One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  “Put your fucking hands on the compress!”

  The crew was accustomed to grunts trying to stay with their wounded.

  “We got him! Back off!”

  As the helo lifted off, the crew shifted Matt’s body and the mass of gauze flopped open.

  “Hold it tight!” Laird yelled into the thumping noise of the helo blades. “Tight! Tight!”

  En route to the hospital, Matt Abbate died on board the helicopter.

  The entry in the 3rd Platoon log was brief.

  “At 1300, 3rd sqd departed to sector P8Q IOT support ist squad ambushed to the north from bldgs 63, 64 and 65. Airstrike ended enemy threat but also created a friendly casualty. HA 1894.”

  Third Platoon had lost the sergeant with the easy grin and wacky expressions. The Marine who helped everyone else, always leading from the front, was gone. Six inches of exposed flesh between Matt’s helmet and his armored plate. One inch of sizzling metal. A hand not pressed tight as the helicopter lurched skyward. Amid battle’s fury, who can judge the cause?

  Grunts live with death; they give it and take it. But they don’t cope with death any better than anyone else. When one is killed, his comrades feel numb. Death is a black hole, the absence of explanation.

  “It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” the Roman general Marcus Aurelius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”

  The world of an infantryman is unlike any other, and a grunt’s motivation in battle is hard to judge from the outside looking in. The grunt makes instant choices in the heat of battle. He must keep his honor clean even when fighting an enemy who hides among civilians. He must resist the sin of wrath. Abbate had shown the right example.

  “When we went out the next day,” Sergeant Deykeroff said, “there was no calling in artillery or anything like that. No revenge. That’s what Matt wanted. Just do your job.”

  A few weeks after his death, the sniper platoon attended a remembrance ceremony. The talk wasn’t of the fighting, but of Matt’s weird sayings and oddball antics. He was friendly toward everyone, and the snipers took turns telling funny stories.

  The battlefield is a giant craps table. Every crack! on patrol is a white-hot slug of lead breaking the sound barrier as it misses you. Any grunt who is not a fatalist is foolish. Death is as random as it is unexplainable. If you’re very skillful—like Matt—you might tilt the odds a little, but not much.

  Chapter 8

  ENEMY RESPITE

  “We’re scared. [But] we still fight for those who can’t fight.”

  —BRETT STIEVE, WISCONSIN

  Sgt. John D. Browning, twenty-six, replaced Abbate as the leader of the ten-man sniper section. Although J.D. had grown up hunting and shooting on a ranch in Georgia, he considered sniper school to be the hardest training he’d received. He had to navigate by compass in the mountains for days on end, hit targets half a mile away, and accomplish missions behind simulated enemy lines. At the end of eleven weeks, only thirteen of thirty in his class graduated. Since then, he had served two tours in Iraq and been wounded once.

  Browning admired the tenacity of the Taliban. One time, he was walking in a shallow ditch to avoid revealing his position when a Talib popped up on a wall only a few feet away, firing a PKM machine gun from his hip Rambo-style. Browning called him “real ballsy.” Fortunately for J.D., the machine gunner was the worst shot in Sangin. Not a single bullet hit home.

  When Browning first arrived in Sangin, a British soldier had warned him, “You’ll never get two hundred meters outside the wire.” By the time he took over in December, J.D. was confident there was no mission he couldn’t accomplish with a four-man sniper team. J.D. had read the book Outliers, which described how experts practice for 10,000 hours. J.D. had fired more than 100,000 bullets.

  On December 4, 1st Squad was pinned down in sector V3J by PKM machine gun fire, and Mad Dog Myers had called back to Fires for mortar support. Back at Inkerman, the watch officer in the ops center listening to Mad Dog’s emphatic radio transmission declared a TIC. Troops in Contact meant that a unit was in trouble and needed help, a condition that permitted the use of air and artillery. Spokes Beardsley authorized an air strike of four 500-pound bombs. The PKM ceased fire and 1st Squad returned to Fires.

  To Captain Johnson’s exasperation, 3rd Platoon had developed a perverse sense of pride. They never called in a TIC. Instead, they called for their own 60mm mortars, leaving it up to the company to decide if heavier support was needed.

  Outside 3rd Platoon, the toll on the battalion was continuing. On December 5, Pfc. Colton Rusk, twenty, of Orange Grove, Texas, was shot and killed. He had been voted “senior class favorite” in high school. His parents adopted his military working dog, a black Labrador named Eli.

  On December 6, Cpl. Derek Wyatt was killed, and the next day his wife, Kait, delivered their son, Michael.

  The 800 grunts in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines had been together for eighteen months. Every man knew at least 200 others by their first names. A day after a death in one company, the other companies heard about it from someone who knew the deceased. That closeness spread stress in a way we grunts hadn’t experienced in Vietnam.

  One night out in the rice paddies back in 1966, my rifle company was hit by mortars as we crouched in our holes inside a grove of palm trees. It was pitch black except for the flashes of the exploding shells. One Marine, badly wounded, was screaming for his mother, his raw terror shivering to listen to. Others tried to comfort him, but he died shrieking. At dawn, his body was carried out in a poncho liner. He was one of five replacements flown in an hour before the mortars hit. We didn’t even know his name.

  The opposite was true in Afghanistan. When a grunt was killed, everyone in the company knew him personally. In 3/5, it was especially tough because the deaths were coming only a few days apart. On average, a battalion in Afghanistan lost one man a month; 3/5 had lost twenty in two months.

  It was excruciating for the families back home. No one was emotionally prepared for the onslaught. At Camp Pendleton in California, the wives knew each other. The same stream of emails and cell phone messages that nurtured close bonds also heightened anxiety and made sleep impossible. Standard procedure was not to release names of the fallen until the next of kin had been notified. But in the digital and cell phone age, news of an IED strike carried back to the States as swiftly as the sound of the explosion. Who was it this time?

  Gen. Jim Amos, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, met at Camp Pendleton with the families of 3/5. As an aviator for thirty years, Amos knew the shock that followed each plane crash. As a wing commander in Iraq, he had written letters to bereaved families. Now as the Commandant, he was meeting with the families of a battalion that had been battered, and would continue to take losses.

  Amos was by nature an empathetic man, a listener with an understanding manner. When he met with the families, they hit him with a hundred questions: Why weren’t we warned Sangin was a hellhole? We didn’t sign up for this! What are we accomplishing? Why aren’t the Afghans fighting? Why can’t another battalion take some of the strain?

  Amos was not willing to pull 3/5 out of Sangin. That would have been defeat, encouraging the Taliban to defend with equal ferocity elsewhere. To quote Napoleon, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” 3/5 was staying put to slug it out.

  Of course, that brought discomfit to the families. The stress-filled meeting stretched on, hour after hour, with no resolution possible. Marines fought until they won. Their mascot was a bulldog. Winning was the core value of the institution.

  General Amos was in a rough spot. It would be idiotic to express that battle cry to anxiety-ridden families. Nor could tender words assuage legitimate fear. The Marines of 3/5 would continue to fight and to die, and their families would continue to worry.

  Day 56. 336,000 Steps

  Garcia sent 2d Squad into P8Q, while he brought in 1st Squad from the north, trying to catch the ene
my between them. As they waded across the wide canal at the entrance to P8Q, Sergeant Dy’s squad drew PKM and RPG fire. The Marines dove for cover and Dy radioed the coordinates of five shooting positions located in the rubble of bombed-out buildings called “Bad-Guy Central.”

  Dy saw a man about 150 meters away duck out of one compound and run hunched over to a nearby rubble heap. Dy waited until the man lay down and then lofted a 40mm grenade onto the heap. The Marines laughed and followed up by shooting an AT4 rocket at the same spot.

  First Squad had moved in from the north. While the smoke from the rocket was still hanging in the air, Mad Dog Myers came running down the canal bank, waving his radio handset.

  “Dy! Get down!” he yelled. “Danger close!”

  “What!?” Dy yelled back, deafened by the gunfire.

  “Just get down!”

  Myers grabbed Deykeroff, pulling him down while frantically waving at the other Marines to do the same. Seconds later, a salvo of hundred-pound Hellfire missiles chewed up the rubble pile. When his ears stopped ringing, Dy looked up to see a giant, gray four-engine aircraft thundering by.

  Beardsley flew KC-130s, the workhorse of transportation aircraft. The KC-130 community had converted a few of the aircraft into the world’s largest gunships. Weighing 160,000 pounds and over one hundred feet in length, “Harvest Hawk” bristled with missiles and telescopes. Using his pilot contacts, Beardsley had asked the Hawk to do a fly-by. When Mad Dog had heard the shooting from 2d Squad, he had persuaded Garcia to allow him to call in a Hellfire shot. Myers and Spokes Beardsley, back at Inkerman, were immensely pleased with themselves. Sergeant Dy couldn’t believe the size of Harvest Hawk; it looked like a Martian spaceship.

  After the firing stopped, Hawk spotted men carrying away three bodies. Uncertain whether they were Taliban or sympathetic farmers, Hawk let them live.

  Three miles to the south, the battalion lost another Marine. An IED tore into Cpl. Christopher Montgomery, tearing off his legs and left hand and lancing his stomach with shrapnel. Before succumbing in the hospital, he told his mother, “God has a plan for me. I don’t know what it is yet, but there’s a plan, and whatever it is, I will fulfill it.”

  Back at Fires, there was a change in squad leaders during the first week in December. Sergeant Thoman was promoted to staff sergeant and moved to Transformer to take over as the platoon sergeant. Sgt. Philip McCulloch took over 3rd Squad. It was his second chance to show he had the right stuff. From Galveston, Texas, he had a rough upbringing and tended to be too hard on his men. Before the company had deployed to Afghanistan, he had been transferred from 3rd Platoon and assigned to company headquarters.

  A month earlier, Mac had been riding in a Humvee that was hit by two rocket-propelled grenades. The first exploded, thrusting the truck sideways. The second grenade pierced partway through the armor and stopped next to Mac’s face, failing to detonate. After a few days in the hospital, he convinced the doctors to let him return to the company. Now he was back with 3rd Platoon, anxious to prove his worth.

  On December 8, he led 3rd Squad on a routine patrol. A kilometer north of Fires, a few Taliban shot at them. The patrol gave chase. A few more Taliban joined in, shooting from the west. The Marines hit one, but when they bounded forward, the gang to the north let loose a fusillade of bullets. The squad kept coming, hitting a second man before the others reached a far tree line. Now two kilometers from base, Mac called for mortar support and pushed after the gang, slowed by carrying their fallen comrade.

  The running gunfight continued northeast for another kilometer. A third Taliban went down. Spokes Beardsley provided a section of two Cobras. When the gunships hit a few Taliban, a second section of helicopters flew over and joined in. Another Taliban went down. Harvest Hawk lumbered loudly onto station. As it flew over the battle area, one Taliban panicked and broke from cover. The Hawk belched and a forty-five-pound missile called a Griffin blew the man apart.

  Geometry dictates firefights. The mortars and air permitted McCulloch to attack from 90 degrees. On this day, the Taliban gangs were strangely slow to grasp that. By continuing to shoot at the few Marines they could see, they were setting themselves up for repeated pounding from the air. Third Squad had counted seven Taliban bodies in the six-hour firefight and retrieved several weapons. But they were four kilometers northwest from Fires. If they took one casualty, it would take hours of fighting to get them out.

  “You’ve had your fun,” Garcia said. “Get your squad back here.”

  By the end of the first week in December, interpreters listening to the enemy Icoms heard the word “Marine” mixed in with Pashto. In radio messages back to Pakistan, the Sangin fighters used sentences like “Marines run toward bullets,” or “Marines have more bullets than we have,” or “Why don’t you come over here and shoot at them!”

  Third Platoon kept up the pressure. On December 9, 3rd Squad detained a man with a wad of Pakistani money and an Icom. Unable to understand what he was saying, the squad released him. Third pushed on and found two IEDs. When two men ran away, heading down a ditch, they shot them. Stashed nearby in a cornfield, the squad found Icom parts, a shoulder-fired antitank tube, and several rounds.

  On December 10, 1st and 3rd Squads were clearing compounds when they were hit by a hailstorm of bullets from a tree line. Esquibel called in the 60mm mortars. Then he and McCulloch sneaked along a compound wall to flank the enemy, who escaped out the back.

  At the same time, Lance Corporal Palma, miffed at being left behind, grabbed a second Vallon from an engineer too hesitant to advance. Palma swept clear a path off to the flank, so that the machine guns could lay down a base of fire without endangering McCulloch. Lance Corporal Xiong brought forward a 60mm mortar team by following the trail of bottle caps dropped by Palma. The mortars put a quick end to the fight.

  The engagement illustrated how the platoon had matured. The squad leaders worked out their own coordination in the midst of the battle. They had opposite personalities. McCulloch was exuberant; Esquibel was reticent. Esquibel was aggressive and measured; Mac was aggressive and unrestrained. To Esquibel, it was positioning his Marines to avoid harm, and then killing. To Mac, it was killing, and then positioning his Marines to avoid harm. Yin and yang.

  That afternoon, company headquarters told all squads to return to base due to a “sensitive situation.” Secretary of Defense Gates was visiting the Marines in Helmand. The last thing the senior staff needed was for 3rd Platoon to be engaged in a major firefight.

  “I will go back convinced that our strategy is working,” Secretary Gates told the press at Marine headquarters. “Frankly, progress—even just in the last few months—has exceeded my expectations.”

  In fact, there were two strategies, and Gates, a career bureaucrat, either straddled both or was too confused to distinguish the fundamental differences between them. The Marines were driving the Taliban out of Helmand. They were intent upon killing the enemy. Yet Gates had termed them “parochial” because they resisted being placed under the direct command of the military headquarters in Kabul (McChrystal).

  “Earn the support of the people and the war is won,” McChrystal, the top commander, wrote. “Strive to focus 95% of our energy on the 95% of the population that deserves and needs our support. Doing so will isolate the insurgents. Take action against the 5%—the insurgents—as necessary or when the right opportunities present themselves. Do not let them distract you from your primary tasks.”

  Far from distracting, the Marines were focused on killing the Taliban. Clearly, there was a disconnect here.

  In March 2009, Obama had approved what Gates termed “a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign … breathtaking in its ambition.” To undertake this “breathtaking” endeavor, Gates had appointed General McChrystal.

  The general had previously commanded the 7,000 Special Operations Forces that specialized in nighttime raids to kill the enemy. But with the fervor of the true believer in the nation building Gates opposed,
McChrystal demanded that the 100,000 conventional coalition troops focus not upon killing the enemy, but upon protecting and persuading the people to support the Karzai government.

  The strategy was based on an impossible theory; indeed, Gates called it a “fantasy.” Pakistan provided the Taliban with aid and a 2,600-kilometer sanctuary. Karzai had provided wretched leadership, giving the ten million members of Pashtun tribes no reason to risk standing against the ruthless and unpopular Taliban. On average, an American patrol passed through any given hamlet about once a week, while the Taliban came and went as they pleased. To provide real protection to the 5,000 Pashtun villages would require 200,000 Americans and twice as many helicopters. The resources were not adequate for the strategy, and Karzai opposed it.

  According to COIN doctrine, the main American objective was to provide security for the tribes, thereby gaining their support. The secondary effort was “neutralizing the bad actors … in a discriminate manner.” This was gibberish. Only by killing “the bad actors” could security be provided. And even when the Taliban were killed by 5 percent of the military effort, the tribes were not persuaded to support the Americans. Survey after survey confirmed widespread Pashtun resentment of our troops.

  When Secretary of Defense Gates said in Helmand, “our strategy is working,” it was impossible to know to which strategy he was referring—destroying the Taliban or persuading the tribes to reject the Taliban.

  On the 14th of December, Captain Johnson ordered 3rd Platoon to cease patrolling and return to base. Back at district headquarters, the farmers were complaining bitterly about the platoon. With the constant fighting, they couldn’t till their fields and it was time to plant the poppy. The Marines should patrol only every other day, they demanded—or, better yet, not patrol at all. Leave the district. We don’t want your “protection.”