeant liked to have in his unit—obedient, eager, and good-natured.

  Elsewhere in the battalion, an IED explosion killed Sgt. Ian Tawney, twenty-five, of Oregon. His wife, Ashley, was expecting a baby girl in January. Tawney was the top student in squad leader school and graduated as the class honor man. 3/5 had lost ten Marines and more than thirty-five wounded. At Camp Bastion, the main coalition base in southern Afghanistan, the Personnel Retrieval and Processing Company prepared each body for transit to the States.

  “If it was a Marine [body] coming in,” Sgt. Thor Holm wrote to me, “we assumed he was coming from 3/5. We tried to take care of him for his buddies. We ironed every flag.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Morris sent a long email to the families of those serving in the battalion.

  “I have decided,” Morris wrote, “not to announce casualty information via the Battalion’s webpage, because I think it will be less mentally draining on families over time than announcing every casualty we sustain as soon as it happens.”

  He had a tough time composing that letter. He knew every family was poring over the daily news bulletins. Names of the fallen, however, were not released until a full day after the next of kin had been notified. Even then, in order not to provide intelligence to the enemy, the location of the incident was not revealed. This meant hundreds of families held their breath for two to three days, not knowing who was ringing the doorbell.

  The families stayed constantly in touch. Patty Schumacher, whose son Victor had been killed on the 13th, talked with Mark and Teresa Soto. Mark had been Victor’s high school football coach. Together, the three launched a Facebook page entitled “The Boys of 3/5.” A news story about each fallen Marine in 3/5 appeared on the page.

  “At the time,” Morris later told NPR, “I was wondering, what were we doing wrong?”

  Chapter 3

  WITH THE OLD BREED

  “We fight, bleed, lose buddies, and get shit done.”

  —JEREMY MORENO, CALIFORNIA

  What shocked 3rd Platoon was that it happened so fast. Ten percent of the unit was gone in one thunderous clap, blood and limbs strewn about. Big Country, their cheerful platoon commander, had left them. One day they were intact, and the next day they were leaderless, with holes blown in their ranks.

  “We lost so many so fast,” LCp
l. Trevor Halcomb, twenty-two, said. “I wasn’t sure I’d get back to Texas to have a happy, healthy family and a house with a white picket fence.”

  Captain Nick Johnson knew 3rd Platoon’s morale had sunk. A student of history, Johnson had devoured Cpl. E. B. Sledge’s harrowing book, With the Old Breed. Sledge, who had served in Kilo Company during World War II, depicted battle as a pitiless monster. The “old breed” of Marines, expecting that many among them would die, bottled up their emotions and fought stoically. Kilo’s radio call sign was Sledgehammer. Knowing 3rd Platoon needed a man like Sledge, Captain Johnson reached for the hardest lieutenant he knew.

  Second Lt. Victor Garcia looked like a walking rock. If you saw him with a scowl on his face, you’d cross to the other side of the street. He spoke softly and with excellent diction. At thirty-six, he was the oldest lieutenant in the battalion. His parents had immigrated from Mexico to the Salinas farming community in California, where his father was a mechanic. His older brother had served in the Marines, and his two sisters were computer designers.

  In high school, Garcia was a champion heavyweight wrestler with mediocre grades. He had joined the Marines in response to a recruiter’s classic gambit that he couldn’t hack it. He liked being a grunt, and did three combat tours in Iraq, progressing from squad leader to platoon sergeant to company gunny. Officers, though, gave the orders, and he wanted to make his own decisions in battle. Selected to attend college as part of the officers program, he enrolled at San Diego State, where he weekly wore his uniform to class. He found the students to be friendly, if a bit intimidated by a Marine gunny. He graduated in two years with straight As, except for a B in Women’s Studies.

  Assigned to Kilo Company, he had hoped to command a platoon. But after five years of deployments, he knew how to control mortars, rockets, artillery, and air. That experience landed him at company headquarters as the Fire Support Officer. Now Johnson needed an experienced leader in the field.

  “Pack your gear,” he told Garcia, “and take over 3rd. Keep the platoon here at company until you get your feet wet.”

  That was it. No rah-rah speech, no pep talk.

  Day 4. 24,000 Steps

  Garcia called together 3rd Platoon for the first time. The numbed Marines knew he had served as a platoon sergeant in Ramadi, where IEDs, snipers, and rocket-propelled grenades were daily occurrences.

  “We’re going to get those sons of bitches,” he said. “We’ll honor our dead by going out again today and every day.”

  Staff Sergeant Cartier took Garcia aside.

  “I’m the platoon sergeant, sir,” he said. “Lieutenant West and I trained this platoon together. With him gone, I have to show I’m still here for them. Let me take out this patrol without you.”

  Garcia knew that Cartier had torn the ligaments in his right knee and, in order to stay in the field, was avoiding the battalion doctor. “You got it,” Garcia said. “Take it slow.”

  “I can’t do it any other way.”

  The patrol left the wire, exchanged small arms fire for a few hours, and returned with no casualties. After that first step, Garcia and Cartier agreed to a division of labor. The platoon sergeant set the patrol and guard rotations, supervised camp cleanliness, listened to everyone’s gripes, and took care of problems that shouldn’t reach the lieutenant. Lighthearted where Garcia was saturnine, Cartier fitted into the role of counselor and ombudsman for the troops. Garcia didn’t want to come across as the hardass that he was.

  “After taking so many losses,” he said, “the platoon was ignoring the little things. They weren’t blousing their trousers, wearing Marine-issue boots, shaving every morning. They were losing the habit of discipline. So each day, I’d suggest one correction to Matt Cartier, and he’d get the point across to the platoon.”

  Garcia understood the Marines, but he wasn’t their buddy. As the new platoon commander, he made no effort to mix in. He let the squad leaders do their jobs, while Cartier kept his finger on the pulse of the unit.

  Garcia’s quiet separateness suggested he had seen this all before. Actually, he had no more understanding of village warfare than did the platoon. The Iraqi city of Ramadi had been the classic urban fight. The concrete streets and sidewalks made it impossible to dig in IEDs; the Marines learned to avoid garbage heaps and abandoned cars. Shots came from the upper windows of apartment buildings, not from distant tree lines. Once the Marines gained control of a city block, concrete barriers were erected at the entrances. There were no open spaces inside a city.

  The Green Zone was a leap in time back into the paddies and bush of Vietnam. No hard roads, no cars, no bright lights, no Quick Reaction Force mounted in armored vehicles. In Sangin, the local Taliban—about 200 full-time and twice that number as part-time help—simply had to prevent the Marines from pushing outside the lines established by the British. The hated occupiers—the infidels or jafirs—were too powerful to assault head-on. But as long as they were penned in close to their forts, they were no threat. Sooner or later, they would leave. The infidels had the watches, but the Islamist resistance had the time.

  Day 5. 30,000 Steps

  Shortly after breakfast, 3rd Platoon heard the distant thumps and rattles of a firefight to their north, up near the Kajacki Dam, guarded by India Battery of the 12th Marine Regiment. LCpl. Francisco Jackson had been killed by an IED and his squad was pinned down, unable to recover his body. After a second Marine was shot, the Taliban closed in to prevent the squad from withdrawing. Back at 3/5’s op center, the air officer, Capt. Matt Pasquali, called for an air attack. Two F-18s responded by dropping two 500-pound bombs, followed by several gun runs.

  Low on fuel, the F-18s had returned to base before Garcia left Fires with the morning patrol.

  Third Platoon had not moved 500 meters outside the wire before bumping into a Taliban gang. Both sides were moving parallel along thick rows of eight-foot-tall corn when they heard each other. In the ensuing firefight, thousands of bullets scythed down the cornfield. When the shooting ended, the Marines found two dead Taliban and a dead farmer. Nearby another farmer lay moaning with bullets in his leg. The Marines attached a tourniquet and the wounded man was taken by tractor to the district market.

  This pattern of fighting—two enemy fighters dead at a cost of one innocent farmer and another badly wounded, plus repeated bombing runs to the north—deeply disturbed the high command. In fact, no army in history ever fought with more restraint than did the Americans, Danes, Dutch, and British in Afghanistan. Seven out of ten civilian casualties were caused by the Taliban, who insisted that every Pashtun sacrifice for jihad. President Hamid Karzai never complained about Pashtun Taliban killing fellow Pashtuns. But he railed about every casualty caused by the foreigners. Karzai had pointed an accusing finger at civilian casualties in Sangin just a few months before 3rd Platoon arrived. The high command was determined to increase restrictions until almost no civilian was killed by coalition fire.

  Shortly after taking command in mid-2009, Gen. McChrystal had issued an extraordinarily specific order, called a “Tactical Directive,” all the way down to the platoon and squad level.

  “The ground commander,” the Tactical Directive read, “will not employ indirect weapons against a compound that may be occupied by civilians, unless the commander is in a life-threatening position and cannot withdraw.”

  The high command, civilian and military, was preaching a theory of benevolent war. The standing order was to ensure PID, Positive Identification, which meant identifying a clear, hostile target before returning fire. But most firefights were exchanges of burning lead and explosives between two tree lines, or between Taliban inside a compound and a coalition patrol in an open field. In 3rd Platoon’s case, within a day of arriving in Sangin, they had seen their friends blown apart, and they carried the bloodstains of their comrades on their cammies.

  Each day, a patrol took fire from somewhere out in the corn and bush. How do you convince them not to shoot back? What strategic ratio
nale, what spiritual commandment, what sorcery would convince these young men to reject what their drill instructors had drummed into them—kill before you are killed? With the enemy wearing civilian clothes and hiding among compliant villagers in flat fields where bullets traveled far distances, the moral choice confronting the grunt—shoot back or hold your fire?—was never clear-cut.

  Third Platoon could not advance a kilometer in any direction without receiving fire from a compound. Since no one can see through walls, civilians may have occupied every compound. The odds were heavily against it, but odds are never perfect. In every battalion operations center, a lawyer monitored all calls for artillery or air support, constantly weighing who might face court-martial or be relieved of command for making a wrong call. General George Marshall, the top commander in World War II, believed two qualities were common to every battlefield victor: energy and optimism. Having to check with lawyers before employing indirect fire hindered both energy and optimism.

  One night at a remote outpost, I sat opposite a visiting Marine brigadier general. I asked him about the Tactical Directive. He looked at the candle flickering between us and said not one word.

  The following day, it was more of the same for 3rd Platoon—a running gunfight in sector Q1E for six hours. Nothing much to report in the logbook—a few bursts of AK or PKM fire each hour forcing the Marines to flop down and peer at green corn rows, green tree lines, and green grass fields, all shimmering in sweltering, humid heat. No wisps of dust, no tiny red flickers as bullets left the muzzles, no shouts, and definitely no PID. In a day of desultory sniping under the oppressive sun, four enemy were seen, each for only one or two seconds.

  Three IEDs were uncovered and blown up without damage. At least that was a plus.

  Garcia was learning the fight by walking the ground. But 3rd Platoon didn’t want to lose two commanders in a row. Throughout the patrol, the Marines called him “Garcia,” not out of disrespect but so that the locals couldn’t single him out. Garcia was having none of it.