One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  Before leaving on the patrol to P8Q, I went over to the sniper’s area to check their wall. Since my visit in January, the tally of enemy stick figures had increased from about forty to over sixty. Taken together, the sniper section and the three infantry squads reported killing 271 of the enemy. That’s probably high by at least a third; shooters always think they hit more targets than they actually do. But when the air and mortar strikes are added in, it’s not unreasonable that 3rd Platoon did kill 200 enemy.

  On a wall near the stick figures were stretched the pelts of ring-tailed coyotes and a few bobcats. Browning—who also cleaned and cooked chickens and goats for the platoon—entertained himself by climbing into a sentry tower at night and using his thermal sight to shoot the coyotes. The reservists on guard duty appreciated the diversion.

  Garcia gathered the platoon for a group photo. Since October, the platoon had averaged one casualty per week, and they had two more weeks to go before heading back to the States. With more casualties likely, few smiled for the camera.

  “Seven months with no break,” Browning said, “was too long. We were tired.”

  Outside the patrol base, shepherds were tending their sheep and cows. Once outside the wire, Yazzie took point. I calculated he was close to one million steps.

  “Yaz,” I said, “how do you do it day after day?”

  “Habit, I guess,” he said with a shy grin. “You get used to it.”

  “How many IEDs have you found?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a dozen.”

  “Oh, way, way more than that, dude,” Mac said. “You’re awesome, the best in the battalion.”

  With a shake of his head, Yaz rejoined Doyle at point. Doyle had joined the Marines to get away from his hometown of Modesto. Now he was looking forward to returning home and going to college.

  “Yaz and me,” he said, “have found thirty-eight IEDs. He won’t tell you that. He’s superstitious about numbers.”

  We headed northeast, cutting across fields filled with thousands of ankle-high green poppy plants. Afghanistan produced 80 percent of the opium for the global heroin market. A blight the previous year had driven up prices. The farmers in Sangin anticipated a price of $200 for a kilogram of raw opium. During the harvest season in April, the farmers sliced open the pods dangling from the purple poppy flowers. A few days of sunshine baked the gummy substance into a black teardrop that was nipped off and placed in a sack. It was like collecting the syrup from maple trees in Vermont.

  A hectare—a field one hundred by one hundred meters—yielded forty pounds of wet, raw opium worth $3,600, four times more valuable than a hectare of wheat. Buyers came to Sangin from Kabul, Pakistan, and Iran. Most of the fields were owned by shadowy syndicates, and the tenant farmers received only 10 or 20 percent of the sales price.

  At the grunt level in Sangin, opium and hashish were ignored, except when askaris went on patrol stoned.

  “We have our hands full with the Taliban,” Maj. Steve Wolf, the regimental intelligence officer, said. “The drug problem is the Afghan government’s business. We don’t have a U.S. eradication effort.”

  We also walked through several fields of cannabis. In the rich soil next to the Helmand River, the yield of 300 pounds per hectare was twice that of the fields in Morocco, Afghanistan’s major competitor in the global market. A poor farmer, without a tractor or much fertilizer, could earn as much from cannabis as from poppy. He had to work harder, though, filtering and pulverizing the leaves and kneading the resin into clumps of hashish to be sold to bulk buyers or in the local markets.

  It seemed every Afghan soldier had his own stash, and it was hard to pick out those who were high on patrol. And with unemployment hovering around 40 percent, addiction to hard drugs was growing. In recruiting local forces in Helmand, the Marines rejected 17 percent of applicants for failing tests for hard drugs.

  Near a fording point across a stream about a kilometer north of Fires, Yaz found and cut a thick white electric wire. Buried somewhere close by was a jug of explosives. Small groups of men glared at us and returned no greeting. After marking the spot, Garcia gestured to Yaz to push ahead.

  “They’re jerking us around,” Garcia said. “This place is rigged. No sense sticking around.”

  Farther out in the fields, farmers, women, and children were hastening to shelter, a signal that enemy lurked nearby. Staying in file, the Marines knelt and prepared to return fire. Covering Yazzie’s back, Doyle glassed the empty fields to our front. Off to our east, four or five men were idling along on their motorcycles, watching us.

  “Fuckers,” Mac muttered.

  Captain Johnson came up on the radio.

  “We’re watching those spotters on the Godcam,” he said. “Make sure you ignore them. We’re at the end of our tour. Don’t risk Leavenworth.”

  In the fall, the platoon had averaged one fight a day. Now it had fallen down to three a week. That was progress, but it hadn’t altered the basic dynamics of guerrilla war. Since my last visit, the Taliban had been insisting the farmers aid them for the sake of Islam. Women, not men, now called openly on the Icoms, knowing the Marines wouldn’t shoot.

  When a helicopter gunship buzzed over the motorcyclists, McCulloch grabbed the radio and testily told the pilot to leave.

  “Mac thinks,” Vic said to me, “that no one should interfere with his private war.”

  Garcia kept a quiet, detached manner. The squad leader ran the show. On one patrol, Vic was carrying the SAW—the machine gun with an astonishing rate of fire. When a fight broke out, Sergeant Dy yelled that he had placed the gun in the wrong place. Garcia quickly hopped up to follow Dy’s directions.

  After the Cobra gunship left, Mac led us toward P8Q, where more small groups of men glared at us and would return no greeting. The white flag of the Taliban fluttered over an abandoned farmhouse 300 meters west of Transformer. I glanced quizzically at Vic.

  “They still give us the finger,” he said. “That compound is laced with mines. The hell with it.”

  Mac stopped in the middle of an open field and we all lay down, the machine gun pointed northeast and snipers scoping the tree lines. Garcia radioed the mortar crew back at base to stand by. The snipers reported that an unarmed man was crawling on his hands and knees to get a closer look at us.

  “He might be a spotter,” Vic said, “or an idiot. Leave him alone.”

  After waiting half an hour with no action, we returned to base. Garcia was apologetic.

  “I was sure some asshole would shoot at us,” he said.

  Day 158. 948,000 Steps

  Second Squad was patrolling into P8Q when Sergeant Dy saw several men in front of a small mosque from which the Marines habitually took fire. Shit, Dy thought, we’re in for it now. He waited anxiously while his machine gun team wiggled into position to provide the base of fire. A single PKM round zipped past the squad kneeling in single file.

  After six months of having the enemy shoot and run away, something snapped inside Dy. He wasn’t playing it safe this time. He turned to his squad.

  “Let’s go!”

  Gambling the Taliban hadn’t rigged IEDs where they gathered, Dy ran across the field toward the mosque. A dozen Marines followed, spread out in a long line. One Marine shot a LAAW (Light Anti-Armor Weapon) that exploded against a wall, sending up a cloud of smoke. As the Taliban ran out the back, the Marines reached the compound and pulled out grenades to clear the rooms.

  At the rear of the file, Corpsman Stuart Fuke, twenty-two, stumbled and went down.

  “I’m hit!”

  Lantznester saw him fall, ran back, and cinched a tourniquet around Fuke’s thigh. Amid the din of the shooting, the other Marines didn’t hear their shouts for help. Lantz and Fuke were feeling very much alone. Fuke had volunteered to join the grunts because he enjoyed their sense of humor. But leaving Lantz and him out in the open by themselves was carrying a joke too far.

  Eventually Dy realized they were missing and the squad ran back. T
he high-velocity bullet had entered Fuke’s thigh and exited out his ass. It was a serious wound, but of course the Marines couldn’t resist a few wisecracks. Thoroughly exasperated, Fuke grabbed the radio and called in his own evacuation.

  The platoon’s ability to call for mortars was restricted. A new battalion, taking over to the north, insisted upon prior approval of any request for fire near its sector. Third Platoon had only a few weeks to go before rotating back to the States.

  “After Doc Fuke was shot in the butt,” Sibley said, “Lieutenant Garcia could have packed it in. Instead, he kept pushing us out. Sergeant Dy and I talked about it. We admired how he handled those last weeks, when there were too many restrictions on how we could fight.”

  To help, Spokes Beardsley had the Harvest Hawk AC-130 fly over whenever it was in the vicinity. With a loiter time of seven hours and a noise like a washing machine loaded with marbles, the monstrous aircraft intimidated the Taliban. A common Icom intercept was “Don’t do anything when the big gray plane is here.”

  A week later, the electronics intercept team at Inkerman reported increasing frustration on the part of the Taliban shura in Pakistan. In the judgment of the senior insurgent leadership, the Sangin local rebels had lost their nerve and weren’t engaging the Marines. So the shura sent in a second batch of jihadists.

  The mosque in P8Q was the reception center for foreign fighters. The Sangin elders, harboring no love for Pakistanis, suggested they wouldn’t complain if the mosque went away. This was tricky stuff, since President Karzai ranted about any perceived American transgression. On March 25, Garcia set out with 1st Squad. Video from the blimp showed that after firing from the mosque, the shooters escaped down a tree line. This day, the Marines had permission to return fire with artillery.

  Sure enough, about 300 meters south of the mosque, the patrol took fire. But due to spotty communications, the ops center at Inkerman canceled the fire mission. Frustrated, Esquibel and Palma moved forward to try some rifle shots.

  “Hey, Sergeant,” Cpl. Porfirio Alvarez, twenty-three, from Connecticut, radioed, “you’re cutting across the field you’ve put offlimits.”

  Esquibel felt a tremendous push under his feet and realized he was floating in the air. For a split second, he thought he was dead. Then he landed in the mud. He lay still, afraid to look at his injuries and fearful of setting off a secondary.

  “Sergeant Esquibel?” Palma was shouting. “Esquibel, where are you?”

  It had been a low-order detonation. Esquibel saw the yellow jug split open next to him, packed with explosives. Palma stood on the bank and looked down.

  “Don’t touch off secondaries,” Esquibel said. “Fuck. How much is left of me?”

  Palma looked at the mud-splattered figure.

  “Looks like only a leg is gone. You’re okay.”

  Palma’s sympathy wasn’t particularly reassuring. As tourniquets were applied, Garcia hustled over. It appeared to him that Esquibel would lose his foot, but not his leg. The sergeant who had taken such special care of his men hadn’t made it to the end of his last tour. As the helicopter approached, a Marine threw a smoke grenade to mark their position.

  “I see no smoke,” the pilot said. “I won’t land until you pop that damn smoke.”

  The field was filled with bright green cannabis plants. Even the mist floating over the field was green.

  “What knucklehead,” Garcia yelled, “threw a green smoke grenade?”

  Day 166. One Million Steps

  The next day, March 27, Lantznester was talking with Yaz, who was taking point on another patrol. Yaz had woken up out of sorts, and heading back up to sector P8Q did not raise his spirits. Third Platoon was turning over Fires next week and he had passed the one hundred patrol mark. This stuff was getting old.

  “I think someone’s hunting me,” Yaz said.

  “Dude,” Lantz said, “you’ll be fine.”

  A few hours later, Yazzie cautiously approached the long tree line marking the entrance to sector P8Q. Yaz had disliked this route since January, when the monstrous slug from a Dishka, a Russian heavy machine gun, had just missed him. With Doyle keeping watch behind him, Yaz decided to lead McCulloch’s squad through a field rather than along a hard-packed trail.

  Seeing a wire protruding from the dirt, he signaled the squad to halt. He knelt down on his right leg, extended his right arm, and began to shove away the loose dirt, as he had done a hundred times before. The pressure plate was so sensitive that the weight of his hand closed the circuit between the two wires.

  Wham! The force of the explosion flipped Yaz’s body upside down in the air and he landed on his back, looking up at the sky. He lay still, hoping his back wasn’t broken. But his right leg kept twisting and quivering.

  “What the hell?” he screamed. “What the hell!”

  Doyle was kneeling over him, his face inches away.

  “Don’t worry, bro,” he said. “We got you.”

  Badly concussed, Doyle was wobbling, trying not to lose consciousness as he helped his friend.

  “Straighten out my leg,” Yaz said. “It’s caught on something.”

  The corpsman was hitting him with morphine. The last thing he remembered was McCulloch patting him on the shoulder.

  “It’s okay. We fixed your leg. It’s okay.”

  Yazzie’s right leg, mangled beyond repair, was amputated a few hours later.

  That same day on another patrol, Corpsman Redmond Ramos stepped on another pressure plate and lost his foot.

  “That IED maker had been watching us,” Yaz told me from his hospital room. “He saw I never used that trail. He was real smart.”

  In the Vietnam village where I served, the top fighter was Suong, the leader of the farmer militia. Suong had started fighting in 1964, and no Marine could match his tactical instincts. One night in 1974, years after we had left, Suong opened a gate in his hamlet and was blown apart. After a thousand patrols, the odds had caught up with him.

  Third Platoon went into Sangin with fifty-one Marines, and concluded the tour with twenty-seven casualties—two killed, nine amputations, and sixteen concussions, shrapnel, or gunshot wounds.

  LCpl. Colbey Yazzie was the magician and platoon talisman, too skilled to be struck down. Amputated leg. Lt. Cameron West had spent his life in the outdoors, too smart to be fooled. Amputated leg. Sgt. Dominic Esquibel was a meticulous man, careful to a fault. Amputated foot. Sgt. Matt Abbate was the Achilles of the platoon, its finest warrior. Dead. Over the course of one million steps, the odds will always catch up.

  Chapter 12

  THE ENDLESS GRUNT

  “Out here in combat, we’re different from others.”

  —JUAN COVARRUBIUS, TEXAS

  In April of 2011, Battalion 3/5 left Sangin. A fresh platoon moved into Fires and spent a week conducting joint operations. On the first patrol, Vic Garcia brought Lt. Chuck Poulton, the new platoon commander, up to P8Q. When a gunfight broke out, Garcia called in Cobra gunships.

  “That’s how it is out here,” Garcia said. “Use your supporting arms. Don’t let them breathe.”

  It was a confusing command environment. When briefing reporters, the high command quietly took credit for urging Special Operations teams to kill more Taliban. But the conventional forces were more restricted.

  “I put out a memo [in May of 2011],” Petraeus said, “re-familiarizing all forces with the Tactical Directive.”

  A year earlier, the Marines had sensed that Petraeus was not going to enforce the Tactical Directive strictly. Over the intervening months, he had gradually relied more on the Special Operations teams to attrite the Taliban. Fire restrictions on conventional forces who were viewed as community organizers again tightened.

  Despite the Tactical Directive, Poulton, who had done a combat tour in Iraq, adopted Garcia’s tactics. Every patrol moved by bounds in single file, watched over by a base of fire with a machine gun, 203s, and a forward observer. At first, action was slow. It was the poppy seaso
n, the fields were ablaze with purple blooms, and the Taliban were helping with the harvest on their farms.

  A few months later, though, when the fields were thick with summer corn, the gunfights and IED explosions resumed. One day in June, the platoon found eight motorbikes hidden in a corn row. After the Marines waited in ambush for several hours, ten Afghans came by, carrying shovels and showing clean hands. Chemical swabs revealed gunpowder residue on all. The district governor, claiming a lack of evidence, released them.

  The war ground on. Eventually, Poulton’s platoon sergeant, all three squad leaders, and the company commander were wounded. His platoon suffered two Marines killed and thirty-two wounded.

  Back in the States, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates concluded his four years of service in June of 2011. He told President Obama that the commanders in the field believed we were achieving success.

  “The more time you spend in Afghanistan,” he told Mr. Obama, “the closer to the front you get, the more optimistic people are.”

  Lieutenant Poulton was not one of those optimistic people.

  “We took over Fires and held it,” Poulton said. “We’re Marines. I’m proud of what we did. But we didn’t blame the people for our losses. We were leaving Afghanistan and the Taliban were staying.”

  His battalion—1/5—had uncovered 895 IEDs, considerably fewer than the 1,315 reported by 3/5.

  “We made progress,” the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Tom Savage, said. “Still, Marines are bad for the poppy business, bad for the Taliban, and bad for some tribes. Will Afghan soldiers from tribes in the north take on Sangin as their fight? That’s the key question.”

  Patrol Base Fires was closed down. The Marines were thinning out their units, and the Afghan soldiers laughed at the suggestion that they remain alone in the middle of the Green Zone.