Advance Praise for The Last Platoon
“Bing West knows combat, the Corps, and the infantry. He is also a masterful storyteller. In The Last Platoon he gives us a raw, passionate feel for what warriors go through on the ground and the price they pay in blood to try to accomplish ill-thought-out missions.”
—GENERAL ANTHONY C. ZINNI, USMC (Retired)
“Among the many virtues Bing West brings to any military/political enterprise is that he knows his shit from the level of the grunt in the foxhole to the SecDef in the Situation Room. He has been there. He has done that. Every page of The Last Platoon radiates authenticity, whether it’s the chaos and carnage of a firefight in Afghanistan or the kitchen-table back-and-forth between a Marine husband and wife on the eve of a deployment. And the man can write! If you’ve only read Bing West’s nonfiction (which is universally five-star), you will sit back with satisfaction seeing that he doesn’t drop a step shifting into the realm of the novel. The Last Platoon reads like a cinematic thriller with nonstop action and conflict, but it is also informed on every page by the maturity and depth of understanding of a Marine combat officer, a war journalist, and a former assistant Secretary of Defense, who has been in the tall grass for decades and has seen and done it all. The Last Platoon is dark because its subject matter—the folly and arrogance of those at the strategic level and the price in blood that young men and women have to pay at the tactical—is grim and permanent. I read it in one sitting, and I will read it again.”
—STEVEN PRESSFIELD, Bestselling Author of Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance
“Combat veteran, historian, and front-line war correspondent Bing West writes a graphic odyssey into the tragic absurdity of the Americans’ twenty years in Afghanistan—a gripping paean to those brave men who fought there and survived the ordeal with dignity.”
—VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, Author of Carnage and Culture and The Second World Wars
“I rarely read fiction books, but when Bing West writes one I know that it will be a page turner. This one is no exception! Bing knows his subject matter like no one else does and writes in a way that draws you in as if you were there. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down until it was finished. I highly recommend this book!”
—MAJOR GENERAL RAY “E-TOOL” SMITH, USMC (Retired), Navy Cross recipient, Hue City, 1968
“Bing West is one of America’s great combat writers. Whether penning history or action fiction, he knows what it is like to be out on the pointy end because he has ‘been there and done that.’ In The Last Platoon, West tells the story of our Nation’s Warriors with the hard, tough, and factual clarity ground combat is and will likely remain. A team of individuals, overcoming their fears and emotions, working together to accomplish a tough tactical mission, which becomes intertwined with politics, international relations, and the complexity of the inter-agency. But that’s what war is, right? Thanks Bing for reminding us of what it is to serve well and honorably.”
—GENERAL ROBERT B. NELLER, USMC (Retired) 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps
ALSO BY BING WEST
Small Unit Action in Vietnam, Summer 1966
The Village
Naval Forces and Western Security (ed.)
The Pepperdogs: A Novel
The March Up:
Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines
(with Major General Ray Smith)
No True Glory:
A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah
The Strongest Tribe:
War, Politics, and the End Game in Iraq
The Wrong War:
Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan
Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account
of the Most Extraordinary Battle of the Afghan War
(with Sergeant Dakota Meyer)
One Million Steps:
A Marine Platoon at War
Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead
(with General Jim Mattis)
A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK
An Imprint of Post Hill Press
The Last Platoon:
A Novel of the Afghanistan War
© 2020 by Bing West
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-64293-673-5
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-674-2
Cover art by Cody Corcoran
Interior design and composition, Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
New York • Nashville
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
In doing what we ought we deserve no praise,
because it is our duty.
—AUGUSTINE
CONTENTS
Major Characters
Time
Prelude: A Decade Ago
DAY 1 APRIL 6
1. The Night Watchman
2. Mission Approval
3. The Wild Ox
4. Shakedown
5. Welcome on Board
DAY 2 APRIL 7
6. First to Fall
7. Do Your Job, Captain
8. Added Mission
9. A Temporary Setback
10. Contact
11. Marine Down
12. Two Holy Warriors
13. Cruz Takes Command
14. Not an Eight-Thousand-Mile Screwdriver
15. Unusual Spooks
16. We Don’t Pick Targets
17. Tajiks Die in Helmand
18. Planting Death
19. Barter or Blackmail
20. Reappraisal
21. Hunters of Gunmen
DAY 3 APRIL 8
22. The Green Zone
23. A Deadly Engagement
24. No Gaps in My Lines
25. Do Your Best
26. The War Is Over
27. A Political Vise
28. Zealots
DAY 4 APRIL 9
29. Martyr or Murderer
30. It’s War, Doc
31. Assigning Blame
32. The Dog That Didn’t Bark
33. The Sappers
34. The Second Death
35. Temptation
36. Heat
DAY 5 APRIL 10
37. Friction
38. Extortion
39. The Third to Fall
40. Counterpunch
41. Ambition Dashed
42. A Daring Enemy Plan
43. The Game Changes
44. Mowing the Grass
DAY 6 APRIL 11
45. We Help You, You Help Us
46. The Smell of Vinegar
47. One Hundred Million Dollars
48. No Right Decision
49. Solace
50. Coffman Takes Charge
51. The Storm Gathers
DAY 7 APRIL 12
52. Broken Arrow
53. The Tipping Point
54. We Hold Here
55. The DNA of Warrior Ants
56. Control the Narrative
57. The Reckoning
58. A Cauliflower Death
59. You Held the Line
60. First, Get Elected
61. Don’t Blame the Dirt
Glossary
In Appreciation
About the Author
MAJOR CHARACTERS
OPPOSITION MAJOR CHARACTERS
&nb
sp; Taliban Commander Zar
Drug Dealer “The Persian”
Pakistani Commander Colonel Balroop
Taliban Emir Imam Sadr
Prominent Farmer Nantush
Vietnamese Sapper Quat
And one million poppy growers
Time
This novel takes place over seven days.
The time in Afghanistan is 81/2 hours in front of Washington, DC.
For example, when it is 5:30 P.M. in Afghanistan, it is 9:00 A.M. in Washington.
Prelude
A Decade Ago
The Marines were walking in single file across a farm field that lay bare and muddy on a dreary winter day. To a civilian observer, they looked like a scraggly bunch of tired teenagers, ambling along with no place to go and all the time in the world to get there. Scudding gray clouds spat sleet into their faces, and frozen poppy stalks snapped beneath their feet. Slender sheens of ice covered the irrigation ditches, and after hours of trudging through soggy fields and wading across frigid creeks, their shabby cammies were dripping and brown water sloshed from their boots. Only their weapons looked clean and burnished, the black lacquer rubbed off by months of hard use.
From a distance, it was hard to tell them apart. The only oddity was a thin whip antenna bobbing high on the back of a stocky grunt in the middle of the column. As he had on his previous tours, Lieutenant Diego Cruz carried his own radio. Snipers usually tried to pick off the radio operator. He wasn’t showing off; it was his way of sharing in the danger.
Cruz had logged the highest number of patrols in the platoon, and was proud of his people. Seven months earlier, fifty grunts, fit and cocky, had deployed to Helmand Province. Since then, they had lost five killed and seventeen wounded, including five amps. But the troops hadn’t slacked off, and they rarely bitched.
Their base, if it could be called that, consisted of an abandoned farm compound with thick mud walls and a rusty hand pump that tapped into a deep well. A mile of poppy fields and irrigation ditches separated them from their company headquarters. Cruz liked the isolation. It gave him the time to wring out the immature impulses of newly minted Marines and shape them into alert, lethal grunts. With no access to the internet and sleeping in caves hacked out of the walls, they had grown close to each other, even as their numbers dropped week by week.
Located at the bottom of Afghanistan, Helmand was a vast, flat expanse of dusty desert and tired hills. One major river snaked through the province, bringing ample water from the snowfields far to the north. Most of the Pashtun tribal people lived and farmed along its fertile banks.
Officially, the platoon was protecting the farmers from the Taliban. In violent Helmand, however, the farmers ignored the Marines or ran away when approached. Cruz didn’t dwell on the irony. If a senior officer had ever asked his opinion about why they were in Helmand, he would have said he had no idea. No farmer’s heart would be won and no farmer’s son would fight for the government in Kabul, somewhere on the other side of the moon. The way Cruz saw it, his job was to kill Taliban by out-thinking and outmaneuvering them. That left fewer of them to blow up his Marines. Each patrol was an invitation to a gunfight, nothing more.
After two hundred days under Cruz’s care, the young grunts had adopted his stoicism. They trudged along silently. Walking across the open fields invited a sniper’s bullet, while staying on the paths along the canal banks risked tripping buried explosives. It was a game of scissors versus stone, risk a bullet in the face or shrapnel in the testicles. Sooner or later, some Taliban would shoot at them, and it would be game on.
The Marine at point, Corporal Blake Hanley, was sweeping his VMR metal detector back and forth like a beachcomber searching for coins in the sand. Hanley concentrated on the ground in front of him, rarely looking up. Behind him, Lance Corporal Hector Sanchez kept his eyes on the tangles of birch and junipers where a sniper might lurk. In his left hand, he held a can of shaving cream, occasionally squirting a dab to mark the cleared passage. The grunts behind him were looking in different directions, each scanning a separate quadrant. None spoke, and no birds twittered. The only sounds were the hissing of their handheld radios and the slurping of their water-filled boots.
When Hanley reached an irrigation canal, he stopped to check the digital map on his iPad tablet. The GPS downlink showed the patrol route running across the canal. The stream wasn’t wide, but the brown water was flowing steadily. The villagers had cut down a scrub oak to provide a path across. Hanley turned to Sanchez and shook his head, pointing at the tree trunk.
“I don’t like using it,” Hanley said.
“Bro, my toes are numb,” Sanchez said. “I don’t want to wade across no creek.”
For Sanchez, that was a long sentence. Back at patrol base, he could sit by the cooking fires for an hour without speaking, letting Hanley prattle on. Sanchez knew how to butcher and cook a goat, while Hanley bartered choice MRE food items for both of them. Inside the squad cave, they slept in adjoining bags. As a team, in the past seven months they had uncovered thirty-eight IEDs and killed four Taliban.
While the two bickered about whether to wade the freezing creek, Cruz signaled the others to take a knee. In the field behind them, a farmer in a ragged jacket was hacking away, clearing a small space for each poppy plant. To Cruz, he looked nervous, but that wasn’t unusual. Americans were bullet magnets.
Hanley and Sanchez glanced from their lieutenant to the farmer, who was scratching the dirt with his hoe. He seemed to smile at them.
“Gross,” Sanchez said. “Dude’s got only one front tooth.”
“That means he’s old,” Hanley said. “Most die before their teeth fall out.”
“You don’t know that,” Sanchez said. “You born a bullshitter.”
“Read it in Wikipedia,” Hanley said.
“That proves what I’m saying,” Sanchez said. “We got no internet. We both know it all comes out your ass.”
The farmer was scratching vigorously with his hoe, all the time shaking his head back and forth.
“Snaggle Tooth’s acting weird, bro,” Hanley said, “like he’s signaling us or something.”
Sanchez responded by shouldering his rifle to look through the scope. That caused the startled farmer to drop his hoe and scuttle hastily toward his dun-colored compound on the far side of the field.
“Show’s over, man,” Sanchez said. “Now can we stop grab-assing and beat feet? I can’t feel my toes.”
Hanley resumed sweeping the hard-packed earth leading to the crude footbridge. Sanchez let out a sigh of relief and fell in behind him. WHAM! The ground heaved up when Hanley’s foot hit the buried pressure plate. He evaporated in a curtain of thick dust, while Sanchez was bowled over and thrown into the canal.
Several feet behind them, the pressure wave rocked Cruz. Mud, pebbles, and bits of flesh slapped against his face, snapping his head back. For a few seconds, the force of the concussion blocked out all hearing and speech. Then, even while the black cloud hung like a shroud over the stunned Marines, Cruz was screaming orders.
“Freeze!” he shouted. “No one steps outside the shaving cream! Corpsman up!”
Hanley was lying facedown next to the tree trunk. Sanchez had regained his footing in the chest-deep canal and, covered in mud, was frantically clawing up the slick bank. Cruz reached down and with a heave jerked him out of the water. From back in the file, a Marine scrambled up with the backup metal detector and began sweeping forward.
Inside thirty seconds, the corpsman, Navy HM3 Stebbins, was kneeling beside Hanley. He was unconscious, his right leg below the knee ripped off, blood pulsing out in steady spurts. Stebbins tore open a tourniquet, wrapped it around the gushing thigh, and twisted the knob, cinching hard. Sanchez stumbled over, sat down in the gore, and cradled Hanley in his arms, murmuring to him. Stebbins jerked open his aid bag, pulled out a morphine syrette, and plunged the needle into Hanley’s thigh.
Cruz called for a medevac and deployed the Marines to guar
d the landing zone. This was the interval when any local Taliban would try to sneak in. But no shot was fired, and no person moved in the barren fields.
Sanchez and Stebbins tended to Hanley, while Cruz kept checking his watch. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen.
“We need that fucking bird!” Stebbins yelled.
Hanley was semiconscious and breathing hoarsely, his thigh ballooning like a giant sausage swelling over a fire.
“Can you stabilize him a little longer?” Cruz said. “Bird’s five mikes out.”
Sanchez was holding Hanley’s hand, rocking his body back and forth. Hanley’s gray face had a faint bluish tinge. Stebbins slid over next to Cruz.
“His pulse is fading,” he whispered. “He’s hemorrhaging internally. Organs all messed up. He’s closing down.”
Hanley slipped from life without saying a word as two Hueys roared in from the southwest. One hovered overhead while the other flared into the field. The body was quickly placed on board, with a Marine handing the crew chief Hanley’s right boot, the foot intact inside.
After the choppers left, Cruz called in the perimeter guards. Once back at their outpost, he’d have to spend two hours laboring over this, his sixth letter on the deployment. He was thinking how to phrase it. Painlessly? No, he’d used that in the last letter. Dear Ms. Hanley, Brad felt no pain. Yes, that sounded better. Once he wrote the first line, all he had to do was compose five more sentences. He hadn’t thought in Spanish for years, and talking in English was no problem. But he froze each time he had to write to the parents or the wife. The words never came out right. He rewrote each letter, over and over again.
He pushed away the thought and looked around to gather the troops. Sanchez was standing on the embankment, head down and cammies soggy with blood. Hanley’s helmet and torn armored vest lay nearby in the mud. Sanchez grabbed the helmet and hurled it into the brown waters. He looked furiously around. A few feet away lay the hoe dropped by the farmer. He grabbed it and swung viciously at the mounds of poppy. Cruz left him alone for several seconds before speaking.
“Let’s form up, Sanchez,” Cruz said.
Covered with blood and mud, Sanchez was swaying from side to side. Rivulets of tears ran down his filthy face. He glared and pointed at the walled compound on the far side of the field.
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