by West, Bing
“That’s a shack,” Tock radioed, meaning a direct hit.
The two F-18s circled, waiting. Both were equipped with day and night cameras that could distinguish between a man and a woman from 10,000 feet. Watching the video feeds at 3/5’s ops center, the air officer, Capt. Matt “Squeeze” Pasquali, had often seen men running from the rubble. The lead F-18 bombed the compound, while the second F-18 trailed behind and twenty seconds later delivered another 500-pounder that burst in the air to scythe down any squirters. This was called “shake and bake.”
Knipe, trailing in Stoic 73, was poised to roll in when a secondary explosion rocked the compound, probably RPG rockets cooking off. No squirters emerged. The aircraft loitered hawklike above 3rd Platoon for the next fifteen minutes. No enemy fired at the 3rd Platoon. The F-18s returned to base.
After it was dark, Garcia occasionally called for illumination rounds above the platoon’s compound, demonstrating that the 60mm mortar crew back at Fires would respond quickly. The next day, no enemy fire was received, while several farmers came forward, curious about the strangers. No British or American soldiers had been in the area before. The farmers seemed tolerant but wary. Would the foreigners be staying long?
When the platoon went back to Fires two days later, they took back with them a white Taliban flag they had ripped from a tree. It wasn’t much, but it gave Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, something to build on.
“I told them,” he said, “we’d gone into Taliban territory and they couldn’t protect their own flag.”
Garcia had no intention of lugging the entire platoon around the battlefield. He had eight sectors to cover, 500 compounds to search, and a thousand irrigation ditches to cross. If the platoon stayed together, it could never dislodge the Taliban. He had to send out two to three squad patrols a day, often going in different directions.
“The Taliban will swarm a squad,” he said, “unless they fear indirect fire. My squad leaders had to believe they could call in fire anytime they wanted. The whole platoon had seen the air support Spokes Beardsley delivered. That made a difference.”
While 3rd Platoon was out on their operation, Lieutenant Colonel Morris emailed back to the families, “Despite taking tough losses in the first days in their area of operations, the Battalion has dusted itself off and continued to move forward.… I just conducted a memorial service for LCpls Catherwood, Boelk and Lopez from Kilo Company … will send you another update. In the meantime, we’ll be ‘getting some’!”
“Get some” means kill the enemy, and it was 3/5’s motto.
Sometimes IEDs struck unwary children in the fields, although for the most part the farmers knew which areas to avoid. The villagers allowed the Taliban to use children as shields. Out of fear and/or tribal loyalty, they kept quiet about the locations of the IEDs and the Taliban gangs. The tribes accepted callousness from the Taliban.
American firepower, on the other hand, angered and distressed the people. The image of Americans rolling about in large armored convoys or swooping in to burn an enemy village was a caricature. The people weren’t forcibly moved, as happened in Vietnam. Nor were there free fire zones or indiscriminate bombing.
The reality was more complicated. The Marine approach was to spread out a battalion across a district, clear it, and then turn it over to Afghan forces to hold. In Sangin, the tribes were firmly controlled by, and contributed to, the Taliban. And so the clearing operation became a brutal fight between the Marines and the insurgents. Usually, the Marines didn’t see the Taliban, and shot back after they were fired at. They struck the compounds, tree lines, and fields from which they received fire. Naturally, the farmers fled in fear and resentment.
This wasn’t happening just in 3rd Platoon’s area. A dozen platoon commanders in 3/5 were reacting like Garcia. A Marine spokesman claimed, “There is nothing out of the norm in terms of operations in Sangin.” But it wasn’t true. October marked the highest number of air strikes in two years, led by 3/5 in Sangin. And Kilo called in the most air strikes of any company, led by 3rd Platoon.
Sangin was a war of attrition, not counterinsurgency. Controlling the farmlands was psychological, not physical. Neither the Taliban nor the Marines could be everywhere. Each side has to send out small groups of men willing to fight when they bumped into the other side. Once one side flinched and avoided entering certain areas, the other side had won. When the Taliban could not sustain their losses, they would withdraw. To break the grip of the Taliban, Garcia’s challenge wasn’t so much the enemy; it was convincing his own Marines that they could survive seven months without being blown up.
Chapter 4
LEADERS FOUND
“We are battle-hardened, but still ordinary goof-offs.”
—MATTHEW CARTIER, ILLINOIS
With the platoon back at Fires, Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier was beginning to feel a bit more upbeat. The fear of the IEDs gave the Taliban a mental edge, but he sensed that the gloom enveloping the platoon had lifted slightly. The operation had proved an elementary point: the enemy could not plant mines everywhere.
Garcia was putting it together. The Iraqi experience had led the Marines astray. In Iraq, a dozen or more civilians lived in a concrete house encased by a stout concrete wall that separated it from the next house. Fifty or sixty houses made up a block, several dozen blocks constituted a neighborhood. The neighborhoods were bounded by broad streets. Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias fought for every inch of turf. As soon as a family on one block was frightened into fleeing, the other side moved in one of its own families. Both Shiite and Sunni fighters planted IEDs along the roads used by the U.S. military, but not inside recently vacated houses families from their own side would occupy within a day or two.
In Sangin, the Taliban were placing their IEDs inside the courtyards and rooms of abandoned compounds. On their forays over the years, coalition troops occasionally stayed overnight in a few isolated, easily defended compounds, abandoned due to the fighting. After they left, the Taliban set pressure plates in the rooms, walls, courtyards, and adjoining pathways. Unlike in the fields, the Taliban didn’t keep track of where they placed them.
Once a compound was rigged, no locals would go near it. A family lost their home, but the Taliban didn’t care. They set the rules, and everyone was supposed to contribute to the jihad against the infidel foreigners. Abandoning his farm was the least a farmer could contribute. Hundreds of compounds stood empty for months. The Taliban reserved a few for their intermittent use. The others were death traps awaiting a fresh set of foreigners.
In 2010, Sangin wasn’t ready for economic development, local government, or farm granges. It might never be ready. The Taliban were embedded among the people. Some were auxiliaries—young men living at home with AKs hidden nearby. Most were roaming about in gangs of four to six, staying in one abandoned compound for several days before moving to another. Whenever the Marines left the wire, farmers and Taliban alike grabbed their cell phones and Icoms to report their movement.
Sangin was like France in late 1944, a battleground where the civilians hid or ran away while the two armed sides slugged it out. The practical definition of control is the confidence to walk where you please, without being shot at. A dog pisses on trees to mark his territory. Similarly, young insurgents cannot resist taking potshots at government soldiers. The same was true in Vietnam and Iraq. Judging by the daily sniping at every patrol, the Taliban were firmly in control.
Back at Fires, Garcia called together his three squad leaders. Lieutenant West was immensely popular and his spirit hung over the platoon. Garcia knew he had to tread carefully.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Our routine will be two squad patrols each day, with a third squad as the QRF”—Quick Reaction Force.
Sgt. Dominic Esquibel, thirty-three, led the 1st Squad. Esquibel wore the ugliest black-rimmed glasses known to man, with shatterproof lenses thick enough to stop a bullet. Slight of frame and diffident in demeanor, he would blend
in among the geeks manning the Genius Bar at an Apple Store.
On Thanksgiving Day back in 2004, Esquibel’s platoon was completing its twenty-first day of house-to-house fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Suicidal jihadists were hiding amid the city’s 10,000 houses. In three weeks, the Marines had engaged in more firefights inside rooms than the combined total of all police SWAT teams in history.
Esquibel’s platoon was assigned to a sector called Queens, a slum neighborhood of one-story concrete buildings. His job as a scout-sniper was to climb onto a roof and cover the alleys while the squad below him searched room to room. As the squad entered a courtyard, five were struck down by firing from inside the house. Esquibel ran to the lip of the roof and hurled a grenade through a window, killing two insurgents and destroying a machine gun. He then crawled across the roof and threw down a second grenade, killing two more and taking out another machine gun. When a tank moved in and began bashing a hole in the courtyard wall, Esquibel took advantage of the dust and noise to drop off the roof and drag a wounded Marine to safety. He then waited until the tank gun fired and darted back into the courtyard, dragging out a second Marine. When the tank again fired, he raced inside a third time, beat out the flames on the body of a mortally wounded Marine, and dragged him outside.
Awarded the Navy Cross—second only to the Medal of Honor—Esquibel refused to wear the medal or to discuss his valor. He was so self-effacing that he requested the Marine Corps to delete the medal from the records (which the Marines refused to do). When I mentioned other Marines I knew during the Fallujah battle, he readily reminisced about them. When I asked about his actions, he waved me off.
“I’m not going there, sir,” he said. “This is my last rodeo. I’m getting out once we’re back in the States. It’s not about me. I’m here for my men, and that’s all.”
Esquibel was as old as Garcia. He respected the former gunnery sergeant, but didn’t hold him in awe. Esquibel accepted every patrol order and carried out the mission to the letter—his way. Determined to bring every member of his squad back in one piece, he maneuvered 1st Squad firmly and with great caution. He assumed an IED lurked on every cow path, every opening in a tree line, and every irrigation bank. If it took an hour to move 1st Squad one hundred meters—and it often did—that was fine with him. In fact, he took pride in his deliberate approach.
“I take the most miserable way,” Esquibel said. “We wade across every canal. My nickname is ‘Wet Bridge.’ I go wherever Lieutenant Garcia wants, and I don’t care if it takes me all day. I like open fields. When we take fire, we can outshoot them. Sure, we’re lying in mud, wet and shivering. But that’s better than getting blown up.”
Garcia considered Esquibel as stubborn as a mule and as reliable. He wouldn’t be hurried or badgered into altering his pace. Believing that any straight path led to perdition, Esquibel invariably took a circuitous route. Despite grumblings from his squad, he chose to hack through thickets rather than trust a cow path. No matter how many footprints showed that farmers routinely crossed over log bridges, 1st Squad sloshed through chest-high muddy water.
From the start, Esquibel made it clear to 1st Squad: he decided how they ran their patrols. He sought no friendships. He viewed his mission as bringing his men home. If that meant hurt feelings or resentments over his cautious exactitude, so be it. After each patrol, he hand-printed in the platoon log a succinct summary, naming those who performed well and those who bitched or hesitated.
“The Taliban were learning too fast,” Esquibel said. “At first, they fired from in close in the cornfields. But we were too good at trading lead. Once they stayed 300 meters away on the other side of a tree line, it was a lot harder to kill them.”
The tactics of 1st Squad were typical of the platoon. Cpl. Darin Hess, the engineer, went first, sweeping with the Vallon. Despite being hit three times by IEDs, he found the will to go back out, moving at the ideal cautious pace Esquibel wanted. Behind him usually came LCpl. Juan Palma, aggressive and sure of himself. The battalion had almost left him behind in the States, due to his “too cool for school” attitude and intolerance of regulations. Esquibel, though, liked Palma’s cockiness.
“On one patrol,” Esquibel said, “I caught him stomping on the ground to show Hess that it was safe to move on. I told Palma, ‘Man, you’re the eyes of the squad. You get yourself blown up and we’re all screwed.’ ”
Esquibel was third in line, followed by a SAW gunner, ready to suppress any tree line with 800 rounds in a minute. Next came a sniper, and then the other Marines. Each patrol had two riflemen with 203s, stubby tubes that lobbed 40mm grenade shells in arcs out to 300 meters. Farther back in the file a Marine carried a second Vallon. Half the squad would move forward or flank the enemy, while the other half provided covering fire.
“Lieutenant Garcia tells me what he wants,” Esquibel told me, “and I get it done my way.”
Sgt. Alex Deykeroff had transferred to 3/5 because he wanted to fight in Afghanistan and arrived in Sangin expecting to see bare, open country. On large-scale maps, the blue line representing the Helmand River and the tiny slice of green called Sangin were dwarfed by gobs of bare brown desert on either side. Sergeant Dy had pulled three combat tours in the desert of western Iraq near Syria, where centuries of wind had scoured away the sand, leaving thousands of kilometers of hard-packed earth. Burying IEDs in the desert was backbreaking and fruitless work. The Marines, in armored vehicles, drove wherever they pleased across the desert. The odds of a vehicle driving over the exact spot of an IED were one in a thousand.
But Sangin’s Green Zone, with its expansive, soggy fields of tall corn and low visibility, meant close-in fighting. To Dy, that was fine. He and Sergeant Thoman, the leader of 3rd Squad, weren’t concerned about crossfires. While watching YouTube together back in California, they’d laughed when Bill O’Reilly had lost his temper and yelled to his camera crew, “We’ll do it live! Fuck it!” Now they enjoyed harassing each other before a patrol by yelling the same thing: “Do it live!”
The squad leaders knew how to adapt in firefights, but the IEDs rattled them both. The day after Abbate’s fight, Dy saw four members of his 2d Squad blown up along with Lieutenant West. Farther back in the column with 3rd Squad, Sergeant Thoman helped to carry out the casualties. Neither wanted to lose anyone else to an IED, but they seemed to be everywhere, on every canal bank, at every break in a tree line, at the edge of every field. Dy and Thoman talked it over and agreed not to push their men. They would stall for time until they could figure out the IED threat.
“We weren’t shutting down,” Thoman said. “But we had slowed the pace to get a grasp on the enemy tactics.”
When Garcia gave 2d Squad a sector to check out, Dy marked its edge on his map, moved forward until his GPS touched that line, spread out his men, and watched for movement in the far fields. Technically, he was accomplishing the mission.
Shortly after Dominguez was blown up, Dy’s squad was approaching an abandoned compound when a boy ran up, warning that an IED was buried up ahead. Then he ran off, leaving a rattled Dy to decide whether the boy was telling the truth, or wanted the squad to use an alternate route that was mined. Garcia, who was accompanying the patrol, said nothing.
“Every squad leader,” Garcia said, “had to find his own comfort level. The worst thing I could do was pressure someone into a hasty mistake.”
That night, he took Dy aside.
“He said my squad had been hit the most,” Dy said. “But we all had to run the same risks every day, no matter who had been hit the hardest. I got the message. He never said a word in front of anyone else.”
Garcia’s fix was simple. Before a patrol, he picked out a compound numbered on the map and told Dy to report back what he found inside the compound. When no IED was triggered on patrol after patrol, Dy and 2d Squad would start to feel surer of themselves.
“Deykeroff was best with the people,” Garcia said. “He loved to talk, easygoing, smiling. Sometimes a k
id would even lead his squad across a few fields.”
Pushing north one day, 2d Squad reached the edge of the large open area called the Golf Course. Nearby, three men were digging an irrigation ditch. One of the diggers started waving his shovel back and forth, and within a minute several AKs and a PKM opened fire from the opposite side of the field. The Marines shot the digger. A battlefield was not a court of law.
Dy radioed in the shot before returning. When Garcia plotted the position, he saw that Deykeroff was 500 meters beyond his assigned compound. Confidence regained.
After two tours in Iraq, Sgt. Clint Thoman, the 3rd Squad leader, had ample combat experience. Initially, Thoman would lead his 3rd Squad deeper into the sector than Deykeroff, but if the Taliban shot at them, he pulled back rather than risk striking an IED by pushing forward. It was obvious to Garcia that Thoman too was constantly remembering Dominguez, and was loath to put his point element at risk again.
Thoman noticed that the platoon commander didn’t say much when he accompanied 3rd Squad. But he knew Garcia was evaluating him. One day when Garcia was back at Fires, a call for mortar support came in from Thoman.
“What do you have?” Garcia radioed.
“Taking fire from our north,” Thoman said. “Two to four shooters.”
Garcia expected Thoman to break contact and pull back to base.
“Roger. Are you disengaging?”
“Negative. I’m pushing forward.”
Thoman told one four-man fire team to flank the enemy from the east. When a larger Taliban gang turned toward them, the team pulled back. This wasn’t unusual. Contrary to public image, Marines do have some common sense. The sniper with the fire team was LCpl. Willie Deel, twenty, from Kansas. His wife was waiting back in California. Willie had this vision: they would have a good life in California, and one day when he was old, his children would ask what he did in the war and he would say, “We made a difference.”