One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (14 page)

And when the corn stalks were cut down after the first frost in early November, the Taliban had taken up positions along tree lines to the west across the Golf Course, 400 meters of flat mud field with not a speck of cover—no walls, no rock piles, no irrigation ditches. No place to hide.

Every day, the Taliban shot at the post, but the Marines couldn’t unravel the pattern. They seemed to be fighting ghosts. Rock explained that these were local Taliban, farmers who walked into the fields with shovels and hoes, uncovered caches of AKs and PKMs, shot at Transformer, put back the weapons, picked up their shovels, and walked past the outpost on their way home.

Captain Johnson urged Donnelly to get after them.

So before dawn on Thanksgiving, a patrol at Transformer assembled in the cold dark for a gear check and final brief. Donnelly took Sotelo aside for a sanity check.

“We’re good to go,” Sotelo said. “But if we lose a Marine, Thanksgiving will never be the same for that family.”

“I don’t like it any better than you do,” Donnelly said. “Let’s get going.”

At dawn, eighteen apprehensive Marines left the wire. As the squad leader, Sotelo was in tactical charge. Donnelly was farther back in line. The target was a Taliban leader—Kataghi—who lived somewhere near Compound 117 in sector P8R, also called Kotozay. In Ranger file, the patrol moved across the Golf Course, sprinkling white baby powder to mark the safe lane. Reaching the far side, the patrol walked past two men sitting by a fire, watching them.

So much
, Sotelo thought,
for surprise
.

When they reached Compound 117, it was deserted, with crude drawings on the walls of helicopters being shot down. An Afghan soldier who had volunteered for the patrol shook his head and pointed to a compound on the far side of a wide field. With a fire team, Sotelo crossed the field and entered a house that had insulation in the walls, a washer-dryer, a cabinet with delicate china teacups, and purple drapes.

“Jackpot,” Sotelo radioed to Donnelly, who was back in the file. “This has to be where Kataghi lives.”

Sotelo walked outside as Donnelly walked across the field. Hearing
pop, pop, pop
from a tree line 150 meters to the west, Sotelo whirled and opened fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Donnelly and a few Marines go flat to return fire. LCpl. Diego Rodriguez saw a shadow in the tree line and cut loose a long burst from his 240 machine gun. Sotelo oriented his fire team toward the threat and yelled across to Donnelly, who was lying in the field.

“Come on!” Sotelo yelled. “Gotcha covered.”

The Marines behind Donnelly had fallen back. Donnelly didn’t move. Even as Sotelo ran across the field to his platoon commander, he knew. The body was too still.
Other Marines ran forward and
turned him over. Donnelly, with a tight grip on his weapon, was dead, shot in the forehead. Sotelo called it in.

“Two Actual is dead,” he said.

Lt. William Donnelly, twenty-seven, had married in September and died in November.

“Lieutenant Donnelly was real personable,” Sotelo said. “He’d shoot the shit with us squad leaders, give us money to buy rice and chickens in the market—a good guy.”

His sister later said of his death, “
I don’t think he would have had it any other way.”

The Marines dragged his body out of the line of fire. A PKM had them pinned near Compound 117. Two Taliban emerged from the orchard behind 117 and hopped over the wall.
The Marines traded shots with them at fifteen feet, and the Taliban hopped back. Sotelo threw a grenade over the wall and turned back to Donnelly, covering the body with blankets. They left his helmet in place and stripped off his armor. Sotelo then broke into a
nearby compound to provide a rally point for his scattered squad. To bring back the body, eight more Marines left Transformer, only to be pinned down short of the compound.

Now two squads from 2d Platoon were engaged on the far western side of the Golf Course, with no supporting fire to cover their return. The Taliban had cut them off, the outcome Sotelo had feared. There was no reaction force waiting on call.

Back at Fires, 3rd Platoon had been listening to the incessant shooting. Curious, Sergeant Dy was walking toward the radio room when Garcia ran out.

“We got a hero,” he said. “Lieutenant Donnelly’s dead. Old Breed 2/1 is pinned down. Get all three squads.”

Abbate threw in the snipers, yelling, “All gunfighters needed!”

Within minutes, the whole platoon was assembled.

“Second Platoon’s north of the Golf Course,” Garcia said. “We’ll move northeast, relieve the pressure on them, and then link up.”

At about nine in the morning, 1st Squad led off, heading northeast on a straight line toward Sotelo’s location 1,500 meters away. Within minutes, they were stopped by fire from a compound in sector Q1E.

“Driftwood 2,” Esquibel radioed to the Kilo ops center, “I’m stuck at 545 792. There’s a PKM in Compound 3.”

Capt. Spokes Beardsley told 1st Squad to get their heads down. Ten minutes later, an F-18 dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on the compound. When the dust cleared, 1st Squad continued on.

Second Squad set out next, after the bomb run. Sergeant Dy saw pyro flares popping in the distance. The pinned-down squad of 2d Platoon was signaling where they were.

It’s on now, Dy thought. Payback time
.

After ten minutes, the point man, Wagner, stopped at a low stone wall to allow 3rd Squad to catch up. Two PKMs and a few AKs were shooting. LCpl. Leonard Rausch, twenty, from Wisconsin, ran forward to bring his SAW, a weapon he loved, into action. He had been over this ground before and, not worried about an IED underfoot, moved too quickly and slipped in the knee-deep mud. Reaching out to help him, Cpl. Armando Espinoza took a bullet in the ankle and went down. It was the second time he had been wounded in ten days. Rausch threw a red smoke grenade to alert the others that he needed help.

While Wagner and Delany pulled Espinoza out of the beaten zone, Abbate stood upright in the field, scoping the tree line for targets and firing short bursts from his M4. Using his 203 grenade launcher, Sergeant Dy arced a dozen explosive shells into the tree line with no apparent effect. If anything, the enemy fire picked up. Dy brought up his whole squad to provide covering fire, while Abbate
and Laird helped carry Espinoza to the safety of a ditch. Lieutenant Garcia called in the big guns. Soon, 155mm Excalibur shells were pulverizing the tree line to their north.

It was time to push on to link up with the Marines protecting Donnelly’s body. Laird took a deep breath, reached down, and hoisted Espinoza onto his back in a fireman’s carry. His rifle in his right hand and his left holding tight on to Espinoza’s forearm, Laird trudged forward.

Between one and two hours had passed since the firing began. By noon, 2d and 3rd Platoons were spread out in a dozen positions. Everyone was trying to avoid the open fields. All the Marines were moving in slow motion, the knee-deep mud in the sopping fields clinging to their legs like cement.

There were no battle lines. The enemy was everywhere and nowhere. There were probably only a hundred hard-core, professional Taliban in the district, and a similar number of “small-t Taliban”—local youths who worked their fields and only occasionally fired their AKs.

Thanksgiving Day seemed to be the grand occasion, as word spread of one infidel American invader dead and others trapped in the Green Zone. Ordinary farmers were dropping their hoes and, minutes later, AK rounds were snapping at the Marines from odd directions. White flags of the Taliban popped up on a few compound walls and windows.

On a battlefield of twenty acres, about a dozen small bands of Marines and Taliban were maneuvering. One squad of 2d Platoon had kicked off the fight, followed by a second. Garcia had brought out three squads, plus the sniper section and machine gun teams. In total, six friendly elements were on the move. On the other side, there were at least that many gangs, with excited farmers taking orders from regular fighters.

Delany ripped through ten magazines during the fight, but saw
only two men dressed in the black garb of the Taliban. This was typical of a firefight. Lying in the mud, peering through the smoke at dense vegetation, ears deafened by the explosions, a Marine rarely glimpses the enemy.

“There! There!” Dy yelled, pointing toward a cluster of men running alongside a tree line. “Light them up! Shoot! Shoot!”

Lantznester flopped down, jamming the bipod of his SAW into the mud and aligning a hazy sight picture. He pulled back on the trigger. Nothing. Not a single snap or click. Not one bullet fired.
What the hell? This never happened!

He jerked out the ammo can, brushed off a chunk of mud, resettled the can, and wiggled around to recapture his sight picture.

“Don’t fire! Don’t fire! That’s 2d Platoon!”

Lantznester let out his breath and lay for a moment with his cheek on top of his weapon.

Back at battalion headquarters, the call had gone out for air support as soon as Lieutenant Donnelly went down. It was a gray, overcast day, with good visibility near the ground and a high cloud ceiling that did not impede flying.

About 9 a.m., Spokes Beardsley was in the company ops center when over the radio he heard the voice of a friend, Capt. Casey “Porch” Blasingame.

“Driftwood 22, this is Shoot-out,” Blasingame said. “What have you got?”

Blasingame, thirty, from Texas, was flying a Huey armed with ten rockets and a machine gunner on each side door. Trailing behind was a Cobra gunship flown by Capt. Joe “Muff” Dadiomoff, twenty-eight, from Virginia. The Cobra was carrying fourteen rockets and a 20mm heavy machine gun. Each pilot had flown more than sixty combat sorties, and both were qualified weapons instructors.

“Shoot-out, we have Marines and bad guys,” Spokes said, “scattered all over the place 400 meters west of Transformer. Mad Dog’s on the battlefield. I’m turning you over to him.”

“This is Mad Dog,” Sergeant Myers radioed to the pilots. “We’re under fire from the north. Got the whole fucking platoon out here. Trying to reach 2d. They’re off somewhere to the east. How about getting to work?”

When back at Fires, Myers entertained 3rd Platoon with a constant stream of tall tales and impossible boasts. When he was amped, he spewed out a torrent of information.

Circling overhead, Blasingame was working off the same map as the grunts. He needed to mark the friendly positions before making a gun run. He was looking down at several scattered clusters of Marines, with no idea where Myers was.

“Mad Dog, pop smoke.”

A minute later, he saw one purple smoke, and then a second. There was a pause, then a third purple.

“Bitches are using our smoke!” Myers radioed. “That’s not us!”

“Which one isn’t you?”

On the ground, Garcia made an adjustment and two more smoke grenades blossomed.

“We now mark two yellow smokes,” Blasingame said.

“Affirm! Affirm!” Myers replied. “Both are us.”

The Huey made a low pass from east to west so that the machine gunner in the starboard door could rake the tree line. The Cobra followed a few meters behind on a straight line over the trees. Capt. Eric Ewing sat in the front seat operating the 20mm gun, while Dadiomoff in the rear seat did the flying. As the two gunships rolled out to the left, the hot empty shells rained down on the Marines.

“You’re slamming them! Slamming!” Myers radioed. “Do it again!”

As the aircraft came around for a second pass, Garcia pulled together the platoon and moved east toward Donnelly’s position. Again the pilots came in low, at about a hundred feet. This time, Dadiomoff saw tracers, muzzle flashes, and RPG smoke trails from the tree lines, as well as the flashes of his 20mm rounds striking the trees and the
ground. He glimpsed a few Taliban in their standard black darting among the trees.

“All right!” he yelled.

The pilots couldn’t believe their luck. It was suicide for a man to shoot an AK or a PKM against two behemoths manned by a half dozen gunners eagerly looking for a single tip-off. Usually the Taliban were too disciplined and sensible to expose their positions. Now even gunners with RPGs were shooting into the air. The pilots saw the black puffs of the explosions, throttled back to locate the dust clouds from the back-blasts, and fired.

“Their muzzle flashes looked like blinking Christmas lights,” Blasingame said. “We had target after target. Dirt and mud were flying up in the field from all our impacts.”

On the third pass, the pilots were orbiting in a tight wagon wheel, with Blasingame pivoting his Huey to bring his port door gun into action. As he swept by the nose of the Cobra, Dadiomoff yelled over the radio, “Hey, Porch! Don’t shoot me!”

The tree line was now smoking and 3rd Platoon had pushed by. But when the helicopters pulled off to catch up with the platoon, some Taliban again opened fire. For a fourth time, the Cobra lined up behind the Huey and again they attacked, shredding the wood line. Then for good measure, the pilots pulled slightly back and hovered, hoping someone would be foolish enough to shoot again and give away his hiding place. The trees smoldered and smoke curled up, but there were no more telltale flashes.

On the ground, 1st Squad and Abbate’s snipers had linked up with 2d Platoon and placed Lieutenant Donnelly’s large body on a pole litter. Garcia came in from the west with the other Marines. Everyone spread out inside a cluster of compound walls. They could clearly see Outpost Transformer to the southeast. Between them and Transformer lay the Golf Course.

Behind them to the north was the tree line where Donnelly had
been shot. To their left was a 200-meter tree line called Belleau Wood. It was habitually loaded with snipers and IEDs. On a wall at Transformer, Sgt. Joel Bailey from 2d Platoon was firing burst after burst from a .50 cal at Belleau Wood. Artillery located at the battalion headquarters in Sangin joined in.

Standing behind compound walls with the gunships hovering overhead, the Marines were safe and sheltered. The mission was to carry Donnelly across the Golf Course to Transformer. The firing had died down, but Garcia wasn’t fooled. Gibberish was still coming over the Taliban Icoms. They were out there, and they could see the Golf Course as plainly as could the Marines. Once the Marines were in the open, the Taliban were positioned to spring an ambush from the north and east.