by West, Bing
Chapter 10
THE ROUTINE
“There’s no end to the bloodshed.”
—VICTOR VALDEZ, TEXAS
In early 2011, I again flew to Helmand Province and met with Col. Paul Kennedy. In 2004, I had embedded with his battalion in Iraq. When I met Paul at his regimental headquarters south of Sangin, he was as terse as ever.
“You’d be bored and ignorant up here at regiment,” he said. “I’ll drop you off where the fighting is.”
Day 91. 546,000 Steps
I arrived at Patrol Base Fires in time to join the morning patrol.
By way of greeting, Vic Garcia handed me two straps.
“You know the drill,” he said. “One’s for you. If you have to use the other one on someone else, twist the knob until he yells. And stay inside the bottle caps. We don’t want to have to carry you back.”
Like the horse stirrup or the bicycle, the modern tourniquet is so simple that it took centuries to invent. Cinch up the strap, twist the fist-wide knob tight, and the blood stops gushing out. A half century ago, my platoon in Vietnam had used narrow elastic tubing that sliced into the flesh without fully stanching the bleeding. In Vietnam, one in four of our wounded died, mainly from loss of blood. In Afghanistan, one in seven died, but the number of amputations skyrocketed.
The fifteen Marines in 3rd Squad wore armored vests sprinkled with dried mud, tan camouflage uniforms hard to detect from a distance, and weathered, unsmiling faces. A few wrapped tourniquets around their thighs; most stuffed them in their med kits. I unwrapped and stowed a tourniquet in each breast pocket.
Garcia didn’t talk, keeping his distance as the Marines fell into a loose line. I noticed the tattered photomap attached to his left hand like a wedding band—the lifeline for calling in fires. At night, he probably used it as a pillow. On patrol, you’d have to cut off his fingers to pry it loose.
The patrol was heading north to sector P8Q. The mission was to walk for a couple of miles, avoiding mines while waiting to be shot at, hoping in return to light up the shooter. We passed by the mortar tubes aligned toward their barber-pole-aiming stakes, left the wire in silence, forded an icy stream, and plodded along in sloshing boots. Every patrol got wet, muddy, and miserable at the start, so there wouldn’t be any hesitation later. The winter-dead landscape looked like a sepia portrait of Oklahoma farms during the Great Depression. Everything was a lifeless shade of brown—the fields, the furrows, the trees, and the walls of the compounds, some clustered together, others standing off alone.
The patrol wasn’t in a hurry. Up at point, Yazzie, the twenty-one-year-old engineer, walked slowly, sweeping his Vallon back and forth with his eyes on the LED magnetometer needle on the handle of the metal detector. He focused on the dirt inside the length of his shadow, rarely glancing up, while his partner, LCpl. Kyle Doyle, watched out for snipers and dropped the caps of water bottles.
We walked with the war’s paradox under our feet—fresh poppy plants. Looking as innocent as lettuce heads, the mind slayers were springing to life in every field. Back in the States, we were fighting an ever-losing war on drugs. Here in a faraway country, we were fighting a war on terror that required toleration of the very heroin we waged war against at home. Afghanistan’s export of drugs created more human casualties than did the fighting. But to eradicate the poppy was the surest way to drive the farmers into the ranks of the Taliban.
The farmers had planted them in long, straight lines and we bruised few as we followed our own straight line, guided by the water bottle caps. Behind Doyle came the two-man machine gun crew. Sergeant McCulloch, twenty-four, followed the machine gunners. On a recent patrol, a bullet had nicked the inside of his thigh. Fearing that a second Purple Heart would mean a transfer to the rear, he bandaged the wound and refused to have it checked out at the battalion aid station. He walked with a limp, but so far had avoided infection.
The patrol walked in file with no concealment, preferring the open fields to the shrubbery alongside the irrigation ditches. Within eyesight of the platoon’s fort, farm life was normal. Scrawny cows and sheep wandered freely, nibbling at stray patches of grass trampled as smooth as putting greens. Carrying thin switches, male shepherds, ages eight to forty, languidly followed their flocks. Wending north, the patrol walked where possible in the fresh hoofprints of the animals.
A thin man in a dirty brown man-dress and a shabby turban, followed by an old man and a few boys, scampered across a ditch to intercept the patrol. As the Marines walked past, he squatted down and extended a piece of paper, his mouth soundlessly agape, displaying enormous front teeth. McCulloch signaled with a clenched fist to halt.
“Turgiman,” the turban man said, waving the card. “Turgiman.”
The card was a standard form for listing war damage. If a Marine signed it, with an estimate of the damage, the farmer would collect money at district headquarters. Like most Marines, Mac had picked up a smattering of pidgin Pashto. He tried out simple words and gestures until he got the gist.
“Toothy here says we killed his cow,” Mac said. “He wants two hundred bucks.”
“Where’s the cow?” Garcia asked.
“Says he buried it weeks ago.”
Garcia dismissed the claim with a wave of his map.
“Dig it up,” McCulloch said, handing the man back his chit, “and eat it.”
The patrol zigzagged along, with the rear guard picking up the bottle caps. Each Marine had a sector to watch. One glance around, one glance down at the caps. Around, down, around, down, never straying out of line.
Near a footbridge across a canal, Yaz clenched his fist, knelt, and scratched at the dirt. He took out wire cutters, snipped a few wires, held up two small boards wrapped in tape, and threw them to me. Glued to the underside of each board was a strand of wire. When a foot pressed down on the boards, the two wires touched each other, completing an electrical circuit connecting a flashlight battery to a plastic jug filled with explosives. Yaz attached a small charge to the IED, blew it up, and the patrol continued.
About a mile from the fort, the Marines passed women and children running pell-mell from a compound. More than a dozen cut across a field in front of the patrol, casting frightened glances. Over the radio, “Rubber Duck”—the call sign for a radio intercept unit at Inkerman—warned that two Taliban gangs were getting ready to open fire. Off to the right, three men on motorbikes puttered along a dirt road, paralleling the patrol.
“Dickers,” McCulloch said. “Cheeky bastards.”
It reminded me of a John Wayne western, with Comanches on the ridgeline keeping pace with a line of troopers. The Marines seemed indifferent to their watchers.
“They’re not idiots,” Garcia said. “Exposed like that, we’d cut them down in a second. Any shooting will come from up ahead, after the people clear the area.”
Gradually the patrol route diverged westward from the road and the cheeky bikers. Halfway across a field, in a furrow with no discernible difference from a hundred others, Yaz stopped. Head down in concentration, he swept the detector back and forth a few times and raised his right hand, signaling an IED.
That’s what makes the IED so insidious. Most give off a low magnetic signature. But some are missed, no matter how careful the sweep man is. Plus, the Taliban are sloppy. Fearing overhead drones, they hastily dig in the explosives and scamper away. Marines take extra care at the obvious places, like a footbridge or a trail intersection. But a Marine, farmer, or cow can step on a pressure plate buried anywhere, with no rational reason why that spot was chosen.
“Some of my engineers freeze up over time,” Garcia said to me. “They know every step could be their last. After a while, they move slower and slower. And some are like Yaz. They keep up a steady pace, patrol after patrol. He never slows down.”
Yazzie trotted back to talk with Garcia and McCulloch. All agreed to get out of there.
“We’ll mark this spot for a sweep by the engineers,” Garcia said. “It’s too unstab
le for us. The assholes have rigged traps all around here.”
Assholes, pricks, stinkies, fuckers, muj … the troops had no pet name for the enemy. Any term of contempt would do. Rarely did they use the words Taliban or terrorists.
For another half hour, the patrol walked north, with Vic Garcia in the middle of the file, far enough behind the point not to be pinned down, far forward enough to call in fire. Third Platoon’s patrol area encompassed six square kilometers, containing hundreds of compounds scattered across about 2,000 fields. Vic’s treasured photomap, overlaid with waterproof acetate, showed every field and tree line, with each compound stamped with a bright yellow number.
Vic occasionally called out something like “Number 23 at our eleven o’clock.” Various Marines would yell back, confirming they were looking at the same compound. If there was disagreement, the patrol took a knee while Vic double-checked and oriented everyone on the same hundred-meter grid. They knew the hot spots, the tree lines and compounds where they were most likely to take fire. If even one Marine disagreed or was uncertain about the number of a compound, the patrol halted while Garcia double-checked their location on his GPS. They weren’t in a rush. They had no appointment to keep, and the last thing they wanted was to call for fire support while not certain where they were.
When we reached the northern edge of P8Q, Garcia called out to me. “This is Belleau Wood,” he said, “where we fought on Thanksgiving.”
I looked at the shattered trees to my front and vast expanse of weeds and dirt leading back to Outpost Transformer to my right. I imagined Matt Abbate shuffling under fire across that field in the glutinous mud, pistol in one hand and the other holding the litter containing Lieutenant Donnelly.
In his classic book Battle Studies, French Col. Ardant du Picq observed that even brave men eventually shirk under fire. To overcome this, he urged commanders to instill in their ranks an esprit de corps—a “spirit of the body” that infused the soldier with the heritage of his unit.
At Belleau Wood in 1918, the Marines had checked the German advance on Paris. The 3rd Platoon log entry for Thanksgiving 2011 included the words Belleau Wood. Whoever wrote the log had linked that battle to their fight nine decades later. A “spirit of the body.”
Yaz moved at his meandering pace for another half hour before stopping at the edge of a burnt-out field. On the far side about 300 meters away stood two large compounds, their walls gouged by bullets. White Taliban flags, the size of hand towels, were sticking above the tops of compounds farther in the distance. While the machine gun and sniper teams set in their bipods, Garcia radioed his GPS location back to the mortar pits.
“A blind man can see us here,” Garcia said. “We’ll give the muj thirty mikes to decide if they want to come out and play.”
The Marines settled in behind their rifles.
“The stinkies can’t resist sneaking a peek,” McCulloch said, watching the walls through his telescopic sight.
Ten or fifteen minutes passed. No farmers ventured into the fields. The Taliban flags fluttered in the slight breeze.
“I see one,” McCulloch said. “Murder hole on the left wall at three o’clock. Turkey necking.”
Someone was stealing quick glances out of the small hole poked through the wall. Mac steadied the telescopic M4 on his left knee, sling wrapped in shooter position. Without taking his eye from the scope, he tried to direct a Marine sniper onto the target. When that failed, he took the shot himself. He squeezed off one round from his small caliber 5.56mm rifle. The pop! sounded as harmless as a kid’s firecracker.
“Get him?” Garcia asked casually.
Seven out of ten times, a Marine should hit a six-inch diameter hole at 200 meters.
“Don’t know,” Mac said. “I think I saw him flinch.”
No return fire came from the compound.
“Want me to look?” Mac asked.
Garcia shook his head without bothering to speak. By this time in the deployment, the platoon was calling him “the Juggernaut.” No one wanted to let him down or dared speak back to him. There was no way he was allowing a Marine to cross that open field to check it out. Maybe the man was dead, and maybe not. Either way, that was the end of it.
A few Marines munched on crackers. One or two sipped water from their CamelBaks. The written rules didn’t allow shooting at a man peeking through a hole in a wall. The rules required a man to be pointing a rifle before he became a target. No one said good shot, or you probably missed, or why’d you take that shot? Third Platoon had modified the rules to take account of Sangin.
After a while, a man in a black turban and tan man-dress puttered by on his motorbike. He showed no fear when the Marines waved him over.
“Delta rasha!” Mac yelled. “Come here.”
Mac grabbed the man’s hands, muttering that they were too soft for farm work. The man reached into a handbag and handed over a clean document. McCulloch held it up to the sun and squinted, as if looking for a hidden hologram.
“Fuck, this is a message from Osama bin Laden. Death to infidels or some shit like that.”
“Give him back his card,” Vic said.
“Claims he’s a mullah going to market,” Mac said. “We let too many of these fuckers go.”
“Tell company to follow him with the Boss scope,” Vic said.
The man wended his bike across the fields toward the road. The ops center, watching him through the G-Boss telescope, radioed that he was driving north. The market was three miles to the south.
“See, he was lying,” Mac said. “Checking out our strength.”
After a while, Garcia decided to return to base.
“The muj don’t like the setup,” he said. “It’s not in their favor.”
Like football teams, small units display individual fighting styles. The Taliban reminded me of the rice paddies south of Da Nang in 1966. Back then, when we moved at night, lookouts in the hostile villagers clacked bamboo sticks to warn of our movement. That was definitely spooky. Similarly, in Sangin the warning net of handheld radios allowed small teams to slip ahead of the Marine patrols. When the patrol crossed an open field, the Taliban opened fire, hoping for a hit or a rash rush by the Marines across a minefield.
The Marines’ counter was equally simple. One four-man fire team with a Vallon peeled off to flank the enemy, while another kept up a base of fire. If the Taliban remained in one position too long, the mortars would find them.
Yaz was leading the patrol across a field with scorched topsoil when he stopped a third time. Again he uncovered a pressure plate IED.
“I can’t figure out the pattern,” I said.
“There isn’t any,” McCulloch said. “The stinkies are fishing. Throwing bait in the water, hoping for a hit.”
We were in the middle of nowhere. What were they fishing for—a Marine, a cow, a kid? There was no rhyme or reason to place a land mine in a field indistinguishable from a thousand others. Or maybe that was the cold ingenuity of it. After all, except for Yazzie’s sixth sense, one of us would have stepped on it. Maybe that was worth someone else’s cow or child.
A few minutes later, the patrol walked past a crumbled wall, startling two large, dark brown coyotes. Again Yaz knelt, disarmed a pressure plate, and blew up a jug of explosives.
Less than a minute later, the crack! from a high-powered sniper rifle from the left sent everyone to the ground. A PKM machine gun opened up with short bursts from the right, on the far side of the burnt-out field.
“They’re pissed and tired of waiting,” Garcia said. “Trying to sucker us across to where the IEDs are.”
Garcia sent McCulloch around to the left to outflank the machine gun. Mac saw a man in a dark brown man-dress running away, leaving behind a jug of explosives and two pressure plates. He heard the bolt of a sniper rifle clack open and close, a sign the sniper was close ahead. But it took ten minutes for Yaz to sweep a path forward, ample time for the sniper and the machine gun crew to flee. Mac found a pile of spent car
tridges behind a wall and retraced his steps back to Garcia.
On the way back to the fort, the patrol passed three waifs—the oldest about seven—standing in a row amid the rubble of their front door. The house stood next to a large field where, a few months ago, a Marine had stepped on a pressure plate. As soon as the explosion erupted, the Taliban opened fire. Amid the screams and frantic yells for a medevac, the Marines had called for covering fire. An artillery shell had crushed one end of the farmhouse.
Since then, rains had packed the debris into sodden heaps of bricks, clay, and broken concrete. This was the shattered hamlet the Marines called HiMars, after the rocket-assisted artillery shell that had destroyed it.
The father was hoeing nearby. He ignored the Marines’ greetings. The clothes sagged upon the tiny frames of his undernourished kids. Unlike the children we had passed in intact compounds, none of these waifs darted forward with extended hands, shouting “Sharana! Sharana!” (Candy.) They were silent, their enormous eyes following each armored giant who walked by. The pace of the patrol quickened, no sorrow more doleful than a numbed and undernourished child.
Once within sight of the fort, the tension left the Marines. You could almost hear the collective exhale of breath. Home again, with no one down. They stood around, ejecting bullets from rifle chambers before entering friendly lines. One Marine wandered over to a bush to take a pee.
“Hey,” he yelled, holding up a twisted black tube. “Boelk’s 203.”
Months earlier, LCpl. James Boelk had stepped on an IED a few feet outside the fort. His dented grenade launcher had lain in the underbrush since his death.
A half century earlier, I had served as a platoon commander. Had things changed much in fifty years? No pilot from 1965 could sit in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft in 2012 and feel comfortable. Infantry platoons had not experienced comparable technological advances. Since Vietnam, we had added night-vision devices, bulletproof armor, digital communications, overhead surveillance, and dining rooms in the rear. Everything else was pretty much the same—the organizational structure, the sound leadership, the patrol rhythms, and the rambunctious ferocity of the Marines.