One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  In Vietnam, I was surprised when an Israeli brigadier general with an eye patch embedded in the bush for a week with a platoon nearby to us. We were fighting every night, and Moshe Dayan left understanding our battle. There was no lack of courage in American generals. Many would like to repeat what Dayan did.

  In today’s military, however, decorum among generals demands deference. In 2003, Maj. Gen. Ray “E-Tool” Smith, a highly admired warfighter, joined me in Iraq to write about the war. Several active-duty generals tried to throw Smith out of theater. Why? Because he was too expert. It seemed improper for him to write about another general’s strategy. Similarly, an active-duty general embedding with a platoon would be seen as meddlesome or distrustful of his own chain of command.

  This posed yet another dilemma never resolved. While it was unrealistic for a four-star to embed with a platoon, a sentient grasp of the combat and the mood of the troops was essential to command. Shakespeare had portrayed Henry V as wrapped in disguise visiting with his archers on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt.

  A gulf persisted between the bruising reality of the battle and a mental model that led generals to believe, for instance, that Sangin “will nurture women leaders.” The 1980 Marine counterinsurgency manual stated, “Attack the enemy relentlessly. Saturation patrolling to locate and fix insurgent forces followed by offensive operations to destroy them is the essence of tactical operations.” The manual called for the constant deployment of squad-size patrols “over a selected area so that insurgents cannot move without being detected.” That was exactly what 3rd Platoon was doing: attack, attack, attack.

  General Petraeus explained that the expansion of counterinsurgency into nation building constituted “the graduate level of warfare.” Gone was the clear order to “attack the enemy relentlessly.” In its place, the grunts were given multiple tasks. They were advisers, constables, project managers, dispute adjudicators, and community organizers.

  There was no military precedent for these ambitious tasks. Most twentieth-century counterinsurgency efforts by the West had consisted of the imposition of colonial power. In the 1950s and 1960s, the British in Kenya and Malaya and the French in Algeria and Indochina had ruled as the political lords. They selected the local leaders and told them what to do. This kind of colonial command was not an option in the twenty-first century.

  Nor did America’s role in Vietnam provide a more instructive model. There, the Viet Cong insurgency was quelled by a web of informants, relentless killing, and imprisonment, and the Viet Cong’s own disastrous decision to leave the countryside to attack the cities in conventional formations in February of 1968.

  In Vietnam, the Combined Action Platoons with American squads living in the villages succeeded because the people wanted them there. Conversely in Sangin, there was not one village where the residents would accept Americans. Even the Alakozai tribe that professed to hate the Taliban wanted the Marines removed from the district. Most of the farmers wanted nothing to do with Marine patrols, with their fearsome firepower. Higher headquarters might claim the intent was to “protect the population.” In truth, the grunts were out there fighting alone without a population willing to be protected.

  Third Platoon with a few token askaris were searching compounds, the exact behavior that the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, was condemning. But if they didn’t search, the Taliban would have safe havens. Third Platoon set the record for the number of air strikes, the exact behavior General McChrystal had issued his Tactical Directive to prevent. In ten weeks, 3/5 had called in 177 artillery and air strikes, including twenty-four Hellfire missiles and forty-four 500-pound bombs. Without such heavy indirect fire, 3rd Platoon would have had to withdraw from Sangin.

  The vast majority of compounds contained no civilians. The logbooks of 3rd Platoon and Kilo Company contain scattered references to civilian casualties among hundreds of entries. Undoubtedly more civilians were killed and compounds destroyed, but not in massive numbers. A farmer did not keep his family in a compound in areas where the Taliban at any moment could rush in, knock murder holes in the wall, and shoot at Marines, drawing a torrent of direct and indirect fire.

  Conversely, 3rd Platoon had no social or amicable contact with the people. In response to my survey, three of its members said they believed the Afghan people are “worth fighting for,” nineteen believed they couldn’t be trusted and aligned with the Taliban, and thirty believed they were “OK, but intimidated by Taliban.”

  The doctrine of counterinsurgency as friendly persuasion was imposed from the top down. The top commanders in Afghanistan, together with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, were its advocates and enforcers. They gave the orders. They weren’t the coaches. They were the referees, ensuring our side played by their rules, while the other side made up its own rules.

  Third Platoon, engaged in a straight-up slugfest, was fortunate. Colonel Kennedy, the regimental commander, had suffered losses trying to enact one-sided COIN in Ramadi, Iraq. On one visit to Inkerman, Colonel Kennedy was in the ops center when a video feed showed two Taliban crossing a footbridge. The watch officer was debating whether to call for artillery. Kennedy told him to make the call; if anyone objected, he’d handle it.

  He had only one rule—clear, firm, and concise.

  “Finish every firefight,” Kennedy said, “standing on the ground where the enemy opened fire.”

  By the end of December, the snipers with 3rd Platoon had recorded forty kills and spent hundreds of hours glassing the fields and compounds.

  “Going into January, our tactics didn’t change much,” Browning said. “We tried building the standard sniper hides, shifting our position at dusk, and dropping off ambush teams, but you can’t really hide when every man, woman, child, and dog is watching you. What worked best was staying with the squads.”

  The Taliban were staying farther away from the Marine patrols, taking shots from 300 to 400 meters. The snipers had developed a sense for what were called “patterns of life”—things like when the villagers awakened, their morning ablutions, who worked in the fields, who attended evening prayer, and which families visited each other.

  Eventually, the snipers could pick out which farmers were Taliban, even when they weren’t openly carrying weapons. Most of the fighters were between twenty and thirty years old, clean, well groomed, with laces in their Skechers. They walked erect, with the casual arrogance typical of power among young men. Many seemed pudgy, because they were wearing magazine chest rigs beneath their man-dresses. The local Taliban didn’t open fire when civilians were around; those from Pakistan didn’t seem to care. Both groups used women and children as shields when they moved across the open. They knew the American snipers were out there somewhere.

  In Helmand, every U.S. operations center down to company level was equipped with video screens attached to the fifty-foot G-Boss telescopes or, even better, tethered blimps floating at 5,000 feet, too high up to be shot down. Both systems had cameras that monitored in startling detail a circumference of two miles. An Icom could be seen in a man’s hand, or a rifle barrel protruding from a pants leg. Dubbed the “Godcam,” aerial surveillance made it impossible for enemy fighters to dart undetected across fields during firefights.

  “The biggest difference since we got here in October,” Capt. Tim Nogalski, the battalion intelligence officer, told me in January, “is that every company is getting technical tip-offs.”

  Still, the grunts at Fires gave the telescopes mixed reviews. They resented operators back at company using the cameras to spy on their outpost and to comment on tactics during patrols.

  “Even when a squad leader,” Garcia said, “puts a fire team in the wrong place, it pisses him off when the ops center calls to help him out.”

  Discounting this normal infantry bitching, the technologies were amazing. If the Taliban talked on phones, big ears were listening. If they moved, Godcam was watching.

  When I dropped by the 3/5 operations center in January, a corpora
l was monitoring video of the market 300 meters outside the gates. On a huge, color flat screen, he zoomed in on two men sitting on a motorcycle. Dozens of men were walking by, browsing from shop to shop. Each passerby veered a few feet around the two men, without exchanging greetings. The two looked alert, not nervous, accepting the deference as their due.

  “They’re dirty,” the corporal said.

  As he kept track with the camera, the two puttered up to a rickety door on a mud building. A man came out, glanced around, and handed them a bulging sack. The corporal stayed focused as they drove up another crowded street. When they stopped for a few seconds at a dingy door, an arm thrust out a pickax. The two puttered away with the sack and the pick.

  “Here we go!” the corporal shouted, as a dozen Marines stopped what they had been doing to watch the show. “I got Hawk on station!”

  Five thousand feet above, Harvest Hawk was chugging in from the southeast, out of hearing range.

  It was odd, watching two men committing unintentional suicide. They drove to a low dip in the road, as the bright aluminum camera peered down at its prey. One doomed Taliban hacked energetically at the hard-packed dirt road, while the other placed on a blanket each chunk chopped loose by the pick. They then pulled a jug from the sack and began to attach wires to it.

  In the quiet ops center, we heard the voice of the pilot in Harvest Hawk.

  “I have visual. Bombs away.”

  Bombs away? Like grunts, pilots change gears but not attitudes. Hawk let loose a Hellfire. Inside the ops center, we heard clearly the loud bang! of the missile. Outside on the road, so did the two targets. Inside three seconds, they had hopped on their cycle and were gone. The missile had a twenty-second time of flight; they were ten seconds and 200 meters down the road before the explosion.

  The corporal stayed focused on the pair as they raced up a hill and around a few blocks, before stopping in front of a large house. The rider banged on the gate, and when it opened they pushed inside. Within thirty seconds, they were pushed out. The owner of the house was no fool.

  They hopped on their cycle and sped out of town toward the Green Zone. The camera patiently followed as Hawk circled. Once they hit an open stretch of road, the AC-130 fired a second Hellfire. The video screen showed a big black puff. Once the slight wind blew away the dust, the twisted cycle and two bodies lying in the road could be seen.

  “That’s a shack!” the Hawk pilot yelled over the radio.

  No one in the battalion ops center suggested sending out a team to search the site. Not worth the risk. Let the townspeople bury them.

  On a macro level, the killing was a demonstration of resources versus sympathy. The Americans had the wealth to apply millions of dollars of high tech to kill two men. More millions had been spent in Sangin for generators, schools, clinics, and roads. Yet the motorcyclist bombers had nonchalantly driven through the crowded market, unafraid of betrayal by those the coalition had aided for years.

  By January, the shooting quieted down around Inkerman. One day, Corporal Laird joined a routine patrol with Lieutenant Schueman and 1st Platoon. When nothing happened for a few hours, they took a snack break on a grassy knoll above a few compounds. After eating a candy bar, Laird lay down with his cheek on his rifle butt. Idly looking through his scope, he saw a small opening in a compound wall 300 meters away. Crouched there was a man talking on an Icom, guarded by a second man holding an RPG launcher. As Laird put his finger on the trigger, the RPG gunner walked across the opening. When the radioman followed, Laird hit him twice in the chest and watched as the man stumbled and disappeared from his sight picture. The next day, the corporal manning the G-Boss telescope at Inkerman reported a well-attended funeral near the compound.

  “Before we got here,” Schueman said, “we listened to lectures about counterinsurgency, drinking tea, meeting with key leaders. That was all bull. No matter what we do here, the people believe we’ll leave and the Taliban will come back and kill them. Whenever the shooting dies down, I know it’ll pick up again.”

  Up at Transformer, the fighting had slackened after the death of Lieutenant Donnelly. Many local fighters had died in that fight and the outpost sitting on Route 611 didn’t threaten the interior Taliban routes to the Sangin market. By mid-December, the Marines had secured the mile of hardtop road between Inkerman to Transformer. Supply vehicles no longer had to take the circuitous six-hour trip through the desert. With 611 open for traffic, the trip took six minutes.

  “For us up at Transformer,” Sergeant Sotelo said, “things improved by Christmas. Over a hundred refugees moved in around our outpost. We bought our food in the market. Kids accepted candy from us, instead of running away. They were flying kites that the Talibs had forbidden. Women walked out of compounds with their faces uncovered.”

  In mid-January, though, Sotelo was walking by an alley where children were playing when a burst of bullets sent him flat. Not seeing the shooter, he held his fire while the kids sought shelter. Then he angrily demanded that the villagers tell him what the hell was going on.

  What were they doing? Those were their own kids out in the street. The Marines were spending $20 a day in the market. Why were they being so stupid?

  Four fighters from Pakistan sneaked in a few hours ago, the villagers said, and threatened to kill anyone who informed on them. After that, the outpost took harassing fire, regardless of whether civilians were present. An enemy sniper took up a roost in Belleau Wood. Every afternoon, when the sun behind him was shining like a spotlight on Transformer, he took one or two shots at the sentry towers. It was only a matter of time until he killed a Marine.

  A sniper team moved up from Fires and spent their first day rigging a dummy that was propped up on the wall, with the helmet, head, and shoulders showing. LCpl. Willie Deel crawled out on the sandbags, checking to see if the dummy could be seen from Belleau Wood.

  “Deel, that’s not smart,” Corporal Laird said.

  His warning was followed by the smack! of a bullet hitting a sandbag. Deel leaped back amid unkind comments about who was the dummy.

  When the enemy sniper proved too crafty to kill, Captain Johnson sent up a 105mm recoilless rifle that fired a twenty-pound explosive shell. The sniper was sticking to his afternoon schedule. After a few days, the recoilless rifle crew had narrowed down the location of his lair. When he again sniped, the response was a half dozen shells aimed directly at the firing point. The sniping ceased.

  A grunt accepts the danger as he does the mud, cold, heat, sweat, stink, and exhaustion; it’s his environment. He copes with his own sense of humor.

  “I got shot in the helmet,” Cpl. Kevin Smith, a sniper, said. “I’m walking across a roof and whang! I’m sitting down, holding my helmet with a dent from a bullet. When I get back on my feet, my buddies refuse to stand next to me. I’m bad luck. My friends!”

  Smith had a friend, Cpl. Jordan Gerber, who had a false front tooth. Before going on patrol, he would place his tooth inside his hollow butt stock. One day, when he was under fire, the stock popped open and out spilled the tooth. The Marines pawed through the dirt with bullets zipping by until they found it. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. This time, the Marines didn’t stick around to look for it.

  Back home, there were tears and anxious phone calls. Jane Conwell Morris, the wife of the commanding officer, was getting a hundred emails each day, fielding the anger and anxieties of 800 families. One wife was convinced she heard her doorbell ring every night, with someone waiting to announce her husband’s death.

  “The families, especially the spouses, really almost lost their minds,” Lieutenant Colonel Morris said.

  In the age of Twitter, what happened on the battlefield instantly affected the home front. And what happened at home instantly reached the troops.

  After being blown up in October, Lt. Cameron West had been evacuated to Bethesda Naval Hospital. For the first week, he had scarcely slept, fighting for breath as his sucking chest wounds healed. His
mother, a nurse, and his father visited him each day. Both praised the medical care he was receiving.

  Still, it was rough going. For weeks, bacteria gnawed at his right stump, requiring a painful daily wash-out to peel away the infected flesh from what was left of his limb. He lost two more inches off his leg and developed six infections causing blood clots that threatened to stop his heart.

  “I had it easy,” Cam said, “compared to the others. I saw guys from 3/5 with worse amputations than my leg and hand. Even my eye was getting a little better. Doc Long was paralyzed from the waist down. I was angry because I felt helpless. I wasn’t in the fight.”

  In January, missing one leg, one hand, and one eye, Cam was transferred to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, seventy miles south of the Marine base at Camp Pendleton. By now, he was friendly with a dozen other amputees and a hundred other injured from 3/5. They were assigned to what is called the Wounded Warrior Regiment to bolster each other’s spirit. Cam was their leader.

  So Jane Morris asked Cam to attend a packed meeting of 3/5 families and represent those in the fight 6,000 miles away. Before doing so, Cam reached back to Captain Johnson and his old platoon out at Fires. He was enormously popular, and 3rd Platoon told him their side of the story. When he stood to speak at the meeting, he was nervous but prepared. Speaking firmly to distraught wives and mothers was not a task for the faint of heart.

  “Everyone in this room is scared and concerned,” he said. “But I hear it from my brothers out there too. They need your support, not your complaints or tears, not from mothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends. Sure, you all have hard days—kids acting up, bills to be paid, things going wrong. Don’t talk about that. Don’t send whining emails or post idiotic comments on Facebook. For the rest of his tour—fourteen weeks—don’t say one negative thing to your Marine. He has enough on his plate. You should be worrying about him; he shouldn’t be worrying about you. He needs you. Keep saying, I love you, I miss you, I pray for you.”