One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (13 page)

Day 41. 246,000 Steps

First Squad “got PID on 2 MAMs with ICOM,” meaning positive identification of two military-age males. Both men were killed. They were wearing green chest rigs containing AK-47 magazines. It took twenty minutes to sweep a clear lane 300 meters to the bodies. During that time, someone had made off with the Icom and the rifles, leaving behind only a radio antenna. The Taliban had scant equipment, and they hoarded every scrap.

The squad found nothing of value on the bodies. That was typical. Garcia sometimes noticed a new stick figure scratched on the snipers’ wall, but the patrol had not reported searching a body as required by the rules. He didn’t bring it up. He let the squad leaders decide when to risk the IED threat by going forward to search a body, and when to move on.

Later that day, Garcia was accompanying 3rd Squad north of Fires when they were pinned down by accurate fire. Garcia called a mortar mission and the 60mm shells hit the compound after two quick adjustments. The Marines blew a hole in the compound wall and Cpl. Kameron Delany pitched a grenade into each room before entering. But the enemy had already fled.

Corporal Delany, twenty, from Texas, had been promoted early for his aggressiveness. He consistently took chances at point. He modestly allowed that the state of Texas was the most patriotic, free-spirited,
brave, wholesome, individualistic, God-fearing, and God-blessed state, to say nothing of the Dallas Cowboys, otherwise known as America’s Team. He planned to return to his humble state and join the police department.

“I respect life,” he said. “But somebody has to do the ass kicking.”

It took repeated patrolling to find an ass to kick. The Taliban used compounds as protected firing positions. Fifteen minutes usually went by before a squad had identified which compounds the shooters were in. It took another fifteen minutes or more to set up a base of return fire and send an enveloping team behind a point man with a Vallon. Before the Marines were in a position to assault, the Taliban ran out the rear. Most compounds had an outside ditch used as a latrine that ran down to a canal. The ditches and irrigation streams allowed the Taliban to avoid enfilade fire as they escaped. Their sneakers would stink, but they were still walking upright.

Third Platoon continued to rely upon close air support for cover. Each squad informed Inkerman of its intended route, and in the ops center Spokes Beardsley put a tic on his photomap as the squad called in each checkpoint. First Squad was midway across sector P8T when it was pinned down by fire from Compound 38. The Taliban were shooting through murder holes and the return fire of the squad bounced harmlessly off the thick walls.

Beardsley called for the two F-18s he was tracking on the daily air chart. The lead pilot, Capt. Scott “Lumpy” Foster from Marine Squadron 232, scanned sector P8T with his video pod.

“Driftwood, this is Maker. I see no movement below me. Nothing.”

Lumpy asked his wing mate, Canadian Capt. Chris “Chester” Horch, to take a look. Horch agreed. It looked normal to him. The Taliban and 1st Squad were both under overhead cover.

On the ground, Sgt. Joe “Mad Dog” Myers, twenty-four, from Ohio, was the forward observer with the squad. However, the final decision for an aircraft to fire was reserved for Beardsley. An avid reader and gifted storyteller, Myers had joined the Marines in 2000 after reading books like E. B. Sledge’s
With the Old Breed
. Sangin was his last tour before getting out and going to college.

Myers radioed the compound number (#38) and GPS grid location of the target to Spokes, who was watching the video from the F-18 pods on a small screen called a Rover. He gave directions to each pilot until the pod on each aircraft was aligned on compound #38. Lumpy then rolled in first with a 500-pound bomb, crushing the compound. Twenty seconds later, Chester followed with another bomb that burst in the air—the now standard shake-and-bake tactic. Enemy firing ceased. Myers notified Beardsley, who thanked the pilots, who flew back to Kandahar airbase while 1st Squad walked back to Fires.

Beardsley had linked the air to the ground with a precision unmatched in history, a combination of amazing technologies—video cameras, digital downlinks, exact telemetry—and common procedures developed over decades between Marines in the air and on the ground.

Back at the hospital, LCpl. Jeff Sibley, the sniper, had recovered from his bullet wound. Once he had mended, he felt embarrassed being in the same ward with Sergeant Humphries, another member of 3/5, who had suffered an amputated leg.

“This Afghan,” Sibley said, “we had shot a few weeks earlier was also on the ward. He should have been in prison.”

Although desperate to return to Fires, Sibley wasn’t allowed on board a helicopter because he didn’t have a helmet and flak jacket. When a clerk in the supply building refused to give him the gear, Sibley demanded to see the senior NCO.

“You a HOG?” asked the master gunnery sergeant in charge.

Upon graduating from sniper school, a Marine is presented a bullet on a thin chain. He is officially a HOG, Hunter of Gunmen. When Sibley nodded yes, the master gunnery sergeant turned to his staff.

“Give this lance corporal,” he said, “whatever he wants.”

Sibley flew into Fires with a box stuffed with knives, gloves, boots, and Mitch helmets—the small, black helmets worn by Special Operations commandos.

“I brought back Christmas early,” Sibley said.

Day 43. 258,000 Steps

A mullah came to Inkerman on the 24th of November, complaining that the doorway to his one-room mosque in sector P8Q was booby-trapped. Lt. Tom Schueman gathered a handful of Marines from 1st Platoon to investigate. Because the company had lost thirty-five killed or wounded in seven weeks, there weren’t enough grunts for such unscheduled patrols. So Gunny Carlisle and Sgt. Jason Peto from the headquarters section volunteered to assist as two riflemen. Carlisle was a force of nature, overburdened with muscles and testosterone and unaffected by his senior rank. There was no chore he would not undertake.

Once at the mosque, an engineer disarmed an 82mm mortar shell lying in the doorway. In case more IEDs were found, 1st Squad came forward from Fires with extra demolitions. Schueman climbed on top of a roof to look out for trouble. As the squad approached, two men on a motorcycle scooted out of a compound to his right. One was shouting into an Icom and Schueman shot him at a hundred meters. When the driver accelerated, the wounded man fell off. He lay still for a few seconds, then pushed himself up and staggered into an adjacent compound.

Gunny Carlisle, who had seen the man go down, shouted up to Schueman.

“Hey, we’ll cut across the field and pick up the blood trail.”

Carlisle and Peto set out and minutes later Schueman saw them enter a compound Marines had previously used as an overnight outpost.

“There’s IEDs here,” Carlisle radioed minutes later.

Schueman sent over the engineer, LCpl. Arden Buenagua, who had disarmed the mortar shell in the mosque. He knelt down near Carlisle and was working on the IED when it detonated, killing him instantly.

Buenagua had written on his Facebook page, “
I like meeting people that are interested in things that I’m into and strange cats that are entertaining. I make friends pretty easily since I just start talking to people.” His mother said he joined the Marines “to get some direction in his life. Arden became a young Marine. The way he talked, the way he acts.… A total transformation of my son.”

Garcia grabbed 2d Squad and rushed out from Fires, bringing a body bag. As they neared the mosque, the Taliban opened fire. Hearing the shooting, Carlisle and Peto entered a room to provide covering fire from a window. Peto tripped a second IED, receiving wounds that would prove fatal. He was on his third combat tour and had been previously wounded by an IED in Ramadi. His father, two brothers,
and an uncle had served in the Corps. He left behind his wife, Tiffany, of Vancouver, Washington.

“I saw Peto’s boot fly into the air,” LCpl. Kyle Doyle said. “It seemed to freeze up there. It took me two weeks to get over it. If you looked at a picture of me in high school and who I am now, it’s two different people.”

The blast hurled LCpl. Jeffrey Rushton, twenty-eight, into the courtyard. He had joined the Marines when he was twenty-four, determined to fight terrorists, then go back to his wife waiting in San Diego and attend college.

Gunny Carlisle, the pillar of Kilo Company, also went down, his upper thigh and half of his buttocks ripped off. Third Squad’s corpsman, Manuel Gonzales, was peppered with shrapnel. One killed and three wounded in a blink. While the wounded were stabilized, Marines fired light rockets,
called LAAWs, at the far tree line and Corporal Laird brought up his team of snipers. Once they began to place rounds knee-high along the tree line, the Taliban pulled back and the medevac chopper came in.

Abbate ran out to where Gunny Carlisle lay facedown. Taking one knee, he shot at the tree line, shouting, “You hurt my gunny! No one messes with my gunny!”

When the firing died down and the helos swooped in, Abbate and Laird picked up Buenagua’s destroyed body. They tried to keep him in one piece as they folded him into the black body bag. Abbate took the lead with the legs in the front of the bag, while the torso rested on Laird’s shoulder. By the time they placed the body on the helicopter, Laird’s face and lips were drenched with Buenagua’s blood. Laird reached down to Gunny Carlisle, who was lying on his side in his sopping bandages.

“We’re gonna kill them all!” Laird shouted. “Every last Taliban!”

After evacuating the dead and wounded it was late afternoon before a gear check was conducted. Peto’s rifle could not be found. A
rifle with its telescopic sight in enemy hands was a serious matter. Garcia took responsibility; it was his duty as senior man to ensure accountability. The failure signaled a bleak future career. Far worse, a Marine on patrol might be hit from long range.

Returning to search for the rifle in the dark would be perilous. A chest-deep canal lay between Fires and the compound. In late November, the ditches had an icy sheen. During the day’s fight, five IEDs had been found or had exploded. Probably a half dozen more lay in wait. As the shivering Marines stomped around in the dark looking for the rifle, how many legs would be lost? One? Two? Five?

Garcia asked for volunteers.

“It’s on us, sir,” Sergeant Deykeroff said. “Second Squad will go back with you.”

Garcia knew they were resigned to losing at least one man. He called on Abbate.

“Sergeant, if a few snipers come,” Garcia said, “it will settle everyone down.”

“Lieutenant, it’s suicide to go out there in the dark,” Abbate said. “I’m not sending any of my Marines to get blown up. I’m sorry, but we’re not going.”

Garcia called back to company, saying he was leaving the wire with a squad. Captain Johnson made no effort to hide his frustration about the missing rifle. But he wasn’t foolish.

“Negative,” Johnson said. “We’ll keep watch with the G-Boss. Stay at your pos. Find the damn rifle in the morning.”

The G-Boss was a powerful telescope perched on top of a fifty-foot pole. An operator back at company headquarters could see if men were prowling around at night. Still, Garcia slept fitfully, worried that the Taliban may already have found the rifle.

Day 44. 264,000 Steps

Before dawn on Thanksgiving Day, 2d Squad was already moving north, wading across the icy canal and fanning out around the compound. After a short search, Peto’s rifle was found on top of a roof, where the IED blast had flung it. The Marines were shaking with cold, but a pissed-off Garcia decided to pick a fight before returning to Fires. He directed several mortar illumination shells to be fired off to the east into the P8T sector, a reliable hotbed of enemy activity. Sure enough, when the shells burst overhead, men ran crouched over among several compounds about 300 meters away. A flurry of bullets was exchanged. It was uncertain whether any Taliban had been hit, but Garcia felt better for ruining their breakfast.

The patrol returned to Fires, stripped off their sopping clothes, and slipped into their “happy suits”—comfortable cold weather trousers and jackets, white wool socks, and flip-flops. Around nine in the morning, they sat down to eat their Thanksgiving meal (ham). Over the radio, they heard a patrol from 2d Platoon had left from Transformer, the outpost on Route 611 one mile north of Inkerman.

Outpost Transformer consisted of a compound with a string of barbed wire on top of the outer wall, surrounded by scattered compounds and huge open farm fields. In early October, Sgt. Ryan Sotelo, a college graduate who’d been with 3/5 Battalion for three years, had moved his reinforced squad into Transformer. From the start, mistrust ran high between the Marines and the Afghan army squad also sent there. The askaris stayed inside their own area behind Hesco barriers and refused to search compounds on patrol. Once, when Sotelo asked the Afghan sergeant to look inside one building, the sergeant threw his weapon on the ground and stalked back unarmed to Transformer.

In late October, a corncob was pitched over the compound wall with a note for Rock, the squad interpreter. It read, “Abdul [Rock’s real name], we know where your parents live in Kabul. Leave this post, or we will cut off your head with a shoemaker’s wire.” The only person who knew Rock’s name was a district elder paid by the Marines for using his farm at Patrol Base Fires. Rock held no grudge.

“Sangin has simple-minded people,” Rock told Sotelo. “You cannot win them over. All they care about is their next meal.”

As if to mock the Marines, the Taliban had even set up a tax collection checkpoint on Route 611, midway between Inkerman and Transformer. In response, Johnson sent Lt. William Donnelly and 2d Platoon to join Sotelo at Transformer. The plan was to send out patrols to push back the enemy, but it was like living in a fishbowl. Next door to Transformer was a motorcycle repair shop where dickers reported the size and movement of patrols leaving the base. Every patrol might as well have had sirens and flashing lights.