One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (15 page)

First Squad led off, followed by the litter party carrying Donnelly. As they headed east across the Golf Course, the only enemy seemed to be the mud that slowed every step. Overhead, Blasingame and Dadiomoff were holding station above Transformer, the noses of their aircraft pointed toward Belleau Wood. Dadiomoff estimated the Marines were about a quarter of the way across the Golf Course when Belleau Wood erupted with muzzle flashes and the dirt clouds from back-blasts. Six or eight rocket-propelled grenades streaked toward the Marines, who flopped down in the mud with bullets kicking up mud spurts around them. The Huey rolled in on Belleau Wood, with the Cobra right behind.

“When we stepped around the corner into that field,” Sotelo said, “we entered the world’s longest shooting gallery. Rounds were coming from Route 611, from the compounds, from the Green Zone behind us, from the tree line to our left. It seemed every farmer had grabbed an AK and opened up. Brass was falling on my head from the Huey shooting above me.”

As the gunships ripped up the tree line on their left flank, the Marines in the field got up and broke into a clumsy run, boots sticking
in the mud. Sgt. Ryan Krochmolny, the strongest man in the company, slung Espinoza over his shoulder and shuffled along. When he got bogged down, Laird again grabbed the hand hole of the poleless litter and staggered toward Transformer.

Abbate, carrying one end of a pole supporting Donnelly’s body, was firing his 9mm pistol at a compound.

“Abbate’s like Achilles,” Rausch said. “He’s what you want to be, a badass. He talks and walks it. But this show was ridiculous.”

Myers was carrying the other end of the litter, talking to the pilots like a manic basketball play-by-play announcer. When he got too wound up, Beardsley cut him off from the pilots. Staff Sgt. Nick Tock, considerably more low-key than Mad Dog, was also directing the pilots.

“Our strafing runs,” Beardsley said, “were forty meters in front of the Marines.”

The pilots flew east to west to rake Belleau Wood, then turned left to shoot up the northern tree line where Donnelly had been hit. Each round-trip from end to end took about two minutes.

“Casey and I could clearly see the Marines,” Dadiomoff said. “We tallied to target, triggering down on the tree lines next to them.”

On each pass, Dadiomoff and Blasingame alternated firing rockets, to avoid going Winchester and running out of ammo. The fierce heat of the explosions flamed the bushes and ignited the bark on the trees. By the fourth run, Belleau Wood was ablaze, red flames flickering above the battlefield.

The Afghan soldiers in the middle of the Marine Ranger file were laughing as they walked toward Transformer.

“They say they’re happy,” Stevie, the interpreter, yelled. “They are on the Marine side.”

When 1st Squad was halfway across, 2d Squad broke from cover and attracted its own bee’s nest of snapping bullets.

“It was chaos,” Rausch said. “I’m suppressing with my SAW. We
cut through this section of compounds and I peek out to see this open field of mud with no cover. And out we step.”

Rausch saw a PKM and an AK lying in the mud. He didn’t stop to pick them up.

“There were small groups of farmers watching from the edges of the field,” Rausch said. “None seemed to have a weapon. Yet I was hearing
pop, pop, pop
—rounds going by like on the firing range. It was definitely weird. Do you shoot at a farmer?”

In the Cobra, Dadiomoff had a problem. He was out of 20mm and small rockets, leaving only Hellfire missiles, which took three or four minutes to align. His fuel gauge indicated twenty-six minutes of air time remained, and the refueling base was twenty-two minutes away. In the Huey, Blasingame had ammo for one more gun run.

“I’ll loiter,” Dadiomoff radioed to Blasingame. “You finish the run and we’ll see if we can get home.”

The Huey made a final, lone strafe along Belleau Wood’s burning tree line. Below, every Marine was exhausted after slogging through the mud and shooting for hours. The pace slowed to a walk, with Sergeant Dy yelling to speed it up.

“Mud was kicking up,” Dy said, “like someone was lighting off tiny firecrackers. I was thinking, we won’t all make it across. Someone’s gonna get hit.”

Toward the front, Laird staggered along with Espinoza on his back. Occasionally, Laird put him down, sprayed the tree line with his M4, then picked him up again. He felt spasms in the small of his back, but what the hell.

As the RPGs exploded and gunships roared overhead, Espinoza, doped up with two hefty shots of morphine, kept muttering, “This is so moto! So moto!”

When Garcia started across with the rear guard, a few Marines up ahead had paused to catch their breath.

“You’re not armor-plated!” Garcia yelled. “Move your asses!”

Once Garcia and his rear guard reached Transformer, a relieved Dadiomoff turned his Cobra east away from the Green Zone and flew across the rocky desert toward Forward Operating Base Edinburgh. Blasingame followed in the Huey. If the Cobra spiraled down out of fuel, the Huey would land and pick up the crew.

The Cobra reached base with less than six minutes flying time remaining. In three hours of nonstop combat, the Huey and Cobra had burned through 2,600 rounds of heavy munitions and twenty-one high-explosive rockets, aimed at targets visible from one hundred feet in the air.

After shutting down their helicopters, the helicopter crews went to the mess hall for the Thanksgiving meal. They pushed the food around their trays, their minds still back at Transformer.

“If I never flew another mission,” Dadiomoff told me later, “I’d done what I signed up to do. The Marine air-ground team worked. Mad Dog, Spokes, Casey, our crews—together we saved grunts from dying out on that Golf Course. But we lost a Marine, a platoon commander, that day. It didn’t feel good.”

In the afternoon, a medevac chopper landed at Transformer and lifted out Donnelly’s body and the wounded Espinoza. Abbate placed his snipers along the wall, scoping west. Belleau Wood continued to burn. Stevie, listening over a captured Icom, said that the Taliban were attending to their casualties. Through the G-Boss, Marines at company headquarters watched as women with wheelbarrows and men on motorcycles took away dead and wounded. After guzzling down water and loading up with ammunition, 3rd Platoon hit the road, heading back to Fires. No one shot at them.

“There were fifty of us in one long trail,” Garcia said. “You don’t fuck around when hell walks by.”

Lt. Cameron West was gone, and now a second of Kilo’s three platoon commanders had been struck down in the snap of a finger.

Based on radio intercepts, informers, and the rash of funerals, the Taliban had lost about twenty fighters. For the Taliban to challenge gunships was a mistake, although understandable. Shooting at so many Marines out in the open was a natural instinct. The Marines were focused on retrieving Lieutenant Donnelly’s body. The Taliban knew where they were headed, and why.

Once the shooting began, it spread and escalated quickly. As the sound and bedlam increased, orders shouted over the Taliban Icom radio nets were drowned out. The Marine interpreters listening in back at Inkerman couldn’t understand what was being shouted, and neither could the Taliban gangs.

With several Marine squads to shoot at, the gangs stayed too long. Once they started shooting up at the gunships, their muzzle flashes told the pilots where the targets were. In a gunfight, the human brain switches off. It feels terrific to blaze away. The Taliban paid for losing control and abandoning their customary caution. The crews of the Huey and Cobra helicopters received the Bell Helicopter Award for the Outstanding Air Engagement of the Year.

Thanksgiving 2010 marked a change in attitudes. The Marines were more angry than intimidated.

“We were so pissed off after Lieutenant Donnelly,” Sergeant Dy said, “it didn’t matter how hard the next fight was. Our attitude was—you kill one of us, we kill twenty of you.”

Revenge has spurred redoubled efforts in every war. In Vietnam in 1966, Battalion 1/9 engaged a Viet Cong battalion personally known to Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam’s leader. Angered by the losses among his favorite guerrillas, Ho promised revenge, calling 1/9
“dib bo che,”
“the walking dead.” He vowed to set mines until every Marine was blown up.

Only a few miles farther south, in my village of Binh Nghia, we were regularly attacked by the one-armed commander of the P-31st
local Viet Cong company. He was furious that we had the nerve to move into his territory.

In Sangin, a few weeks prior to the Thanksgiving battle, to the north of Kilo’s area, the Marine Red Devils squadron had bombed twelve targets simultaneously. The Taliban leader in Sangin, and more than a dozen of his fighters, had been killed.

Now, after the Thanksgiving battle, the Marines and the Taliban in Sangin were determined to destroy each other.

Day 51. 306,000 Steps

A week after Thanksgiving, 1st Squad headed north toward sector P8Q. They had a lead on the facilitator who had emplaced the IEDs that killed Buenagua and Peto. When the squad reached the corner of two tree lines, the two-man sniper team dropped off and hid in the underbrush. Abbate was carrying the M40A5 sniper rifle and Laird the standard M4.

“I’ve played peekaboo,” Abbate said, “with this guy on the last two patrols. I know he’s around.”

First Squad pushed on and was crossing into another tree line when LCpl. Juan Palma, who was at point, spotted two sets of
clothes folded neatly under a bush. The Marines grinned and settled in to wait. After fifteen minutes, the patrol again pushed on. Abbate and Laird didn’t move from their hide. A few minutes later, a man on a motorcycle putted up a nearby path and signaled to a man with a shovel. The IED would be waiting when the Marines came back.

Sniper conditions were perfect. Laird whispered the range—115 meters. On scope. On target. Fire. The round ripped through the man’s face just below his nose. Instantaneous body collapse. Matt Abbate laughed and punched Jordan Laird in the ribs.

“That,” Matt said, “was for Buenagua and Peto.”

The snipers caught up to the squad at the edge of a field. The Marines hid in the shrubs to see what would happen next. After a few minutes, two farmers ambled along. Through his spotting scope, Laird saw a rifle barrel sticking out of the bottom of a man-dress. When Laird dropped him, the tree line to the front erupted with AK and PKM fire.

First Squad quickly gained fire superiority and maneuvered toward a compound, marked on the photomap as Building 64. The Marines saw the head of a man in his fifties bobbing up and down in the furrows of a field as he crawled away from the compound. They shot him and the firing continued. One man kept sticking out his head at the compound wall.

“I see one turkey necking,” Abbate said, concentrating on his sight picture.

Back at Fires, 3rd Squad strapped on their gear and headed north to help. At company headquarters, Spokes Beardsley called in two F-18s that were flying in a nearby holding pattern.

“We didn’t think we needed air support,” Lantznester said, “but they pushed the birds to us, so we used them.”

Once air was on station, the procedure called for a shake-and-bake mission—one bomb to shake the compound to its foundations,
followed by a bomb that burst in the air to scythe down any squirters. It was the forty-third close air support mission for the platoon.

The Marines were lying on line in a flooded, furrowed field, about 200 meters from the compound.

“Heads down!” Laird yelled.

As the lead F-18 swept in to their front, Sibley saw the black puff of an air burst by a rocket-propelled grenade that had a one-in-a-million chance of hitting the jet. The aircraft dropped a 500-pound bomb with a delayed fuse that obliterated a section of the compound wall. Following procedure, there was a pause of thirty seconds. A column of dust now clearly marked the target. The second F-18 rolled in, dropping another 500-pound bomb that exploded in the air, loosing a thousand sizzling shards to scythe down any enemy running out of the rubble.

Abbate was lying prone near Laird. As the F-18 roared in, Laird tried to squeeze his body inside his helmet. He heard a chunk of metal hit the ground and skid by him at sonic speed. He grinned in relief.

“That was close!” he said, turning toward Abbate.

Matt was lying within arm’s length, facedown. It took only a second for Laird to see the blood gushing from his neck. Maybe Matt had raised his head for a fraction of a second to get eyes on the insurgent, or maybe the shard had torn through the ground when his head was down.

Laird pushed Matt over onto his back and ripped out a thick bandage. Other Marines rushed over, fumbling for their bandages. While Laird called for a medevac, the corpsman, Stuart Fuke, pressed gauze deep into the wound.

“Get off me!” Abbate gurgled, flinging Fuke backward.

Blood again spurted out.

“Hold him down!”

Four Marines pinned down Matt’s arms and legs. Fuke grabbed
handfuls of gauze and LCpl. Dylan Nordell packed them into his neck.

“I can’t breathe!”

“You couldn’t talk if you couldn’t breathe, bro!”

The Marines held Abbate firmly, keeping pressure on his neck. Laird checked the time. Five minutes had gone by. Where was the rescue bird? Come on, come on.

“This sucks,” Matt muttered. “I can’t believe it. This sucks.”

“You’re gonna be okay,” Laird kept repeating. “We got the bleeding stopped. You’re gonna be okay.”

“It burns,” Matt gurgled, “like fire.”

“A good burn, bro. It’s that stuff in the bandage that stops the bleeding.”

Another glance at the watch. Twenty minutes. Finally, rotors were heard.

Esquibel knew wounds. In the Fallujah battle in 2004, when two fellow snipers lay wounded, he helped to stanch their blood flows. Now the situation was the same.