One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  A disciplined sniper was the surest way for the Taliban to disrupt Marine patrols in the Green Zone. Yet this enemy sniper did not strike again. No intelligence ever followed about whether he had been killed, moved on, or taken up a safer profession.

  When going to the sectors where a firefight was certain to break out, Garcia’s pattern was to send two patrols at different angles to hem in the Taliban shooters, so that mortar shells could drop on them or force them to run across an open field. The Marines were superior marksmen. But unlike Abbate’s sniper section, they hadn’t fired the thousands of bullets needed to hone the skills to hit fleeting targets. Four out of five firefights erupted, dazzling like a match dropped into a box of firecrackers, and sputtered out without damage to either side. At the end of three weeks, the Marines and Taliban were slugging it out, toe-to-toe. Both sides were adapting, but it wasn’t clear who was gaining the psychological advantage.

  On the morning of November 4, 3rd Platoon heard deep rumblings, as though a powerful thunderstorm had struck unseen. The 3rd Battalion of the 12th Marine Regiment was guarding the approaches to the Kajacki Dam. For weeks, the Marines on duty atop that huge concrete structure had watched through powerful telescopes as the Taliban methodically stored weapons and munitions in a set of compounds. The coordinates of each storage point were checked and rechecked, as were the daily movements of enemy and civilians in the vicinity.

  The data were shared with Lt. Col. Dan “Knuckles” Shipley, who commanded the Red Devil squadron of twelve F-18s. When 3/12 alerted him that the civilians had left the area, he ordered a strike by seven F-18 Hornets carrying 14,000 pounds of laser-guided bombs.

  Satisfaction about the air strike was short-lived, however. In the afternoon, tragedy struck. A Taliban in an Afghan uniform shot and killed two Marines at 3/5 headquarters. LCpl. Brandon Pearson, twenty-one, was an outdoorsman from Denver. LCpl. Matthew Broehm, twenty-two, left behind his wife, Liana, who was eighteen.

  “He is with God now,” Liana said. “He will always be my husband.”

  The killer escaped, and the Taliban crowed. Distrust of Afghan soldiers rippled through the Marine ranks. Only three weeks into their deployment, the grunts of 3/5 began to harden against the Afghan soldiers they were supposed to treat as brothers. On patrols, a few Afghan soldiers contributed little. They did not speak Pashto and generally were mediocre marksmen. But their presence did allow senior officers to report “joint operations” that pointed toward the total turnover of responsibility to the Afghan army.

  Third Platoon, however, was not training the askaris. Although most tagged along willingly, it wasn’t clear what tactics or methods they were learning to apply on their own. They could not read maps; they had no mortars or air support; and they had no intention of absorbing casualties by patrolling in the Green Zone once the Marines departed.

  “None of us trusted them,” Sergeant Browning said. “We kept our weapons loaded.”

  The Afghan battalion commander working with Lieutenant Colonel Morris and the Afghan company commander with Captain Johnson were trying their best. Most of the askaris, though, were from the northern part of the country and spoke Dari. They weren’t welcomed by the locals. Third Platoon tolerated but generally ignored them.

  Worse, since Fires was remote and constantly under pressure, the Afghan officers used it as a penal colony, sending soldiers there as punishment. This included one Pashtun lieutenant who became incensed whenever mortars and bombs were called in. The Marines responded by daring him to lead his men across the fields without fire support. When he refused, he was removed from Fires. The platoon gradually took less interest in the Afghan soldiers. Two or three askaris were expected to accompany a patrol—no more, no fewer.

  Sergeant Esquibel had a high degree of maturity and thus empathy for the unfortunate askaris banished to Fires.

  “If you act like you don’t expect much from a guy,” Esquibel said, “you won’t get much.”

  Almost a half century earlier, I had served in a Combined Action Platoon consisting of a dozen Marines and two dozen Vietnamese farmers. We lived together in a ramshackle fort inside a village of 5,000 Vietnamese. For the first three months, every night we clashed with local guerrillas who were infuriated that we had the gall to move in. To stay alive, we had to train and get along with the farmers, called Popular Forces, who fought alongside us. Gradually, the villagers not only accepted our presence; they actually liked us.

  Of the 300 rifle squads in a Marine division, 118 were deployed independently in Vietnam villages. The Marines had hoped to apply the same model in Afghanistan. It didn’t work. In Vietnam, we were truly integrated. The same squad stayed in a village for a year with the same local militia. In Afghanistan, outposts were shared but not integrated; both Afghan and U.S. squads rotated in and out, moving on after a few months.

  The chance of betrayal was high. No American squad dared to live for a year in a compound among the people. Several battalions did establish outposts manned by a mix of Marine and Afghan squads. And the Army Special Forces set up over one hundred local police units, although Americans did not live among them. These efforts, with mixed results, were small in relation to a vast country containing millions of xenophobic tribesmen and suspicious mullahs.

  The Americans patrolled on foot in the Green Zone, with indirect firepower and helicopter medevac on call. Left on their own, the Afghan soldiers would remain in fixed posts guarding the roads. They had no such firepower or evacuation means. The high command referred to the placement of Afghan soldiers at U.S. outposts as “partnering,” erroneously implying benefits for both sides. Senior commanders claimed that by this technique the Afghan army would mature into a credible stand-alone fighting force. Although daily observation of American combat routines was helpful, the Americans remained the fighters and the Afghans the onlookers.

  Day 25. 150,000 Steps

  The most dangerous sector in Sangin was P8Q. The canal system forced the Marines to pass through a long defile that provided the Taliban with a clear field of fire. P8Q was the ideal spot for an ambush, a place of peril that would challenge the Marines for the next six months.

  On November 6, a patrol, including Sgt. J. D. Browning and two other snipers, cautiously moved across a deep canal on the outskirts of P8Q. Browning was on high alert, constantly scanning the terrain to cover their movement. But he never saw the machine gun that fired from deep in the bush. LCpl. Randy Braggs, twenty-one, of Sierra Vista, Arizona, was struck and killed by a burst from a PKM machine gun. Both of his parents had served in the Army and his younger brother was also in Afghanistan, serving in the Air Force.

  Back at the company ops center, Capt. Spokes Beardsley, the air officer, called in two F18s. After they dropped four 500-pound bombs on the suspected tree line in P8Q, enemy firing ceased. One bomb touched off secondary explosions from IEDs inside a compound.

  The angry Marines returned the next day. First Squad shot one man talking on an Icom and looking at the passing patrol. His two comrades dragged his body into a herd of goats, using the animals to screen their escape.

  On the next patrol into P8Q, a poor goat suffered the wrath of the frustrated Marines. First Squad was moving north near the river when LCpl. Chatchai Xiong shot a man with an AK running from one compound to another. The electronic intercept team at Inkerman warned that the Taliban were talking on Icoms inside different compounds. Within seconds, the patrol came under fire from three directions, while two men dragged away the body.

  While shooting from the prone position, Xiong heard a snort and looked up to see a goat standing over him. Xiong, twenty, from St. Paul, planned to design computer games. This scene, though, provided material too bizarre to use. Grabbing the goat’s halter, he pulled it down next to him as bullets zipped by. When the firing ceased, the patrol headed back toward Fires, with the goat tagging along. Even when stones were thrown at it, the animal stuck with the patrol. It took over an hour to reach the wire. By that time, the Marines we
re calling the goat Stacy.

  “I told them you shouldn’t name anything you might kill,” Esquibel said. “The squad thought otherwise.”

  That night, the Marines ate Stacy.

  At the end of the first week in November, two squads of Marine reservists arrived at Fires. Although they weren’t trained for Sangin’s grunt work, some lobbied Garcia for a chance to fight, and he inserted them into the patrols until Captain Johnson found out.

  “Vic,” Johnson said, “we can’t train them properly out here. On patrol, they’ll eventually die. That reserve unit took heavy losses in Iraq. We can’t let that happen again.”

  So the reservists took over the tasks of guarding post and standing the watches. This comparatively safe duty stirred no resentment inside 3rd Platoon. For six weeks, the platoon had functioned on five hours of sleep a night. A Marine was either on patrol, standing watch, or clearing the underbrush around the fort. Now all they had to do was patrol, eat, and sleep for eight hours at a stretch! Third Platoon was in grunt heaven.

  The grunts had no other place to go, or anyone else to talk with. Regardless of how bad the day had been or who was carried out on the chopper, when they came back they could only wash off the blood at the pump and shed their sopping cammies. They had only one another. Nighttime inside Fires was no place for the loner, the introvert, or anyone who wanted peace and quiet. There may have been different tastes in music, but not on the nights I was at Fires. Somehow they stored enough battery life for a few scratchy speakers hooked to iPods with heavy metal sounds that no one over twenty-five can comprehend.

  During the 2004 battle for Fallujah, the Marines harassed the insurgents by rigging up giant loudspeakers that blared out soothing tunes like “Hells Bells” from AC/DC: “I’m rolling thunder, pouring rain. I’m coming on like a hurricane. My lightning’s flashing across the sky. You’re only young, but you’re goin’ to die. Won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives.”

  Third Platoon embraced that sentiment. They had cut loose from society—no girls, sex, beer, bars, cars, McDonald’s, families, holidays, sports, TV, college, or job—nothing beyond laughing at night and killing in the morning. The worst punishment in the platoon was psychological banishment—the feeling that the others didn’t think highly of you. Garcia kept his hands off how things were settled inside the squads. If a squad leader gave extra duty to someone, that was squad business. If things got too bad, Staff Sergeant Cartier would handle it.

  On November 9, Lt. Robert Kelly of Lima Company was killed by an IED a mile south of Fires. He had enlisted in 2003 and was on his third combat tour. When his father, Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly, heard the news, he said, “We have a saying in the Marine Corps and that is ‘no better friend, no worse enemy, than a U.S. Marine.’ We always hope for the first, friendship, but are certainly more than ready for the second. If it’s death they want, it’s death they will get, and the Marines will continue showing them the way to hell if that’s what will make them happy.”

  A text of the general’s remarks was circulated throughout 3/5.

  “Every squad received a copy of General Kelly’s speech,” Sergeant Thoman said. “It had a huge effect. We weren’t leaving Sangin until we repaid the hurt.”

  Sergeant Deykeroff saw it the same way.

  “By this stage,” Dy said, “we were all in the fight. We were taking the area back and hurting those who had hurt our brothers. We wanted payback.”

  On November 10, the 235th birthday of the Corps, 3/5 lost another Marine. LCpl. James Stack, twenty, of Chicago, was shot in the head and killed. He left behind a wife and one-year-old daughter. Stack had written to his father that “one minute you would be having a good time with your friends and joking around, and the next day they were gone.” He was a national champion air pistol shooter in the 2008 Junior Olympics. “I can shoot better than they can,” Stack wrote, “don’t worry about me. I’m coming home.”

  In one month, 3/5 had suffered fifteen dead, forty amputations, and over seventy others wounded. In London, the Sunday Times published a story entitled “U.S. Humbled in Bloody Sangin.” The casualty rate was unparalleled in the Afghan war, and it would continue to be.

  Back in the States, there was shock among the families of the battalion and the general public. Every night, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates signed condolence letter after letter. He didn’t put his sense of loss on display, but the evening TV news captured his somber expression. A decent, caring man, the attrition of 3/5 affected him deeply. Perhaps the daily toll was too heavy for slight, elusive gains that might prove temporary. In eastern Afghanistan, U.S. Army forces had pulled out of the Korengal Valley after taking heavy losses. Gates suggested pulling the Marines out of Sangin.

  The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos, adamantly refused.

  “We don’t do business that way,” he told NPR. “You would have broken the spirit of that battalion.”

  Secretary Gates deferred to the Marines. Reflecting on that decision, he later wrote, “I thought to myself … that pulling them out would possibly have been one of my worst mistakes as secretary of defense. These Marines had been hit hard, very hard. But despite their terrible losses, they were very proud they had succeeded where so many others had failed. And justifiably so.”

  The Marine high command, however, did not dispute the costs.

  “I don’t think there’s ever been a battalion in the Marine Corps at any time,” Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the Marine commander in Afghanistan, said, “in World War II, the Korean conflict, Vietnam, that has pulled a tougher mission than what 3/5 has right now.”

  Third Platoon knew they had a tough mission. They had no illusions about their chances. One drizzly day when the fifty-one Marines were all inside the wire at Fires—the snipers, squads, and mortar crews—they all took a few hours to respond to a detailed questionnaire I gave them (Appendix D).

  One question asked what each would choose “if you had it to do over again.” Almost all responded, “I’d be right here.” Most wished those back home could understand how hard they were trying. For their sacrifices, they desired a higher recognition than those in the rear. This has been the sentiment of all foot soldiers since Alexander the Great.

  A majority believed the Pashtuns were untrustworthy, either because they were aligned with the Taliban or because they were intimidated by them. When a Marine patrol approached, the women and children ran away if there were Taliban fighters nearby. The villagers knew the Marines would respond with heavy fire. For the Marines, the hasty evacuation by families was a reliable early warning system that ambush was imminent. At the same time, the fields nearer to Fires grew heavily populated once the Taliban pulled back. Cows, sheep, and donkeys were everywhere. The Marines could walk in the hoofprints of the animals, safe from IEDs, until they were beyond sight of the sentry towers.

  Third Platoon was finding about one IED a day and averaging four firefights a week. With no intelligence offered by the farmers, their demands for payment for war damages went unheeded. The Marines directed complainants to the district governor’s office and walked on. As they went from compound to compound, they occasionally met families genuinely glad to see them, while other farmers scowled and turned their backs.

  As for the enemy, 3rd Platoon believed the Taliban were better fighters than the Afghan soldiers, but not by a wide margin. They didn’t view the Taliban as terrorists like Al Qaeda, dedicated to attacking America. They knew Afghans were fighting to determine the future of Afghanistan, not the United States. In like fashion, the Marines related their daily struggles at Fires to the cause of defending America.

  “I know that body counts are not a measure of what we want these days,” Major General Mills said. “But I can tell you that with the heavy casualties that they [3/5] have suffered, they have inflicted ten times that amount on the enemy.”

  In the theoretical world of benevolent counterinsurgency, the general wasn’t supposed to talk that bluntly. The metap
hysical mission was to persuade the Pashtun tribes, rather than to kill the enemy. As the top commander through mid-2010, General McChrystal had laid down a strict rule.

  He wrote, “I wanted to take away any incentives that might drive commanders and their men to see killing insurgents as the primary goal.”

  McChrystal had previously commanded the Special Operations Forces that focused on killing. As the overall commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal divided tasks. The SOF—7 percent of the force—were dedicated killing teams, while the conventional forces—93 percent of the force—were to avoid killing.

  “Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing,” wrote the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson. “To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality. Euphemism in battle narrative or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian.”

  In Afghanistan, that omission from the battle narrative became a direct order.

  “I directed all units to cease reporting … insurgents killed,” General McChrystal wrote.

  Small teams of Special Operations Forces were praised for killing Taliban leaders, while conventional forces were treated differently. McChrystal even supported a proposal to award medals for “courageous restraint” to grunts who did not return fire in populated areas.

  David Petraeus took over in the summer of 2010. He diligently kept in touch with many unofficial sources and received a torrent of complaints about onerous restrictions. His solution was to quietly pass the word that the chain of command below the top had interpreted McChrystal’s Tactical Directive too literally. Thus he avoided rebuking McChrystal by revoking his directive, while signaling that he wasn’t going to be a hardass about enforcing it.