One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (21 page)

“Before we got here,” Schueman said, “we listened to lectures about counterinsurgency, drinking tea, meeting with key leaders. That was all bull. No matter what we do here, the people believe we’ll leave and the Taliban will come back and kill them. Whenever the shooting dies down, I know it’ll pick up again.”

Up at Transformer, the fighting had slackened after the death of Lieutenant Donnelly. Many local fighters had died in that fight and the outpost sitting on Route 611 didn’t threaten the interior Taliban routes to the Sangin market. By mid-December, the Marines had secured the mile of hardtop road between Inkerman to Transformer. Supply vehicles no longer had to take the circuitous six-hour trip through the desert. With 611 open for traffic, the trip took six minutes.

“For us up at Transformer,” Sergeant Sotelo said, “things improved by Christmas. Over a hundred refugees moved in around our outpost. We bought our food in the market. Kids accepted candy from us, instead of running away. They were flying kites that the Talibs had forbidden. Women walked out of compounds with their faces uncovered.”

In mid-January, though, Sotelo was walking by an alley where children were playing when a burst of bullets sent him flat. Not seeing the shooter, he held his fire while the kids sought shelter. Then he angrily demanded that the villagers tell him what the hell was going on.

What were they doing? Those were their own kids out in the street. The Marines were spending $20 a day in the market. Why were they being so stupid?

Four fighters from Pakistan sneaked in a few hours ago, the villagers said, and threatened to kill anyone who informed on them. After that, the outpost took harassing fire, regardless of whether civilians were present. An enemy sniper took up a roost in Belleau Wood. Every afternoon, when the sun behind him was shining like a spotlight on Transformer, he took one or two shots at the sentry towers. It was only a matter of time until he killed a Marine.

A sniper team moved up from Fires and spent their first day rigging a dummy that was propped up on the wall, with the helmet, head, and shoulders showing. LCpl. Willie Deel crawled out on the sandbags, checking to see if the dummy could be seen from Belleau Wood.

“Deel, that’s not smart,” Corporal Laird said.

His warning was followed by the
smack!
of a bullet hitting a sandbag. Deel leaped back amid unkind comments about who was the dummy.

When the enemy sniper proved too crafty to kill, Captain Johnson sent up a 105mm recoilless rifle that fired a twenty-pound explosive shell. The sniper was sticking to his afternoon schedule. After a few days, the recoilless rifle crew had narrowed down the location of his lair. When he again sniped, the response was a half dozen shells aimed directly at the firing point. The sniping ceased.

A grunt accepts the danger as he does the mud, cold, heat, sweat, stink, and exhaustion; it’s his environment. He copes with his own sense of humor.

“I got shot in the helmet,” Cpl. Kevin Smith, a sniper, said. “I’m walking across a roof and
whang!
I’m sitting down, holding my helmet
with a dent from a bullet. When I get back on my feet, my buddies refuse to stand next to me. I’m bad luck. My friends!”

Smith had a friend, Cpl. Jordan Gerber, who had a false front tooth. Before going on patrol, he would place his tooth inside his hollow butt stock. One day, when he was under fire, the stock popped open and out spilled the tooth. The Marines pawed through the dirt with bullets zipping by until they found it. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. This time, the Marines didn’t stick around to look for it.

Back home, there were tears and anxious phone calls. Jane Conwell Morris, the wife of the commanding officer, was getting a hundred emails each day, fielding the anger and anxieties of 800 families. One wife was convinced she heard her doorbell ring every night, with someone waiting to announce her husband’s death.

“
The families, especially the spouses, really almost lost their minds,” Lieutenant Colonel Morris said.

In the age of Twitter, what happened on the battlefield instantly affected the home front. And what happened at home instantly reached the troops.

After being blown up in October, Lt. Cameron West had been evacuated to Bethesda Naval Hospital. For the first week, he had scarcely slept, fighting for breath as his sucking chest wounds healed. His mother, a nurse, and his father visited him each day. Both praised the medical care he was receiving.

Still, it was rough going. For weeks, bacteria gnawed at his right stump, requiring a painful daily wash-out to peel away the infected flesh from what was left of his limb. He lost two more inches off his leg and developed six infections causing blood clots that threatened to stop his heart.

“I had it easy,” Cam said, “compared to the others. I saw guys from
3/5 with worse amputations than my leg and hand. Even my eye was getting a little better. Doc Long was paralyzed from the waist down. I was angry because I felt helpless. I wasn’t in the fight.”

In January, missing one leg, one hand, and one eye, Cam was transferred to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, seventy miles south of the Marine base at Camp Pendleton. By now, he was friendly with a dozen other amputees and a hundred other injured from 3/5. They were assigned to what is called the Wounded Warrior Regiment to bolster each other’s spirit. Cam was their leader.

So Jane Morris asked Cam to attend a packed meeting of 3/5 families and represent those in the fight 6,000 miles away. Before doing so, Cam reached back to Captain Johnson and his old platoon out at Fires. He was enormously popular, and 3rd Platoon told him their side of the story. When he stood to speak at the meeting, he was nervous but prepared. Speaking firmly to distraught wives and mothers was not a task for the faint of heart.

“Everyone in this room is scared and concerned,” he said. “But I hear it from my brothers out there too. They need your support, not your complaints or tears, not from mothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends. Sure, you all have hard days—kids acting up, bills to be paid, things going wrong. Don’t talk about that. Don’t send whining emails or post idiotic comments on Facebook. For the rest of his tour—fourteen weeks—don’t say one negative thing to your Marine. He has enough on his plate. You should be worrying about him; he shouldn’t be worrying about you. He needs you. Keep saying, I love you, I miss you, I pray for you.”

In early 2011, I again flew to Helmand Province and met with Col. Paul Kennedy. In 2004, I had embedded with his battalion in Iraq. When I met Paul at his regimental headquarters south of Sangin, he was as terse as ever.

“You’d be bored and ignorant up here at regiment,” he said. “I’ll drop you off where the fighting is.”

Day 91. 546,000 Steps

I arrived at Patrol Base Fires in time to join the morning patrol.

By way of greeting, Vic Garcia handed me two straps.

“You know the drill,” he said. “One’s for you. If you have to use the other one on someone else, twist the knob until he yells. And stay inside the bottle caps. We don’t want to have to carry you back.”

Like the horse stirrup or the bicycle, the modern tourniquet is so simple that it took centuries to invent. Cinch up the strap, twist the fist-wide knob tight, and the blood stops gushing out. A half century ago, my platoon in Vietnam had used narrow elastic tubing that sliced into the flesh without fully stanching the bleeding. In Vietnam, one in four of our wounded died, mainly from loss of blood. In Afghanistan, one in seven died, but the number of amputations skyrocketed.

The fifteen Marines in 3rd Squad wore armored vests sprinkled with dried mud, tan camouflage uniforms hard to detect from a distance, and weathered, unsmiling faces. A few wrapped tourniquets around their thighs; most stuffed them in their med kits. I unwrapped and stowed a tourniquet in each breast pocket.

Garcia didn’t talk, keeping his distance as the Marines fell into a loose line. I noticed the tattered photomap attached to his left hand like a wedding band—the lifeline for calling in fires. At night, he probably used it as a pillow. On patrol, you’d have to cut off his fingers to pry it loose.

The patrol was heading north to sector P8Q. The mission was to walk for a couple of miles, avoiding mines while waiting to be shot at, hoping in return to light up the shooter. We passed by the mortar tubes aligned toward their barber-pole-aiming stakes, left the wire in silence, forded an icy stream, and plodded along in sloshing boots. Every patrol got wet, muddy, and miserable at the start, so there wouldn’t be any hesitation later. The winter-dead landscape looked like a sepia portrait of Oklahoma farms during the Great Depression. Everything was a lifeless shade of brown—the fields, the furrows, the trees, and the walls of the compounds, some clustered together, others standing off alone.

The patrol wasn’t in a hurry. Up at point, Yazzie, the twenty-one-year-old engineer, walked slowly, sweeping his Vallon back and forth with his eyes on the LED magnetometer needle on the handle of the metal detector. He focused on the dirt inside the length of his shadow, rarely glancing up, while his partner, LCpl. Kyle Doyle, watched out for snipers and dropped the caps of water bottles.

We walked with the war’s paradox under our feet—fresh poppy plants. Looking as innocent as lettuce heads, the mind slayers were springing to life in every field. Back in the States, we were fighting an ever-losing war on drugs. Here in a faraway country, we were fighting a war on terror that required toleration of the very heroin we waged war against at home. Afghanistan’s export of drugs created more human casualties than did the fighting. But to eradicate the poppy was the surest way to drive the farmers into the ranks of the Taliban.

The farmers had planted them in long, straight lines and we bruised few as we followed our own straight line, guided by the water bottle caps. Behind Doyle came the two-man machine gun crew. Sergeant McCulloch, twenty-four, followed the machine gunners. On a recent patrol, a bullet had nicked the inside of his thigh. Fearing that a second Purple Heart would mean a transfer to the rear, he bandaged the wound and refused to have it checked out at the battalion aid station. He walked with a limp, but so far had avoided infection.

The patrol walked in file with no concealment, preferring the open fields to the shrubbery alongside the irrigation ditches. Within eyesight of the platoon’s fort, farm life was normal. Scrawny cows and sheep wandered freely, nibbling at stray patches of grass trampled as smooth as putting greens. Carrying thin switches, male shepherds, ages eight to forty, languidly followed their flocks. Wending north, the patrol walked where possible in the fresh hoofprints of the animals.

A thin man in a dirty brown man-dress and a shabby turban, followed
by an old man and a few boys, scampered across a ditch to intercept the patrol. As the Marines walked past, he squatted down and extended a piece of paper, his mouth soundlessly agape, displaying enormous front teeth. McCulloch signaled with a clenched fist to halt.

“Turgiman,” the turban man said, waving the card. “Turgiman.”

The card was a standard form for listing war damage. If a Marine signed it, with an estimate of the damage, the farmer would collect money at district headquarters. Like most Marines, Mac had picked up a smattering of pidgin Pashto. He tried out simple words and gestures until he got the gist.

“Toothy here says we killed his cow,” Mac said. “He wants two hundred bucks.”

“Where’s the cow?” Garcia asked.

“Says he buried it weeks ago.”

Garcia dismissed the claim with a wave of his map.

“Dig it up,” McCulloch said, handing the man back his chit, “and eat it.”

The patrol zigzagged along, with the rear guard picking up the bottle caps. Each Marine had a sector to watch. One glance around, one glance down at the caps. Around, down, around, down, never straying out of line.

Near a footbridge across a canal, Yaz clenched his fist, knelt, and scratched at the dirt. He took out wire cutters, snipped a few wires, held up two small boards wrapped in tape, and threw them to me. Glued to the underside of each board was a strand of wire. When a foot pressed down on the boards, the two wires touched each other, completing an electrical circuit connecting a flashlight battery to a plastic jug filled with explosives. Yaz attached a small charge to the IED, blew it up, and the patrol continued.

About a mile from the fort, the Marines passed women and children running pell-mell from a compound. More than a dozen cut across a field in front of the patrol, casting frightened glances. Over the radio, “Rubber Duck”—the call sign for a radio intercept unit at Inkerman—warned that two Taliban gangs were getting ready to open fire. Off to the right, three men on motorbikes puttered along a dirt road, paralleling the patrol.

“Dickers,” McCulloch said. “Cheeky bastards.”

It reminded me of a John Wayne western, with Comanches on the ridgeline keeping pace with a line of troopers. The Marines seemed indifferent to their watchers.

“They’re not idiots,” Garcia said. “Exposed like that, we’d cut them down in a second. Any shooting will come from up ahead, after the people clear the area.”

Gradually the patrol route diverged westward from the road and the cheeky bikers. Halfway across a field, in a furrow with no discernible difference from a hundred others, Yaz stopped. Head down in concentration, he swept the detector back and forth a few times and raised his right hand, signaling an IED.

That’s what makes the IED so insidious. Most give off a low magnetic signature. But some are missed, no matter how careful the sweep man is. Plus, the Taliban are sloppy. Fearing overhead drones, they hastily dig in the explosives and scamper away. Marines take extra care at the obvious places, like a footbridge or a trail intersection. But a Marine, farmer, or cow can step on a pressure plate buried anywhere, with no rational reason why that spot was chosen.

“Some of my engineers freeze up over time,” Garcia said to me. “They know every step could be their last. After a while, they move slower and slower. And some are like Yaz. They keep up a steady pace, patrol after patrol. He never slows down.”