One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

by West, Bing

  In September of 2011, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment (1/7) took over from 1/5. I returned to Sangin. With the American withdrawal well under way, 1/7 was holding Sangin with half the number of troops that 3/5 had deployed.

  The morning after my return, I accompanied a dozen Marines from B Company, each carrying ninety pounds of armor and gear, as they slogged through stifling cornfields in ninety-five degree heat. We headed for sector Q5H, where Lieutenant Donnelly had been killed. No Afghan soldiers accompanied the Marines. They were staying inside their bases away from the Green Zone until the corn was harvested.

  When a four-foot cobra slithered across our path, the Marines shrugged; a snake couldn’t blow off their legs. The patrol emerged from the cornfield in front of a small madras, or Islamist school. A black-turbaned mullah quickly herded the schoolboys inside the courtyard, while a dozen farmers glared at us.

  We walked on, eventually reaching a tiny outpost called Pabst Blue Ribbon. Inside PBR, a dozen Marines and local Afghan militia were relaxing, overseen by a sentry with a machine gun. Such was the distrust that all Afghans handed in their weapons before entering the post. With no interpreter, the Americans and Afghans could only nod at one another. Although every Marine post and patrol was “partnered,” the Afghans were learning little they could apply on their own.

  We pushed on. Staff Sgt. Edward Marini, the lead engineer, uncovered and blew up two wooden pressure plates attached to yellow plastic jugs filled with ammonium nitrate. In six months, Bravo Company had uncovered seventy-seven IEDs and taken ten wounded. This tally was far fewer than in the previous year, proof that the Marines had largely cleared Sangin of active enemy.

  Once the two IEDs were detonated, the platoon commander, Lt. Kurt Hoening, faced a choice.

  “We’ll get into a fight in Q5H,” he said to me. “That means we come back down this path at dusk, and there’ll be fresh IEDs waiting for us. I’m not risking my men to get into a fight that has no meaning.”

  Hoening had not yet been in a firefight that qualified him to wear the prestigious Combat Action Ribbon that symbolized a combat veteran. He placed the safety of his men above his own career advancement.

  Back at base, he asked me to say a few words to his Marines, who were questioning what they were accomplishing out there on their own.

  I thanked the Marines. It was an honor to have taken my last combat patrol with the battalion I had joined fifty years earlier. They might question what they were doing at the end of the earth where the farmers and enemies looked the same, and often were the same.

  In Vietnam, I had fought a similar confusing war. But people and nations don’t long remember policies. Marines have fought in 160 campaigns. Even historians can’t remember the policy reasons for many of them. Policy is not the point.

  You volunteered for the Marine Corps not to make policy, but to guard our nation. Marines fight wherever our commander-in-chief orders us to go. Your grandchildren will one day ask, Did you fight in Afghanistan? You will proudly say yes. You’ve had an extraordinary adventure, not shared by your peers back home. Some of your brothers were killed or lost limbs. You all knew that was the cost before you volunteered. Your fallen brothers would volunteer again.

  The task of the grunt is to defeat any foe on the battlefield. Put him six feet under. Guard our nation so fiercely that no one wants to fight America.

  Everyone wants recognition for a hard job done well. In 2011, 3rd Platoon had borne the hardest of the fighting. Most of the platoon told me they wished the people back home could understand the toils of the grunt. It may be of some comfort to them to know that their most famous platoon mate—Cpl. E. B. Sledge—felt that exact same way in 1945.

  “As I strolled the streets of Mobile, civilian life seemed so strange,” Sledge wrote. “People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things. Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free and untouched by the horrors of war. To them, a veteran was a veteran—all were the same, whether one man had survived the deadliest combat or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform.”

  When he enrolled at Auburn University in 1946, a clerk in the Registrar’s Office asked him if the Marines taught him anything useful. Sledge replied, “Lady, there was a killing war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill Japs and try to survive. Now, if that don’t fit into any academic course, I’m sorry. But some of us had to do the killing—and most of my buddies got killed or wounded.”

  Back in the States, Lieutenant Colonel Morris visited the families of the fallen in the summer of 2011.

  “Some were very angry,” he told NPR, “yelling, why the hell did I lose their sons for this? What do you say? That his son died doing what he wanted to be doing and that he had a positive impact on the people of Afghanistan.”

  The unit patch of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment is a red-and-yellow shield. In one quadrant is the fleur-de-lis symbol of knighthood, bestowed by France after 3/5 stopped the 1918 German advance on Paris through Belleau Wood. Another quadrant is decorated with a line of green bamboo shoots, symbolizing the jungles of Vietnam. Atop the shield is a banner inscribed with the name “Darkhorse,” the radio call sign during the battle at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir in 1950. On the bottom of the shield is printed the battalion motto: “Get Some”—an infelicitous reminder that the task of the infantryman is to kill the enemy.

  In the past decade, 3/5 had six recipients of the Navy Cross, our nation’s second highest award for valor. This was the highest number in any Army or Marine battalion. In August of 2012, I attended the Navy Cross ceremony at Camp Pendleton, California, for Sgt. Matt Abbate. Most of Matt’s sniper section and 3rd Platoon were there, together with a thousand others. The stories of Matt had entered Marine folklore. Like Corporal Sledge, he was now a member of the Old Breed whose story would be told in boot camp.

  Lantznester said it best: “We are war’s fiercest warriors, and the fallen live on through 3/5.”

  After the parade, many of us adjourned to a biker bar in San Clemente. A hundred Marines, the extended Abbate family, and a few startled bikers toasted Matt and told war stories. Gunny Carlisle showed gross pictures of what the IED had done to his rear end, Vic Garcia actually grinned as he drank beer, and Cameron West showed how he could walk with his prosthetic leg.

  At one point, a lance corporal, fortified by a few beers, indignantly asked Garcia why he had not promoted him to fire team leader.

  “You didn’t work as hard as the other guy,” Garcia said.

  “Yeah, but I was with the platoon at Fires,” the lance corporal said.

  “And you slacked off,” Garcia said, “when we got back. What you did in Sangin doesn’t hack it back here.”

  The war was over for 3rd Platoon.

  Cam West went back to Georgia, where he rides horse and tends cattle on his ranch. Vic Garcia headed off to Army Ranger school. Tom Schueman transferred to a recon company. Spokes Beardsley, whose eighty-nine air strikes in seven months was the highest total in the war, took a civilian job as a pilot instructor. Mad Dog Myers returned to Ohio and graduated from the University of Toledo, with plans to become a federal marshal.

  Sergeant Deykeroff decided to stay in, as did Sergeant Thoman, who felt relieved to be home, saddened by the losses but glad that the Taliban had been pushed back. It had, he believed, been “a good fight.” Esquibel was evacuated via Bagram air base near Kabul. While there, Yazzie and Doc Ramos were carried in. Yazzie’s face was wrapped in a mound of bandages, but eventually the cuts healed. The three encouraged each other until they were put on separate flights to Germany.

  Sergeant McCulloch was awarded the Silver Star and became a drill instructor. But when his hot temper flared against a recruit, the Marine Corps demoted him to corporal. He drank too heavily, and broke up with his wife. A knife-wielding psychopath assaulted Mac in a bar in Galveston, almost killing him. It took a year for him to partially recover.

  When 3/5 returned to Cal
ifornia, the high command kept the battalion intact and under close observation for three months. Their mental ailments were no higher than those reported by the rear-echelon units. Yet 3/5 faced the hardest sustained fighting and took the highest casualties in the war.

  “Out at Fires, I had one genuine case of PTSD,” Garcia said. “That Marine had stepped on four IEDs. After we returned to the States, I heard of three others from my platoon.”

  Sgt. J. D. Browning left the sniper section with thirteen confirmed kills. On his next tour, he qualified for the Marine Corps national rifle team and traveled the country in shooting competitions. He accepted the dying and killing as what he had signed up for.

  “PTSD? We all had post-traumatic stress after serving at Fires,” he said. “That doesn’t mean a disorder. I have nightmares. That’s to be expected. But to draw pay for nightmares for the rest of my life? No, that’s not to be expected.”

  Cpl. Jordan Laird, married for eight years and with two daughters and a baby boy (named after Matt Abbate), took a job on the oil fields of North Dakota. He had two crushed vertebrae from carrying Espinoza across the Golf Course during the Thanksgiving battle.

  “Up to eighteen, our parents took care of us,” he said. “Then we signed up, and the Corps took care of us. When we got out and split up, it took us a year to learn how to take care of ourselves. That caused stress. But it’s normal. Third Platoon had a grunt mentality—get on with your life.”

  Imagine you belong to 3rd Platoon. For seven months, you kill men and watch your friends die. You try not to think about dying or losing your legs. You rarely reflect on anything. Life is basic. You have your platoon family, ample food, a comfortable rack, and your rifle. At twenty years old, you are the power in the land. You sense it wherever you walk. Farmers, elders, sheiks, Taliban, headquarters staff, senior officers, every Marine who doesn’t go on patrol—all admire your stature. You are the lion tamer, the man on the high wire, the race car driver, the risk taker whose life and limbs are no safer than a coin flip.

  Then your tour ends. You don’t carry a rifle anymore. You are not the death dealer when you wake up in the morning. You are just a corporal inside the rigid peacetime Marine Corps, or a civilian selling cell phones. You’re no different than a million others your own age. You are no longer a warrior king.

  When that happens, there will be stress. For some, it will be memories from Sangin. For others, the stress comes from the abrupt loss of power and self-confidence that out at Fires had encased each grunt as solidly as his armored vest.

  “A counselor said the VA will pay me,” Lantznester said, “because I was in 3/5 and got shot at. No way. I pay for myself. Some Marines are really messed up by that war. But too many others are taking stuff just because it’s offered.”

  Cpl. Matt Smith found that his family came through for him.

  “Once we were back, I drank too much,” he said. “Even when I was having fun, dark thoughts popped up. I’d have flashes of depression, but a Marine isn’t supposed to show weakness. If you’ve got a problem, deal with it. My dad, though, knew. He helped me out of it.”

  For Cpl. Kevin Frame, it was as though he had dropped down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.

  “I used to be really someone—a Marine fighting a war,” he said. “Once back in civilian life, I was making minimum wage. Unless you’ve been through it, you can’t relate to the shock of that.”

  Cpl. Logan Stark enrolled at Michigan State University and produced an excellent documentary video on 3/5’s tour, entitled For the 25.

  “We were bred to be these big, tough creatures,” Stark said. “All of a sudden [back in civilian life] … well, stress just happened. I saw how my moods upset my mom, and so I took steps to change. The good part that will never go away is that we were brothers.”

  Cpl. Jeff Sibley left the service and joined the family construction company. For relaxation, he drove a racing car and hoped to raise enough money to fund a racing team.

  “We accomplished a lot in Sangin,” he said. “Once the Marines left, though, the Taliban came back. I don’t think about it. I don’t want our losses to be in vain.”

  Garcia was more detached.

  “Our job,” he said, “is not to question politics or the strategic outcome of our battles. Marines push the fight to the enemy, no matter the cost.”

  Garcia’s low point as a leader had come in October when Cpl. Juan Dominguez lost both legs and his right arm. Dominguez emerged as the symbol of 3rd Platoon. He invited them all to his wedding in 2013, where he wore his dress blues and when one of his prosthetic legs fell off, he pushed it back on, took his wife’s arm, and continued walking.

  “I am not some poor schmuck who stepped on an IED and now everyone can feel sorry for him,” he told Gretel Kovach of The San Diego Union-Tribune. “I am a musician and living my life to the fullest that I can, for the guys who didn’t come back.”

  Yazzie returned to his parents’ farm on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona. He bought a black GMC Sierra truck for his nine-hour treks to southern California and planned to go to college in the fall.

  “The people of Sangin,” he said, “didn’t want to be helped. They’d prefer us not being there. Of course, I’d do it again. We were brothers at Fires.”

  Corporal Lantznester returned with a similar attitude.

  “Looking back, it was terrifying,” he said, “not knowing which step was your last. One day, Doc Fuke and I were talking when rounds hit above our heads. Someone was aiming to kill me. Not just anyone—me. After Sangin, I won’t let anything stop me.”

  Chapter 13

  WHO WILL FIGHT FOR US?

  “What does Sangin mean? They sent us there to fight—so we fought.”

  —GEN. JOHN KELLY, U.S. MARINE CORPS

  The members of 3rd Platoon possessed the warrior spirit expected of Marines. They did not focus 95 percent of their effort upon friendly persuasion. Indeed, their aggressive, almost obsessive focus upon destroying the enemy seemed to contradict the restrained strategy of the high command. Third Platoon was determined to win. To them, that meant walking across the poppy fields without stepping on a mine or being shot at. That was a limited but practical definition of winning.

  Placed in counterinsurgency context, 3rd Platoon was in the “clearing” phase, with “holding” by Afghan forces and “building” by Afghan government employees to follow. Whether that process would be carried out was beyond the time frame and control of 3rd Platoon. How Sangin evolved—whether it progressed or regressed—depended upon the interaction among the Taliban, the tribes, and the Afghan army after the Americans left. The American strategy of protecting the population with an ever-expanding oil spot had postponed but not canceled that time of reckoning, when the Afghans would fight and barter among themselves. One thing was certain: the ferocity and cohesion of 3rd Platoon, which was welded together like steel plates, sprung from factors not attributable to the uncertain strategy.

  Sangin: The Setting

  After 3/5 left in 2011, four more Marine battalions rotated through Sangin district. By late 2012, the Taliban had largely stopped shooting and planting mines. Beaten down, the Taliban had decided not to contest the American troops patrolling inside the district. By staying on the offensive for two years, the Marines had won the battle of attrition.

  “Violence has subsided,” according to a 2012 article in the Marine Corps Times, “… but the overall U.S. toll in Sangin is staggering. More than 50 Marines have been killed here in fewer than two years. At least 500 more have been severely wounded. In practical terms, a half of a battalion in amputees has been created here.”

  Was Sangin worth the cost? In 2011, 3rd Platoon did not believe they had won the trust or support of the villagers. Nor did the battalions that came after them. Although the Taliban ruled mostly by fear, they had put down deep roots that sprang back to life as the Marines pulled out.

  By the fall of 2013, travel along Route 611 above Outpost Tran
sformer was once again perilous.

  “Sangin is like an open space for the Taliban,” the district governor said in September of 2013. “Anyone can enter, and anyone can leave.”

  The Taliban were sneaking back in again, launching ambushes inside the very markets constructed by the British six years earlier to motivate the farmers to reject the Taliban. The Afghan battalion replacing the Marines received a cold reception from the farmers.

  “It’s difficult to find local people who are against the Taliban,” an Afghan colonel told a New York Times reporter. “This place [Sangin] is like a prison.”

  Sergeant Deykeroff posted the article on his Facebook page, with a three-word comment: “same old Sangin.” The reversion showed how deeply the tentacles of the Taliban extended. The farmers weren’t innocents yearning for freedom from the Taliban. Growing opium corroded the collective soul of the community. Afghanistan had the highest percentage of drug addicts in the world. The individual farmer knew he was destroying the lives of others. He knew the names and families of the dazed, thin men wandering around his village. There were no starving farmers in the fertile Green Zone. The rich soil grew whatever was planted—corn, melons, sunflowers, wheat, tomatoes, pomegranates, marijuana, poppy.

  The farmer pleaded that opium was Inshallah—God’s will. The estate owners in Kabul, the Taliban, the buyers from Pakistan—they were responsible for what the poor farmer planted. In his view, the farmer could no more rebel against the Taliban than he could refuse to plant poppy. Besides, poppy paid four times more than wheat.

  The Taliban were part of a soiled social fabric that extended from Karzai downward. Their control over Sangin, where no Afghan official arrested a Taliban, could not be changed by Americans. Commanders at the top claimed the population switched sides. After the Thanksgiving battle, though, 3rd Platoon knew that the farmers threw in with the winners. No matter how momentarily dominant, the Marines were forever transient outsiders. Only Afghans could repair the damage their complicity had wrought upon their own society.