by West, Bing
Halfway through its seven-month tour, the 800-man battalion had taken over 200 casualties. Over 500 IEDs had been found, and about another one hundred had exploded.
Of the 136 Marines in Kilo Company, nine had been killed and forty-five wounded. Even with some replacements, the company was down to ninety-six men, a reduction of 30 percent. Another dozen were banged up but refused medical aid above the company level. Like football players, they rejected by silence the very concept of traumatic brain injury. IED explosions were something you shook off. You saw that big white light, your peripheral vision had jagged zigzags, a fast movement caused a flick of pain around your forehead, and then after a week or so, you were back to normal. You were dinged, but all grunts are dinged. No problem for twenty or forty years, or maybe never. Back to work.
Every platoon in 3/5 was waging a straight war of attrition, exchanging American for Afghan lives. If the Marines killed enough Taliban, the Afghan army might—might—have the self-confidence to take over. The hope—hope—was that Afghan officials would then gain the support of the people, who would turn against the Taliban, many of whom belonged to their own families.
Strategy is the application of resources to achieve a goal. Attrition wasn’t a true strategy, because its success depended upon Afghan actions that the Americans did not control. The Americans could not select, promote, or even tell Afghan officials what to do.
The grunts in 3rd Platoon were pushing the edge of the risk envelope. In ten weeks, one in three in the platoon had been killed, lost a limb, or evacuated with gunshot or shrapnel wounds. In eighty-two days, they had found seventy-five IEDs and engaged the enemy about forty times. Altogether, the platoon members had seen about 150 Taliban and killed a few dozen, in addition to sniper kills of over thirty. Even allowing for double-counting, this is heavy stuff. You leave the wire, you get shot at, you see a spurt of flame, you shoot back, you hear a crump! and screaming, you taste that sandpaper grit on your teeth … you’re in it.
In Sangin, don’t bat an eye walking past women and kids hacking at mud clods like it’s the Middle Ages. Watch the tree lines, and pour out hell at the first tiny sliver of red flame. Listen to Garcia, Esquibel, Deykeroff, and McCulloch. When the dirt spurts up in front of your eyes, don’t flinch. You’re a grunt. Don’t ask questions about the idiotic mission. Your job is to pull the trigger, keep your humanity, avoid Leavenworth, and support your insane buddies.
Conflicting Visions
The counterinsurgency doctrines in Afghanistan and Vietnam were polar opposites in emphasis.
In Vietnam, focus was upon defeating the enemy. After the war, in 1980, the Marines published a field manual that emphasized this: “Concentrate on destruction or neutralization of the enemy force, not on terrain.” That objective carried over into Helmand.
“We need to challenge the enemy where he thinks he has strength,” four-star Marine Gen. James Conway said. “There’s no place in a zone where we’re not going to go.”
However, in 2006 there was a new COIN doctrine, agreed to by the Marines, that focused on winning the support of the population rather than challenging the enemy. The new idea was to persuade the people to reject the Taliban and actively work alongside the officials from Kabul.
In 1980, the focus was upon destroying the insurgents in order to protect the population. In 2006, the focus was upon stealing the affections of the population away from the insurgents.
“We’re here for seven months. We can’t do that counterinsurgency stuff of ‘clear, hold, and build.’ We can show that we go where we want, and the Taliban can’t stop us,” said Capt. Nick Johnson. “At shuras, the elders ask us to stop patrolling. Who’s telling the elders to say that? My answer to the insurgents is—we’ll never stop coming.”
The gap between what the grunts were doing and what the 2006 theory was espousing was not resolved. A commander manages what he measures. If killing the enemy was not to be measured, then in order to “manage”—that is, to win a war—the commander would measure … what?
When the Japanese army seized Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, and Burma in 1941, British Field Marshal William Slim invigorated a beaten British corps and eventually crushed the Japanese. In his memoir, Defeat into Victory, he explained his command philosophy.
“Commanders in the field,” he wrote, “must be clearly and definitively told what is the object they are locally to attain.”
From the top, no clear and definitive objective was ever issued about Sangin. Secretary Gates believed in “rooting the Taliban out of their strongholds.” He was quite specific that this meant challenging and killing the enemy.
But for unexplained reasons, Gates appointed two commanders in a row who strongly disagreed. General McChrystal sternly ordered that only 5 percent of the military effort be focused against the Taliban. General Petraeus held a nuanced, Delphic view of the Taliban. His strategic approach had to be carefully read and parsed several times to extract meaning.
“If you don’t want to have to kill or capture every bad guy in the country,” he explained in an interview, “you have to reintegrate those who are willing to be reconciled and become part of the solution instead of a continued part of the problem.… [Conduct] a comprehensive civil/military counterinsurgency campaign.… Areas of progress, we’ve got to link those together, extend them, and then build on it because, of course, security progress is the foundation for everything else, for the governance progress, the economic progress, rule-of-law progress and so forth.”
This “comprehensive campaign” had to be conducted at a breathtaking (Gates’s adjective) pace, because Obama had already decided to bring our troops home. Petraeus wanted battalions like 3/5 to clear one area and then extend outward like an oil spot. The scope of the task was stunning: sixty coalition battalions had to clear five thousand villages and then persuade Pashtuns living in those villages, which were scattered amid mountains and deserts adjacent to Pakistan’s vast sanctuary. Petraeus was out of time and troops. Yet with inadequate resources and without Karzai as a reliable partner, he persisted with nation building.
The Marines were employing the hard tactics Secretary Gates urged to achieve the soft strategic goals Petraeus espoused. As the secretary of defense envisioned, 3/5 would batter the Taliban. Then, as General Petraeus envisioned, the Marines would remain for years in Sangin to help with economics, governance, and the rest of nation building. Plus, they would expand the oil spot another twenty miles north, opening up Route 611 to achieve the seven-year goal of installing a third turbine to the Kajacki Dam.
Left unresolved was whether the population was the means of winning the war (Petraeus) or the prize for winning the war (Gates). Third Platoon was at the tip of the spear for both strategies, fighting in a soggy wasteland occupied by monsters who set in mines to rip off limbs without debating strategic theories.
“These farmers don’t have the backbone,” Mad Dog Myers said, “to stand up for their families. The Afghan soldiers won’t fight. Know what rules out here? The aimed fire of us grunts.”
But was the goal to defeat the enemy on the field of battle? “Troops risking their lives,” Secretary Gates wrote, “need to be told that their goal is to defeat those trying to kill them.”
Not so fast. General Petraeus held a different view.
“We’re making progress,” he said, “and progress is winning, if you will, but it takes the accumulation of a lot of progress ultimately, needless to say, to win overall, and that’s going to be a long-term proposition.… I’m always leery of using terms like ‘winning’ because it seems to imply that, you know, you just find the right hill out there somewhere, you take it, you plant the flag, and you go home to a victory parade. I don’t think that’s going to be the case here.”
Secretary Gates believed the troops deserved to be told that the goal was to defeat the Taliban. The military high command, however, could not decide whether the Taliban were a mortal enemy that had to be destroyed like Al Q
aeda, or a localized opponent with legitimate grievances against the Karzai cabal. Thus, there would be no winning or defeating of the enemy. All 3rd Platoon could do was slug it out, day after day.
Day 82. 492,000 Steps
On the 2d of January, 2011, 2d Squad surprised two men emplacing an IED on a canal bank 150 meters outside the wire. Tim Wagner, twenty, from Nebraska, killed them both. Farther on, Kameron Delany, the Texan who liked walking point, surprised another gang and killed five, an unheard-of number.
“We got lucky,” Sergeant Dy said. “They didn’t know we were back.”
On a subsequent patrol, 2d Squad killed a motorcyclist talking on an Icom and found six IEDs. The batteries were buried among tree roots to make detection harder. The sensitivity bars on the Vallon jumped around, but the metallic source couldn’t be located without chopping through the heavy roots. The engineers marked off the danger zones. In a few cases, the Marines had to take a running leap to clear the suspected IED lane.
Palma’s risk taking caught up to him. He and Hess, the engineer, were at point when a low-order detonation lifted them thirty inches off the ground. Palma got up with a badly bruised left ankle, but refused to be medevaced. For the rest of the patrol, he continued with his practice of hacking holes through roofs rather than entering compounds through doors.
For Hess, the effect of the explosion was worse. It was the fourth time he had detonated an IED and his nerves were shot. Garcia decided that was his last patrol. Hess had done more than his share.
Third Squad, on the first patrol back into the P8Q sector, came under machine gun fire. McCulloch called 60mm mortar shells down on a compound. Once the Marines reached the building, they found PKM casings scattered everywhere, but the machine gun crew was long gone. The conclusion was obvious: during the cease-fire, along with being amply resupplied, the Taliban had regained their eagerness to engage. In response, the squads competed with each other, lobbying Garcia to send them to the north and east, where the opportunities to shoot were highest.
“Suppose you picked the top guys from my high school,” Jeffrey Rushton, who had joined when he was twenty-four, said, “and gave them world-class military training. Even so, there’s no way they’d fight as good as us. It’s not just training, it’s a feeling we have of how to work together.”
The outpost’s isolation strengthened those bonds. The fire pits and man-caves were their social centers. There was no administration, no daily emails from families, no first sergeant with a list of chores. Their entertainment was each other. Unlike in the rear, they didn’t live two polarizing lives, with ten hours at work followed by two hours visiting home with the click of a mouse.
Some grunts did fall short of expectations. Before deploying, Captain Johnson had dropped from the company twenty out of 144 Marines. After a few months in Sangin, Lt. Tom Schueman, the 1st Platoon commander, concluded that four of his forty men were not pulling their weight. But he kept them in the platoon.
Likewise, Garcia had four marginal performers. Two replacements who arrived in late December were too out of shape to stay alert on patrol, so they were assigned to the sentry towers on base. A third Marine too often flinched under fire, and a fourth tolerated being shot at without returning fire.
“I didn’t want to send a problem child to anyone else,” Garcia said. “I found a spot for everyone.”
While 3rd Platoon had been at Patrol Base America, the dozen Afghan soldiers left behind at Fires had become accustomed to doing things their own way.
“There was no unit cohesion,” Staff Sergeant Arney, their adviser, said. “I worked with two sets of Afghan officers in three months. When an officer isn’t present, nothing happens. Soldiers come and go as they please.”
Terry Walker, the Marine chief trainer in Afghanistan, had a more nuanced view.
“To understand the Afghan system,” Walker said, “follow the money. Sangin is a shitty place. No way to make a profit. So it’s an advantage not to have soldiers physically present. You want ghost names on a payroll list. If 20 percent physical bodies are missing, that’s 20 percent free money for someone. Hell, I’m surprised anyone’s out at Fires.”
While 3rd Platoon was gone, the Afghan soldiers had taken the firewood from squad fire pits and cut a hole in the wire to buy food from the locals. Upon returning, the platoon restrung the barbed wire. Things came to a head when McCulloch asked for a few Afghan soldiers to accompany his patrol. The procedure had been automatic for months.
Not this time. The askaris gestured for Mac to leave without them. No one ever accused Mac of being diplomatic. When he started yelling and cursing, his squad rushed over to form a semicircle around him. Both sides were armed. The call went out for Lieutenant Garcia.
With his wrestler’s skills and arms as big as a man’s legs, he was the toughest man in the platoon as well as the leader. As he ran toward the Afghan fire pit, by habit he was carrying his M4. The Afghan corporal who was the ringleader saw him coming, ducked inside, and came out with a PKM. Without thinking, Garcia reached out and slapped the machine gun to the ground.
For a moment, no one moved. A dozen armed men shuffled around, not saying a word. Eventually a few Afghan soldiers sullenly joined the patrol. Bad karma, never resolved while 3rd Platoon held PB Fires.
“My bad,” Garcia said later. “I should have seen it coming and defused the situation.”
The problem went deeper than unit discipline. The askaris weren’t trusted. Since the murders at 3/5 headquarters, two more Marines had been gunned down north of 3/5’s area. The motivations for these killings were murky, a perverse mixture of injured personal pride, Islamist ideology, and tribal culture.
With lack of trust on both sides, the performance of the Afghan soldiers at Fires did not improve despite patrolling with the platoon. In his unruliness, unpredictability, and toughness, the Afghan soldier reflected his society—fragmented, tribal, and troubled.
Day 89. 534,000 Steps
On January 9, a Marine sniper dropped a man at 820 meters and 2d Squad surprised a man digging in an IED. After he escaped into the reeds, Delany followed the IED wire back to a hootch, heaved in a stun grenade, rushed in, dragged out the man.
“We shoved this dude in front of us,” Lantznester said, “thinking he’ll be the first to get blown up. I’m at the back of the patrol, where I got careless and trip. I heard this pop! and the ground rocked under me. I tried to run. I was having a heart attack. The explosion knocked me to the ground but the big package in the jug didn’t explode. It was just a low-order detonation. All I had was a sprained ankle and Sergeant Dy yelling at me to catch up.”
After his lucky escape, Lantznester decided to pray regularly. He was sharing a man-cave with Wagner and LCpl. David Hickle. When they went to bed each night, they listened to Tracy Lawrence sing “If I Don’t Make It Back,” a somber, disturbing choice.
Wagner began, “Boys, if I don’t make it back …”
“Have a beer for me,” Hickle responded, “don’t waste no tears on me.”
Third Platoon considered themselves blessed because they could sleep at night. The Marine reservists stood the night watches in the cold sentry towers, allowing the grunts to rest.
After the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote, “I do not believe the officers of the regiment ever discovered that I had never studied the tactics that I used.” Similarly, 3rd Platoon made up its own fighting tactics.
Coaches for professional football teams spend thousands of hours preparing for a three-hour game. Every one-hour firefight or patrol into sector P8Q was obviously far more deadly than a football match. Yet the generals and senior staffs, who shuffled data back and forth like self-licking ice cream cones, offered no new concepts or tactics for those doing the fighting. Garcia was the coach.
“No one above battalion came up with anything new for us,” Garcia said. “We didn’t receive advice on tactics. It was killing every day. No Afghan informant helped us. Intelligence didn’t drive ops; o
ps drove ops.”
Captain Johnson put a huge photomap on the wall of the ops center, with a pin designating every IED found and tree line where fire was taken. Garcia, Schueman, and the others gathered weekly with Johnson to figure out the enemy patterns.
The Pentagon had spent $22 billion to counter the IED, mostly to purchase a fleet of excellent bomb-resistant vehicles. The equipment on foot patrols in Sangin, where the threat was highest, was primitive. Third Platoon discovered most IEDs by eyesight, with the Walmart-style metal detector occasionally providing confirmation. Intelligence resulting in the arrests of the IED makers was close to nonexistent, due to the wall of tribal silence that protected the Taliban network.
At the village level, Afghanistan wasn’t much different from Vietnam. Some villages liked you, others hated you, and all knew you were temporary. Because you were the outsider, no one publicly gave you information. You survived by being the better fighter. Third Platoon repeated what worked, and no one from company level up to the Pentagon came up with a better idea.
The secretary of defense and four-star generals visited Sangin. Given their public statements later, it was questionable whether they grasped the claw-and-tooth nature of the fight. Their statements were vague and upbeat. But in all fairness, how can seniors grasp what is going on? Supposing every layer in the chain of command is too optimistic by only 5 percent. When the estimate finally reaches the top, it will be 50 percent in error.