One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  Schueman sent over the engineer, LCpl. Arden Buenagua, who had disarmed the mortar shell in the mosque. He knelt down near Carlisle and was working on the IED when it detonated, killing him instantly.

  Buenagua had written on his Facebook page, “I like meeting people that are interested in things that I’m into and strange cats that are entertaining. I make friends pretty easily since I just start talking to people.” His mother said he joined the Marines “to get some direction in his life. Arden became a young Marine. The way he talked, the way he acts.… A total transformation of my son.”

  Garcia grabbed 2d Squad and rushed out from Fires, bringing a body bag. As they neared the mosque, the Taliban opened fire. Hearing the shooting, Carlisle and Peto entered a room to provide covering fire from a window. Peto tripped a second IED, receiving wounds that would prove fatal. He was on his third combat tour and had been previously wounded by an IED in Ramadi. His father, two brothers, and an uncle had served in the Corps. He left behind his wife, Tiffany, of Vancouver, Washington.

  “I saw Peto’s boot fly into the air,” LCpl. Kyle Doyle said. “It seemed to freeze up there. It took me two weeks to get over it. If you looked at a picture of me in high school and who I am now, it’s two different people.”

  The blast hurled LCpl. Jeffrey Rushton, twenty-eight, into the courtyard. He had joined the Marines when he was twenty-four, determined to fight terrorists, then go back to his wife waiting in San Diego and attend college.

  Gunny Carlisle, the pillar of Kilo Company, also went down, his upper thigh and half of his buttocks ripped off. Third Squad’s corpsman, Manuel Gonzales, was peppered with shrapnel. One killed and three wounded in a blink. While the wounded were stabilized, Marines fired light rockets, called LAAWs, at the far tree line and Corporal Laird brought up his team of snipers. Once they began to place rounds knee-high along the tree line, the Taliban pulled back and the medevac chopper came in.

  Abbate ran out to where Gunny Carlisle lay facedown. Taking one knee, he shot at the tree line, shouting, “You hurt my gunny! No one messes with my gunny!”

  When the firing died down and the helos swooped in, Abbate and Laird picked up Buenagua’s destroyed body. They tried to keep him in one piece as they folded him into the black body bag. Abbate took the lead with the legs in the front of the bag, while the torso rested on Laird’s shoulder. By the time they placed the body on the helicopter, Laird’s face and lips were drenched with Buenagua’s blood. Laird reached down to Gunny Carlisle, who was lying on his side in his sopping bandages.

  “We’re gonna kill them all!” Laird shouted. “Every last Taliban!”

  After evacuating the dead and wounded it was late afternoon before a gear check was conducted. Peto’s rifle could not be found. A rifle with its telescopic sight in enemy hands was a serious matter. Garcia took responsibility; it was his duty as senior man to ensure accountability. The failure signaled a bleak future career. Far worse, a Marine on patrol might be hit from long range.

  Returning to search for the rifle in the dark would be perilous. A chest-deep canal lay between Fires and the compound. In late November, the ditches had an icy sheen. During the day’s fight, five IEDs had been found or had exploded. Probably a half dozen more lay in wait. As the shivering Marines stomped around in the dark looking for the rifle, how many legs would be lost? One? Two? Five?

  Garcia asked for volunteers.

  “It’s on us, sir,” Sergeant Deykeroff said. “Second Squad will go back with you.”

  Garcia knew they were resigned to losing at least one man. He called on Abbate.

  “Sergeant, if a few snipers come,” Garcia said, “it will settle everyone down.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s suicide to go out there in the dark,” Abbate said. “I’m not sending any of my Marines to get blown up. I’m sorry, but we’re not going.”

  Garcia called back to company, saying he was leaving the wire with a squad. Captain Johnson made no effort to hide his frustration about the missing rifle. But he wasn’t foolish.

  “Negative,” Johnson said. “We’ll keep watch with the G-Boss. Stay at your pos. Find the damn rifle in the morning.”

  The G-Boss was a powerful telescope perched on top of a fifty-foot pole. An operator back at company headquarters could see if men were prowling around at night. Still, Garcia slept fitfully, worried that the Taliban may already have found the rifle.

  Day 44. 264,000 Steps

  Before dawn on Thanksgiving Day, 2d Squad was already moving north, wading across the icy canal and fanning out around the compound. After a short search, Peto’s rifle was found on top of a roof, where the IED blast had flung it. The Marines were shaking with cold, but a pissed-off Garcia decided to pick a fight before returning to Fires. He directed several mortar illumination shells to be fired off to the east into the P8T sector, a reliable hotbed of enemy activity. Sure enough, when the shells burst overhead, men ran crouched over among several compounds about 300 meters away. A flurry of bullets was exchanged. It was uncertain whether any Taliban had been hit, but Garcia felt better for ruining their breakfast.

  The patrol returned to Fires, stripped off their sopping clothes, and slipped into their “happy suits”—comfortable cold weather trousers and jackets, white wool socks, and flip-flops. Around nine in the morning, they sat down to eat their Thanksgiving meal (ham). Over the radio, they heard a patrol from 2d Platoon had left from Transformer, the outpost on Route 611 one mile north of Inkerman.

  Outpost Transformer consisted of a compound with a string of barbed wire on top of the outer wall, surrounded by scattered compounds and huge open farm fields. In early October, Sgt. Ryan Sotelo, a college graduate who’d been with 3/5 Battalion for three years, had moved his reinforced squad into Transformer. From the start, mistrust ran high between the Marines and the Afghan army squad also sent there. The askaris stayed inside their own area behind Hesco barriers and refused to search compounds on patrol. Once, when Sotelo asked the Afghan sergeant to look inside one building, the sergeant threw his weapon on the ground and stalked back unarmed to Transformer.

  In late October, a corncob was pitched over the compound wall with a note for Rock, the squad interpreter. It read, “Abdul [Rock’s real name], we know where your parents live in Kabul. Leave this post, or we will cut off your head with a shoemaker’s wire.” The only person who knew Rock’s name was a district elder paid by the Marines for using his farm at Patrol Base Fires. Rock held no grudge.

  “Sangin has simple-minded people,” Rock told Sotelo. “You cannot win them over. All they care about is their next meal.”

  As if to mock the Marines, the Taliban had even set up a tax collection checkpoint on Route 611, midway between Inkerman and Transformer. In response, Johnson sent Lt. William Donnelly and 2d Platoon to join Sotelo at Transformer. The plan was to send out patrols to push back the enemy, but it was like living in a fishbowl. Next door to Transformer was a motorcycle repair shop where dickers reported the size and movement of patrols leaving the base. Every patrol might as well have had sirens and flashing lights.

  And when the corn stalks were cut down after the first frost in early November, the Taliban had taken up positions along tree lines to the west across the Golf Course, 400 meters of flat mud field with not a speck of cover—no walls, no rock piles, no irrigation ditches. No place to hide.

  Every day, the Taliban shot at the post, but the Marines couldn’t unravel the pattern. They seemed to be fighting ghosts. Rock explained that these were local Taliban, farmers who walked into the fields with shovels and hoes, uncovered caches of AKs and PKMs, shot at Transformer, put back the weapons, picked up their shovels, and walked past the outpost on their way home.

  Captain Johnson urged Donnelly to get after them.

  So before dawn on Thanksgiving, a patrol at Transformer assembled in the cold dark for a gear check and final brief. Donnelly took Sotelo aside for a sanity check.

  “We’re good to go,” Sotelo said. “But if we lose
a Marine, Thanksgiving will never be the same for that family.”

  “I don’t like it any better than you do,” Donnelly said. “Let’s get going.”

  At dawn, eighteen apprehensive Marines left the wire. As the squad leader, Sotelo was in tactical charge. Donnelly was farther back in line. The target was a Taliban leader—Kataghi—who lived somewhere near Compound 117 in sector P8R, also called Kotozay. In Ranger file, the patrol moved across the Golf Course, sprinkling white baby powder to mark the safe lane. Reaching the far side, the patrol walked past two men sitting by a fire, watching them.

  So much, Sotelo thought, for surprise.

  When they reached Compound 117, it was deserted, with crude drawings on the walls of helicopters being shot down. An Afghan soldier who had volunteered for the patrol shook his head and pointed to a compound on the far side of a wide field. With a fire team, Sotelo crossed the field and entered a house that had insulation in the walls, a washer-dryer, a cabinet with delicate china teacups, and purple drapes.

  “Jackpot,” Sotelo radioed to Donnelly, who was back in the file. “This has to be where Kataghi lives.”

  Sotelo walked outside as Donnelly walked across the field. Hearing pop, pop, pop from a tree line 150 meters to the west, Sotelo whirled and opened fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Donnelly and a few Marines go flat to return fire. LCpl. Diego Rodriguez saw a shadow in the tree line and cut loose a long burst from his 240 machine gun. Sotelo oriented his fire team toward the threat and yelled across to Donnelly, who was lying in the field.

  “Come on!” Sotelo yelled. “Gotcha covered.”

  The Marines behind Donnelly had fallen back. Donnelly didn’t move. Even as Sotelo ran across the field to his platoon commander, he knew. The body was too still. Other Marines ran forward and turned him over. Donnelly, with a tight grip on his weapon, was dead, shot in the forehead. Sotelo called it in.

  “Two Actual is dead,” he said.

  Lt. William Donnelly, twenty-seven, had married in September and died in November.

  “Lieutenant Donnelly was real personable,” Sotelo said. “He’d shoot the shit with us squad leaders, give us money to buy rice and chickens in the market—a good guy.”

  His sister later said of his death, “I don’t think he would have had it any other way.”

  The Marines dragged his body out of the line of fire. A PKM had them pinned near Compound 117. Two Taliban emerged from the orchard behind 117 and hopped over the wall. The Marines traded shots with them at fifteen feet, and the Taliban hopped back. Sotelo threw a grenade over the wall and turned back to Donnelly, covering the body with blankets. They left his helmet in place and stripped off his armor. Sotelo then broke into a nearby compound to provide a rally point for his scattered squad. To bring back the body, eight more Marines left Transformer, only to be pinned down short of the compound.

  Now two squads from 2d Platoon were engaged on the far western side of the Golf Course, with no supporting fire to cover their return. The Taliban had cut them off, the outcome Sotelo had feared. There was no reaction force waiting on call.

  Back at Fires, 3rd Platoon had been listening to the incessant shooting. Curious, Sergeant Dy was walking toward the radio room when Garcia ran out.

  “We got a hero,” he said. “Lieutenant Donnelly’s dead. Old Breed 2/1 is pinned down. Get all three squads.”

  Abbate threw in the snipers, yelling, “All gunfighters needed!”

  Within minutes, the whole platoon was assembled.

  “Second Platoon’s north of the Golf Course,” Garcia said. “We’ll move northeast, relieve the pressure on them, and then link up.”

  At about nine in the morning, 1st Squad led off, heading northeast on a straight line toward Sotelo’s location 1,500 meters away. Within minutes, they were stopped by fire from a compound in sector Q1E.

  “Driftwood 2,” Esquibel radioed to the Kilo ops center, “I’m stuck at 545 792. There’s a PKM in Compound 3.”

  Capt. Spokes Beardsley told 1st Squad to get their heads down. Ten minutes later, an F-18 dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on the compound. When the dust cleared, 1st Squad continued on.

  Second Squad set out next, after the bomb run. Sergeant Dy saw pyro flares popping in the distance. The pinned-down squad of 2d Platoon was signaling where they were.

  It’s on now, Dy thought. Payback time.

  After ten minutes, the point man, Wagner, stopped at a low stone wall to allow 3rd Squad to catch up. Two PKMs and a few AKs were shooting. LCpl. Leonard Rausch, twenty, from Wisconsin, ran forward to bring his SAW, a weapon he loved, into action. He had been over this ground before and, not worried about an IED underfoot, moved too quickly and slipped in the knee-deep mud. Reaching out to help him, Cpl. Armando Espinoza took a bullet in the ankle and went down. It was the second time he had been wounded in ten days. Rausch threw a red smoke grenade to alert the others that he needed help.

  While Wagner and Delany pulled Espinoza out of the beaten zone, Abbate stood upright in the field, scoping the tree line for targets and firing short bursts from his M4. Using his 203 grenade launcher, Sergeant Dy arced a dozen explosive shells into the tree line with no apparent effect. If anything, the enemy fire picked up. Dy brought up his whole squad to provide covering fire, while Abbate and Laird helped carry Espinoza to the safety of a ditch. Lieutenant Garcia called in the big guns. Soon, 155mm Excalibur shells were pulverizing the tree line to their north.

  It was time to push on to link up with the Marines protecting Donnelly’s body. Laird took a deep breath, reached down, and hoisted Espinoza onto his back in a fireman’s carry. His rifle in his right hand and his left holding tight on to Espinoza’s forearm, Laird trudged forward.

  Between one and two hours had passed since the firing began. By noon, 2d and 3rd Platoons were spread out in a dozen positions. Everyone was trying to avoid the open fields. All the Marines were moving in slow motion, the knee-deep mud in the sopping fields clinging to their legs like cement.

  There were no battle lines. The enemy was everywhere and nowhere. There were probably only a hundred hard-core, professional Taliban in the district, and a similar number of “small-t Taliban”—local youths who worked their fields and only occasionally fired their AKs.

  Thanksgiving Day seemed to be the grand occasion, as word spread of one infidel American invader dead and others trapped in the Green Zone. Ordinary farmers were dropping their hoes and, minutes later, AK rounds were snapping at the Marines from odd directions. White flags of the Taliban popped up on a few compound walls and windows.

  On a battlefield of twenty acres, about a dozen small bands of Marines and Taliban were maneuvering. One squad of 2d Platoon had kicked off the fight, followed by a second. Garcia had brought out three squads, plus the sniper section and machine gun teams. In total, six friendly elements were on the move. On the other side, there were at least that many gangs, with excited farmers taking orders from regular fighters.

  Delany ripped through ten magazines during the fight, but saw only two men dressed in the black garb of the Taliban. This was typical of a firefight. Lying in the mud, peering through the smoke at dense vegetation, ears deafened by the explosions, a Marine rarely glimpses the enemy.

  “There! There!” Dy yelled, pointing toward a cluster of men running alongside a tree line. “Light them up! Shoot! Shoot!”

  Lantznester flopped down, jamming the bipod of his SAW into the mud and aligning a hazy sight picture. He pulled back on the trigger. Nothing. Not a single snap or click. Not one bullet fired. What the hell? This never happened!

  He jerked out the ammo can, brushed off a chunk of mud, resettled the can, and wiggled around to recapture his sight picture.

  “Don’t fire! Don’t fire! That’s 2d Platoon!”

  Lantznester let out his breath and lay for a moment with his cheek on top of his weapon.

  Back at battalion headquarters, the call had gone out for air support as soon as Lieutenant Donnelly went down.
It was a gray, overcast day, with good visibility near the ground and a high cloud ceiling that did not impede flying.

  About 9 a.m., Spokes Beardsley was in the company ops center when over the radio he heard the voice of a friend, Capt. Casey “Porch” Blasingame.

  “Driftwood 22, this is Shoot-out,” Blasingame said. “What have you got?”

  Blasingame, thirty, from Texas, was flying a Huey armed with ten rockets and a machine gunner on each side door. Trailing behind was a Cobra gunship flown by Capt. Joe “Muff” Dadiomoff, twenty-eight, from Virginia. The Cobra was carrying fourteen rockets and a 20mm heavy machine gun. Each pilot had flown more than sixty combat sorties, and both were qualified weapons instructors.

  “Shoot-out, we have Marines and bad guys,” Spokes said, “scattered all over the place 400 meters west of Transformer. Mad Dog’s on the battlefield. I’m turning you over to him.”

  “This is Mad Dog,” Sergeant Myers radioed to the pilots. “We’re under fire from the north. Got the whole fucking platoon out here. Trying to reach 2d. They’re off somewhere to the east. How about getting to work?”

  When back at Fires, Myers entertained 3rd Platoon with a constant stream of tall tales and impossible boasts. When he was amped, he spewed out a torrent of information.

  Circling overhead, Blasingame was working off the same map as the grunts. He needed to mark the friendly positions before making a gun run. He was looking down at several scattered clusters of Marines, with no idea where Myers was.

  “Mad Dog, pop smoke.”

  A minute later, he saw one purple smoke, and then a second. There was a pause, then a third purple.

  “Bitches are using our smoke!” Myers radioed. “That’s not us!”

  “Which one isn’t you?”

  On the ground, Garcia made an adjustment and two more smoke grenades blossomed.

  “We now mark two yellow smokes,” Blasingame said.

  “Affirm! Affirm!” Myers replied. “Both are us.”